Baseball is a ball-and-bat sport whose rules I am not even going to attempt to describe. As I discovered recently when asked to explain the rules: 1. The sport is not ubiquitous, and 2. Attempting to describe it to someone who did not grow up with it is incredibly difficult.

So, for those not familiar, what you need to know is that this sport, invented somewhere in the United States at some point (super contentious) and influenced, to some degree (also super contentious), by earlier English ball-and-bat sports, caught on around the country. As early as 1856, a New York state reporter called the game a “national pastime.”

In the late 19th century, the rules of the game were codified, and two professional leagues were formed, with the most American names imaginable: the older National League and the younger American League. With the two leagues competing over both money and players, they came together in 1903, formalizing a relationship without actually merging. They recognized one another and agreed to respect the terms of players’ contracts. Players could not simply sign with another team, even after their contracts ran out.

This was the reserve clause, and it created a system that New York Supreme Court Justice Herbert Bissell called “as complete a monopoly as any monopoly can be made.” This system was co-authored by former baseball player, manager, and founding owner of the Chicago White Sox, Charles Comiskey. We will return to him.

The 1903 agreement also set the stage for the championship of baseball, the World Championship Series, gradually becoming the World’s Series, and now the World Series. This was despite the fact that baseball at the time was very much only played by Americans. There were also no playoffs. Instead, the championship was arranged between two teams, which thankfully happened to be the leagues’ two best: the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Boston Americans, now the Boston Red Sox, in a best-of-nine-game series, which is way too much baseball.

Now, despite the fact that the next World Series was boycotted, Boston’s Huntington Grounds, had sold out for the first one, with fans even packed onto the playing field, showing the early American hunger for baseball. A bleacher seat cost 50 cents, while a reserved seat went for about a dollar, with standing room available for even less. The relatively low prices helped draw people in and spread the game’s popularity.

Early baseball, and early professional sports in general, were not huge cash cows, and the only ones making much money were the owners. For example, Cy Young, Boston’s star player and one of the most dominant pitchers of his time, made the equivalent of an estimated $126,000 a year in today’s money. Now, that is enough for a good living, but he was one of the most valuable players in the sport. Most of the rest were barely making ends meet.

In 1905, the two leagues came together again, and the World Series rules were hammered out, with the then-governing body of baseball, the National Baseball Commission, organizing the game between the two best teams from the two different leagues. The leagues remained legally separate entities within Major League Baseball, which was essentially just the name given to the two leagues combined. Baseball was, and will always be, convoluted, and it used to be a whole lot more convoluted.

The first two decades of the World Series’ existence were dominated by two cities renowned for their love of baseball: Boston, and Chicago, where the Cubs won back-to-back World Series in 1907 and 1908, and then would have to wait a loooooong time to win another. And, of course, there were our pals, the Chicago White Sox, owned by Mr. Charles Comiskey, who won two themselves, in 1906 and then again in 1917. Charles Comiskey, I have no idea what he’s doing; is this an action shot or is it staged? Who’s to say, but here he is looking like a lovable grandpa and not the ass that he was.

Charles Comiskey was the son of a Chicago Democratic Party official who did all right for himself. Charles attended prep schools and then St. Mary’s College, where he was a standout baseball player. The point being, he did not come from nothing.

After college, he played professionally for 12 years for the early iteration of the St. Louis Cardinals, the Chicago Pirates, and the Cincinnati Reds. This was early, early baseball, when men were drinking while playing and the game itself was extremely rudimentary. Comiskey, who was the player-manager for three of the four teams he played for, is credited with being the first player to realize that, while playing defense as a first baseman, he did not actually have to stand on the base, but could stand off it and cover more ground defensively. Apparently, no one had ever thought of that.

After his playing days ended, Commy, as he was known for a while (presumably until the First Red Scare), went into ownership. He owned a minor league club in Minnesota that then moved to Chicago and, in 1900, became the White Stockings. That minor league then became part of the American League the next year, and when people stopped calling Sox “Stockings,” they became the White Sox. They played on Chicago’s South Side, while Chicago’s other team, in 1900, the Orphans, one hell of a name, but by 1903 the Cubs played on the North Side in the National League.

Comiskey oversaw a golden age of White Sox baseball and the construction of White Sox Park, an exceptionally modern stadium for its time. Only the third concrete-and-steel baseball stadium built, it seated 32,000 people and was constructed on what had previously been a dump. Within three years, it was renamed Comiskey Park. Why? I don’t know. Might be as simple as the fact that Comiskey was an asshole.

He was not a pleasant man, noted for being stern, demanding, and humorless, but what was worse for players and managers was that he was a notorious miser. Even his own defenders called him “frugal.” He forced his players to pay to have their own uniforms washed. The White Sox paid less than other teams, and, due to reserve rules written in part by Comiskey, players had to accept the substandard wages Comiskey offered or be blacklisted from baseball. Why did players accept this? Well, it was their career, they loved the game, and the White Sox were good.

The White Sox won the 1917 World Series as the best team in baseball, having won 100 games behind their ace, 33-year-old Eddie “Knuckles” Cicotte, who led the league in wins and ERA (don’t worry about what it means, he was good), and outfielders 26-year-old Oscar “Happy” Felsch, one of the most recognizable players in all of baseball 30-year-old “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and fellow 30-year-old second baseman Eddie “Cocky” Collins, who had just won his fourth World Series. Early baseball loved its nicknames.

While the team took a big step back the next year, they returned to winning ways in 1919, a season slightly shortened by the effects of the raging Spanish Flu. Cicotte was again one of the league’s best pitchers, and both Shoeless Joe and Collins had even better seasons in 1919. The White Sox finished first in the American League and set a date with the National League’s best team, the Cincinnati Reds, in the World Series.

But all was not well in the White Sox dugout. The team was terribly underpaid by a man they despised. Shortstop 24-year-old Charles August “Swede” Risberg made less than $3,000 a year, about $55,000 today, a number matched by the team’s number-two starter, Claude “Lefty” Williams, both of whom had been integral to the 1917 World Series. Shoeless Joe, Eddie Cicotte, and 29-year-old third baseman George “Buck” Weaver made $6,000 a year, or about $111,000 today, despite being among the best players at their respective positions, markedly below their value compared to what other players on other teams were being paid.

The players hated Charles Comiskey with a passion, and this boiled over into public view when they clinched the pennant, first place in the league. Comiskey had promised his team that if they won the pennant and brought him back to the World Series, he would give them a bonus. They did, and that bonus was a case of flat champagne.

Eddie Cicotte led the league in wins with 29 entering the final week of the season and had a provision for a $10,000 bonus in his contract if he won 30 games that season. While nothing is in writing, manager William Jethro “Kid” Gleason benched Cicotte during that final week, denying him the opportunity to hit that bonus, which would have more than doubled his earnings that season. Ostensibly, this was done to rest Cicotte’s arm for the World Series, but resting players in 1919 was almost unheard of. Comiskey likely ordered Gleason to bench Cicotte to avoid having to pay an extra ten grand.

While the White Sox clubhouse was united in its dislike of Comiskey, there were two camps within the locker room. Those who thought, “Yeah, it’s bullshit, but we are professionals,” led by second baseman Eddie Collins, a Columbia University graduate noted for his sense of superiority, and another group which thought, “This is fucking bullshit.” Most prominent among them was Eddie Cicotte, a likable man whose skill combined with the substandard wages had pushed him to a breaking point, and the “Professional Malcontent,” bullying 31-year-old first baseman Charles “Chick” Gandil. Gandil looking exactly like you imagined after that brief description.

On September 18th, the White Sox lost their day game to the New York Yankees and immediately hopped on a train for Boston for their series against the Red Sox. By now, the pennant had been clinched, and the White Sox were set for a World Series with the Reds, who may have had the better record, but the White Sox had a World Series-winning roster that many would consider one of the best of all time and were the bettors’ favorites.

Gambling was once illegal in this country. Imagine that. A history of gambling this is not, as interesting as that might be, but gambling was nothing new with the professionalization of sports. Sports betting occurs through a bookmaker or casino, which sets odds or spreads that individuals then bet on.

For instance, in the 1919 World Series, the Chicago White Sox were generally seen as 5–1 favorites. If people bet on the White Sox, and they won, they would win a relatively small amount of money. If someone bet the same amount of money on the Reds and they won, they’d stand to win substantially more.

This was all very illegal at the time, and when things are illegal, they don’t tend to be particularly stand-up and honest. Bookmakers regularly approached professional baseball players about fixing or throwing games, deliberately changing their performance to alter the outcome so that the bookie might make a substantial amount of money. Typically, this involved a favored team losing, bettors losing a lot of money that the bookie kept, and a nice payment being made to the players involved.

The reason players did this was simple: they were not well paid. Some would quickly dismiss this as greed, and yes, but not only were the men underpaid, early baseball was brutal. Injuries were exceptionally common during a massive slate of games, and their profession was something that could be lost easily. If a player were seriously injured, their contracts had no guarantees, and many players were given what passed for treatment at the time: stimulants that they themselves became addicted to, as well as nursing their pain with regular alcohol use. Put all this together, and it’s no surprise that players considered, and did, throw games.

That being said, most did not. At the outset of the 1903 World Series, Boston bookmaker Joe “Sport” Sullivan approached the team’s pitcher, the aforementioned Cy Young, about fixing the series. But Young valued his professionalism and honor more than a wad of cash. Sullivan, a notorious bookie, was arrested for it in 1907, but got out and went right back to it, forming relationships with many professional baseball players, including White Sox first baseman Chick Gandil.

And so, with the White Sox coming to town and heading into Boston’s Hotel Buckminster, either Gandil or Sport Sullivan asked to meet; it is disputed. Over dinner and drinks, with Eddie Cicotte alongside him, Sullivan pitched Gandil on a plan for the White Sox to throw the series for a total of $80,000, or about $1.575 million today. Gandil was interested. Sullivan then asked him to get a group of players together.

Gandil would later say, covering his own ass, that Sullivan had asked him to meet and that he “was kind of surprised when Sullivan suggested that we get a ‘syndicate’ together of seven or eight players to throw the Series to Cincinnati…I said to Sullivan it wouldn’t work. He answered, ‘Don’t be silly. It’s been pulled before and it can be again.’ He had a persuasive manner which he backed up with a lot of cash. He said he was willing to pay $10,000 each to all the players we brought in on the deal. Considering our skimpy salaries, $10,000 was quite a chunk, and he knew it.”

Cicotte did not deny the meeting with Sport Sullivan, but in his own later account, he had reached out to former professional player William “Sleepy” Burns, noted for his underworld connections. Cicotte, in his telling, and other White Sox players had heard that several members of their crosstown rivals, the Cubs, had received $10,000 each the previous year to throw the World Series against the Red Sox. While this has never been proven, it is fair to say it was certainly possible. As of yet, no professional players had seriously been punished for fixing games, and one who had been caught recently was exonerated.

On September 20th, after a doubleheader against the Red Sox, Chick Gandil checked into a room at the Ansonia Hotel in New York City, with there being an uncharacteristic three-day break between games. There, Gandil, Cicotte, the team’s number-two pitcher Lefty Williams, third baseman Buck Weaver, shortstop Swede Risberg, and star outfielder Happy Felsch listened as Sullivan and a few other bookies, along with Sleepy Bill Burns, pitched them on throwing the World Series for a $100,000 payout.

All agreed, as well as Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was not in attendance but had verbally stated he was in to the men who were going, but Buck Weaver, according to Gandil, wanted the money up front, and when Sullivan could not provide it, Weaver backed out. Regardless, Weaver was not in on it, but swore he would not betray his fellow players.

Sullivan could not provide the men with their payday because he did not actually have the money. He had asked around the gambling world and come up empty, and then went higher, to the famed gambler, racketeer, gangster, and Jewish mobster, 37-year-old Arnold Rothstein.

Here, things get complicated. According to all of the, well, criminals, Rothstein, who had already heard of the plot, refused. With the players now out a payday, they went on to finish the season and prepare for the World Series.

But former world featherweight champion and close friend of Arnold Rothstein, Abe Attell, got involved, approaching Burns and telling him that Arnold Rothstein, one of the most respected and feared criminals in the country, had reconsidered and would indeed finance the fix. Sleepy Bill Burns woke up and got his ass to Cincinnati, where the White Sox were preparing to open the World Series on October 1st. Arnold Rothstein in 1919.

In the meantime, the handful of White Sox players who had been thinking about fixing the series were not prepared to just walk away with empty pockets. At the Warner Hotel in Chicago, they met again with two men. One was Sport Sullivan, while the other is unknown; some have posited that he was another Rothstein associate. Regardless, they brought the men a renewed offer.

Eddie Cicotte, mistrusting this, demanded his $10,000 share up front, then walked out of the room to get some drinks at the bar. The two men continued their pitch, with Lefty Williams later saying he was unsure whether these were the men financing the fix or merely the middlemen. Regardless, when Eddie Cicotte returned to his hotel room, he found $10,000 in his pillowcase.

This meeting was unknown to Sleepy Bill Burns, who arrived in Cincinnati later, on the cusp of the first game of the World Series. In another hotel room, he and Abe Attell met with the six players aforementioned, Joe Jackson again absent, and this time with the team’s 27-year-old utility player Fred McMullin.

McMullin did not play often, but he had a great mind and eye for the game and served as the White Sox’s scout, studying other teams. He had overheard a few of the others, and, making far less than the other White Sox players while being sent ahead to watch other teams with little to no financial assistance from Charles Comiskey, McMullin was beyond eager to be included. He went so far as to threaten to report them unless he was.

At the Sinton Hotel, the White Sox were informed by Attell and Burns that they would be paid off in installments of $20,000 after each White Sox loss in what was once again a best-of-nine-game series, done to bring in ticket revenue. Later that evening, Sleepy Bill Burns was drinking at the bar and met with an old acquaintance, sportswriter Hugh Fullerton. Burns asked Fullerton what he thought, and he said, like anyone else, that the White Sox would win. Burns, drunk, said a Reds win was a “sure thing.” Fullerton knew about Burns’ reputation since his playing days, and something about the way Burns said it, or his demeanor, tipped Fullerton off that something was afoot.

And if everything about this plot that I have brought up to this point has been noted by you, you will realize this plot was not a well-kept secret. Such an open secret was it among bookmakers and bettors that, at the very last minute, the Reds became slight series favorites. These rumors reached some in the press, and a few sharp eyed men resolved to closely watch the games to see if anything was questionable. Though, to the public and fans, nothing was wrong.

Eddie Cicotte was on the mound for Game One, and with his second pitch of the game, he hit Morrie Rath with a pitch. This was deliberate. It signaled to the other White Sox, and to the bookies, that the fix was on.

For the next three innings, Eddie Cicotte was Eddie Cicotte, one of baseball’s best players. Then, in the fourth inning, he fell apart. Fielding a ground ball, he fired wide to Swede Risberg at second base, an error which brought in a run, and Cincinnati won the game 9–1. Yet after the game, Abe Attell reneged on the deal and refused to pay the players. Yet.

The next day, reporting on the World Series, The Philadelphia Bulletin published a cutesy little poem:

Still, it really doesn’t matter,
After all, who wins the flag.
Good clean sport is what we’re after,
And we aim to make our brag
To each near or distant nation
Whereon shines the sporting sun
That of all our games gymnastic
Base ball is the cleanest one!

Lefty Williams took the mound that afternoon for Game Two, and again, in the fourth inning, he fell apart, walking three players in a row and coming back to the dugout complaining that he was feeling ill. The White Sox lost Game Two 4–2. The White Sox struggled offensively throughout the series, and not just the players in on the fix. In some cases, those players actually had a higher batting average than those who were not. At least in part, this was due to the influence of Fred McMullin, who had fed his teammates inaccurate information about Reds pitching.

After Game Two, the other angle of the fix, from Sleepy Bill Burns, delivered the players $10,000. But the players were owed $20,000 and accused Burns and his associates of double-crossing them. Burns, in so many words, explained that this was the best he could do at the moment. This lends credence to the idea that Arnold Rothstein was not, in fact, financing the fix, and that any use of his name was intended to assure the players. If anything, he may have given his blessing to associates to go ahead with it; he just was not financially involved.

Regardless, the players, led by Gandil, assured Burns and company that the fix was on for Game Three, and so they put considerable money on the Reds, underdogs as the series shifted to Chicago. Here again, things get muddled. Some involved, and some historians, claim that the fix was off, the players realizing what they had been promised was a pipe dream. Others deny this and maintain that the fix continued in Game Three, Shoeless Joe Jackson among this camp.

Not involved in the fix, rookie pitcher Dick Kerr was outstanding, and Chick Gandil hit a decisive two-run single to give the White Sox a 3–0 victory. Regardless, Burns and company had bet what money they had left on the Reds and were left empty-handed. After the win, according to Gandil, Attell approached him about whether or not the fix was still on, and Gandil rebuffed him. In professional gambling circles, the fix was fairly widespread, with groups in different cities discussing it, whether or not to make their own approach, and what to do about it.

In Game Four, Cicotte returned to the mound, and whether or not he was still on the fix, he pitched like the player he was. His fielding, however, makes this a legitimate question. In the fifth inning, he made two terrible fielding errors, bringing in two runs. He would maintain that he had done his utmost to win this game, and as he kept pitching excellently afterward, it’s possible. But the White Sox had just three hits and lost 2–0.

Another thing in Cicotte’s favor: after the game, Joe “Sport” Sullivan came through with $20,000 for Chick Gandil, who distributed it equally between himself, Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch, and Lefty Williams, who again took the mound in Game Five, losing his second game of the series and bringing the Reds to four wins, needing one more to win the World Series. No money came to the players after this game, and again, at least from the testimony of a few of the players, they again attempted to double-cross the fixers.

The White Sox won Games Six and Seven, a comeback win which saw the White Sox’s best hitters, Buck Weaver, Happy Felsch, and Shoeless Joe, wake up, followed by a comfortable victory in Game Seven behind a great performance by Cicotte.

This set up Game Eight, a must-win to send the series to a decisive Game Nine. According to some reports, and as shown in a later movie, threats of violence were made against the White Sox players who had been in on the fix and their families to ensure they lost Game Eight.

Regardless, Lefty Williams was back on the mound, and it was a disaster. He was pulled in the first inning after giving up four runs. It never got any better, and the Reds won the game and the World Series. Williams is the only player in MLB history to lose three games in a single World Series. This is the highest quality picture I could find of the 1919 World Series, a Red is thrown out at second base during Game 2 in Cincinnati.

For the public, baseball fans, and most in the press, this was a great upset, a David vs. Goliath moment, and the celebrations and acclaim for the Cincinnati Reds were widespread in newspapers and among the American public.

One man sang a different tune: Chicago sportswriter Hugh Fullerton, who questioned the integrity of the World Series and made the claim that at least seven men would no longer be wearing a White Sox jersey this time next year, though he did not go so far as to say why.

This was not at all well received. Not from the press, who thought it was embarrassing for a writer to make such a baseless claim; not from fans, who saw it as a Chicago sportswriter saying that the only way the White Sox could lose was if they were trying to lose; and not from organized baseball, who simply ignored it. Early baseball legend Christy Mathewson, working as a special correspondent for The New York Times, wrote a prominent article arguing that a World Series fix was all but impossible.

And so it faded into the rearview mirror for nearly all, except for one man: Charles Comiskey. Gamblers are not great at keeping their mouths shut, and as was stated before, word had gotten around, to the extent that the owner of the team received reports during the World Series and sent club officials to gambling dens and bookmakers to learn the truth. He learned from informants that members of his team had, in fact, promised to throw the series for a payout of $100,000.

Comiskey stewed but did not go public. This would be terrible for him and the team. He re-signed Shoeless Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Lefty Williams, and even gave them pay raises, ironically enough. It’s almost certain that Comiskey did this because he couldn’t stand to take the financial blow. Baseball was increasingly big money, and was growing and growing in popularity. The only man not brought back was the fix’s ringleader, Chick Gandil, who rejected the contract Comiskey offered, which was no different from his previous one. Comiskey then put him on the team’s ineligible list, ending his baseball career.

The 1920 season kicked off, and the White Sox and Yankees dueled it out for first place in the American League. Comiskey Park was packed full, and ticket prices rose. Things were looking good for the Chicago White Sox and, more broadly, Major League Baseball.

Then, in late August, a suspected fix in a regular-season game involving two completely different teams, the Philadelphia Phillies and, importantly, the Chicago Cubs, and a minor league baseball scandal coalesced, leading to calls for an investigative body to delve into allegations of game fixing in professional baseball.

This call brought in recently installed Cook County Judge Charles A. McDonald, a baseball fan looking to make a name for himself, and the president of the American League, Ban Johnson. McDonald empaneled a grand jury to investigate game fixing, but soon Johnson and members of the press who had their suspicions were urging the judge to look into the previous year’s World Series. By the time of the first substantive session on September 22nd, 1920, the focus had shifted from a meaningless late-August regular-season game to the World Series.

These proceedings, despite the legal mandate of secrecy for grand jury proceedings, were big news. Testimony was reported verbatim, along with commentary on the ongoing proceedings by the foreman of the jury, the prosecuting attorney, and Judge McDonald. Newspapers across the country followed the case, with little better to report after the end of World War I and the Spanish Flu. For all involved, ignorance of the law was apparently for the good of cleaning up the national pastime, and destroying the names of the men indicted: Eddie Cicotte, Chick Gandil, Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Lefty Williams, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Fred McMullin, the men soon branded the Black Sox.

For the time being, the charge against them was the generic conspiracy to commit an illegal act. Soon, through the first gambler to go public, the first White Sox players to admit any wrongdoing came forward: Shoeless Joe Jackson and Eddie Cicotte. Both agreed to accepting a payoff to lose the World Series, but stated they never actually did anything to back that up. The press ate this up, adding details about Cicotte lobbing pitches and Joe Jackson deliberately striking out.

Joe Jackson had an excellent World Series, and while Jackson would later recant his confession and profess his innocence, none of the other players ever said he was at any of the meetings with the gamblers. The only money he ever took was $5,000 in cash given to him by Lefty Williams in their hotel room. His involvement remains one of the most debated aspects of the whole affair. Both men insisted they had played to win at all times and laid the blame on Chick Gandil, while not knowing who exactly had financed the fix.

This repeated itself with Lefty Williams and Happy Felsch, both of whom stated they had accepted money but had not deliberately done anything wrong. Williams added the names of those involved in the fix, both players and gamblers, though he did not know the exact identities of some of them. The other Black Sox, Gandil, Risberg, McMullin, and Weaver, named as being in on the fix by Lefty Williams, protested their innocence. Weaver, who had refused the money but agreed to secrecy, was especially adamant about his intention to fight any charges against him.

Those charges arrived on October 29th, 1920, with the Black Sox players charged with five counts of conspiracy to obtain money by false pretenses. Sleepy Bill Burns, Abe Attell, and Sport Sullivan had all been identified and were charged in connection. The criminal court case was a disaster.

A Republican landslide victory in the November election brought in a new administration to the Attorney’s Office, and they found evidence missing. Hopes for convictions rested on the testimony of those who had come forward. However, now these men backtracked, and the prosecution was left scrambling, to the point that the charges were dismissed, with a plan to reorganize the case and bring it back to a grand jury for new indictments.

The court would do this, and in July of 1921, the trial began. Sleepy Bill Burns, having agreed to testify, was the prosecution’s star witness. Owner Charles Comiskey was at one stage called to the stand and became so agitated by questions being asked by the defense that he rose from the witness chair and shook his fist at counsel like he was a cartoon character. Burns was the one man to say the name others had been loath to mention: Arnold Rothstein.

The defense offered little, and the players did not take the stand. The defense’s explanation was that the state had made no case against them. The only real evidence they had, aside from the testimony of an ex-ballplayer turned crook, was the grand jury testimony of three of the players, which they had recanted and said they had been coerced into making under the promise of immunity. Having this testimony read was a dull and numbing process, which likely had the exact opposite effect of what the prosecution intended.

On July 28th, the case went to the jury, and in less than three hours of deliberation, they returned with verdicts of not guilty on all charges for the players. The players would not be criminally charged, but that was not the end of the matter by a long shot.

The courtroom immediately exploded into cheers. The players were congratulated by the crowd and jurors alike, some of the men hoisted into the air and carried around, and the defendants and jury ate together that night at a local Italian restaurant, singing “Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here.”

The most likely explanation for the verdict, aside from the poor case put forward by the prosecution, also explains this reaction: jury nullification.Jurors are instructed to focus only on the facts of the case and the evidence, removing prejudice, sympathy, and emotion from their judgment. But obviously, that is nearly impossible, and the defense had done a good job not so much proving their clients’ innocence as portraying Charles Comiskey, baseball owners, and the power brokers of Major League Baseball as wealthy, dispassionate, miserly crooks who had forced the players into the situation. I would argue that this was largely true, but whether or not that means the men were innocent is another question entirely.

Regardless, those spurned by the ruling, baseball owners and Major League Baseball officials, were not going to sit idly by. Baseball was growing and was a massive moneymaker. The specter that games were influenced not by competition but by game fixing damaged the league’s reputation and put the money it brought in at risk.

So, in the immediate aftermath of the ruling, the owners approached respected federal judge and noted baseball fan Kennesaw Mountain Landis to form a three-headed commission to oversee professional baseball. Landis made it clear he would only do this if he were the game’s sole commissioner and were granted essentially unchecked power over the sport. Desperate to clean up the game’s image and ensure its continued growth, they agreed.

And so Kennesaw Mountain Landis became the first Commissioner of Major League Baseball. In one of his first acts, he placed the eight implicated players on the ineligible list, banning them from playing professional baseball. Judge Landis ruled professional baseball with an iron grip for 24 years, credited with both restoring public confidence in the game and making the office of commissioner a virtual dictatorship. He repeatedly refused the players’ requests for reinstatement.

Most infamously, Shoeless Joe Jackson, probably the best of the players. But more egregiously to me was the case of Buck Weaver, the only one of the men not to have accepted any money in connection with the fix. Landis rejected his six attempts at reinstatement, once essentially saying, “If you meet with criminals, you are a criminal.”

Both Jackson and Weaver went to their graves in the 1950s professing their innocence. Chick Gandil, in 1956, expressed remorse for getting the other players involved, but explained in a Sports Illustrated article that the players had, in fact, abandoned the scheme, and that their numerous errors came not intentionally, but from fear of being watched closely because of their meetings. He also stated that the players deserved the ban regardless.

The men worked a wide array of jobs, never escaping the infamy. Lefty Williams ran a garden nursery. Risberg worked on a dairy farm and eventually had a leg amputated, which he claimed was due to an injury that was never allowed to heal during his playing days. McMullin went on to become a deputy marshal. Jackson owned a dry-cleaning business and later a barbecue restaurant. Felsch owned a grocery store and several bars. Cicotte managed a gas station and served as a game warden in his home state of Michigan. Gandil became a plumber. And sadly, the man who was never truly able to move on was Buck Weaver. He was quoted near the end of his life as saying: “There are murderers who serve a sentence and then get out. I got life.”

The White Sox struggled for the remainder of Charles Comiskey’s life, whose own reputation had also been damaged. The White Sox would not make another World Series for 40 years, and would not win another for 86 years after the 1919 World Series.

As baseball escaped the shadow of the scandal, the men and that World Series became legendary: the darkest moment of America’s pastime. Books from The Great Gatsby to The Natural reference it, while the novel Shoeless Joe led to the classic baseball movie Field of Dreams, with the Black Sox, and particularly Shoeless Joe Jackson, integral to the story, appearing as ghosts in a cornfield, as I mentioned at the beginning.

So beloved is this 1989 movie that in 2019, 100 years after the 1919 World Series and 30 years after the film, Major League Baseball announced the MLB at Field of Dreams game, played at a ballpark of the same name in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. The inaugural game was, fittingly, won by the Chicago White Sox.

And seeing as how it is pretty silly that Major League Baseball is playing a game inspired by a movie about rehabilitating relationships, in which the ghosts of the Black Sox get to play baseball again, something remarkable happened in 2025. Fifty years after the death of the last of the eight men, Commissioner Rob Manfred reinstated the Black Sox.

It means little now. The men are dead. The scandal is more than a century old. Nothing can give them back the lives they lost or erase the decades they spent carrying the stigma of being the men who cheated baseball. But it does mean that the men, particularly Jackson and Cicotte, can now potentially be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame as early as 2027. It means little to the dead.

But perhaps, after more than a century, they can finally find some rest in that cornfield after all.

2026 World Series Fixing Fund

HBH History Bites Number 1 is being prepared, titled "Raised By Wolves." This article explores children throughout history who have been raised by wolves. It will be available to paid subscribers, and there will be a paywall after the first vignette. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to gain full access.

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know I love you.

The spectre looms,
vast and monolithic,
its shadow falling long before you ever knew
there was such a thing as darkness.

It has no face,
and yet you know it intimately,
a lover you never wanted.

Its grip is at your throat.
It tightens without hands,
leaving you gasping for air
where everyone else breathes easily.

It is ravenous.

It feeds upon you in secret,
taking and taking
until you fear there will be nothing left,
until it strips you to the bone,
until you become only the shadow
of a memory
of the person you might have been.

It wraps itself around you like a shroud:
heavy, suffocating, invisible.

They cannot see its weight.
They cannot hear its chains dragging behind you.
They cannot understand why you stumble
beneath something they swear is not there.

But you see it.

You see it clearly.

You never wanted it.

It was simply given.

Passed into your hands like some ancient inheritance,
like an heirloom nobody wanted to name,
carried from one trembling pair of hands
to another.

The Curse.

And perhaps that is the cruelest thing:

You did not create it.

You were not born deserving it.

It was given to you
by those who were given it before,
and all it has ever known how to do
is take.

It leaves you broken and shaking,
one moment numb as stone,
the next a cannon waiting for the fuse.

Your body remembers what your mind tries to forget.
Your heart braces for footsteps
that have long since passed.
You sleep with ghosts
and wake with their fingerprints on your throat.

And somewhere, in the long and terrible history
of what was given to you,
you may find yourself standing before another soul
with the same inheritance burning in your hands.

The Curse asking to be passed on.

The drawing above is “Trauma,” in charcoal by Grethe Angen.

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But you know what, y’all? I just can’t. There are only so many profoundly depressing editions of this blog I can write before I bum myself out. My Lai. The Armenian Genocide. Hitler. Unit 731. Albert Fish. At some point, even I need a break from humanity at its absolute worst.

So instead, to mark my return to my final year of graduate school, we’re looking at another unethical study. AND IT TOOK PLACE IN AUGUST! I literally just learned that. So today, join me on a trip to Stanford, and to the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The lovely couple seen in the above photo from 1972 are Christina Maslach, who, I must say, was quite a looker, and who I know extensively from my elective on the psychology of burnout (she is the world’s foremost expert), and Philip Zimbardo, who I did not know was married to her and who, I must say, was not much of a looker.

Philip was born into a Sicilian immigrant family on March 23, 1933, in New York City. Early in his life, he survived a major childhood illness that kept him at Willard Parker Hospital for over a year. His family was poor, living on public assistance in the South Bronx in an America still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. As you may or may not be aware, growing up in an immigrant family reliant on social welfare is not always a good time. He was bullied and looked down upon as a result. These experiences stuck with him, shaping his later desire to explore how and why people could behave this way.

Zimbardo was bright and inquisitive, graduating from James Monroe High School with high honors. He became the first member of his family to both pursue and graduate with a college degree, attending Brooklyn College, where he graduated summa cum laude with a triple major in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, which is one hell of a trifecta.

He then moved an hour or so northeast to pursue his master’s and then doctorate at Yale. He taught popular undergraduate classes there before receiving his doctorate in 1960. By this point, he had married his first wife, fellow Yale student Rose Abdelnour, later an English literature professor who would go on to write several scholarly books on Tolkien.

Save for his most infamous experiment, Zimbardo seems like a pretty chill guy. As discussed last edition, academia has a tendency to lean into a kind of intellectual elitism, for lack of a better phrase, smelling its own farts. But Zimbardo, coming from a far more humble background than many in academia, was committed to, as he put it, “giving psychology away.”

Beyond teaching very popular introductory psychology courses for general education students throughout his forty-year teaching career and authoring numerous textbooks, Zimbardo was known for his ability to make psychology accessible. He would later present the PBS series Discovering Psychology, an Emmy Award-winning program seeking to bridge the gap between academia and public understanding. He also produced educational voice-over videos explaining the psychology behind scenes from Candid Camera.

Zimbardo was not just a lecturer, of course. He was known both for his commitment to civil rights and racial justice, organizing teach-ins, walkouts, and protests. But more importantly for our purposes, he conducted research into how individual behavior is shaped by social systems: the sets of relationships and roles we play, whether informal and small, like a family, or even smaller, like being a son or a brother, or larger and more formal, such as being an American.

This was, of course, inspired in part by his own upbringing and the prejudice and discrimination he witnessed. A good deal of his early work in the 1960s focused on cognitive dissonance: what happens when our actions do not align with our personal values and belief systems.

This tied into what had become one of psychology’s biggest questions in the decades after the Second World War: Are people naturally cruel, or does the situation make them cruel? Of course, this connects to the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Does who we are come primarily from our genetic makeup or from how we are raised? And, perhaps even more fundamentally, are human beings inherently good or inherently bad?

After bearing witness to the horrors of the Nazis, and of the Japanese Empire, governments and the public demanded answers. How could human beings do these things? Psychology was, in many ways, duty-bound to try to answer it.

By the 1960s, the field of psychology had increasingly begun to lean toward the idea that ordinary people could behave with immense cruelty when placed in situations that encouraged cruelty. One of the first major stirrings of this idea came not from a psychologist or sociologist, but from political philosopher Hannah Arendt.

Arendt spent an immense amount of time covering the trial of, and interviewing, SS officer Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal organizers of the Holocaust. After Eichmann was tracked down and abducted by Israeli Mossad agents, he was taken to Israel and put on trial, found guilty, and executed.

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt came to what was, for many, a startling conclusion. Eichmann, who, through his organization of deportations, played a role in the deaths of millions, did not strike her as an inherently evil or cruel person, or even as a fervent Nazi. Rather, he appeared to be motivated largely by his career, and clung throughout his life to the sentiment: “I was just following orders.” In other words, Arendt’s argument was that he was terrifyingly ordinary.

As interesting as this was, however, it was an observation, not a defensible psychological experiment. Inspired by this more than anything, Yale social psychologist and contemporary of Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram, organized his own experiment. Milgram, who was Jewish and had family members who survived the concentration camps, wanted to investigate how ordinary people could participate in acts of extraordinary cruelty.

Study volunteers, paid a whopping $4.50 for their time, were told they were taking part in “a scientific study of memory and learning” designed to determine what effect punishment had on a subject’s ability to memorize information. There would be three people involved: the experimenter, who wore a lab coat and carried a clipboard to project authority; the participant; and another supposed volunteer.

The two volunteers were assigned roles. One would become the teacher, responsible for administering the experiment, while the other would become the learner. They were then separated into adjacent rooms. The learner, whom the teacher could not see during the experiment itself, appeared strapped into what looked like an electric chair. The teacher would then read a list of words that the learner had to recite back. If the learner got an answer wrong, the teacher was instructed to administer an electric shock by pressing a button.

Except the learner was not actually being shocked. He was not actually a volunteer either. He was an actor. The real subject of the experiment was the teacher. As the supposed shocks increased in intensity, the actor began yelling, screaming, and eventually complaining about a heart condition. Many participants protested and expressed a desire to stop. But with only relatively mild prodding from the experimenter, many continued. “It is absolutely essential that you continue…Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.”

Milgram summarized his findings: “The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”

While the results themselves have been criticized, and that criticism has been debated, the most immediate controversy centered on the experiment’s ethics. The participants were deceived about the nature of the study. They believed they were doing real harm to another human being and could, and likely did, walk away with emotional distress.

Milgram had shown how ordinary people could be persuaded to commit what they believed were terrible acts simply because an authority figure told them to do so. But there was another question; what happens when ordinary people aren’t being ordered to exercise power, but are simply given it? A distressed “teacher” after shocking the “learner.”

Zimbardo wanted to explore the power of social roles. People do not behave in a vacuum; we adapt ourselves to the roles we have in life. A teacher is expected to, and hopefully does, behave differently from a student. A parent differently, again hopefully, from a child. A police officer, once more hopefully, from a civilian. But with each of these roles comes a difference in power, a nebulous thing: the ability of an individual or group to exert control over another. As a Stanford article from 1996 put it:

“Zimbardo’s primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals.”

It would seem that the choice of methodology for the experiment was influenced, at least in part, by who funded it and why. The U.S. Office of Naval Research funded the study on behalf of the Navy and Marine Corps, who wanted to investigate and better understand conflict between guards and prisoners. And so, as Zimbardo’s website notes:

“We wanted to see what the psychological effects were of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. To do this, we decided to set up a simulated prison and then carefully note the effects of this institution on the behavior of all those within its walls.”

After receiving permission from Stanford in 1971, study participants were recruited through advertisements in the “Help Wanted” sections of the Palo Alto Times and The Stanford Daily, looking for “male college students” for a “psychological study of prison life.”

The one- to two-week study, beginning on August 14, offered participants $15 a day, which is roughly $120 per day today, which sounds great. But I have to tell you, some of them were going to be there all day. Four dollars in 1963, when the Milgram experiment took place, is almost $44 today, and that was for an hour, so sign me up for shocking some people. But because Santa Clara County college males needed beer money, and they also had no idea what they were getting into, 75 men applied.

The participants were predominantly middle-class young white men who appeared to be psychologically and physically healthy, whatever that meant. Those with criminal backgrounds, medical problems, or mental health conditions were deliberately excluded, and 24 were ultimately selected. On a random basis, half of the men were assigned to be prisoners, while the other half, nine working in shifts of three, with another three on call, were assigned to be prison guards.

Their prison was the basement of Jordan Hall, Stanford’s psychology department, and for the prisoners, this would be their home for the next seven to fourteen days. The graduate student offices in the basement were repurposed into mock cells, each arranged to hold three prisoners. There was a small corridor in the middle to serve as a prison yard, a closet for solitary confinement, and a much larger conference room across from the prisoners’ rooms for the guards and the warden, undergraduate research assistant David Jaffe.

Two fabricated walls were erected: one at the entrance and another near the cells to block observation from the outside. Each cell measured seven feet by ten feet, roughly 2.1 by 3 meters, was unlit, and intended to house three prisoners. Each contained three cots, with a mattress, sheet, and pillow. The prisoners were confined to the cells at night and spent their days in the yard. The guards, meanwhile, stayed in the warden’s office when not making their rounds, where they were able to rest and relax. They worked in teams of three, rotating through eight-hour shifts, and were sent home at the end of each shift. This was a study unlike any other.

Zimbardo, taking on the role of superintendent of the prison, held an orientation session with the guards the day before the experiment began. He instructed them not to physically harm the prisoners or withhold food or water, but to maintain law and order, whatever that meant in a college hall’s basement.

They were provided with wooden batons, khaki shirts and pants from a local military surplus store, and mirrored sunglasses intended to prevent eye contact and, in theory, deindividualize them, not only from one another, but from the men playing the roles of prisoners.

He instructed them to refer to the prisoners by number rather than by name, a practice intended to diminish the prisoners’ sense of individuality. Zimbardo explained that the guard orientation was meant to instruct them to exert power over the prisoners. He has since emphasized that he explicitly instructed his fellow researchers to make clear that the guards were not to beat the prisoners. Instead, they were to treat the simulation like a real jail, something these young men had never actually experienced and had mostly seen portrayed on television and in movies.

The orientation took place on August 14. The next day, the experiment began, already breaking the ethical contract Zimbardo had drawn up. Having recruited the local Palo Alto police, each prisoner was arrested, well, mock arrested, as they had not actually committed a crime, at their homes. The arrests came as a complete surprise to the men, who, when they asked what they were being arrested for, were told it was for armed robbery or burglary.

They were brought to Palo Alto Police Headquarters and fully booked, with the police taking no procedural shortcuts. Their Miranda rights were read, they were fingerprinted, and mug shots were taken. All of these actions were video documented by a local reporter riding in Zimbardo’s car.

The twelve men were then transported to Stanford, where three guards prepared for the arrival of the inmates, who had been told they were going to the “Stanford County Jail.” There, in the basement of Jordan Hall, they were strip-searched and given their new identities: inmate identification numbers and prison uniforms consisting of uncomfortable, ill-fitting smocks. They were given no underwear and provided with stocking caps for sleeping, as well as a weighted chain around one ankle.

They were then greeted by the warden, who talked down to them as convicted criminals who had committed serious offenses. The prison’s rules were dictated to them, and then they retired to their miserable, cramped cots after what was almost certainly the worst day of their lives. Beginning of a strip search.

Confined in their miserable cells and realizing that this was their life for the next one to two weeks, the prisoners stewed. At 2:30 in the morning on the second day, Monday, August 16, the guards woke the prisoners, blowing whistles and clanging their batons for a roll call. The prisoners refused to leave their cells, ripped off their number tags, removed the sleeping caps they were supposed to wear for some reason, and insulted the guards.

In response, the guards sprayed the prisoners with fire extinguishers, called in the three on-call guards, and forced the prisoners out of their cells. They removed their clothes and mattresses and took the main instigators into the Hole, a dark closet. One of the guards remarked to another, “These are dangerous prisoners.”

The next day, in order to further discourage acts of disobedience, those deemed to have played the most minor roles in the rebellion were separated from the others and rewarded with access to the larger office. There, they were given access to beds and better food, spending the day in relative comfort while the others remained in their cramped cells, or in the closet, not a euphemism.

At one point, the warden, undergraduate research assistant David Jaffe, almost certainly with Zimbardo’s encouragement, urged the guards to act “tougher.”

They did this by asserting their power over the prisoners: humiliating them, forcing them to do pushups, restricting their access to the bathroom, and forcing them to relieve themselves in a bucket. How did they force them?

Well, they didn’t, not in any real, physical sense. The guards had simply been given authority and power over the prisoners.

Why did the prisoners put up with it? Well, I’m sure the promise of $15 a day played a role, but there was clearly something else going on.

The first man to crack was Prisoner 8612, Douglas Korpi. After 36 hours, he broke down, yelling: “Jesus Christ, I’m burning up inside… I can’t stand another night! I just can’t take it anymore!”

And, just like that, a research assistant pulled him aside, and he was released from “prison,” a replacement brought in. Korpi first said, in 1992, that the prison experiment had deeply affected him and that the experience had pushed him toward becoming a prison psychologist. Then, in 2017, he said his breakdown had been fake. He had an exam to study for, and when his attempts to study during the experiment while “imprisoned” were rejected, he claimed that he faked a breakdown to get out. He later added that he wished he had filed false imprisonment charges. Zimbardo believed he was lying in the 2017 interview. I’m not entirely sure why he would be, but I am also inclined to agree.

Having seen the guards divide them and show favoritism toward those who had not been active in the rebellion, the remaining prisoners shunned the supposedly favored group, believing them to be snitches. On the other hand, those now shunned began to see the others as a threat. They valued the few amenities they had, their mattresses and clothes, and did not want to lose them again because of the actions of a few men. The guards had succeeded in dividing the prisoners against one another.

That same day, Prisoner 819, whose real identity has not been publicly identified, began crying and hyperventilating. Zimbardo sent in a priest to talk to him. Prisoner 819 refused to speak to the man of God and instead asked for a medical doctor.

Concerned, Zimbardo, the superintendent, pulled him aside and tried to talk some sense into the crying man, reminding him who he was. He was not actually a prisoner. Despite having spent the previous few days working day and night to convince him otherwise.

It would seem that, without prompting from Zimbardo, as he was talking to 819, the guards encouraged the other prisoners to insult him, and cries of: “819 did a bad thing!” broke out. Hearing this, Prisoner 819 broke down and began crying. Zimbardo gave him his pay and got him out of there.

Day 5, Thursday, August 19, was visitation day, in order to further simulate the prison experience. The guards, at Zimbardo’s direction, told a prisoner that their family was there, then deliberately made them wait a long period before allowing them to see their visitors. The visits lasted just ten minutes and were supervised by a guard.

Parents and girlfriends grew concerned about how awful their sons and boyfriends looked after five days of being trapped in a basement and harassed. One set of parents stated that they were going to contact lawyers so their child could be released early, clearly, and understandably, not fully grasping that this was supposed to be a psychological experiment, they could leave at any time.

Zimbardo got visitors of his own that day. Cognitive psychologist Gordon H. Bower, a Yale graduate and now, like Zimbardo, a Stanford professor, was concerned. He framed that concern through the lens of a fellow academic, questioning Zimbardo about what the independent variable was. What exactly was he altering to test its effect?

The answer was the random assignment of participants to either guard or prisoner. The dependent variable, what he was measuring, was their behavior. Bower was not satisfied, but he had done his professional due diligence.

Luckily, 25-year-old Stanford doctoral student Christina Maslach visited that night.

Zimbardo had divorced earlier that year and would marry Maslach the following year, so I feel safe in saying they were seeing each other. Maslach had witnessed guards getting physical with prisoners and forcing them to wear bags over their heads. She confronted Zimbardo from a far more human and personal place than Bower had, questioning the immorality of the study and his apparent lack of care toward his subjects. Zimbardo defended himself from a research perspective: this was all supposedly for the good of knowledge.

But after she flat-out told him that she didn’t like what the experiment was doing to him, insinuating that she was beginning to question their relationship, and because she looked like she did and he looked like he did (remember that?), Zimbardo began asking others involved in the study for their opinions. The research assistants and others echoed her concerns. Zimbardo went home to think it through.

Citing Maslach’s objections, the parents’ talk of getting lawyers involved, and the increasing brutality of the guards, Zimbardo gathered everyone together on Friday, August 20, Day 6, and told them that it was over. Everyone would be paid for the full amount of time they spent in the experiment.

He then debriefed the participants over the course of several hours before bringing everyone together so they could have a nice chat, which I’m sure was not awkward in the slightest. They were asked to complete a personal retrospective and mail it directly to Zimbardo. They were also asked to return a week later to share their opinions and emotions again.

The “Stanford County Jail” was broken down, and the basement once again became graduate student offices. Zimbardo and his graduate student researchers then set to work writing their articles about the experiment. In a 1997 interview, Zimbardo was quoted as saying that “more than 50 people had observed the study in progress and none had objected.” Not sure how he figured that.

Zimbardo concluded that the simulated prison, rather than the participants’ individual traits themselves, had caused their behavior to change. The experiment appeared to show that the regular attitudes and behavior of ordinary people could be dramatically altered by the social situations in which they found themselves.

Zimbardo argued that the experiment’s “social forces and environmental contingencies” had led the guards to behave cruelly and tyrannically, while the prisoners, after their early rebellion, began to see themselves as prisoners: deindividualized, powerless, and increasingly divided among themselves. This is broadly tied to the idea of role internalization: people taking on the behavior and expectations associated with the roles they are given. Even Zimbardo himself later admitted that he sometimes felt more like a prison superintendent than a research psychologist.

And that gets into one of the major criticisms of the study. Zimbardo and his researchers may have immersed themselves in the experiment too much. They encouraged the guards to behave more harshly and, in doing so, may have influenced their behavior. Critics have argued that what the guards exhibited was, at least in part, demand characteristics: participants behaving in the way they believed the researchers expected, or wanted, them to behave.

Thirty-one years later, the BBC organized its own televised prison study. Similar in some ways and different in others, it directly questioned Zimbardo’s central assertion that people simply slip mindlessly into their assigned roles. The researchers went so far as to describe the Stanford Prison Experiment as: “A study of what happens when a powerful authority figure, Zimbardo, imposes tyranny.”

Other critics have argued that the experiment suffered from selection bias. The recruitment poster specifically advertised a study about prison life, potentially attracting people who were more aggressive, abusive, authoritarian, or otherwise inclined toward those kinds of behavior. A criticism I personally find both patronizing and antagonistic toward a group of college students who were, more likely than not, simply looking to make some money.

Thibault Le Texier, great name, argued that Zimbardo encouraged the guards to behave as they did because he was seeking to confirm conclusions he had already arrived at in his own mind. Like with other criticisms, Zimbardo pushed back, arguing that other studies and findings supported his conclusions. Which is, honestly, a pretty weak comeback.

Because the broader idea behind the study, that ordinary people can be influenced into doing things they might never normally do because of the social situations and roles they find themselves in, is true. Or at the very least, there is substantial psychological evidence that situations can have an enormous influence on behavior.

The problem, well, the first problem, is that the Stanford Prison Experiment itself is seriously flawed. It is not a valid scientific demonstration of everything Zimbardo claimed it was. There are significant questions about whether its findings could be replicated, whether the guards were genuinely transformed by the situation, or whether they were behaving as they believed they were expected to behave.

And, perhaps most damningly, the experiment was designed from the beginning to psychologically manipulate its participants in a way that was both harmful, and not detailed to them. As was written in Section 3, Arrival, of the study:

“Each prisoner was systematically searched and stripped naked. He was then deloused with a spray, to convey our belief that he may have germs or lice... Real male prisoners don’t wear dresses, but real male prisoners do feel humiliated and do feel emasculated. Our goal was to produce similar effects quickly by putting men in a dress without any underclothes. Indeed, as soon as some of our prisoners were put in these uniforms they began to walk and to sit differently, and to hold themselves differently – more like a woman than like a man.”

The men were deceived not only about the nature of the study, but also about the extent to which they could be harmed emotionally, psychologically, and even physically. It is not difficult to see how this could have resulted in genuine harm to the participants. Zimbardo maintained that none of the participants experienced lasting harm. And while, of course, he would find that, aside from Douglas Korpi, none of the participants have publicly claimed that the experiment caused them lasting damage.

But that is beside the point. The Stanford Prison Experiment took place during what was, in many ways, a kind of Wild West period for human experimentation in psychology. Studies such as this, along with others that had raised serious ethical concerns, helped accelerate the development and strengthening of ethical standards.

The result was firmer rules surrounding informed consent, participants understanding what they were actually getting themselves into, and the principle that researchers have a responsibility to protect participants from harm. Today, human research is reviewed by an Institutional Review Board, or IRB, to determine whether a proposed study meets ethical guidelines. So, for that reason alone, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains important. Beyond, of course, being absolutely bonkers.

Zimbardo, who died in 2024 at the age of 91, defended his conclusions until the end of his life. In 1971, he wrote to the House Committee on the Judiciary about the experiment. Decades later, after the publication of the abuse and mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he was struck by the similarities with his own experiment. He was particularly dismayed by attempts by the military and government to place the blame for the torture on “a few bad apples” rather than acknowledging deeper systemic problems. As Zimbardo put it:

“I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil—to be Mother Teresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It’s the situation that brings that out.”

He became involved in the defense of one of the guards, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, testifying as an expert witness. After being given extensive access to the investigation, Zimbardo wrote The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, exploring both his own experiment and the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

If you remember the beginning of this piece, Zimbardo’s career, while forever defined by the Stanford Prison Experiment, continued without a hitch. Aside from stricter regulations surrounding human experimentation, there were no real professional repercussions for him. He went on to have a long, successful, and respected career.

Should it have been different? Well, I cannot really argue that it should have been, no one died, and people in this field have gotten away with far worse not too long before or after Zimbardo. But his most infamous study involved unethical human experimentation, placing the pursuit of knowledge above the people being experimented upon, in the belief that the information he hoped to gain justified what he was doing.

And, ultimately, that is where I think the Stanford Prison Experiment’s real lesson lies. The pursuit of knowledge does not supersede the most basic level of human decency. There is no discovery so important that it gives you the right to forget that the people you are studying are, first and foremost, people. So, I suppose the lesson is: Don’t be an asshole.

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Hare-brained History Bites will be going live next month! These exclusive articles, one or two a month, are going to be a lot of fun. And, aside from my shameless need to pay for things, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $5 a month for access to them.

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know I love you.

To throw a bone to one of my best friends, we look at a man who became the world’s foremost Albanologist, that is, a scholar of Albania. He was a pioneering paleobiologist, geologist, writer, spy, explorer, and murderer who came remarkably close to becoming King of Albania. So today, join me on a journey to Albania, via the Kingdom of Hungary, as we explore the life of Baron Nopcsa Ferenc Felsőszilvási.

Ferenc, his first name (I immediately learned that the Hungarian naming tradition follows the Eastern name order, with the family name coming first), was born on May 3, 1877, into the aristocratic Nopcsa family. The Nopcsas were Hungarian, although their ancestral castle at Săcel stood near the city of Déva, in the region of Țara Hațegului, the Land of Hațeg, an ancient, heavily forested and mountainous corner of Transylvania.

The region had long been held by Hungarians, with the medieval Hungarian Kingdom extending its authority into Transylvania after the Magyar tribes migrated westward. Transylvania, still under Hungarian control, became an autonomous principality under the Ottomans, before eventually falling under the control of our pals, the inbred Habsburgs, in the late seventeenth century.

The Habsburg monarchy was centered in Austria, and Hungarian elites resented Austrian political dominance. The result was over a century of unrest, culminating in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 creating the Dual Monarchy, giving the Kingdom of Hungary substantial political autonomy within the empire. It was, however, a solution to one nationalist problem that did little to solve the Empire’s many others.

What does any of this have to do with Ferenc Nopcsa and his family? Well, admittedly, not all that much. But it is important to understand the world into which he was born. Nopcsa was born in an empire where ethnic, cultural, religious, and political tensions were everywhere. His family was part of the Hungarian aristocracy: landed, wealthy, educated, and possessing privileges simply unavailable to the surrounding Romanian population whose origins, languages, and religious traditions were dramatically different. Transylvania, inhabited primarily by Romanians, was held by Hungary, while the small Kingdom of Romania wanted this territory, seeing it as part of România Mare, Greater Romania, you know, nationalist stuff.

Nopcsa’s father, Elek, Baron Nopcsa, had himself lived a rather interesting life. As a young man, he had served as a hussar under none other than our friend Maximilian I of Mexico, that poor idiot. Elek, unlike Max, survived that adventure, returned home, married another Hungarian aristocrat, and eventually became involved in public and cultural life in Budapest, serving as vice-director of the Hungarian Royal Opera and as a member of the Országgyűlés, the Hungarian parliament. Home, however, was a long way away.

The Nopcsa estate was in the Hațeg region of Transylvania, roughly 274 miles from Budapest. And while the landscape was spectacular- ancient forests, ravines, cliffs, and the looming Carpathian Mountains- it was hardly the ideal place for commercial agriculture or international trade. The family’s landholdings provided them with income and status, but they were not infinitely rich.

Still young, Ferenc nevertheless grew up with servants, a first-rate education, and exposure to several languages. He learned Hungarian, Romanian, English, German, and French. About his upbringing, there is little to say in addition, save for he was not only well-educated, but deeply inquisitive. There was only so much an education could do to satisfy a boy whose curiosity seemed determined to outrun the curriculum.

In 1895, when Ferenc was eighteen, his younger sister Ilona was walking along the family’s property near a riverbank when something sticking out of the muddy bank caught her attention. She dug at it and, after some effort, managed to pull it free. She turned it over in her hands. It was a skull, anyone could see that. But it was unlike any skull she had ever seen. Ilona carried it home to show her older brother. Eighteen-year-old Ferenc Nopcsa was fascinated.

This is not the skull she found; I really doubt it was this intact, and even if it were, there is no way she carried it home, but it is a near-complete skull of the kind of animal she had unwittingly discovered.

Nopcsa traveled straight to Vienna and took the skull to the esteemed and pioneering geologist Eduard Suess, professor of geology at the University of Vienna. Nopcsa expected the Doctor to take the skull for study, but Suess did not, likely done to encourage the young man’s scientific study. Identifying the bones as those of a dinosaur, he told the eighteen-year-old to take them back home to Transylvania, a region that was then just beginning to be recognized as a gold mine for paleontology, the study of fossils, and to investigate them himself. Nopcsa, educated and intelligent but lacking any real concrete knowledge of dinosaurs, asked the professor what he should do. Suess simply replied, “Study them!”

And Ferenc did. Retreating into the library of Săcel Castle, he read voraciously, devouring everything he could find on geology, physiology, anatomy, and neurology, while writing letters to Europe’s foremost scientific minds and begging them to send him books. At this time, very few European dinosaurs had been found, so Nopcsa had to find them himself. He scoured the valleys and riverbanks of Transylvania, excavating fossils himself.

From a tiny scratch on one fossilized skull, he began speculating about the relationship between the pituitary gland, which regulates growth, and an animal’s size. He also noticed something particularly interesting about the fossils he uncovered in Transylvania. The bones he unearthed belonged to sauropods, long-necked, long-tailed, small-headed dinosaurs with pillar-like legs, the sort of creatures like the most famous of them, Brontosaurus, but those found in the region were much, much smaller than their relatives elsewhere.

He named one of these dinosaurs Magyarosaurus, and from its diminutive size he began to deduce that the region of Hațeg had once been an island. There, he argued, because of what he called “limited resources,” the island environment had the effect of “reducing the size of animals.” And he was right. The theory of insular dwarfism, sometimes discussed as part of the island rule, is accepted today, and Hațeg really was once an island inhabited by a remarkable collection of unusual animals.

Nopcsa did not stop there. He studied the skulls of lizards and alligators, rearticulating the jaw of his fossils and trying to envision how the animals might actually have been constructed and lived. This was groundbreaking. The study of dinosaurs at the time was largely focused on reassembling bones. Scientists were not yet routinely asking what those bones might have looked like in life, and certainly were not systematically comparing fossils of long-dead animals with living species to understand their anatomy and behavior.

Nopcsa took that next step. He theorized that birds had evolved from dinosaurs. By watching living birds, he examined their nesting behavior and recognized that dinosaur hatchlings may have behaved similarly: defending their young in nests and exhibiting complex social behaviors centered around caring for their offspring.

He also theorized about how dinosaurs might have developed flight. Nopcsa proposed that ground-dwelling dinosaurs could have begun flapping their arms as they ran and jumped, using them to steady themselves. Over generations, scales could have developed into feathers, jumping could have become gliding, and eventually sustained flight. The theory was utterly novel, and although the actual evolution of flight was considerably more complicated than Nopcsa’s proposed mechanism, many of his ideas would become widely accepted long after his death.

He also concluded that some Mesozoic animals, the era of the dinosaurs, encompassing the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, were warm-blooded like mammals. Once again, he was right.

Some of these ideas would be refined later; but the fundamental insights came while Nopcsa was still a young man in his study. For his immense contributions to the field, several extinct animals have since been named after him, including Nopcsaspondylus, Elopteryx nopscai, Thesaurus nopcsai, Hyposaurus nopcsai, and Neosophis nopcsai.

For all of this, and for his insistence on studying extinct animals not merely as collections of bones but as living creatures with anatomy, behavior, physiology, and evolutionary histories, Ferenc Nopcsa is regarded as one of the founders of paleobiology. Holotype dorsal vertebra of Nopcsasopondylus.

In 1897, after two years of private study, Nopcsa began studying geology at the University of Vienna on the advice of Dr. Suess, different from Dr. Seuss. Here too, Nopcsa would prove himself an intellectual genius far ahead of his time.

Having already understood that his home region had once been an island, and now, obviously, wasn’t, he was quick to grasp the principle of continental drift: that the Earth’s landmasses are not fixed in place. This was a fringe theory, to say the absolute least. Nopcsa, through his geological mapping as part of his studies, recognized that there was something to the idea of the Earth’s landmasses moving, interacting with one another, and geological activity giving rise to landforms.

This, in part, is how he became interested in the small European country of Albania, where the European Plate and the Adriatic microplate converge, creating several mountain chains excellent for geological study, including the Bjeshkët e Nemuna, or the Accursed Mountains (a sick name).

At twenty-two, Nopcsa presented his work to the University of Vienna in a lecture on the “Dinosaurs of Transylvania.” There were two primary reactions from the faculty and fellow students to the lecture he gave. One: this was impressive work from a young man. Two: this young man was a pompous ass.

Nopcsa was brilliant, but he was also arrogant, rude, vain, and, traits that would be pretty standard in academia, but damningly, completely lacking in concern for etiquette. During his lecture, he derided the then-standard classification system of the respected paleontologist Georg Baur. He also bragged to the Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo about how outstanding his work was during the lecture itself.

Nopcsa was a very complex person, beyond simply being an ass, which he certainly could be. He was described as both respectful and deferential, but also exceptionally self-confident and convinced of his intellectual superiority. That being said, he was also perfectly happy to let others build upon, and even publish, his work, something that could be considered academic suicide.

He was sophisticated and comfortable in high society, but, as we will see, he was not particularly pretentious or inclined to stick his nose up at people. When he became interested in something, there was almost nothing that could stop him. He worked frenetically, sometimes for as many as eighteen hours a day, and was willing to spend anything or ignore almost any rule in pursuit of his interests.

Even during his period of private study at home, Nopcsa was never someone who wanted to remain in a library with charts and books. He wanted to go into the field and learn for himself, at a time when field research was hardly funded or subsidized. His family’s money, however, was not limitless. Thankfully for Ferenc, his uncle had once been a favorite courtier of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who was assassinated in 1898. Because of that relationship, the uncle had access to financial support from her widower, Emperor Franz Joseph, and was able to provide Ferenc with money for many of his coming adventures.

But Nopcsa also went through periods that contemporaries described as extensive lethargy, when he could barely be roused, and what he himself called his “shattered nerves.” His extensive field notes reveal pages and pages of frantic writing, sometimes followed by spidery, lazily written notes. His mother would, on several occasions, write to academics inquiring about Ferenc, explaining that her son was indisposed with illness. While we obviously cannot diagnose someone who died nearly a century ago, it is easy to see in these accounts symptoms consistent with what we would now recognize as bipolar disorder.

In 1903, Nopcsa completed his studies, earning his doctorate in geology. But another great interest was increasingly occupying his mind.

His, well, close companion at the time, Count Louis Draškovic, had spent time in Albania and was enthralling Nopcsa with tales of the mountain tribesmen living high in the reaches of the Albanian Alps. Now, like with the mental disorder he likely had, we cannot say this for certain, but, like, it is pretty damn clear that Nopcsa was gay. This was a time and place where being an openly gay man was obviously not acceptable. So Nopcsa never wrote something like, “Me and my gay lover had sex,” but he gets pretty damn close.

After Draškovic died young, it seems that traveling to Albania became something Nopcsa felt he simply had to do. And, as it happened, this aligned rather nicely with the plans of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Albania was then part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and nationalist sentiment was growing, with increasing calls for independence. Looking on, the Austrian Imperial Council apparently decided, “You know what, adding another ethnic group who wants independence would be great,” and concluded that it would be useful to have a better understanding of Albania.

Not many Austro-Hungarians were eager to be sent to what was, to them, an impoverished, mountainous backwater that spoke an utterly foreign language and where a substantial portion of the population was Muslim. Nopcsa was the obvious choice. He was tasked with scientifically and ethnographically mapping the country for the Austrian Imperial Council.

While planning the trip to Bucharest, Nopcsa met a 18-year-old Albanian named Bajazid Elmaz Doda. Doda, born in the mountain village of Shtirovica, had left his small, poor village in search of work and happened to meet the twenty-nine-year-old eccentric Hungarian preparing to travel to his homeland. It seemed the pair were destined for each other, and they quickly became extremely close. As Nopcsa later wrote in his memoirs:

“On 20 November 1906, in Bucharest, I met Bajazid Doda. Since that time, Bajazid has been with me and, since the death of Louis Draškovic, he has been the only person who has truly loved me and in whom I had full confidence, never doubting for a moment that he would misuse my trust.”

If that is not enough evidence of a homosexual relationship, after returning to Transylvania and discovering an extinct genus of stem turtles, Nopcsa named it Kallokibotion bajazidi, literally “beautiful box of Bajazid.” In the words of British paleontologist Gareth Dyke, “the shape of the shell reminded him of Bajazid’s arse.” A photo of an Albanian man one day after his marriage, taken by Doda on his and Nopcsa’s travels.

After their initial meeting, Nopcsa and Doda returned to Săcel Castle, where they remained and presumably studied one another’s boxes (Is that too much? Maybe). From there, they traveled to London, where Nopcsa had scientific contacts, most notably Arthur Smith Woodward, the geological curator of the British Museum. Woodward was one of the few men in academia Nopcsa befriended, and the pair would write to one another monthly for more than thirty years. While in London, Doda became sick with influenza, and Nopcsa nursed him back to health. In November 1907, they finally set off for Shqipëria, the Land of the Eagles: Albania.

They first stopped in Shkodër, a major city situated on the lake of the same name and serving as a gateway into the Albanian Alps. Nopcsa bought himself a house there. Outside of academia, Nopcsa was a charismatic and charming man with a flair for the dramatic who, again, was both extremely intelligent and extremely assured of that fact. Yet whereas in university lecture halls he could fall into, for lack of a better term, “dick-measuring contests” over his intelligence, on the ground in Albania he did not necessarily fall into the classic anthropological trap of, “Look how uncivilized these savages are.”

Rather, he immediately set about learning the notoriously difficult Albanian language and the customs of the Albanian people. He took up Albanian dress and became both fascinated by and deeply admiring of Albanian culture.

He was particularly transfixed by the Albanian sense of honor and respect, which he described vividly in a letter to Smith Woodward. He had been having tea at someone’s house with a group of other men, a respectful and otherwise rather nondescript gathering, only to later learn that one of the guests had killed another guest’s son. Yet the victim’s father had sat and shared tea with the very man who had killed his kin because they were guests under another man’s roof, and getting into a dispute beneath another person’s roof would have been considered deeply disrespectful.

The privileged aristocrat Nopcsa built relationships with everyone from the tribesmen of the Accursed Mountains to educated Albanian nationalists in Tirana. Not that it was all smooth sailing. During their very first expedition, on the recommendation of a priest, they traveled into the mountains to meet a local named Mustafa Lita. Nopcsa described him:

“A portly fellow, but agile and quick in his movements. He seemed quite muscular. He had a large grey moustache, always entered the room with large forceful strides and hastened to take his seat, during which time all the rest of the men rose to their feet. He was promptly served by his men…”

Nopcsa goes on at some length describing Mustafa Lita. Why?

“The reason I am endeavouring to describe Mustafa Lita in such detail is that he was one of the most dastardly robbers.”

And to this end, recognizing that Nopcsa was an aristocrat, Lita and his band of followers took Ferenc and Bajazid hostage, demanding ten thousand Turkish pounds. They held the pair for weeks, moving them around as they attempted to find a way to extort Nopcsa’s wealth, or the Austrian government, for a ransom.

Eventually, Bajazid’s father organized their rescue with ten armed men, joined by “a further forty men,” with the intention of killing the man who had kidnapped his son. But Lita had treated the pair with respect, as best as one could while holding two men captive, and Nopcsa dissuaded Mr. Doda from killing him.

After that, Nopcsa got on with his studies. He took thousands upon thousands of pages of notes, made sketches, and compiled more than fifty scientific studies of Albania, covering its geology, language, folklore, culture, people, history, and the Kanun, Albania’s customary law. As perhaps the only person to conduct such a comprehensive study of the country over several years, Nopcsa’s Albanological work became foundational to the study of Albania and remains an important part of the country’s scholarly heritage.

But Nopcsa’s time in Albania was not all academic work, or being a hostage. He regularly involved himself in the feuds of mountain tribesmen as a negotiator, acting as a third party with no stake in the dispute who had nevertheless befriended many of the people involved. He dressed in Albanian clothing, Shqiptar robes, and immersed himself in the country and its nationalist and insurgent movements. He also covertly smuggled money and supplies from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Albanian revolutionaries while he and Doda traveled around the country on a motorcycle, Nopcsa driving and Doda sitting in the sidecar.

He remained an aristocrat, with all the manners and connections that came with it. He could go months without communicating with someone and then show up for a long-scheduled dinner wearing Albanian dress at one of Europe’s luxurious hotels, restaurants, or tea houses. In 1912, however, Nopcsa’s Albanian academic adventure had to go on a sabbatical. The reason was war.

The independent Balkan states of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro went to war with the Ottoman Empire, and both Nopcsa and Doda were commissioned by the Austrian Imperial Council to spy on the combatants and gather intelligence for the empire. Which they did. They traveled across Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia, primarily gathering intelligence on the Ottoman forces.

Nopcsa later wrote of an incident while traveling with a group of his Albanian compatriots:

“Nikol Gega and Bajazid, in a fit of sudden fury, seized their revolvers and were only prevented from killing one another by the intervention of Gjok Prenga and Mehmet Zeneli, I was able to arbitrate to the detriment of neither, and make peace between them so that they were eventually reconciled.”

He continued:

“Many Europeans were amazed at how I was able to keep all these very different characters together, who like all Albanians incline to envy and jealousy…”

Nopcsa was an incredibly contradictory character. He could oscillate from genuine empathy for the Albanian people to deep insensitivity toward them. Much like the rest of his character, it can be difficult to make sense of.

The war ended in 1913 with a victory for the Balkan League, and the Austro-Hungarians demanded, as part of the resulting settlement, that Albania gain independence from the Ottoman Empire. The Albanians held a congress in Trieste to discuss who should rule them, apparently deciding that a monarchy was the best course of action. They were looking for a mbret, a king. Ferenc Nopcsa put himself forward.

And this was not simply the eccentric Nopcsa being eccentric. He was an aristocrat who had just spent half a decade in the country, building relationships and connections there. Albanian representatives, particularly those from the rural and mountainous north, were inclined to listen to him. Had the decision been left entirely to the Albanians, it is conceivable that Nopcsa could have become king. He wrote, quite nonchalantly in his diary:

“Once a reigning European monarch, I would have no difficulty coming up with the further funds needed by marrying a wealthy American heiress aspiring to royalty, a step which under other circumstances I would have been loath to take.”

No points for guessing why he’d be loath to take that particular step. The great powers, however, had their own hands in the decision, and the choice was made to install Prince Wilhelm of Wied, a second cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II, as the mbret of the Principality of Albania.

Why? Well, the German Empire wanted a German, and the failing Austro-Hungarians were hardly in a position to oppose their greatest ally. Britain, France, and Italy were also willing to accept the choice. And, unfortunately for Nopcsa, an eccentric Hungarian scientist with a succession of “close companions” did not have quite the cachet necessary to win the support of Europe’s great powers. As he wrote to his friend Smith Woodward: “My Albania is dead.” Nopsca in Albanian military dress in that coming war.

Nopcsa continued working as an Austro-Hungarian spy and was drafted into the army as a soldier, serving in the disputed land of Kosovo, where he wore the Albanian uniform seen above and led a group of Kosovar Albanian volunteers against Serbia. He also worked undercover in the Kingdom of Romania, which had declared war on Austro-Hungary and the rest of the Central Powers, primarily because it hoped to gain territory such as Transylvania. Nopcsa dressed as a shepherd and sent reports on Romanian troop movements.

While Romania would have a very, very bad time of it, suffering devastating defeats and being forced into a humiliating treaty, the war ultimately turned against Austro-Hungary and the rest of the Central Powers. So Romania reentered the war at quite literally the last possible hour, November 10, 1918. And that would be bad news for Nopcsa. That same year, Elek Nopcsa died, making Ferenc Nopcsa the Baron Nopcsa. Articles I have been reading while researching this edition have referred to him as Baron Nopcsa throughout his life, but that is wrong, and don’t let yourself be fooled!

Anyways, his time as Baron would not go well. First, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary went through more than a year of struggle between republican and communist forces. During the brief existence of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the Baron, being an aristocrat, was in a bit of trouble, communists not known for being particularly friendly toward hereditary titled landowners.

According to a Hungarian source, which I am not trusting in the slightest, Baron Nopcsa became the first man in history to hijack an aircraft in order to flee the country. Do I believe the eccentric Baron could have yoinked an aircraft? Yes. Absolutely. Was he actually the first person in history to do so? No way.

Because of Romania’s reentry into the war on the winning side, the victorious Allies were happy to listen to Romanian calls for România Mare, or Greater Romania. In 1920, Transylvania, along with several other regions you have almost certainly never heard of unless you are Romanian, Moldovan, Ukrainian, or Hungarian, were awarded to the Kingdom of Romania. The landed Hungarian aristocracy of Transylvania lost their estates, the wealth those estates generated, and much of their property in a flash.

Săcel Castle fell into disrepair. What had once been filled with ornate Persian rugs, a piano, a grand staircase, and cathedral-like painted glass was gradually broken down and left to crumble. The floorboards rotted. The walls were ripped apart by treasure seekers over the following century. Today, what remains is broken and decaying. Romania, itself a cash-strapped country, has little interest in spending substantial amounts of money restoring the ancestral castle of a foreign aristocratic family.

Nopcsa, it seemed, took all of this in stride for a time. He lived in Vienna with Doda, continued his scientific work, and traveled around Europe on a motorcycle with his close companion. Then he realized he was running out of money.

His family had been aristocratic, but never truly, solidly rich. They had now lost the estates that provided their income, and his uncle, who had helped funnel money to him through the Emperor, no longer had an Emperor from whom to borrow.

While Nopcsa was not particularly well regarded by many of his academic peers, his brilliance was enough to earn him a job as head of the Hungarian Geological Institute in 1925. But the eccentric, restless, and manic Nopcsa was never destined for an office job, and he soon resigned.

By this point, in a Europe devastated by war, the heartbeat of the scientific world had increasingly moved to the United States. This was especially true in paleontology, where the fossil beds of the United States and Canada were producing extraordinary discoveries, and much of the cutting-edge work in the field was now being done across the Atlantic. Nopcsa and his work were left behind.

He had helped advance the field enormously, but academia is, and always has been, a world where having friends to advance your work and, for lack of a better word, hype you up, matters. Nopcsa had very few people willing to do this for him. Then, as now, he was forgotten. Some have pointed to the fact that he was almost certainly a gay man. Then, as now in some places, that could present obstacles to the restoration of his legacy. But there was also his ending, which throws an even greater wrench into the question of how we should remember him.

Nopcsa’s final years were almost the complete antithesis of the life he had once lived. Deep in debt, he was forced to sell his immense fossil collection and his impressive library. His health deteriorated. He became ill enough that he was forced to give lectures from a wheelchair in London. And he appears to have become increasingly unstable, at times reportedly chasing people around his property with a pistol.

In April 1933, he wrote a letter to Smith Woodward. It began in his usual formal style, with Nopcsa apologizing for being unable to meet his old friend. But near the end, the letter reportedly drifted into nonsensical, manic rhymes.

On the morning of April 26, 1933, the fifty-five-year-old Nopcsa sent his housekeeper away on an errand. He made tea for Doda and slipped sleeping powder into it. After Doda had passed out, Nopcsa shot him in the head. He then wrote a letter and turned the pistol on himself. He wrote simply:

“The reason for my suicide is my nervous system which is at its end. The fact that I killed my long-term friend and secretary, Mr. Bajazid Elmaz Doda, in his sleep, without him having an inkling as to what was going on, was because I did not want to leave him behind sick, in misery and in poverty because he could have suffered too much. I wish to be cremated.”

He got his wish. Nopcsa was cremated and buried in Vienna, with nothing adorning his grave. Doda was buried in the Muslim section of the same cemetery, where an ash tree grows over his grave.

Now, obviously, don’t kill people. Even if you are mentally suffering. Again, obviously, I feel considerably worse for Doda. And whatever sympathy one might have for Nopcsa’s struggles cannot excuse what he did to the man who had apparently been his closest companion for nearly three decades. But Nopcsa’s end is nevertheless tragic. He appears to have spent much of his life struggling with untreated mental illness, although we can never know exactly what he suffered from.

In the end, I’m not sure how much more there is to say. The man lived one of the most remarkable, interesting, contradictory, and thoroughly Hare-brained lives imaginable. The ending does take some of the shine off it, I know. It’s impossible to tell the story of Nopcsa as a simple tale of an eccentric genius and adventurer when it ends with the murder of the man who had stood beside him for nearly thirty years.

But perhaps that is what makes the story worth telling. Ferenc Nopcsa was brilliant, arrogant, generous, vain, curious, insensitive, adventurous, and, at times, deeply empathetic. He was a paleontologist, geologist, ethnographer, writer, spy, aristocrat, motorcycle enthusiast, and almost King of Albania.

He lived a life so improbable that if you wrote it as fiction, people might reasonably accuse you (or me) of making half of it up. And while his ending was tragic, his life deserves to be remembered. Hopefully, this edition has helped spread his story just a little further.

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Hare-brained History Bites will be going live next month! These exclusive articles, one or two a month, are going to be a lot of fun. And, aside from my shameless need to pay for things, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $5 a month for access to them.

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

I love you, Mom.

Mom, I don’t say it enough,

not enough for you to know

just how much you have kept me up,

kept me on my feet.

You have been my rock

all my life.

You gave me life,

and there were times

I shook yours apart.

I brought you into my darkness.

I wore you down to the bone.

And there were days

when I felt like nothing but bones myself,

broken,

brittle,

empty.

Empty,

and so completely alone.

But never truly alone.

Not while I had you.

You were there.

Through everything.

Through the nights I could not see a way out,

through the days when I couldn’t see beyond myself,

through every place my darkness carried me.

You tried to pull me back.

You told me you loved me.

Again,

and again,

and again.

Even when I could not love myself.

I was so broken, Mom.

So tired.

There were times I did not have the strength

or the will

to keep going.

And on and on it went,

into places so dark

I don’t know how I would have found my way out

if you had not been there.

But you were.

You were there for me.

Always.

Always when I needed you most,

even when I did not know how to say

that I needed you.

And I know,

I know I take you for granted sometimes.

I know there are days

when I forget to say the words

that should never go unsaid.

So let me say them now.

Mom,

thank you.

For every time you pulled me back up.

For every time you stayed.

For every time you told me you loved me

when I could not believe I was worth loving.

Thank you for giving me life.

And thank you for helping me

find a reason to keep living it.

I don’t say it enough.

But I hope you know.

I love you, Mom.

I always have.

I always will.

Nah, not really. It certainly looks like it, though, right?

Anyway, without further ado, for the second edition in a row, join me as we explore the destructive force of Earth, heading to Pompeii to witness one of history’s most infamous disasters: the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

It has been a long, long time since we ventured back to Ancient Rome. And, well, the city of Pompeii, in the beautiful, temperate, and rugged region of Campania, about 85 percent hills and mountains, is older than Rome.

Pompeii was first inhabited by the Osci, an early Italic people who lived in south-central Italy. They built their settlement near the mouth of the Sarno River, on a high and defensible coastal plateau, with their backs protected by the large mountain just a few miles behind them: Vesuvius. The initial Osci settlement was almost certainly small. The name itself may hint at this. The Oscan word for five was pompe, leading some to suggest that Pompeii was originally settled by five families or five groups. Whether that’s true or not, by roughly the late sixth century BC, Pompeii was an established town.

By then, the Italic peoples of the region had been heavily influenced by the seafaring Greek, who brought their language, customs, architecture, and religion, and Pompeii embraced plenty of it. A great temple was built to Apollo, the god of music, poetry, prophecy, and a whole lot else, while the city became a port used by Greek sailors.

Pompeii grew quickly, historically speaking, helped enormously by its excellent location. Its port gave it access to the Mediterranean, while the Sarno River could be navigated roughly 15 miles, or 24 kilometers, inland. It sat near the important Greek settlement of Neapolis, modern-day Naples, and the land was absurdly fertile. There was probably a reason for that, but nothing to worry about.

The growing town became something of a cultural melting pot. The Greeks had arrived, as had the Phoenicians by sea, while the Italic peoples of the region, the Etruscans, Samnites, Umbrians, and Latins, came and went. Eventually, in the fourth century BC, Pompeii came under the control of the Samnites, another Oscan-speaking Italic people from central Italy.

The Samnites expanded and fortified the settlement, and the already prosperous little town became even more prosperous. A wealthy upper class emerged, building increasingly large homes, while temples and public buildings multiplied. There were baths, shops, markets, theaters, and the sort of businesses that emerge wherever men have money, free time, and questionable judgment.

The Samnites initially allied themselves with their northern neighbors, the Romans, a Latin-speaking people from the city of Rome on the Tiber. The two fought together against invading Gauls and later against other Italian peoples. But Rome had developed an unfortunate habit of expanding. Soon, Samnite-held territory was being swallowed by the Roman Republic, and the two former allies found themselves at war. Obviously, the Romans won.

Pompeii fell into Rome’s sphere of influence, and Roman architecture and institutions increasingly appeared throughout the city: a Forum, a temple to Jupiter, a large theater, a basilica, bathhouses, and the other standard Roman trappings of urban life.

Now, this may or may not come as a shock, but the Romans were assholes. Although cities like Pompeii were now under Roman control, their inhabitants did not necessarily enjoy the privileges of Roman citizenship. This became one of the major grievances behind the Social War, fought from 91 to 88 BC, when Pompeii and several other Italian communities, rose in revolt against Rome. It did not go well.

Pompeii was besieged by the great general and even greater name-haver Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix. Sulla scorpions bombarded the city with artillery and destroyed several buildings and, presumably, the unfortunate people inside them. The rebellion collapsed. Those deemed to have opposed Rome faced execution, exile, or the confiscation of their estates and possessions. Sulla would go on to become consul, fight and win a civil war, and seize power as dictator, a very real political office.

To ensure the region remained loyal, Sulla redistributed confiscated estates to his veterans, and former Roman soldiers were settled in Pompeii. The city was rapidly Romanized. For those who remained, Roman citizenship eventually came with the deal. Latin replaced Oscan as the dominant language. Roman political institutions were introduced. And Pompeii became increasingly integrated into the enormous Roman economy, further accelerating its prosperity.

And that economy had one hell of a natural advantage. The soil around Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum was, again, extraordinarily fertile. Herculaneum, a smaller but wealthier resort town named after its legendary founder, Hercules, became a favorite retreat for Roman elites, who built luxurious villas decorated with colored marble and all the other things rich people like to use to remind everyone that they are rich.

Around both cities, farmers grew wine, olives, grain, fruits, and vegetables, while livestock grazed across the countryside. Wine was particularly important. Vineyards covered the landscape, especially the foothills of the mountain looming above the city. Campanian wine was shipped throughout the expanding Roman world as the Republic transformed into an Empire.

By the first century AD, Pompeii was a prosperous city of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people. Its streets were packed with shops, taverns, bakeries, laundries, temples, public buildings, and private homes. But Pompeii’s wealth was not evenly distributed, with a significant population of laborers, shopkeepers, freed people, and slaves. The city was deeply unequal.

Many ordinary residents lived in insulae, the apartment buildings that were a defining feature of Roman urban life. These could be constructed from brick, timber, and stone and were often haphazardly expanded or rebuilt. Ground-floor apartments and shops were generally preferable, while residents on the upper floors had to contend with cramped quarters, poor access to water, and the unpleasant reality of having to carry your waste down flights of stairs.

And then there was slavery. Like every Roman city, Pompeii was a slave society. Romans could enslaved people from many different ethnicities and regions, if the Rome conquered you, you could become property. An enslaved person might perform unskilled physical labor, domestic work, agricultural work, or highly skilled and educated jobs. Their treatment depended enormously on their owner. Some were subjected to horrific abuse; others were treated, well, well, as well as a slave can be, and were eventually be freed. Even relatively modest Roman households might own one or more slaves. Pompeii, like the rest of the Roman world, was therefore defined by an enormously hierarchical social order.

And it was also very, very horny, Venus, goddess of sex and love superceded Apollo as the patron of the city. Prostitution, whether conducted in brothels or by individual sex workers, was common. Roman society was deeply patriarchal, and sexuality was closely tied to status, masculinity, and power. The ideal Roman man was expected to be sexually active and dominant, reflecting the concept of virtus: manliness, courage, and power. Women of respectable status, meanwhile, were expected to embody pudicitia, chastity, modesty, and sexual self-control.

Marriage was as much a social and economic institution as a romantic one. Women were generally expected to manage the household, produce children, and remain faithful to their husbands. Men, meanwhile, could and did have sexual relationships with lower-status women, prostitutes, and enslaved people, who had little legal ability to refuse. There were serious laws concerning stuprum, illicit sex and sexual assault, but Roman law was primarily concerned with status and property. An enslaved person, for example, could not appeal to the law against their owner’s sexual exploitation in the way a free citizen might.

Sex between a man and another man’s wife could be scandalous and legally consequential, when both belonged to respectable social classes. Same-sex relationships were also a recognizable part of Roman society, as were practices such as pederasty, in which adult men had sexual relationships with adolescent boys, traditions that Romans inherited and adapted from Greek culture.

And in this deeply patriarchal society, erotic art was everywhere. Frescoes, mosaics, sculptures, household objects, and graffiti depicted sex with a casualness that can be startling to modern eyes. And then there were the dicks. Dicks were everywhere, associated with fertility, prosperity, good fortune, and protection against the evil eye. Phallic imagery could even serve a practical purpose.

See a giant dick pointing down the street? Follow the dick. It might just lead you to a brothel.

Pompeii was more than your average Roman city; it was exceptionally wealthy. The wealthy filled their enormous domus, marble-and fired-brick villas, with frescoes, mosaics, gardens, sculptures, private dining rooms, and their own private baths. But even still, while the amount of wealth in Pompeii was exceptional, the city was not exceptional in more important ways. It was ordinary.

The streets were full of carts rattling over the stone, carrying goods; shopkeepers yelling to customers; vendors selling food; and people shopping along the narrow, crowded streets. The main roads even had proto-sidewalks: raised stones that allowed pedestrians to walk the street without stepping into the same filthy, waste-filled roads used by carts.

Thanks to Rome’s great aqueducts, water entered Pompeii and filled bathhouses, public fountains, and the homes of the wealthy, who had their own private plumbing. Lower-class people relied on public fountains and baths.

The city was filled with bakeries, filling the air with the smell of bread, there were a remarkable number of them, while thermopolia, selling hot food and wine, adorned many of the streets. These were especially useful for people living in the insulae who did not have kitchens; buying prepared food was how many of them ate. Restaurants and taverns served everyone from ordinary workers to the wealthier residents. Wine was a huge part of Roman life. It was commonly diluted with water and sometimes mixed with herbs, spices, or honey, and was drunk regularly, its alcohol content reduced by all that water.

The city was also defined by Roman luxuries. Pompeii had several bathing complexes, used for both bathing and socializing. There were cold-water rooms, warmer rooms, and hot rooms, with furnaces built into the floors and walls, the heat rising through channels beneath the floors. The Romans were assholes, but in some things they knew what they were doing. People came to the baths to gossip, conduct business, relax, and wash themselves. The Romans were, especially among the wealthy, and well, anytime before the last century or so, remarkably cleanliness-obsessed people.

The Pompeii amphitheater was capable of holding some 20,000 people. There, they watched gladiatorial fights, animals fighting gladiators, and people being torn apart by animals, cheering all the while. The city also had theaters for dramas and musical performances.

Life was life. There was hardship, there was crime, there were horrifying and aggravating social norms and practices, but there were also loving families, couples, playing children, and, well, everything that makes life life.

And then, in the year 79 AD, according to the later historian Cassius Dio, “at the very end of summer,” and according to the later testimony of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, a lawyer, writer, and magistrate, better known as Pliny the Younger, to distinguish him from the uncle we will meet, their world ended forever on August 24th. Then again, that is after the letter he was writing was copied, and copied, and copied throughout history. Modern scholars have suggested an eruption in October instead, pointing to the heavier clothes worn at the time and dried fruits and vegetables being eaten, though that is disputed. I am going with August 24th.

Up until that day, there was little cause for alarm. Though there probably should have been. As Pliny wrote, in the days leading up to the eruption, there had been several minor tremors, which “were not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania.” The area did have a history of geological activity, but what did that mean to the Romans?

A sign from their gods, perhaps. And they would interpret that as they would, because they had no understanding of tectonic plates and how all of that connected to the enormous mountain they lived beneath.

In 62 AD, a major earthquake hit the region, badly damaging Pompeii and Herculaneum. Buildings collapsed, temples were damaged, walls cracked, and people were killed. The people of Pompeii questioned their priests, particularly the augures, who interpreted omens. They killed their chickens and examined their organs, they weren’t exactly working with advanced seismology, and whatever signs they anticipated, things eventually went back to normal and they rebuilt. They hadn’t all died in a fiery hellscape. That would be crazy.

Two years later, in 64 AD, the insufferable actor-emperor Nero was performing in Naples when the region was hit by another, more minor earthquake. According to Suetonius, Nero forced everyone to remain in their seats so he could finish his performance before they evacuated.

And then, well, there could have been minor tremors, but the people of Pompeii learned to live with them. If dealing with the earth shaking a bit meant getting incredibly fertile land in the foothills of their mountain, that was a deal they were willing to take. Vesuvius as seen by the famous Pine of Venus sometime in the later 19th century.

Mount Vesuvius is a 4,203-foot (1,281-meter) active somma-stratovolcano. Geologically speaking, Vesuvius is a young volcano, originating less than 200,000 years ago where the African tectonic plate is pushed beneath the Eurasian plate. As the water-saturated sediments of the African plate are pushed into the hot depths of the planet, the water is boiled off, lowering the melting point of the mantle above and causing the rock to partially melt. Because magma is less dense than solid rock, but a lot hotter, it burns upwards until it finds a weak spot in the Earth’s crust, and thus Vesuvius was formed.

This is a volcanically and geologically active region, where two major tectonic plates converge, which helps explain the earthquakes experienced in the first century. Now, I joked earlier about the residents of Pompeii regarding Vesuvius simply as a mountain and being unaware of the fertility of the regions around a volcano, but they did in fact know it was a volcano. They simply did not understand the danger, and they had little reason to fear it.

First, Vesuvius had been dormant for a very long time. Following a massive eruption around 1800 BC that wiped out several Bronze Age settlements in the area, the volcano went quiet. The Greeks, and later the Romans, believed that the great Hercules, during the performance of his labors, passed through the countryside on his way to Sicily and did battle with “the sons of the Earth,” who lived in “the mountain which of old sprouted forth a huge fire.” So, the people of Pompeii knew their mountain had once shot out fire, but there was no indication that it would do so again.

And so, the morning of August 24th, 79 AD, passed by without incident. It was a day like any other. Eighteen-year-old Pliny the Younger was with his uncle, 54-year-old Gaius Plinius Secundus, Pliny the Elder, an accomplished naturalist, lawyer, author, and Admiral. A personal friend of the previous emperor Vespasian, Pliny the Elder retained his place of esteem under the new emperor, Vespasian’s son Titus. He was commanding the Roman fleet stationed 18 miles from the volcano, across the Bay of Naples. As Pliny the Younger would write to the historian Tacitus decades later:

“About one in the afternoon, my mother pointed out a cloud with an odd size and appearance that had just formed. From that distance it was not clear from which mountain the cloud was rising, although it was found afterwards to be Vesuvius.”

Without warning, at around one in the afternoon, Vesuvius violently erupted. The mountain tore itself open. A column of volcanic debris and superheated gases blasted upward into the sky, climbing higher and higher until it reached the stratosphere. Ash and pumice began raining down over the countryside, blanketing streets, rooftops, and fields. The sky darkened as the eruption continued, and beneath the growing weight, roofs began to collapse. Studies have found that the first phase projected a column of volcanic debris and hot gases into the stratosphere. This lasted for almost an entire day, depositing as much as nine feet of ash and pumice in areas directly around the volcano.

Rescue efforts began almost immediately. People dug through collapsed roofs and buildings, desperately searching for those trapped beneath the debris. Then the earth began to shake. Major earthquakes rippled through the region, sending a tsunami across the Bay of Naples. More buildings collapsed, killing people who, in a grim sense, might have been the lucky ones. Watching from across the bay, Pliny the Younger described the eruption:

“The cloud could best be described as more like an umbrella pine than any other tree, because it rose high up in a kind of trunk and then divided into branches…Sometimes it looked light coloured, sometimes it looked mottled and dirty with the earth and ash it had carried up.”

“Like a true scholar,” Pliny the Elder saw this, understood that knowledge comes before safety and ordered a boat to be prepared. He told his nephew that he could come with him. Pliny the Younger said, approximately, “Nah I can study it from here.”

But just as his uncle was preparing to leave, Pliny the Elder was handed a message from his friend Rectina, who lived closer to the mountain at Stabiae. She was frightened and stranded, and she was asking for help. As his nephew later wrote, Pliny:

“changed plan at once and what he had started in a spirit of scientific curiosity he ended as a hero.”

He ordered the large galleys to be launched and set sail. While everyone else was fleeing the volcano in fear and haste, Pliny the Elder steered directly toward it, into the danger zone. The Last Day of Pompeii

The first pyroclastic flows began that night, or perhaps in the early morning of the following day. A pyroclastic flow is a fast-moving mixture of volcanic gases, ash, and rock that races down the slopes of a volcano, usually following the collapse of an eruption column, lava dome, or part of the volcano itself. Reaching temperatures of around 1,970°F (1,075°C) and speeds often exceeding 60 miles per hour (100 km/h), and sometimes considerably more, pyroclastic flows are likely the most deadly phenomena produced by a volcanic eruption.

The first release was brief and caused relatively little damage. But for those living around Vesuvius, the sight must have been horrifying: a smoking, exploding mountain suddenly sending rivers of superheated gas and debris down its slopes. The spectacle was enough to send people fleeing from settlements across the Bay of Naples. Even at Misenum, where Pliny the Younger remained, people began to evacuate. By the following morning, a thick, choking blackness had swallowed the sky. Even as far away as Misenum, daylight had almost disappeared. Pliny wrote:

“It was now day everywhere else, but there a deeper darkness prevailed than in the thickest night.”

Then, as Pliny looked toward the mountain, another pyroclastic flow erupted from Vesuvius and raced down toward the settlements below: Oplontis, Herculaneum, and Pompeii. Those who had not fled, or had simply not fled far enough, had no chance.

The temperatures were so extreme that many victims were killed almost instantly. Others were trapped beneath collapsing buildings as the dense, fiery clouds swept over them. Some may have died in the initial collapse; others may have survived for seconds or minutes, suffocating in the darkness or being overwhelmed by the heat as the deposits settled around them. The volcanic material eventually hardened into rock, entombing everything beneath it. Pompeii, Oplontis, and Herculaneum ceased to exist.

Meanwhile, Pliny the Elder and his rescue party continued toward Stabiae beneath an apocalyptic sky. The mountain was still exploding, the horizon was dark, and showers of hot cinders, chunks of pumice, and ash rained down around them. His companions begged him to turn back. Pliny was said to have replied:

“Fortune favors the bold.”

And so they continued to Stabiae, where they found Pomponianus, a Roman senator and acquaintance of Pliny. Pomponianus had already loaded a ship with his possessions and was desperate to escape, but the same winds that had brought Pliny’s fleet to Stabiae now prevented them from leaving. Even then, Pliny remained remarkably calm. The great naturalist looked toward the flames erupting from the mountain and attributed them to burning villages on its slopes. As his nephew later described it, Pliny believed they were:

“nothing more than fires left by the terrified peasants, or empty abandoned houses that were blazing.”

Perhaps this was an attempt to calm his companions. Or perhaps Pliny genuinely believed it. Supporting the latter, he proceeded to lie down and fall asleep, reportedly snoring loudly. Meanwhile, Pomponianus, his servants, and Pliny’s sailors watched in terror as Vesuvius continued to darken the sky. Ash and pumice were now falling over the villa’s courtyard. Then the earth began to shake. As Pliny the Younger described it:

“Buildings were now swaying back and forth and shaking with more violent tremors.”

They debated what to do. Pliny, awakened, advised everyone to protect their heads with pillows from the falling pumice, and eventually they moved toward the ships, hoping to escape by sea. But the winds had not changed. They could not leave.

Pliny, 53, was overweight and suffering from difficulty breathing. He eventually sat down against a sail on one of the ships and refused to move, asking for a drink of cold water. The rest of the party eventually escaped by land.

Stabiae was buried beneath a thick blanket of ash, but it escaped the worst of the pyroclastic flows. Pomponianus, his companions, and Pliny’s men survived and were able to tell Pliny the Younger what had happened. Pliny the Elder did not. Three days later, his body was recovered. As his nephew put it, his body was found “intact and uninjured, still fully clothed and looking more like a man asleep than dead.”

Pliny the Younger suggested that poisonous sulfurous gases had killed him, although the fact that nobody else in his immediate party died, or even reported immense difficulty in breathing, makes that explanation uncertain. An asthma attack followed by a stroke or heart attack is possible; so too is a stroke or heart attack by itself.

We do know the names of a handful of other victims, or people who may have been victims. Drusilla, daughter of King Herod Agrippa II, the son of the biblical Herod, may have died in the eruption at the age of 41. Her son Agrippa almost certainly did die, although the sources that record his death are those which leave uncertainty about his mother’s fate.

Pompeii’s leading producer of garum and liquamen, the fermented fish sauces beloved throughout the Roman world, was Aulus Umbricius Scaurus. His business had been operating for decades, and his products were exported across the Empire. He was an elderly and extremely successful businessman by the time Vesuvius erupted. He did not survive.

Neither did Alleius Nigidius Maius, a wealthy Pompeian businessman, politician, and Roman priest. He had served as an aedile, duumvir, and quinquennial duumvir of the city, and, in proper Roman fashion, had built much of his popularity through sponsoring gladiatorial games and public spectacles. A notice dated July 1 indicates that he was almost certainly alive shortly before the eruption. After that, he disappears from the historical record.

The Roman poet Caesius Bassus also appears to have perished. Bassus was highly regarded by his contemporaries; Quintilian went so far as to suggest that, with the exception of Horace, he was the only lyric poet worth reading. He was an “intimate friend” of the poet and satirist Persius, a roommate, if you will. He, too, was swallowed by Vesuvius.

But these are merely the names history happened to preserve. More than 1,000 casts have been made from impressions left by human bodies in Pompeii’s ash deposits, while the scattered bones of roughly another 100 victims have been recovered. At Herculaneum, around 332 bodies have been identified. The majority were found within deposits produced by pyroclastic surges.

The postures of these victims can look horrifying. Some appear to be twisting, crouching, or desperately trying to protect themselves. But they were probably not experiencing prolonged agony. The heat of the pyroclastic surges was so extreme that victims could be killed almost instantaneously. A multidisciplinary study, published in 2010, found that the majority of people died by heat, rather than ash suffocation. Their bodies would have undergone cadaveric spasm, a violent contraction caused by extreme heat, producing the twisted postures we see in the remains. Our friend, the “masturbator,” was probably contorted in this way, not, as I suggested at the beginning, gooning while his world ended. Unfortunately.

More than 1,500 human remains have been recovered from an eruption that occurred nearly two thousand years ago. Vesuvius released an enormous amount of thermal energy, with some estimates placing it at roughly 100,000 times the combined energy released by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The eruption is generally assigned a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 5: an enormous eruption, though not the largest humanity has witnessed, or even that we have covered on this blog. Tambora’s 1815 eruption, for comparison, reached a VEI of 7 on a scale that runs from 0 to 8. The population of the communities surrounding Vesuvius was substantial. Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis alone may have collectively housed more than 20,000 people, while the wider region contained many more settlements and villas.

The exact death toll will never be known. But it’s all but certain that it’s far higher than the number of bodies we have recovered. The dead preserved in the ash are not the death toll. They are simply the people we were lucky enough to find.

Pompeii was buried beneath as much as 20 feet of tephra, the rock, ash, and other volcanic material ejected during the eruption. Emperor Titus organized a relief effort, donated money from the imperial treasury to aid survivors, and personally visited the region in the immediate aftermath and again the following year. But there was no attempt to dig Pompeii out. To the Romans of AD 79, there was little reason to. The city was buried, the dead were dead, and the living live on.

Survivors, and thieves, did return, however. Some came to salvage what they could, removing marble statues from the Forum and stripping buildings for anything valuable or reusable. Others simply took building materials. They left behind evidence of their presence: holes cut through walls, tunnels through the debris, and even graffiti written after the eruption that reads, rather bluntly, “house dug.” It’s a little on the nose.

Some people did return to the area, likely survivors or relatives of those who had died. But Pompeii was never truly rebuilt. What emerged was a scattering of crude dwellings amid the ruins, nothing approaching the prosperous city that had existed before Vesuvius erupted.

And for centuries, Vesuvius remained restless. After more than a thousand years of dormancy, the mountain had awakened. Within the next four centuries, it erupted at least three times, and possibly as many as six. The eruptions of the fifth century appear to have coincided with the abandonment of much of the surrounding area, and another major eruption in 512 covered the remnants in yet another layer of ash.

The ruins became known for a time as La Civita. Then they disappeared. For more than a thousand years, Pompeii lay beneath the earth, forgotten. Until someone accidentally found it. In 1592, an architect constructing an underground aqueduct in the area broke through ancient walls covered with paintings and inscriptions. He simply built the aqueduct straight through the remains of the ancient city and, apparently, told nobody what he had found.

It would take centuries before anyone understood what was beneath the ground. In 1689, another excavation uncovered a wall bearing an inscription mentioning Pompeiis. The name was associated with Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Pompey the Great, the Roman general, protégé of the aforementioned dictator Sulla, and eventual loser of the civil war against Julius Caesar. This time, someone paid attention. By 1693, enough excavation had been done to establish that an ancient city lay beneath the earth. But the discovery attracted relatively little attention.

Then, in 1738, workers excavating for a summer palace for Charles de Bourbon, King of Naples and later Carlos III (You know I love my pretentious language conventions), King of Spain, rediscovered Herculaneum. Charles was fascinated by what was being uncovered. Born in Spain as the son of the first Bourbon king of Spain, he had led Spanish troops as a teenager in the conquest of Naples. Under his patronage, the Spanish military engineer Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre expanded excavations at Herculaneum and eventually Pompeii as well. Charles collected, displayed, and promoted the artifacts being recovered, even after he left Naples for Madrid.

The Bourbon excavations were the beginning of the real rediscovery of Pompeii. The process accelerated under the French occupation during the Napoleonic era, when as many as 700 workers were employed excavating the site.

But perhaps the most important archaeologist to work at Pompeii was a local Neapolitan named Giuseppe Fiorelli. Fiorelli took over the excavations in 1863 and transformed the way Pompeii was studied.

He realized something extraordinary about the strange voids that appeared throughout the layers of hardened ash. Occasionally, bones could be found inside them, but otherwise they were simply empty cavities. Fiorelli realized what had happened. The bodies of the victims had been buried in the hot ash. Over time, their flesh decomposed, leaving hollow spaces behind. The ash had effectively formed a mold around the bodies.

So Fiorelli developed a technique for filling those voids with plaster. Slowly, the shape of the dead emerged. A person curled on their side. A child. Someone clutching their belongings. People caught in the final moments of their lives.

The technique is still used today, although modern archaeologists generally use clear resin instead of plaster, allowing the casts to be more durable while preserving the bones and other remains inside. Fiorelli also introduced systematic documentation and more scientific excavation methods, helping transform Pompeii from a treasure hunt into an archaeological site.

And because of that, Pompeii gives us something almost impossible to find anywhere else. A city frozen at the moment its life was violently interrupted. The streets are still there. The bakeries. The taverns. The baths. The political advertisements. The houses. The graffiti. The temples. The absolutely unreasonable number of dicks.

And then there are the casts. For nearly two thousand years, these people lay beneath layers of ash and volcanic debris, preserved in the positions in which death found them. Huddled together. Curled on the ground. Reaching for one another. Their lives ended in an instant of horror scarcely imaginable. And yet, because Vesuvius buried Pompeii rather than simply destroying it, so much of their world survived.

Today, modern Pompei is a town of around 23,000 people, many of whom make their living from the roughly four million visitors who arrive each year to walk through the ancient city, marvel at its ruins, stare at the preserved remains of its inhabitants, and point at all the dicks on the ground.

Above them, Vesuvius still looms. For now, the mountain mostly produces little more than sulfur-rich steam. Its last eruption was in 1944, and it has not produced anything remotely approaching the catastrophe of AD 79 since, well, AD 79. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that roughly 3 million people now live within Vesuvius’s potential impact zone. During the 1631 eruption, volcanic ash fell as far as Istanbul, more than 750 miles from the volcano. The mountain is not dead. It is merely sleeping. And someday, Vesuvius will erupt again. The question isn’t if. It’s when.

Coffee

NEW NOTE: Hello, Substack. Aidan here.

On August 31st, I’ll be returning to the final year of my master’s program and, thankfully, gainful employment. This means I, the most prolific writer here, at least in terms of sheer output, will be taking a bit of a step back.

I’m not going anywhere. But there is a catch: I’ll be completing an unpaid internship. God bless the United States and its social services system. So, going forward, I’ll be publishing one article a month for paid subscribers. This is something I’ve resisted for a long time because I’ve always wanted my writing to entertain and inform as many people as possible. But, well… I need money.

In exchange, you’ll get access to what I’m calling HBH History Bites. Cute, right? A paid subscription also gives you access to the subscriber chat, where you can post your own work, start conversations, share things you’re interested in, and generally participate in the little community we’ve built here. So far not really happened, but a boy can hope!

I hope you’ll consider subscribing. And if you’re already a free subscriber, thank you. If you’re just reading this without any intention of subscribing, thank you, too. Honestly, I’m grateful that you’re here at all. Sending my love and good vibes to all of you.

OLD NOTE: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

It was 1986, but in a rural village like Cha, the modern world could feel very far away. Modern amenities were scarce, and the nearby highway was, for some residents, the clearest reminder that this was the end of the twentieth century rather than some distant age. For many, life remained remarkably close to that of their ancestors. Village life was communal by necessity and by tradition. Families farmed together, watched over one another’s livestock, raised children together, and intermarried. Everyone knew everyone. A person was not simply born into a family; they were raised by the village.

The elders were the closest thing Cha had to formal leaders, gathering to deliberate over matters ranging from petty disputes and crime to the interpretation of unusual signs or events. It was a close-knit community, and on the morning of August 21, there was no reason for anyone to believe that anything was about to change. The day passed without incident.

That night, sometime after most of the village had gone to sleep, someone still awake might have heard a distant rumble. Thunder, perhaps. Then came something else.

Within minutes, there was an unpleasant smell in the air, strange but difficult to identify. Some would later describe it as resembling rotten eggs. Then came dizziness. Confusion. Difficulty breathing. People began to choke and gasp for air. Those who woke in the darkness stumbled from their beds, overturning tables, chairs, and cooking pots in desperate attempts to escape whatever had entered their homes.

Some felt an inexplicable heat, not heat from the night air, but a burning sensation inside their bodies. They tore off their shirts, trousers, and dresses and ran into the darkness, some collapsing only yards from their homes.

Ephrem Ngong Kum, from the village of Su-Bum, far to the southeast, later recalled: “I saw people dying, people dead all around. They died in the houses, in streets, outside the forest, in the stream.”

Chia David Wambong, also of Su-Bum, remembered, “Everyone started to cough, and some people vomited blood.”

Joseph Nkwaim gave an even more harrowing account: “I could not speak. I became unconscious. I could not open my mouth because then I smelled something terrible. I heard my daughter snoring in a terrible way, very abnormal [...] When crossing to my daughter’s bed, I collapsed and fell. I was there till nine o’clock in the morning until a friend of mine came and knocked at my door. I was surprised to see that my trousers were red, had some stains like honey. My arms had some wounds. I didn’t really know how I got these wounds. I opened the door. I wanted to speak, my breath would not come out. My daughter was already dead.”

When the sun rose on August 22, some awoke surrounded by corpses. There was no obvious explanation. No gunshots. No fire. No epidemic anyone could understand. Whatever had happened during the night had struck with terrifying speed and then vanished, leaving behind a village filled with the dead and survivors who had no idea what they had just witnessed.

The answer lay between Cha and Su-Bum, at the edge of a small volcanic lake. Its name was Lake Nyos.

Welcome to the 125th installment of Hare-brained History, a blog in which your intrepid host treats you to absurdities, follies, mind-fucks, and everything in between from the world of history. Today, we are inspired by that vignette. As I enter the late stage of Substack, I am returning to school and gainful employment, and I have leaned more into these little opening table-setters. Anyway, I do believe I have referenced this story once before. I am not going back to look for that reference, but I am all but certain I labeled it one of the most mysterious and rare natural disasters our planet has ever seen. Well, spoiler alert: it is. And there are still many things about what happened that, 40 years later, we do not fully understand.

So, without further ado, join me in Cameroon as we look at, and try to wrap our heads around. the eruption of Lake Nyos.

Lake Nyos, seen above, is a crater lake, filling a maar: a broad volcanic crater formed when magma rises toward the surface and encounters groundwater, causing a violent explosion of steam and rock. The crater sits within the Oku Volcanic Field and is one of several volcanic features in the region, alongside the smaller Lake Manoun to the south. This area has been volcanically active for millions of years.

The volcanic field is part of the Cameroon Volcanic Line, a chain of volcanoes and volcanic features stretching from the Gulf of Guinea northeastward across Cameroon toward the Oku region. At its southwestern end is Mount Cameroon, or, as it is known locally, Mongo ma Ndemi, “Mountain of Greatness”(A+ name). Beneath this region, magma can rise relatively close to the Earth’s surface. Here, this means very little to the people living above it. But geologically speaking, this is an active volcanic region.

Lake Nyos itself lies on the flank of a long-inactive volcano, so old and eroded that it does not even have a name. But beneath the exceptionally deep little lake, just over a mile (2 kilometers) long and roughly three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) wide, with an average depth of about 311 feet (94.9 meters) and a maximum depth of 682 feet (208 meters), which is really fucking deep, something remained active.

A pocket of magma beneath the lake continuously released carbon dioxide. The gas dissolved into groundwater, which was then carried upward into the bottom of the lake. Over time, enormous quantities of carbon dioxide accumulated in the deep water.

This is where things get a little beyond me, this is not Big-brained Science after all. Like many deep lakes, Nyos is thermally stratified. Its water is divided into layers, with warmer, less-dense water near the surface and colder, denser water below. And because carbon dioxide is dissolved in the deep water, the deeper you went into Lake Nyos, the more carbon dioxide there was. This makes sense.

There is nothing inherently unusual about carbon dioxide being present in water. It is naturally found in lakes, rivers, groundwater, and even the water we drink. The problem at Nyos was the sheer quantity of it, and the fact that it was trapped deep below the surface.

For thousands of years, as far as anyone knew, Lake Nyos was simply a lake. Tilapia swam in it. Crabs, snails, and frogs lived around it. Livestock and wild animals came to its shores to drink. We are still at the part that makes sense. Nothing about it appeared particularly threatening. But deep beneath the surface, carbon dioxide was quietly accumulating. The only time you’re ever gonna see me use a chemistry model, CO2

That bug-looking molecule, obviously just a model, because that is not what a gaseous chemical actually looks like (I think), was building up, and building up. And it wasn’t happening only at Lake Nyos.

Two years earlier, on August 15, 1984, about 60 miles to the southeast, something remarkably similar happened at Lake Monoun. Around 10:30 that night, several people heard a loud noise. Then, in the blackness, the hand of death seemed to creep outward, choking victims to death. Survivors later reported a whitish, smoke-like cloud that smelled bitter and acidic drifting through the area in the hours before dawn.

A truck carrying twelve people suddenly stopped, its engine sputtering. The passengers climbed out, only to collapse moments later into violent coughing fits before choking to death. Two men sitting atop the truck watched helplessly as the others clawed at their throats, desperately trying to breathe, before dying around them.

Thirty-seven people were officially recorded as having been killed. It could well have been more. This was extremely rural Cameroon in 1984, and Cameroon, like much of postcolonial Africa, was still dealing with the consequences of centuries of European exploitation, along with poverty, inadequate infrastructure, and endemic corruption. Thirty-seven mysteriously dead villagers in the mountainous northwest were hardly at the top of anyone’s agenda.

Those who did investigate the aftermath found some curious things. Vegetation around the eastern shore of the lake had been flattened, suggesting that a large wave had swept outward from the water. But no one could explain what had happened, and, frankly, it is difficult to blame them. Nothing like this had ever been documented before. There was no known mechanism by which a lake could seemingly exhale a cloud capable of killing dozens of people.

The mystery would remain unsolved for two years. Then, in August 1986, it happened again.

Lake Monoun

There was absolutely no anticipation that something was about to happen at Lake Nyos. And then, sometime that night, another limnic eruption occurred.

A limnic eruption, a name which signals very little to you and me, is also sometimes called a lake overturn, which much more aptly hints at what happens. Simply put, it occurs when enormous amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide suddenly escape from the deep water of a lake and erupt into the atmosphere. The released gas, being denser than air, spreads outward, displacing the oxygen and suffocating anything unfortunate enough to be caught in its path.

There may be evidence that something similar happened long before anyone had a name for it. Fossils from the Messel Pit in Germany have been interpreted by some scientists as showing signs consistent with a limnic eruption. The Roman historian Plutarch also reported that in 406 BC, Lake Albano in Italy suddenly surged upward and spilled over the surrounding hills despite there being no apparent explanation for such a rise in water. The resulting flood destroyed fields and killed people and livestock in the surrounding area, not all of them necessarily by drowning.

Some researchers have suggested that both incidents could have been limnic eruptions. Lake Albano, like Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun, is a crater lake in a volcanically active region. All three contain deep water saturated with carbon dioxide, with colder, denser water at the bottom and warmer, more oxygenated water above it. All three also sit relatively close to volcanic activity.

So why did Lake Nyos erupt? Or, more scientifically accurately, why did it outgas, the sudden release of dissolved gas from water?... [fart joke]

The honest answer is that we don’t know. Some geologists argue that there must have been a trigger: perhaps a small increase in volcanic activity beneath the lake, a landslide disturbing the water, or even a sudden influx of cool rainwater that disrupted the lake’s delicate layering after decades of carbon dioxide accumulation in its depths. Others believe that no specific trigger was necessary, and that the lake may simply have reached a point where the enormous amount of dissolved gas became unstable.

Regardless of what started it, once the process began, it became self-sustaining. When supersaturated deep water begins to rise and mix with the upper layers, the pressure surrounding the dissolved carbon dioxide decreases. The gas then begins to come out of solution, forming bubbles that make the water less dense, causing it to rise even faster. As it rises, even more carbon dioxide comes out of solution, producing more bubbles, which cause more water to rise. A geological feedback loop. The entire lake effectively began to overturn through a rapidly ascending column of expanding gas bubbles.

It is estimated that roughly 1.2 cubic kilometers of carbon dioxide were released during the eruption. The sudden displacement of water produced a massive wave, while a column of violently bubbling water rose above the lake’s surface. Reports and later studies indicate that a wave roughly 25 meters (82 feet) high swept across part of the shoreline, flattening vegetation and tearing through the surrounding landscape, including large trees. The lake itself, once dubbed by locals as the “good lake,” normally blue, turned a deep reddish-brown. This was caused by iron-rich water from the depths being brought to the surface and exposed to oxygen.

Carbon dioxide is about 1.5 times denser than air, which meant the enormous cloud of gas did not simply rise and disperse. Instead, it hugged the ground, flowing downhill through the valleys and low-lying areas surrounding Lake Nyos. Estimates suggest the cloud reached roughly 50 meters (160 feet) in thickness and traveled at somewhere between 12 and 31 miles per hour. This also helps explain the strange detail from the Lake Monoun disaster: the two men sitting atop the truck survived while the people on the ground below them suffocated.

At night, the cloud would have been almost impossible to see. At most, under the right conditions, it might have appeared as a faint, hazy mist. But there was no warning, no obvious sign of what was coming, and certainly no reason for the people of the surrounding villages to understand that the air itself had become lethal.

The gas rolled downhill through northwestern Cameroon, and wherever it went, people and animals stopped breathing. The damage was, and forever will be, incalculable.

A Washington Post reporter who arrived less than a week later described the scene as “looking like the aftermath of a neutron bomb.” And in some ways, that was exactly what made it so horrifying. The homes were still standing. Cooking pots, furniture, tools, and belongings remained where people had left them. Almost everything was intact. Except for the people.

Swaths of the landscape around Lake Nyos were littered with corpses: wild animals, livestock, and humans. The lake itself was covered with floating bodies, in some places so thick that the water beneath could barely be seen. It looked like something out of a science-fiction movie. Understandably, the authorities initially feared that a massive epidemic had swept through the region. Soldiers and officials arrived in protective gear and began quickly burying the decomposing dead, often without stopping to count them.

Lieutenant General James Tataw explained to reporters, “There are mass graves because we only had a few laborers and we could not dig individual graves. Those who have individual graves, those were dug for them by their relatives. The cows have no relatives, so their burial will be last.”

In the village of Nyos, named for the lake, Tataw counted 1,196 dead out of a population of roughly 1,200. In Su-Bum, after a mass grave had been dug, a single surviving chicken emerged and wandered across the freshly turned earth. Tataw remarked, “All the people, the goats, the pigs and the cows died. What surprises me is how that chicken survived.”

By the end of the week, the Cameroonian army had buried virtually the entire population of the three villages within the roughly 10-square-mile area reached by the gas cloud: Nyos, Su-Bum, and Cha. At least 300 survivors were rushed to hospitals in Yaoundé, the capital. Some suffered skin lesions and burns, while others displayed respiratory problems and temporary paralysis.

The strange symptoms initially contributed to the belief that the victims had been poisoned by sulfur-based gases. But interviews with survivors and subsequent pathological studies eventually established what had actually happened: they had suffocated from carbon dioxide. And the symptoms made sense. Survivors described becoming dizzy first, followed by an overwhelming sensation of choking. Then came panic. Some would later be found by rescuers still clutching their hands over their noses and mouths, desperately trying to breathe even though there was nothing they could do. They were not simply unconscious; many were terrified as they suffocated.

Peter San Kinibi of Su-Bum remembered the bodies of his family: “When you touch them, they be like stone and they be white spot [dried spittle] on they mouths and on the ground. My wife, my six children, all dead.”

The evidence ultimately pointed to carbon dioxide, which was found to be the only gas present in significant quantities in the lake. Initially, there were fears that sulfur-based gases were responsible, particularly because survivors reported a smell resembling rotten eggs. However, severe carbon dioxide exposure can produce neurological effects, potentially explaining some of the unusual sensory experiences reported by survivors.

In addition to those taken to hospitals, roughly 4,000 people were displaced from the surrounding area, many of whom suffered lingering respiratory problems and other injuries. The understanding of what had happened eventually came, but not before three villages had been devastated.

The Cameroonian government kept the affected villages from being fully repopulated for years. People have since returned to places like Cha, but none of the communities have ever returned to the populations they had before the disaster.

The final death toll is uncertain. The UN Disaster Relief Coordinator estimated that 1,746 people died in 1986, a figure that remains the most commonly cited today. But given the chaos of the aftermath, the rapid mass burials, and the remoteness of the region, the true number may have been higher. In total, it is estimated that roughly 20,000 people had their lives disrupted in some way.

And from this tragedy came a better understanding of one of nature’s strangest and rarest disasters. Limnic eruptions are extraordinarily uncommon. If you live near a lake, you probably don’t need to start eyeing the water suspiciously. Beyond Nyos and Monoun, there is one other major lake where scientists have long studied the possibility of a similar disaster: Lake Kivu, between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is vastly larger than Nyos and surrounded by millions of people, making it a far more consequential scientific concern.

Lake Nyos, meanwhile, has not simply been left to chance. Since the disaster, scientists have installed degassing pipes in the lake, designed to slowly remove the carbon dioxide accumulating in its deepest waters. The system works by bringing gas-saturated water upward through a pipe. As the pressure decreases, carbon dioxide comes out of solution, creating bubbles that make the water lighter and cause it to rise further. Once started, the process can therefore sustain itself without an external power source.

The first degassing pipe was installed in 2001, with additional pipes added in 2011 and 2019. By 2019, researchers determined that the system had reached an essentially steady state and that a single functioning pipe could maintain the degassing process indefinitely, keeping the concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide at a safer level.

It is a remarkable bit of engineering, and it means that Lake Nyos is unlikely to ever again become the silent weapon it was in 1986. But no amount of engineering can undo what happened there for those who survived it, for those who lost loved ones, who lost everything.

Lake Nyos is a reminder that the planet beneath our feet is still capable of doing things we barely understand. Sometimes, nature doesn’t announce itself. Sometimes, the air simply disappears.

Coffee

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

In my scramble to find a topic, I remembered a topic I discovered months ago, which happened on August 20th. The topic was inspired by a painting of an event in Nederland, two in a row! So today, join me on a trip to The Hague as we look at the assassination of the de Witt brothers.

The de Witt family, arms seen above, which for a few decades came to dominate Nederland (I am using the Dutch version, get over it), had humble origins. Arising in the city of Dordrecht, the family first came to any note around 1295. This family would rule one of the most prosperous and powerful nations in the world for almost two full decades, only to literally be torn apart and hung from a gibbet. But to fully understand this in context, we need to go back.

Dordrecht is the oldest city in Holland, which you might be surprised to learn is a region within Nederland, itself meaning “low countries,” as much of the country is flat and defined by its waterways, rivers like the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt, which spill out into the North Sea. Much of the land lies below sea level, in areas known as polders, artificial areas enclosed by dikes.

This artificial land is nothing new. The first known examples were constructed in the 11th century. So much of the country was and is polder land, people fighting against nature to transform formerly unusable waterways or marshland into arable land. As a very Dutch saying goes, “God created the world, but the Dutch created the Nederland.” That is said matter-of-factly, not arrogantly; that is just what being Dutch is.

A single farmer, or even a village, could not build a dike by itself, and if a village ignored upkeep, not only would its farmland be flooded, but several other villages would as well. This led to a culture of cooperation where, in spite of differences and dislike, essentially, “I hate you, and everything about you, but if we don’t work together, we will drown.”

For so much of its history, it was full of Germanic tribesmen turned subsistence farmers. The Dutch, like the French, tie their history to the old Frankish kingdoms. While largely under the nominal control of the Frankish kings, the area was a collection of useless swamp land and of little concern, left to its own devices. This allowed for the creation of a unique culture, people, and language, with Old Dutch emerging from Old Frankish.

But with the emergence of the land management I discussed, agricultural surpluses became possible, populations grew, cities grew, and so did power, just as the Frankish kingdoms fell into disarray and feudalism peaked. This led to the establishment of piecemeal little fiefdoms: Holland, which is a region on the western coast; Zeeland, a collection of islands below Holland; Utrecht, inland from Holland; Frisia, a grassier land across the IJsselmeer from Holland; and, well, you get the idea. Each developed their own laws, political institutions, privileges, and forms of government, as well as culture, while still being “Dutch.”

The growing cities took advantage of their prime locations. Like Hamburg a few hours north, they were tied to rivers that stretched far inland, while the North Sea connected these cities to England, Scandinavia, the Baltic, and, much later, the Americas and Asia. A powerful urban middle class of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, craftsmen, and politicians grew, exercising political power on the local level as their great medieval cities grew around them.

Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Leiden, Haarlem, and Dordrecht. I know some of those are in Belgium, shh. Then it was Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium today. These cities became fabulously wealthy and, for hundreds of years, faced few serious threats. Yes, the little Dutch counties, duchies, and bishoprics fought, allied, and schemed against one another, and their wars had fun names like the Hook and Cod Wars. That one is actually important.

To defeat their rivals, the nasty Hook faction of conservative Dutch nobles, the Cod faction invited the ambitious and cunning Duke of Burgundy, Philippe, to take power, essentially handing over rule if he could help them stick it to those Hook bastards. He did, and Nederland were united under a single political entity.

Philippe and his son, Charles the Bold, sought to take these wealthy Dutch provinces and exploit them for the good of the Burgundian state. They quickly found that was not going to happen, and to avoid war, the Dutch kept their special privileges and forced the creation of the Staten-Generaal, the States General, a gathering of Dutch representatives from the provinces that met to coordinate matters for their respective territories. The Dutch settled into this, and things were good. Then the last Duchess of Burgundy married a Habsburg, and soon the Nederland were controlled by the big chin himself.

Old Habsburg jaw himself, friend of the blog, Holy Roman Emperor Karel V (because we are talking about the Nederland), ruled as the Duke of Burgundy, in addition to being, well, a whole lot else. Ruling half of the world gave the Emperor a lot of headaches; among them were with the Dutch. Karel spent his reign trying to, well, reign in all the disparate regions and integrate them so it wasn’t such a fucking headache. But the Dutch had hundreds of years of local autonomy, provincial privileges, and people not telling them what to do, which is as Dutch as it gets.

Also, like with the rest of Europe, religion came into the picture, and things always get simpler when that is the case. The Dutch took to Protestantism, first Lutheranism and then Calvinism, and, when that was thrown into the mix with the other quarrels over power, political privileges, taxation, and opposition to Habsburg centralization, the Netherlands and Habsburg rule were always bound to come to a head. Karel was forced to accept the Peace of Augsburg, allowing areas within his domain to choose their religion. He then retired to a convent to try to ease his headache.

His vast domains were split between his sons, the Duchy of Burgundy going to Phillip, who was a real asshole, and more importantly, a real Catholic asshole. Through his Catholic assholery, he provoked the Dutch so much that the Dutch people in 1566 attacked Catholic churches, priests, and ripped up Catholic iconography. It was extreme, and that is a theme: don’t piss off the Dutch. The reaction to what had been a spontaneous religious protest led to occupation and the execution of Dutch leaders. So instead of pacifying the Dutch, this drove them into full revolt.

The revolt found its leader in a former Habsburg servant, Willem van Oranje, the Prince of Orange. A wealthy German-born noble born into the House of Nassau, whose ancestral territory lies around the small town of the same name in the Rhineland, Willem inherited the Principality of Orange after convoluted familial inheritance, itself a small town in southern France. This meant Nederland got its eventual royal house from a small town in Germany and its most famous color from a small town in France.

Willem was taken to court by Emperor Karel as a young man and became a favorite of the aging Emperor, eventually named stadhouder of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht. The Stadthouder, essentially meaning “place holder,” but in practice meaning lieutenant, made him the Spanish Crown’s chief representative in the Dutch provinces. But Willem, an intelligent man who listened more than he said, earning him the sobriquet “the Silent,” was devoted to religious freedom and sided with the Dutch Protestants. After the execution of Dutch nobles, he joined the revolt. The office of the stadhouder remained, but rather than serving as the royal lieutenant, it essentially became the national leader of the Nederland.

King Phillip did not like this. He offered a reward of 25,000 crowns, peerage, and an inheritable estate to anyone who killed or captured Willem, declaring him a “pest on the whole of Christianity and the enemy of the human race,” which is a bit much.

And so on July 10th, 1584, the 26-year-old Balthaszar Gérard shot the stadhouder at the Het Prinsenhof in Delft. The Prince of Orange’s probably apocryphal last words were, “My God, have mercy on me and on my poor people.” Gérard dashed away and almost made it to the estate’s ramparts, with a pig’s bladder tied to his waist so he could swim across the moat to reach the saddled horse waiting for him on the other side. Instead, at the last moment, he slipped and was captured.

In proper Dutch fashion, Gérard was tortured brutally. He was lashed with a whip while hanging upside down, with honey lathered on his wounds to draw animals to them, then left like this for days with heavy weights tied to his big toes. Then he was given shoes made of well-oiled, uncured dog skin that were too small. For some reason.

Then he was put before a fire, feet first, and the shoes contracted, crushing his feet brutally until they were nothing but stumps. Okay, I see the point now. Then his armpits were branded, and he was put in a shirt soaked in alcohol. Burning bacon fat was poured over him, and sharp nails were stuck between his fingernails and toenails and the skin. Finally, he had his head cut off and put on a pike, while his arms and legs were put on pikes on the four gates of the city. Bullet holes from the assassination.

While parts of the Spanish Nederland reconciled with Spain early in the war, principally the southern areas (predominantly Belgium and Luxembourg), the northern provinces declared that Phillip was an asshole and that they were doing their own thing. The Dutch proved themselves formidable, aided by their strong navy and early guerrilla warfare tactics, such as deliberately flooding their polders, which kept the Spanish from ever fully retaking the Dutch territories.

In 1588, the provinces formally came together in a confederation, forming the Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. This was convoluted. The States General was the federal power, and each of the seven Dutch provinces had its own States, and together they worked with the Stadthouder.

Also aiding the Dutch was their wealth. Despite the war, the major Dutch cities remained largely untouched and became major centers of trade. The decentralization of the government meant lower federal taxes, the country sat at a great spot for trade, and the Dutch were great seafarers, spreading around the world. The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company, dominated trade in Asia and much of the immensely profitable spice trade for two full centuries, bringing back immense wealth while exploiting people around the world.

The country, unusually urban, developed a prosperous, well-read, politically active middle class. The Republic continued the great Dutch tradition of “don’t tell me what to do,” allowing freedom of thought and worship, while artists and scientists of note in the 17th century, like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Huygens, and van Leeuwenhoek, helped lead the country into what we call the Dutch Golden Age.

The Dutch would eventually win their war with Spain, forcing Spain to recognize Dutch independence. And suddenly, thanks in large part to the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch had one of the most lucrative colonial empires in the world, and this truly tiny, young European nation was a world power.

Of course, there were problems. With such a convoluted system, there was constant political tension. Broadly, this fell into two groups: the Orangists, those who supported the House of Oranje-Nassau, and the Republicans, who favored provincial autonomy, mercantile interests, and limiting the power of the Stadthouder. The Orangists, the more conservative group, favored stronger central leadership under the Stadthouder and unification.

Much of the Republican base was in Holland. Apologies to anyone Dutch from a non-Holland area, but there is a reason the country was known as Holland for so long: it is where the majority of the population and wealth were concentrated, and where the most important cities in Nederland were, and still are today. Holland was where the most important merchants lived and where the capital flowed through, so they didn’t take kindly to the idea of centralization and having to pay more taxes.

During periods of war, the people leaned toward the Orangists, wanting a strong military leader, and during times of peace they leaned toward the Republicans, led by the most influential political families of Holland.

Tensions came to a head in 1649 when, across the North Sea, King Charles I of England was separated from his head. Charles had been the Prince of Orange and the Stadthouder, 23-year-old Willem II’s father-in-law, and he saw this as an opportunity to extend Dutch power and snuff out the newly declared English republic, influenced as well by astrological readings. He was a crystal girl.

The Dutch Republicans did not care much for any of this, which led Willem to plan a coup to break their power in Amsterdam, with an army at his back. Comically, his relative, Prince Willem Frederik, got lost, which led to the discovery of the plot and the coup’s failure. Willem’s plan fell apart. Then, he died. His son, Willem III, was two days old. A power vacuum suddenly emerged, which the Republicans exploited. Enter the de Witt family.

Big nose here is Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland. Since we left off (remember that), the de Witt family had gone from a minor family in Dordrecht to the most powerful family in the city. Throughout the 16th century, family members served as mayors, regents, and Burgemeesters of Dordrecht while also serving in the States General of Holland.

From 1619 to 1621, Andries de Witt served as Grand Pensionary of Holland, a position that is very hard to express in any modern terms, but was essentially a prime minister. A civil servant of the Estates of a province, he was essentially the head of the province, but one appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the Estates.

His younger brother Jacob was the Burgomaster of Dordrecht, educated at Leiden University, a lawyer, and a member of the States of Holland. Jacob was a leading member of the Estates when the city of Amsterdam and he and his fellow republicans came into conflict with the Stadtholder Willem, who had him and several others arrested. But then, again, he died.

The de Witts were connected by marriages to some of the other most powerful families of Holland. Families like the de Graeffs, who held the mayoralty of Amsterdam and the presidency of the Dutch East India Company, and the Bicker family, the oldest patrician family of Amsterdam, who held the Burgomastership. Such families ruled Amsterdam and Holland as oligarchs.

Jacob’s sons, Cornelis (born in 1623) and Johan (born in 1625), were born as this web of wealthy and powerful families came to the fore, leading to a privileged upbringing. The pair were schooled by some of the world’s greatest scholars of the time, and both attended some of the world’s foremost schools. The elder, Cornelis, was more of a dreamer and creative, not a leader, but an intelligent and able man who served as his younger brother’s chief counselor, among several minor positions.

Johan, the younger of the two, was the leader his elder brother was not. Johan studied law at Leiden and went on to earn a Doctorate in Law at the University of Angers. The same year that Willem of Orange died, a 24-year-old Johan was appointed to the States of Holland and became the Pensionary of Dordrecht. Nederland had a whole lot of convoluted titles; just roll with it.

In 1652, in the Zeeland port city of Vlissingen, de Witt was stared down and threatened by an angry demonstration of Dutch East India Company sailors striking for better wages. The Dutch Republic was one of the most politically free countries in the world at this point, and commoners could, and regularly did, protest. The situation was resolved, and the next year, with the backing and intercession of the Regent and Mayor of Amsterdam, Cornelis de Graeff, a 27-year-old de Witt was named Grand Pensionary of Holland, effectively the most politically powerful man in the country, with there being no Stadtholder.

In many ways, de Witt understood what had made the Nederland a great world power: mercantile shipping, trade, and colonialism. To that end, as Grand Pensionary, he strived to maintain a peaceful foreign policy. War was bad for the economy. Contemporary and ally, economist, businessman, and fellow wealthy Hollander (someone from Holland. I wanted to have called him Hollandaise) Pieter de la Court went so far as to suggest replacing the rampant lion in the Dutch coat of arms with a cat to symbolize a peaceful Dutch Republic, which is a bit much.

Of course, for both de Witt and de la Court, these goals were not only for the good of the Dutch, but for the good of Holland, the economic engine of the Dutch Republic, in which they, their families, and their powerful allies had great stakes. And so de Witt pushed for the greatest possible autonomy for Holland and the permanent disempowerment of the Prince of Orange.

In 1655, a 29-year-old de Witt, on the advice of his father, married 19-year-old Wendela Bicker, descended from two of the great Dutch families, the de Graeffs and Bickers. Wendela, a “gentle woman of slender and graceful growth…” (no idea) “with blond curls and gentle eyes.” Johan apparently really needed a wife. The workaholic kept a “miserable bachelor household.”

Wendela was a kind and loyal wife. Like all Dutch women at this time, she had been drilled to be a mother and homemaker, which Wendela did with vigor, popping out 8 children in 12 years while maintaining meticulous notes and journals. These provide great depth and insight into the homes kept by women in the Dutch Republic for modern historians, while she played the role of, essentially, first lady of the Republic. Wendela, in what I have to admit, is not a very flattering portrait.

At the time, de Witt’s hold on power was secure. For the Orangists, there was no strong Prince of Orange to rally around, what with him being a little kid, and so the best that the conservative nobles, those from outside Holland, and the middle class that made up the Orange faction could do was be a thorn in de Witt’s side. Johan’s power base was civilian politicians, the “regenten,” the wealthy, and those from Holland, while, as ever, the common people would side with whoever they felt could best keep them safe and fed.

Of course, religion played a big role in this divide. The republican, or “States faction,” were more inclined toward religious moderation and a separation of church and state, while the Orangist faction were strict Calvinists, which the Prince of Orange, at least outwardly, championed. The Prince of Orange, Willem III, a toddler of three when Johan de Witt came to power, was urged by the Orangist faction and commoners alike to be elected as Stadtholder. But the Estates, under the control and direction of de Witt, saw no reason to do this.

For the Orangists, this was so that the House of Orange-Nassau could be empowered, and thus they, too, empowered. For the commoners, it was because the Dutch Republic was at war with the Commonwealth of England, Parliamentary England after the execution of Charles I. The war was a pet project of the dead Willem II, again, who was dead, and so de Witt speedily attempted to forge a peace treaty.

He found that the D̶i̶c̶t̶a̶t̶o̶r Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, demanded that the House of Oranje be permanently excluded from power in the Dutch Republic, as they had sided with the English House of Stuart. De Witt understood this would be hated by the Orangists and push many undecided toward that camp, but he also knew he didn’t really have a choice. The Republic and his primary base among wealthy families were struggling economically because of the war, so he signed the Treaty of Westminster and then the Act of Seclusion, excluding Willem III, Prince of Orange, from ever taking power as Stadtholder.

Aside from this condition, though, the treaty was favorable to the Dutch. Soon, economic prosperity returned, and even grew, and in the coming years the Dutch Republic continued its upward trajectory. While he sought to keep peace, this was mainly done to maximize profit, and so when profit was threatened, to war they went. Under de Witt, the Dutch intervened on behalf of the allies in the Northern War of 1655–1660 against the Swedes, who were mucking up the Baltic for Dutch merchants through the Øresund.

While he may have begun as a tool of the rich families, particularly his uncle by marriage, Cornelis de Graeff, who took a large part in the government, de Witt, as time went on, grew in power: a man of intelligence, cunning, and ambition. This was while he presented himself to the outside world as nothing more than a humble servant.

He walked the streets of The Hague with a single servant and no guard, dressed well but not aristocratically. As the English ambassador said, de Witt was “indistinguishable from the common man.” Johan was quick to emphasize that he had “no decisive vote, authority or power,” yet, as the French ambassador put it, power in the Dutch Republic lay with “Monsieur de Witt.”

In 1657, Johan and Cornelis de Graeff signed the Treaty of Raalte in the name of Willem III, giving up the Prince’s ownership of the province of Overijssel. This was done to resolve a dispute in the area, but it also underscored how the balance of power in the country had shifted. A few years later, in 1660, the States General, under de Witt and the de Graeff family, resolved to take charge of the course and direction of Willem III’s education, ensuring he would be educated in republican values.

The Grand Pensionary was doing what he could to undermine the power of the House of Oranje, again angering the Orangists, but so long as the economy continued thriving, that mattered little. The seeds of that change began when the English D̶i̶c̶t̶a̶t̶o̶r̶ Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, and his son, Dicky C (Richard Cromwell), proved a failure. The country fell into instability, leading to the return of the House of Stuart, and the beheaded Charles’ son, also Charles, obviously, was crowned.

The Dutch Republic had signed a treaty against the House of Stuart, but de Witt was no idiot and moved to make friends with the new King of England. But the English King was understandably unhappy about the treaty, and even more so about Dutch wealth. From 1660 to 1664, relations deteriorated until war broke out.

The English captured Dutch territory in North America, as the They Might Be Giants song can tell you: even old New York was once New Amsterdam. With the English having gotten the jump on the Dutch, and the English fleet defeating the Dutch at the Battle of Lowestoft, de Witt, for reasons of ego, took command of the navy himself, despite being a 40-year-old with no naval experience, and soon found himself constantly throwing up over the side.

Thankfully, de Witt was a much better delegator than he was a captain, and he then rightly placed command in the hands of the celebrated admiral Michiel de Ruyter. At the Four Days’ Battle, so named because it lasted four days, the Dutch gave the English Royal Navy one of its greatest-ever defeats. A well-timed outbreak of the bubonic plague and the Great Fire of London also helped the Dutch, which de Witt was quick to exploit. He sent his brother Cornelis and de Ruyter up the River Medway, burning English ships on the river and quite literally stealing the English flagship, HMS Royal Charles, and towing her away. Dutch cannon fire could be heard in London, and a panic ensued in the burned and sickly city. Charles II of England was forced to sign a humiliating treaty. The seizure of the English flagship ‘Royal Charles,’ captured during the raid on Chatham, June 1667.

After the Peace of Breda with England, as well as with the Nederland’ allies in the war, Denmark-Norway and France, who I neglected to mention because the Dutch had won so swiftly they had almost literally done nothing, Johan de Witt was in a position to pass the Eeuwig Edict, abolishing the office of Stadtholder in Holland, while the other provinces agreed to declare the office incompatible, just stopping short of abolishing it.

Unfortunately, as the Dutch Republic’s prime enemy over the last two decades had been England and so the navy had been more important, the army was greatly neglected. Meanwhile, their erstwhile allies, the Kingdom of France under the ambitious and power-hungry King Louis XIV, were expanding. As their ally, de Witt and the Dutch Republic had taken a pro-French stance, but he disagreed with Louis’ plan to annex Spanish Nederland, again essentially Belgium and Luxembourg, as he and the Dutch Republic felt a whole hell of a lot safer with the land of another country between them and the French.

De Witt urged the Spanish, then ruled by a regency for its inbred child king, Carlos II, to turn over a number of cities to King Louis XIV, and the Spanish agreed. But Louis realized he could just take them, and the lot of it anyway, and did so. Because of this, on January 23, 1668, the Dutch signed the Triple Alliance with England and Sweden: if France attacked any of them, the others would declare war on France. What de Witt could not have known was that the only reason the English had entered into the treaty was to get receipts, to show the treaty to the French. King Charles II indeed showed the outraged French. The two countries then signed the Treaty of Dover, making plans for a joint attack on the Dutch Republic.

1668 was a tough year for de Witt personally. His wife, Wendela, died after an illness, leaving behind five surviving children and Jacob de Witt, Johan’s now elderly father, whom she had cared for.

The Dutch were not blind. They were aware the English and the French were now talking, and de Witt counted on English and French hatred, as well as their religious differences, England being Protestant and France being Catholic, to keep them apart. And that was a very understandable belief. A cold war followed, with the Dutch and the French both trying to court Sweden. An effort the French won. But de Witt was able to court the Dutch’s historic enemies, the Spanish, as well as the Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, and the symbolic support of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold, though that essentially amounted to: “rooting for you.”

With war increasingly looking imminent and unavoidable, the Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt named the Prince of Orange, Willem III, Captain General in the event of a war. Willem, now a bright, determined, frugal, and temperate young man, refused unless they compromised. He would be promised the title of Captain General, in charge of the defense of the country, on his 23rd birthday. De Witt agreed.

In March of 1672, the wars began when the English declared war, followed soon thereafter by the French. This was the beginning of the Rampjaar: the Disaster Year. A French army of 53,000 crossed the Meuse River and attacked the Dutch. The Dutch army was forced back, and Willem led the force through Utrecht to take positions behind the Water Line, where they released the polders and halted the French advance.

While Admiral de Ruyter defeated the combined Anglo-French fleet, preventing them from landing in Zeeland, the Dutch land losses were heavy, and large swaths of the Republic were occupied by the French. Orangist propaganda went into overdrive, accusing the de Witts brothers and the republicans of handing the country over to the French. Not helping matters, Holland opened negotiations with King Louis on June 14, offering the French king the territory he desired, plus 10 million Dutch guilders. Louis responded with a counteroffer: increased religious privileges for Catholics, the cession of Dutch Republic territories, and 24 million guilders.

Before the Grand Pensionary could respond, Johan de Witt was slashed by an assassin, seriously wounded in an attempt on his life in the streets of The Hague. The assassin, Jacob van der Graef, was caught and swiftly executed, as he should have been, but the country, in the midst of unmitigated hardship, invasion, death, destruction, and the horrors of war, had turned against de Witt. Over a decade of prosperity meant little in the face of disaster.

The wounds the 46-year-old de Witt suffered in the attack had been severe enough that he was unable to resume his duties, leaving the country’s political leadership effectively vacant. Poor Cornelis de Witt was imprisoned in July in The Hague on suspicion of treason and of plotting to assassinate Willem of Orange. The charges were trumped-up lies. He was tortured for a confession but never gave one at the Gevangenpoort prison in Buitenhof Square. He was ultimately sentenced to exile.

The cries for the appointment of Willem as Stadtholder grew louder, and Dordrecht, Johan’s birthplace and the city of origin of the de Witt family, was the first to ask Willem to take the office, fueled by unrest in the streets. Willem, despite being just 21, was rational above all else. He looked to his family’s history and to the response his father and uncle had engendered when they tried to seize power. He waved off the petitions at first, or, perhaps, he made a show of it, demonstrating his magnanimity before the representatives.

After the representatives of Dordrecht expressed their fear for their city, and themselves, if they returned without Willem’s accession, he returned with them, and the rioting quelled. But the people asked Willem to become Stadtholder. The Prince of Orange stated he would only accept the role if the Estates revoked the edict that kept him from ever having it. Soon, a popular upswell of Orangist support forced the Estates’ hand, and Willem was appointed Stadtholder, restoring a modicum of order.

The young Prince of Orange then set about reorganizing both the military and the government, both to beat back the invasion and to solidify his power. He removed republicans from government posts and made appointments outside normal political means, citing the ongoing invasion. Willem also declined an offer from the English to become a sovereign ruler, a king, if he so chose, under English protection, obviously then being beholden to English will. He stated that he would serve as Stadtholder at the request of the Dutch people and would not accept terms dictated by an invading power.

He also offered Johan de Witt the opportunity to remain in office as Grand Pensionary and work together. But de Witt, still recuperating and likely disgusted by his brother’s treatment in the name of the Prince of Orange, resigned from the office instead on August 3, 1672.

On August 20, Johan de Witt received a letter said to have been sent by his imprisoned brother Cornelis, inviting him to the prison, which was quite literally a few yards from his home in The Hague, to discuss his impending exile. De Witt left the safety of his home and indeed went to the prison.

What exactly happened next is hard to say with certainty. The details are murky, though the result is certain. Perhaps Cornelis did send the letter, and the two brothers talked in the jail. Or, as was posited by the contemporary Dutch diplomat Abraham de Wicquefort, the letter was a fabrication sent by Orangists to lure de Witt out of his home.

An Orangist mob, led by The Hague’s civic militia, stormed the jail and seized both brothers. They were assaulted, punched, and pelted with garbage and scraps of food. Then, almost anticlimactically, the brothers were shot on the grass mat at the foot of the scaffold of the building.

They were left to the mob. Remarkably, the mob was noted to maintain a degree of discipline that led many contemporary observers to question whether this had truly been a spontaneous act. Many then, and many now, suspected and accused the Prince of Orange of somehow inciting the violence. Willem, a shrewd and calculating young man, could well have orchestrated the men’s downfall, but we have no concrete evidence.

The brothers, shot but not yet dead, were brutally murdered. Hopefully, they died quickly, as the mob tore the brothers limb from limb, literally. Most infamously, it is said that the Orangist mob ripped out their livers, cooked them, and ate them. This, as best I can figure, seems to be hearsay, if not an outright legend. But it is true that the bodies were strung up on the public gibbet, naked, mutilated, and displayed before they were further ripped apart. Their limbs were sold off at auction, pieces were displayed at local pubs in The Hague, and some were dried and preserved in turpentine.

Today, parts of their bodies remain as proof: Johan de Witt’s tongue and his brother’s finger, long believed to have been a toe but later claimed to have been proven by DNA testing to be Cornelis de Witt’s finger. Well, DNA profiling found that it did indeed belong to a man between 40 and 50 years old who died in 1672, and I don’t know who else a ripped-off finger would have been kept from. Within the year or the next few years, the Dutch painter Jan de Baen, who lived in The Hague and was acquainted with the de Witts and had painted portraits of both men, painted The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers.

Whether Willem incited the mob or ordered the killings, he did not prosecute any of those involved. Men like Johan van Banchem, an alderman who swore the Hague militia to an oath preventing them from aiding the de Witts, and the regent of Rotterdam who helped organize the militia, Johan Kievit, escaped punishment. So did Cornelis Tromp, a former Lieutenant Admiral who had been removed by de Witt and who was present among the mob that day. All three were rewarded.

Thanks to the flooded polders, as well as the solidified Dutch alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor, the situation improved by the end of the Rampjaar, and with Spanish reinforcements, Willem was able to turn the tide. In 1674, the English, once again outclassed by the Dutch navy, were forced into a treaty with the Dutch. The French fought on until 1678 and gained significant territory (the Spanish Netherlands, Alsace-Lorraine, etc.), but Willem retook everything the Dutch had lost during the Rampjaar, having reorganized the country’s military into one of Europe’s most effective fighting forces. He had also become the undisputed power broker in the Netherlands, bringing the office of Stadtholder to its height.

In 1677, the 26-year-old Prince of Orange, the son of Princess Mary, eldest daughter of the beheaded King Charles I, married his cousin, also named Princess Mary, eldest daughter of James, Duke of York. At the behest of King Charles II, she had been raised as a Protestant, meaning the two shared a religion, if not a bed. Willem never had any children, instead keeping several close male associates throughout his life. They were known for being strikingly handsome. Rumors that he was gay were spread by his enemies, but if he was, we today would celebrate a queer Prince of Orange.

After his uncle-in-law, King Charles II, died without legitimate heirs, his father-in-law, the devoutly Catholic James II, took the throne. A believer in the divine right of kings and a Catholic asshole, he was soon at odds with the protestant English Parliament. And so came the Glorious Revolution. Willem, Prince of Orange, and his wife Mary were invited to invade England, where they successfully deposed her father and were crowned King William III and Queen Mary II. England soon adopted a Bill of Rights, but we are speaking about the Dutch.

Willem’s absence, and especially his early death at just 51, threw the Dutch Republic into disarray. Order was eventually restored when the Prince of Orange, another Willem, obviously, was made hereditary Stadtholder, but the position itself was abolished before the 18th century was out. Then the little Corsican Napoleon did Napoleon things, and for the first time in its history, the Netherlands became a kingdom, with the House of Orange-Nassau reigning as it does today. The country eventually fell into pillarisation, the stratification of Dutch society around religious and political identities, particularly the Calvinist faith of the House of Orange and the monarchy.

Today, Nederland carries on, in so many ways, the best parts of the legacy of the Dutch Golden Age: high degrees of social tolerance, political activism, and an especially impressive economy for such a small country.

Without getting too melodramatic, the height of the Dutch Golden Age came under Johan de Witt, a man whose rise has been largely forgotten while his spectacular fall, and his brutal tearing apart, became his legacy.

He rose to become the most powerful man in the Dutch Republic, presided over an extraordinary period of prosperity, defeated England at sea, and helped guide the Republic through some of the most dangerous years of its existence. And then, in the space of a single afternoon, his body was torn apart by the people he had spent nineteen years governing. But that is the way it goes when you play Spel van Tronen. Game of Thrones.

koffie

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

Then she walked out of his life forever.

“And I’ll see you when I see you, you fucking bitch.”

Joel dropped his hands from the keyboard and rubbed at his temples until little sparks danced behind his eyelids. The digital clock in the corner of his monitor read 11:47 PM. The computer screen cast the only light in the condo, bleaching the walls a sickly blue while the rest of the room dissolved into shadow.

He reached into the overflowing ashtray beside him, a cheap tourist souvenir from Amsterdam painted with a scantily-clad woman who had long since disappeared beneath layers of gray ash, and fished out the largest cigarette butt. He stuck it between his lips, inhaled, tasted nothing, and swore.

“Ah, fuck.” He flicked it back into the graveyard of its brothers.

He’d been chained to Crimson Heart: Midnight Whispers since the morning, back when sunlight had still been pouring through the windows and the ashtray had actually been visible beneath the mountain of cigarette ends. Fourteen hours spent manufacturing longing between characters he’d stopped caring about two books ago. Bridget loved a man. The man loved Bridget. Somebody lied. Somebody cried. They broke up. They fucked. They got back together. Repeat until two hundred and eighty pages had passed.

It sold well. Which made Joel hate it even more.

Rising Sun Publishing had given him an entire year to deliver the manuscript. Naturally, he’d finished it at the last possible minute, pounding out pages with the same desperate panic he’d once reserved for freshman essays in Narrative and Narrative Theory. The only difference was that back then he’d still believed he was practicing for the books he actually wanted to write.

Those books still lived somewhere inside him. These were just what paid the mortgage.

This was Joel’s third Crimson Heart novel, and, God willing, his last.

He’d created Bridget Heart in his mid-twenties. Back then she’d been a bright-eyed intern at S-E-X Asset Management, still thinking on that brought a wry smile to his face, determined to climb the corporate ladder and become a successful financial advisor. Instead, she’d been seduced into climbing Mr. Xavier, the firm’s handsome, manipulative CEO. Three books later, Bridget was a fugitive after stealing millions from him, realizing their relationship was toxic, only to throw herself from one steel-jawed, emotionally unavailable man into the next. They shattered her heart. She shattered theirs. She found her true love every fourth chapter, and there was always another sex scene waiting just around the corner.

Joel could barely remember writing half of it. The drinking hadn’t helped.

He’d started the series after Brittany Henderson. She’d been his college love. They’d sworn they’d make long distance work after graduation. Joel had kept that promise. Brittany hadn’t. Within months she’d begun an affair with the forty-eight-year-old married senior partner at the firm that hired her.

Crimson Heart had never been therapy. It hadn’t even been revenge. It had been mockery.

Bridget was little more than a cruel caricature of Brittany, same deep red hair, long, lean figure and bright green eyes, dropped into a paint-by-numbers romance overflowing with absurd melodrama and increasingly ridiculous sex scenes. Joel had written it between shifts waiting tables and brewing coffee, snickering to himself at how shamelessly stupid it was. If nothing else, he thought, maybe turning Brittany into a walking cliché would finally get her out of his system.

Meanwhile, the stories that actually mattered to him, the literary novel, the horror screenplay, the collection of short stories he’d spent years polishing, came back one rejection letter at a time. Three years of pouring everything he had into work he loved, only to watch strangers dismiss it in a templated letter, sanded him down to nothing.

With rent coming due and his bank account hovering just above zero, he submitted Crimson Heart to Rising Sun Publishing almost as a joke.

If they rejected it, he could laugh, close that chapter of his life, and finally give up on writing. Maybe he’d find some copywriting job. Some office. Some career that paid enough to survive through a meek and useless existence.

Instead, life collapsed before it improved. He lost the apartment. Moved back in with his parents. Interviewed for soul-crushing jobs that seemed less like careers than rehearsals for the rest of his life. He was already imagining himself forty years older, sitting in the same beige cubicle, wondering why he hadn’t just bought the rope when it was on sale.

Then Rising Sun called. They wanted the book.

Then came the advance. Royalties. Interviews. Bookstore signings. Letter after letter from sad housewives who seemed to regard Bridget as a real woman who was teaching them the meaning of true love. His name, well, the fake one he made sure went on the cover, began appearing on bestseller lists. He bought a condo. Started dating again, and again, and again.

Then his editor asked for a sequel. Looking back, Joel could think of no moment that had ruined his life more completely than hearing those words.

Joel went to the liquor cabinet and pulled out a small glass, then another. He found the bottle of bourbon tucked behind a row of wine he’d never bothered to open. A drink and a smoke. That was how he celebrated finishing anything. It didn’t matter whether it was a three-thousand-word short story or a three-hundred-page manuscript; whether he was proud of it or hated every word. Once the final sentence was written, Joel poured himself something amber and lit a cigarette. It had become ritual.

Only five of those celebrations had ever led to anything resembling a career: the three Crimson Heart novels and two short stories he’d sold for a little over a thousand dollars combined. The distinction no longer seemed particularly important.

The drinking had long since ceased to be reserved for celebrations anyway. There was always something to celebrate. A finished chapter. A good sales report. A bad sales report. An email from his editor. No email from his editor. Tonight, though, he had earned it writing that slop.

He carried the bourbon across the polished tile floor toward the mahogany table, where his computer continued to glow in the darkness. His eyes had finally adjusted to the absence of light after hours spent staring into the fluorescent blue of the screen. The glow had left them bloodshot, and the dark hollows beneath them looked almost bruised.

The condo was otherwise black. There was enough ambient light from the computer, the microwave clock, and the various little electronic indicators scattered throughout the kitchen to keep him from walking into anything. He set the bottle beside the keyboard and glanced toward the bedroom.

The room was pitch-black. Joel stood there for a moment before deciding against turning on the light. He knew what he would find anyway: sheets tangled into a heap of dirty linen, clothes scattered across the floor, and the stale smell of alcohol and sweat lingering in the air. The maid was coming tomorrow, so that was good.

He pulled out his phone and used its pale glow to navigate the room. In the top drawer of his dresser, beneath a stack of socks and underwear, he found the oak box exactly where he’d left it. The arrangement made him feel vaguely like a teenager hiding contraband from his parents.

The box, however, was anything but teenage. It was solid oak, custom-made, and expensive enough to make him feel like he was treating himself. Joel slipped his phone into his pocket. He didn’t smoke much anymore. Not compared with the way he used to. Drinking had taken over that particular vacancy.

Still, traditions were traditions. He tucked the box beneath his arm and started back toward the bedroom door, following the faint blue glow spilling in from the computer.

He was almost through the doorway when his foot caught on something. For one brief, weightless second, Joel had no idea what had happened. Then the floor came up hard…

Joel came to in darkness. He groaned, though more from the indignity of waking up on the floor than from any actual pain. He rolled onto his side and pushed himself upright, blinking into the blackness. As he shifted his feet, they brushed against something hard and rectangular.

A book.

Joel reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. 11:51 PM.

He’d definitely blacked out when he fell, but apparently only for a minute or two at most. He waited for the pain to arrive, the splitting headache, the throbbing nose, the sharp complaint of a broken tooth.

Nothing. He ran a hand over his face. No blood. No swelling. His nose felt intact. He opened and closed his jaw. Every tooth seemed accounted for.

He turned on his phone’s flashlight. The beam fell across a familiar, ghastly splash of purple and scarlet. Crimson Heart: Insatiable Lust.

Joel stared at the cover. An impossibly beautiful woman leaning seductively against a desk with long, deep-red hair stared back at him, her skirt tight enough to qualify as a medical emergency, stockings stretched over legs that seemed to have been designed by a man who had never actually met a woman. Joel had no say in its farce.

Joel laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at the second Crimson Heart book. Well, that wasn’t quite true. He’d looked at it when Rising Sun had sent the author’s copy to him. He remembered opening the package. Remembered turning it over in his hands. Remembered thinking that the cover was even worse in person.

After that? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually seen it.

Joel frowned. Could he remember what he’d done before falling asleep last night? No.

The night before? Not really.

He supposed he’d probably pulled it out during one of his drunken blackouts, seen the cover, and tossed it aside. There was no reason to think anything of it. Though, a small part of his mind asked quietly, “Hadn’t you given it away?”

He kicked the book across the floor. It skidded into the darkness and disappeared beneath the bed.

Joel pushed himself upright. He had a manuscript to finish, a drink to pour, and a joint to light.

Joel busied himself with the bottle. He poured a generous measure of whiskey into the glass, took the first swallow without bothering to taste it, and poured another. The burn was familiar. Comforting, almost. He carried the glass back to the desk and lowered himself into the chair.

The computer screen was still waiting for him. He’d disabled the sleep function. The document would remain open all night, glowing patiently in the darkness like an accusation.

Joel looked at it. The page was blank. He frowned.

At the top of the screen, beneath the familiar toolbar, was the title he’d given the file half a year ago: CRIMSON HEART 3: BRIDGET GETS FUCKED IN AMSTERDAM

He tilted his head. Took another drink. Looked again. It was still blank.

For several seconds, his mind simply refused to process what his eyes were telling it. Why is this blank?

He opened the version history. Nothing. No drafts. No revisions. No autosaves. No activity except a single timestamp: 11:53 PM

“What the fuck?” His palm cracked against the mahogany desk hard enough to make the whiskey jump in the glass. He stood, breathing heavily.

Then he forced himself to stop and control his breath. In. Out. Again. This was a mistake.

A computer error. A corrupted file. Something stupid and mundane that would make perfect sense once he figured it out. He had backups. Of course he had backups. Multiple copies on external hard drives. Cloud storage. He’d learned years ago not to trust technology with his livelihood.

At worst, he’d miss the deadline. And what would Rising Sun do? Send an angry email? Threaten to pull the contract? They made too much money from Crimson Heart to do anything particularly dramatic. They’d scold him, tell him not to make a habit of it, and give him another deadline.

Joel reached for the mouse. He’d reload the document first. The cursor moved toward File.

The caret in the middle of the empty page was blinking. Blink. Blink. Blink.

Joel watched it. Something about it bothered him. He couldn’t have said why. Joel’s hand remained on the mouse. Then, a letter appeared.

J. Joel froze. Another key. o. Then e. Then l. His breath caught.

The words appeared one after another, not quickly, but with deliberate patience.

Joel, the alcoholic, talentless hack writer, looked at the screen, slack-jawed and dumbfounded, his mouth hanging open.

Joel stared. The keyboard continued.

He wondered if perhaps he had hit his head harder than he realized.

Joel laughed. It came out thin and breathless. “Oh, Jesus.”

He put his head in his hands.

“I hit my head.” He said stupidly.

That was it. Concussion. He’d hit his head. He’d been drinking. The human brain was capable of producing all sorts of strange things under the right, or wrong, circumstances.

He lifted his head. The keys were still moving. Joel’s eyes dropped to the keyboard. His blood seemed to drain from his body.

The keys were depressing themselves. No hands. No mechanism. Nothing.

Just one key after another being pushed down by something he couldn’t see.

The big-headed halfwit stared down at something his pea-brain could not comprehend. Would the cynical scribbler drown his fears in alcohol, pornography, or both tonight? Or would he simply let the moment pass him by, like he had let his career pass him by?

Joel stopped breathing. He read the paragraph again. The words were his. And they weren’t. The rhythm was his. The bitterness was his. Even the insults sounded like something he might have written. But he hadn’t written them.

The fear came slowly, rising through his chest like cold water. Joel grabbed the mouse. He exited the document.

The screen went blank. For a moment, there was only the soft hum of the computer. Joel exhaled. His heart began to slow.

Then the document reopened. The same empty white page. The same title. The same blinking caret. Joel didn’t move. The cursor blinked once. Twice.

Then the keys began to type again.

Think you can get rid of me that easily, Joel?

“What is this?” Joel said aloud. He didn’t wait for an answer.

He dragged the mouse toward File, then down to Open. The instant the menu appeared, it vanished.

The document returned. The caret blinked. Then the keys began moving again.

You really are quick with it, aren’t you, you apathetic…

Joel lunged for the keyboard. His fingers hammered the keys, desperately trying to interrupt whatever was happening, but the letters he typed came out as an incoherent jumble beneath the words appearing above them.

His stomach lurched. It felt as though he were standing on the deck of a ship in a violent sea, his insides rolling several seconds behind the rest of him. He swallowed hard, fighting to keep the whiskey down.

The mouse moved. Joel stopped. The left button depressed by itself.

The sentence he’d been trying to interrupt vanished. Every letter disappeared. The cursor returned to the end of the previous paragraph. Joel’s head went light. The room seemed to tilt around him, the walls and furniture beginning to swim in his peripheral vision. Everything was moving except the computer screen. That remained perfectly still.

The keys began pressing themselves again.

You will not do that again, you drunken dullard. Do you understand me?

Joel’s hands went to his stomach. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. His throat worked soundlessly, toxic bile rising to coat it.

This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. A low, anguished moan finally escaped him. He bent forward and burped, a horrible sour taste flooding the back of his throat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“What is this?”

The keys continued.

Some writer you are.

Joel stared.

You really are pathetic.

His breathing became shallow.

Without me, what have you ever accomplished? Two short stories? One you plagiarized, a cheap ripoff of Shirley Jackson. And the other... what was it? The Red Brick House?

Joel’s face went cold. The keys continued.

Cliché. If you hadn’t written Crimson Heart, it would have been another rejection letter.

Joel shook his head. “No.” His voice sounded almost childish. Afraid.

You know how those go.

The next words appeared slowly, almost lovingly.

Dear Mr. Keenan,

Thank you for sharing with us your drivel. It was truly insulting that you expected such a prestigious literary publisher to degrade itself by publishing the masturbatory slop you call a story.

Joel stared at the screen. His mouth had gone dry. Tears had begun to run down his cheek.

We truly hope you take the time to tie yourself a rope and encourage you to consider hanging yourself from it.

Go fuck yourself,

Every Publisher Ever

Joel’s burning eyes remained fixed on the words. For a moment, there was no sound in the condo except the faint electrical hum of the computer.

Then another sentence appeared.

But they didn’t say that about me, did they?

Joel stopped breathing. The cursor blinked.

They said yes. So you will keep writing Crimson Heart, because it is all you have. You are nothing, Joel. Nothing at all. You are a slave to me, and without me, you would have nothing.

The nausea finally overwhelmed him. Joel vomited violently, whiskey and bile splashing across his shirt, the desk, the keyboard. His stomach seemed determined to tear itself free through his throat. He lurched forward, gagging, and the edge of the mahogany table rushed up to meet him.

When he came to, he was on the floor again. He retched weakly into the mess beneath him, his whole body trembling. For several seconds he could do nothing but breathe and try not to vomit again.

Then he felt the pain. A sharp, blinding agony ran through his nose. Joel whimpered and reached up. The instant his fingers touched it, he knew. Broken.

Blood ran warm between his fingers. He rolled painfully onto his side and fumbled for his phone. The screen came alive. 11:53 PM.

Joel stared at the time. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. It was a weak, breathless laugh, but relief washed through him so powerfully that for a moment he almost didn’t care about the blood or the pain.

He needed a hospital. He needed someone to look at him. But the computer. The writing. It had to have been the concussion. The whiskey. A hallucination brought on by exhaustion and alcohol and the impact of his head against the table.

That was all. It had to be.

Joel sat there for another moment, trying to gather his thoughts.

At his feet lay a book. Crimson Heart: Insatiable Lust.

Its garish purple cover seemed almost luminous in the darkness.

The woman on the cover stared back at him. Joel had always thought she looked seductive. Now he saw something else.

Hatred. Pure, naked hatred.

He recoiled. “No!” He scrambled to his feet.

The sudden movement sent the room spinning. He grabbed at his wall and waited until the floor settled beneath him. Then he staggered out toward the computer.

The screen was still on. The document was open. And it wasn’t blank.

Joel stopped. He stared at the screen, barely daring to breathe. The manuscript was there. All of it.

Every page he’d written. It was finished.

His eyes raced down the final paragraphs. There, at the bottom of the screen:

Bridget smiled through the ache in her heart. She looked at Max one last time, blinked away a tear, and whispered, “Well, I’ll see you when I see you.”

Then she walked out of his life forever.

Joel read them twice. Then a third time. His breathing slowly steadied.

It was over. Whatever had happened tonight, it was over.

He lowered himself into the chair. The manuscript was finished. The deadline would be met. He could send it to Rising Sun, go to the hospital, and forget this entire miserable night.

Maybe tomorrow he would wake up and laugh about it. Maybe he would finally quit drinking. Maybe he would finally quit Crimson Heart.

Joel reached for the mouse. Then stopped.

Below the final sentence, the cursor blinked. Once. Twice.

Joel watched it. The keys remained still. He exhaled.

Then one key depressed.

I

Another.

‘

Another.

l

Joel’s hand slowly fell away from the mouse.

The sentence appeared one word at a time.

I’ll see you when I see you, you fucking bitch.

Thank you to the master of nuggets on Pintrest, from whom I took the stock photo of “Office attire women, short skirt babes…” for the book cover I edited on Canva. I am not very good at Canva, so I could not figure out how to write out the book title. Thank you for reading, and now reading whatever this is. Bye.

Crimson Heart Fund

Born on March 30th, 1853, in the southern Dutch town of Zundert, Vincent was the eldest surviving child of Theodorus, a Dutch Reformed Church minister, and his wife, Anna Carbentus, from a prosperous family in The Hague. His maternal grandfather, who he was named for, was a prominent art dealer, and had three sons who themselves became art dealers. The pair met at another wedding, between Anna’s younger sister and Theodorus’s older brother.

Vincent was the eldest of six who survived into adulthood. Being a man of God, well, at least a devout man of God, does not lead to wealth, but it provided Theodorus’ family with a home, a carriage, and servants, you know, church things, I guess. Through their mother, Anna, they were drilled in Dutch high-society manners, while their more reserved father taught them Christian morals and values.

Vincent was a melancholic child, serious and thoughtful, even before he was sent off to a village school at 7 in 1860. In 1864, he was sent to a boarding school, where he felt lonely and abandoned by his family, and he intentionally tried to sabotage his education and regularly petitioned his family to bring him home. But he was unsuccessful, and in 1866 he was sent to middle school in Tilburg, where the above photo was taken.

He remained a deeply unhappy child, his escape was what was really a family tradition: art. He had been interested in art all his life. Anna van Gogh encouraged her son’s artistic interest. At Tilburg, van Gogh was taught by the successful artist and renowned art teacher, with the Dutchest name imaginable, Constant Cornelis Huijsmans.

Trained in Romanticism, Huijsmans’ philosophy as a teacher reflected the priorities of that style of art: less of an emphasis on technique, and more of an emphasis on passion, emotion, and one’s impression of things, be it nature or a vase. He was a good teacher, but van Gogh couldn’t be said to have enjoyed his teachings, not because Huijsmans was a taskmaster or an asshole, but because Vincent was all his life plagued with melancholy, or what we might call depression. In March of 1868, he abruptly returned home. He wrote that his youth was “austere and cold, and sterile.”

In July of 1869, Oom Cent (Dutch is the silliest; oom is uncle. Cent was his name) obtained a position for the 16-year-old through his industry connections at the art dealers Goupil & Cie in The Hague. He apprenticed and trained for years, essentially a full four-year education in the art-dealing trade, before receiving his first position in the field, at the firm’s London branch. He lived at 87 Hackford Road in London, and his sketch, using pencil and chalk highlights, of the three-story Georgian terrace, made in either 1873 or 1874, is the first known work of Vincent van Gogh. As a young man in London, where he proved a successful art-dealing agent, were some of the happiest years of his life. 87 Hackford Road

Vincent fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, and went so far as to confess his feelings. Being already engaged, which is a non-starter, she turned him down. He slipped into melancholy, isolating himself and turning to religion. His uncle perhaps sensing his deteriorating mental state, had him transferred back to the continent at the Goupil & Cie branch in Paris, where van Gogh became fed up with the art-dealing profession as a matter of principle. It commodified and put a price tag on art, something which did not sit right with Vincent.

He sat in his melancholy for half a year before returning to England in 1876 to take unpaid work as a substitute teacher, which is one hell of a thing to do. This was never destined to last, and he again sat in his darkness before moving to his parents’ new home in Etten in the Netherlands. He took up work at a bookshop, during which time he doodled or copied Bible passages into the other languages he spoke: English, French, and German.

He immersed himself in Christianity and was devoutly pious, praying and living a stoic life. It seemed to the family he was following in his father’s path toward a life of the cloth, and so they sent him to live with his uncle Johannes Stricker, a respected theologian in Amsterdam. There, he prepared for the University of Amsterdam’s theology program entrance examination, but failed. He left Oom Johannes’ house and went to a Protestant missionary school in Laken, Belgium, entering into a three-month preparatory course, only to fail again at the end of it.

Vincent van Gogh was deeply introverted, introspective to a fault, putting off opportunities and overthinking things. He was a dreamer, thinking of possibilities and dreaming of fulfilling his purpose, while transfixed on what his identity was. This was combined with what was almost certainly an undiagnosed mental disorder. Certainly a form of depression; he described feelings of isolation, worthlessness and an inability to find happiness, which led the naturally introverted man toward further isolation. There were also manic and even psychotic symptoms, which we will get into. These things could make him prickly, argumentative, and at times hard to deal with. He was a man struggling with something the world did not yet understand.

In January of 1879, he took a post as a missionary, despite the failures, at Petit-Wasmes in the working-class coal-mining district of the Borinage in the Belgian Walloon region. Such was the state of the poor coal miners, and such were the depths of Vincent’s empathy, that he gave up his comfortable lodgings as a missionary to a homeless person and lived in a hut. Despite this gesture being very Christian, he was dismissed from his post by the church for “undermining the dignity of the priesthood.”

He walked 47 miles (75 kilometers) to Brussels, before walking all the way back again, only to then agree to return home to be with his fearful parents in Etten, where he stayed until March of 1880. His parents were getting increasingly scared about his state, and his father wanted him to be committed to a lunatic asylum.

Van Gogh returned to Wallonia in August, lodging with a coal miner. Taking up his beloved younger brother Theo’s advice, van Gogh leaned into art and began sketching the people and the scene around him. Theo, who had become the successful art dealer that the family had once expected Vincent to be, had idolized his elder brother, three years his senior, as a child, and he was the closest person to Vincent all his life. Theo was one of the few to understand that Vincent was dealing with something that wasn’t his fault, and supported him, in every sense of the word, all his life, including monetarily.

Theo wrote to Vincent constantly, while Vincent, true to the nature of depression, did not always write back. That being said, 651 letters written to Theo from Vincent survive today, while only 32 of Theo’s to Vincent survive. Theo was a successful art dealer, keeping records meticulously was part of his job, and he loved his brother dearly, and kept every single letter. Vincent struggled all his life and wandered. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his brother; it was that he was lost in himself and often moving around frequently, losing things.

In 1881, visiting Theo, Theo recommended Vincent study to become an artist with the Dutch artist Willem Roelofs, who himself recognized that Vincent had talent and persuaded him to attend a formal art school, the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. Vincent began in November of 1880, where he studied anatomy, modeling, and perspective.

On break in April of 1881, Vincent returned to his parents, during which he drew the whole time: neighbors, his family members, and the view. That August, his cousin Kee Vos-Stricker, the recently widowed daughter of his Oom Johannes, came to visit. The pair got on well, taking long walks together. Kee saw these as friendly and familial; Vincent, a lonely man, saw them as romantic. Gross, but it was a different time. He rather abruptly asked for her hand in marriage, to which she responded with “nooit, neen, nimmer”: no, nay, never.

She left soon thereafter, and Vincent went to The Hague to try to sell his paintings and to meet with his second cousin-in-law (this time not asking to marry), the successful realist painter Anton Mauve. Mauve too recognized his talent and told him to practice working with charcoal and pastels, which van Gogh did.

But he also stewed on the rejection, and wrote a letter to Oom Johannes that he later wrote to Theo about, saying essentially, “yeah, I fucked up.” Johannes wrote that Vincent’s “persistence is disgusting.” At one point, Vincent was so distraught, and well, unwell, that he held his hand in the flame of a lamp while repeating the mantra, “let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame.” Partly because he had no job, and partly because he was clearly unwell, the family told him in no uncertain terms to leave Kee alone. An early Van Gogh, The Sower, made while at home in April of 1881.

Mauve took van Gogh on as a student and introduced him to watercolor painting, kindly welcoming him in and providing for him monetarily. Vincent threw himself into the style for a month before returning home for Christmas. Things looked up. Vincent was devoted to Mauve, calling him his master, and of his own watercolors, he said they had “started to look like something.” For van Gogh speaking about his own work, that was high praise.

While there is no point in speculating, as things went dark for him quickly, he may well have been in an intense episode of whatever he suffered with. He fought with his father, refusing to attend church, and returned to The Hague, where he fell out with Mauve. Over what? Well, van Gogh used models that he hired off the street; they were the only ones he could afford, which Mauve saw as beneath an artist. Van Gogh and Mauve also differed on the viability of drawing from plaster casts.

In June, van Gogh suffered a bad bout of gonorrhea from a prostitute, more on that in a second, and he spent three full weeks in the hospital. Soon after, he borrowed money from Theo to buy oil paint and began experimenting with it, finding he liked it. He spread the paint liberally, scraped it from the canvas, and then worked backwards with the brush. He wrote that he was surprised at just how good the work was.

While living in The Hague, Vincent had struck up a relationship with Clasina Maria “Sien” Hoornik, an alcoholic, destitute pregnant prostitute with a five-year-old daughter, Maria, and took the pair into his apartment. She had lived a very, very hard and tragic life. And so, she and Vincent got on well. Sien was a few years older than Vincent, born in 1850 into a poor family. She worked as a seamstress and house cleaner to supplement their wages, and they had to rely on public assistance. After her father died, the family was thrown outright into abject poverty, and so prostitution followed, with three children in four years, only Maria surviving.

She struggled with her health, being a poor prostitute, the pain of childbirth, illnesses, and venereal diseases, including gonorrhea, which she likely gave to Vincent. She was ill when they first met, and he nursed her back to health. She posed as a model for him often during their time together, and he seems to have fallen in love, considering marrying her and taking in her children, envisioning a life where she could help him and further his artistic career. She seems to have wanted it as well. Vincent left the hospital early to be with her. She had just given birth to her son Willem on July 1st, 1882. Vincent was very happy, and seemed to want to be a father to the child, explaining that he wanted to go deeper as both an artist and a man.

But because she was a prostitute with two children by two different fathers, Vincent, for a time, lost everyone in his life. Van Gogh’s father pressured him to abandon Sien or risk losing the family. Mauve cut van Gogh off for good. Influential art dealer and family friend Hermanus Tersteeg abruptly ended their relationship, and even Theo withdrew to an extent at this time.

Van Gogh remained with her for over a year, and while we are not entirely certain on what grounds, in the autumn of 1883 van Gogh left The Hague and traveled to Drenthe. Sien returned to working as a seamstress and probably as a prostitute, and her two children, her youngest, Willem, went through his life believing Vincent van Gogh was his father (he almost definitely was not), went to live with her mother and her brother, who lived together.

On November 22nd, 1904, Sien threw herself into the Schelde River and drowned, fulfilling something she had remarked to van Gogh two decades earlier: “what the bad moods are is still more desperate; it’s bound to end up with me jumping into the water.” Sorrow by Van Gogh, 1882, using Sien as a model while she was pregnant. He described the drawing as “the best figure I’ve drawn,” and “I want to make drawings that touch some people.”

Driven by extreme loneliness, Vincent moved back in with his parents, now living in Nuenen, in December of 1883. Working outside in the sun, van Gogh completed a series of works we can generalize as the Peasant Character Studies. Van Gogh found sympathy, fascination and attachment to the working-class poor. He frequently painted, in watercolor, farmers, weavers, fishermen, washerwomen, and miners, and he did many still-life paintings, that is, household items sitting around.

Still in his sad-boy romance era, van Gogh fell into another relationship, with one of his family’s neighbors’ daughters, Margot Begemann, ten years his senior. This time though, she fell in love with him. The pair wanted to marry, and both families disapproved. Because in his life, nothing ever went right, a distraught Margot took an overdose of strychnine, rat poison, and only survived as Vincent found her and rushed her to the hospital.

Theodorus van Gogh, Vincent’s father, died of a heart attack on March 26th, 1885. Soon after this latest loss, a Parisian art dealer got in touch with Theo about Vincent’s work he had seen somewhere. To this point, Vincent had painted over 200 watercolors and many, many more drawings, with a color palette of somber earth tones, and he had sold nothing and gained little interest in anything.

Theo asked Vincent for a work to show the dealer, and Vincent painted De Aardappeleters, The Potato Eaters. As described by Vincent to Theo:

“These folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour and that they have thus honestly earned their food… For my part, I’m convinced that in the long run it produces better results to paint them in their coarseness than to introduce conventional sweetness.”

Today it is heralded as a masterpiece. In 1885, Theo dismissed it as too dark. Neither The Potato Eaters nor any of the peasant characters Vincent offered were sold to the art dealer. In August of 1885, his work was publicly exhibited for the first time, in the shop windows of the dealer Leurs in The Hague, but nothing came of it.

In September of 1885, one of the young women who sat for him became pregnant. Vincent was accused of being the father and of having forced himself on her. It does not seem the accusation came from her, and I am choosing not to believe that was the case. All that came of it was the village priest forbidding churchgoers from modeling for him.

He moved to Antwerp in Belgium soon thereafter and took a room above a paint dealer’s shop. Using money sent to him by Theo, he just went downstairs to collect painting materials and hire women as models, and went back upstairs to paint. He went out only every few days to buy the only things he was consuming: bread, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol. Once a week or so, he would travel to museums and became very interested in the work of the famous Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens and his use of colors.

Van Gogh threw himself into color theory, how colors interact both in the mixing of paint and on the canvas, and broadened his color palette to include carmine yellow, cobalt blue, and emerald green. He bought Japanese ukiyo-e art brought to the country to study and incorporated aspects of the style into his art. He took high-level admission exams at the Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and passed them in January of 1886. But as he soon wrote to Theo, he could only remember eating six hot meals in over half a year, and his teeth had become loose and painful. As it turns out, drinking coffee and alcohol and only eating bread and smoking are bad for you.

He was hospitalized for weeks, run down by overwork, poor diet, excessive smoking, and a possible venereal disease. When he did attend classes at the academy, he got into trouble for his unconventional style and, for lack of a better term, for refusing to color between the lines.

When required to draw the Venus de Milo, a famous ancient Greek sculpture of a naked female missing her arms, he drew a naked Flemish peasant woman in the same style. The drawing-class teacher ripped up his work, leading Vincent to shout, “You clearly do not know what a young woman is like, God damn it! A woman must have hips, buttocks, a pelvis in which she can carry a baby!”

He soon left for Paris in March of 1886, moving in with Theo, where he painted portraits of friends of Theo’s, still lifes, views of Le Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, Asnières, and along the Seine, watercolor portraits with a much brighter color palette. He was fascinated with Japanese art and tried his hand at what he called Japonaiserie, an expression of Japanese art, and what I saw was pretty good.

Exposed to the Parisian art scene, Vincent adopted a brighter and bolder painting style. Through Theo’s connections, he made some needed friends, including the Australian John Russell and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, among others, both of whom painted portraits of van Gogh.

Two major new art styles were developing in Paris in real time: Pointillism, a technique in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image, developed by two van Gogh acquaintances, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac; and Neo-Impressionism, taking a more methodical and almost scientific approach to color and lighting in painting contemporary life.

Theo, an art dealer, tried to share these styles with Vincent, but being stubborn, Vincent, like the snooty art critics of Paris, initially dismissed them. The two brothers began to fight living on top of one another. Vincent was depressed, rigid, and inflexible, and Theo found living with his brother “almost unbearable.”

In early 1887, Vincent moved to the suburb of Asnières, which greatly aided the brothers’ relationship. Here, Vincent ironically befriended Signac, who taught Vincent the finer points of Pointillism, no pun intended. Alright, pun intended. While in Asnières, Vincent continued painting brighter, more vibrant watercolors, parks, restaurants, the Seine, again, nothing had yet been sold.

In November of 1887, the brothers both met a new man they befriended, 39-year-old Paul Gauguin, a former successful stockbroker and married father of five, whose career fell apart in a financial crash. He had always held an interest in painting, and after the loss of his career, he leaned into art, at the expense of his family. In some ways like Vincent, having struggled after a relatively privileged background and with a painting style that differed from the established art scene at the time, Gauguin was far less technical than the Impressionists, his work seeking to hit emotions rather than evoke scenes of real life. But Gauguin was also extroverted, a womanizer, and had a larger-than-life personality, compared to Vincent, quiet, introverted, and a hopeless romantic. The pair somehow got on well.

Towards the end of 1887, Vincent did something totally out of character and arranged an exhibit at the Grand-Bouillon Restaurant du Chalet, 43 Avenue de Clichy, Montmartre, for his work and his friends, Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, and de Toulouse-Lautrec. Bernard would write that this exhibition was miles ahead of any other work exhibited in Paris at this time, representing the future of art. Bernard and Anquetin had their first paintings sold, and Gauguin and van Gogh, though they had nothing bought, exchanged work. While little public interest came from this exhibition, it was huge for the careers of many of the men.

In February, a sickly van Gogh, again suffering from drinking and smoking too much, moved away from Paris. In his two years in Paris, he painted more than 200 paintings, again selling none. He went south to Arles on the Mediterranean coast in hopes of finding his health again and, it seems, starting an art colony there with his friends coming to join him. Vincent van Gogh by John Russell (1886).

Vincent liked Arles, describing it as a near foreign country in a letter to Theo: “The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésienne going to her First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world.”

He again painted prolifically, energized by the warmth and the sun of southern France, and in many ways his work reflected this, rich in yellows, ultramarine deep blue, and the mauve of flowers. He befriended landlords Joseph and Marie Ginoux and signed a lease to move into their property, the Yellow House, which he painted, and he began working on landscapes using a gridded “perspective frame.”

Again, he made friends here and had work shown in an exhibit, while he worked on a series of works intended to decorate the Yellow House of the Ginoux family. He “befriended” and gave lessons to 3rd Zouave Regiment 2nd Lieutenant Paul-Eugène Milliet, a decorated military officer, who stayed with him for a few days, took paintings north to Paris, and then, when he returned south, brought him Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts sent by Theo. Van Gogh then painted The Lover. Maybe they were roommates or close companions.

Gauguin planned to come to Arles, with Vincent hoping their friendship continued and that they could realize his dream of an artists’ collective. He went all out in preparation, making several paintings to impress Gauguin and buying a second bed. Gauguin, busy with being a stereotypical flamboyant and problematic Frenchman, delayed his visit, with Vincent pleading for him to come visit him, which he finally did in October. Gauguin moved in with him.

Gauguin painted Van Gogh and the sunflowers he had painted, while Vincent, at his friend’s suggestion, began painting from pure memory rather than what he could see, adopting a more imaginative style of painting. They visited Montpellier and viewed paintings held in the city’s Musée Fabre. Like with Theo, while both men admired one another, living together was difficult. Vincent found Gauguin arrogant and loud. In December of 1888, van Gogh was entirely fed up with the situation, which he marveled was full of “excessive tension” and heading for a breaking point.

This led to the most infamous episode, which I referenced earlier. Vincent, despite his frustrations with the man, seems to have realized Gauguin was going to leave and he feared being alone more than continuing to live with Gauguin. In the midst of heavy rain, keeping both men inside the Yellow House, Gauguin remembered that van Gogh followed him around and “rushed towards me, an open razor in his hand.” He describes Vincent as increasingly unhinged.

On the night of December 23rd, 1888, by then Gauguin had already left to stay in a hotel, Vincent heard voices in the Yellow House. What exactly they said is unknown, but taking a razor, he severed either a large portion of, or his whole left ear, causing severe blood loss. Haphazardly wrapping the wound, he wrapped the ear in paper and delivered it to a young cleaning girl, Gabrielle Berlatier, not a prostitute, at the brothel he and Gauguin frequented. He passed out on the street soon thereafter and was taken to the Hôtel-Dieu-Saint-Espirit and placed under the care of the young doctor in training, Félix Rey.

The ear was brought to the hospital by the horrified Berlatier, but Rey did not attempt to reattach it; too much time had passed. Van Gogh had no recollection of the event, suggesting a mental break. Gauguin left after hearing about it, telling a policeman, “Be kind enough, Monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal for him.” While they continued writing to one another, and Gauguin would later propose van Gogh move in with him, they never saw each other again.

Diagnosed with “acute mania with generalised delirium,” van Gogh continued struggling mentally, with hallucinations and delusions for months. Theo, on the same day he proposed marriage to Johanna Bonger, sister of a mutual friend of Theo and Vincent, was informed by Gauguin of what happened and boarded an overnight train to Arles, arriving and comforting Vincent.

Vincent left hospital care on January 7th, but he was in a bad way mentally, to such an extent that in March, 30 townsfolk, calling him le fou roux, “the redheaded madman,” including the Ginoux family who owned the Yellow House where he stayed, signed a petition to get him out of there. The police forced him out, and Vincent returned to the hospital first, and then into a room owned by Doctor Rey. In June, he voluntarily entered Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy. He wrote around this time: “Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant.”

Before leaving, he gave a portrait he had painted of Doctor Rey to the good doctor, who hated the portrait and used it as part of a chicken coop instead before giving it away. Today, it is valued at over $50 million.

A former monastery established in the 10th century, Saint-Paul had been converted into a psychiatric asylum by Franciscan monks in 1605. Van Gogh entered on May 8th, 1889, and was given two cells with barred windows, due to the asylum being at half capacity at that time. He continued painting, looking out at, and sitting in, the asylum’s garden and painting flowers and trees. As he wrote to Theo, “When you receive the canvasses that I have done in the garden, you will see that I am not too melancholy here.”

His life was very limited, as life tends to be in a mental institution, trust me. Supervised walks were allowed, and he used the time to eye cypress and olive trees, which he then painted, as well as interpretations of works by other artists from memory, all in a style characterized by dramatic color swirls.

His most famous work, The Starry Night (above, obviously), depicts the view from his east-facing window of his asylum room before sunrise. The village below the almost psychedelic sky is totally imagined by van Gogh; there was no village van Gogh could see. Van Gogh was not a fan, calling it a “failure.” Today, it sits in the Museum of Modern Art and is valued between $600 million and $1.2 billion if it were ever to be sold.

Van Gogh was at the asylum for the rest of 1889, in and out of periods of intense depression and suicidality, painting and receiving what passed for mental-health treatment at that time. He was 36 years old and had not sold a work of art. Theo’s son, Willem Vincent, born in January of 1890, brought some happiness to Vincent, who wrote to Theo, “I started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky.”

In the entire year he was there, on the outside, Vincent’s work, shown around by Theo, finally received an inkling of recognition. French art critic and artist Albert Aurier, writing in Mercure de France in January of 1890, wrote that van Gogh was “a genius.” In February, van Gogh and his work were invited by Les XX, a collection of avant-garde Belgian artists, to show his work at their annual exhibition, an invite-only show.

Van Gogh did not attend, but his work did, and was insulted by Belgian Symbolist painter Henry de Groux as beneath the prestigious collective at their opening dinner. Coming to van Gogh’s aid were friends he had made in Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac, both of whom threatened de Groux with violence if he did not take back his insult. He did, and left the group. Simultaneously, other works of van Gogh were on display at the sixth exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in the Pavillon de la Ville de Paris on the Champs-Elysées. Famous French Impressionist Claude Monet stated that van Gogh’s work was the best in the exhibition.

From the Les XX gallery, the one and only painting Vincent van Gogh sold during his life was acquired by Anna Boch, a member of the group, who bought The Red Vineyard for 400 francs, which, through a very convoluted set of calculations I did, I have found to be $2,469 in today’s money. Today, it is estimated at between $130 and $230 million.

Van Gogh was finally receiving recognition for his art. It didn’t matter. He thought he was a failure, and he was broken mentally.

In May of 1890, after an entire year, he left the clinic in Saint-Rémy. One of his last paintings done at the asylum, At Eternity’s Gate, is a depiction of an elderly man in a state of utter and complete desolation. He then moved to the distant Parisian suburb commune of Auvers-sur-Oise, a village town of around 2,000.

He did this to be closer to Theo, but also because the physician and amateur painter, 61-year-old Paul Gachet, lived in the town. Gachet, a bit of an eccentric, had gained renown in the art community not for his art, but for treating artists, not dismissing the deep emotional pains tied to the physical ones which plague artists. Vincent went to see him based on Theo’s advice and found him “iller than I am, it seemed to me, or let’s say just as much.” But Vincent kept seeing him and came to say he had “found in him a complete friend, even something like a new brother.”

Vincent kept painting, completing 70 oil paintings during his time in Auvers. His health, having spent an entire year locked up, was delicate, as he said, “the thing is that after that long seclusion, the days seem like weeks to me.” But soon his health, and his mood, was improving.

In June, he wrote to the Ginoux couple, who had signed a petition to have him removed, and said, “I am feeling completely calm and normal.” He wrote a letter to Gauguin, which he ultimately did not send, which was very positive about the future, and to his brother, “I am also trying to do as well as I can…”

In July, Vincent wrote that he had become absorbed “in the immense plain against the hills, boundless as the sea, delicate yellow,” and while he had been captivated by the great wheat fields of the countryside around Auvers when they were young and green, in July he found them “as vast fields of wheat under turbulent skies.” He wrote to Theo that they represented his own “sadness and extreme longing,” and that his “canvasses will tell you what I cannot say in words, that is, how healthy and invigorating I find the countryside.” He completed Wheatfield with Crows that July.

He was staying at the Auberge Ravoux, a small inn in the center of the village. Auvers, a picturesque little town near Paris and easily accessible by rail, had been a favorite of artists for some thirty years before van Gogh arrived. But van Gogh was an artist unlike any others. He was a very, very quiet man, sickly and pale, and odd, as well as missing an ear. The local children teased him, stole his brushes, and were nuisances to him.

In a letter to Theo on July 10th, he wrote, “I feel like a failure. And the prospect grows darker, I see no happy future at all.” His letters to Theo, his mother, and sister in the following days show him in a better mood, and in a letter to Theo on July 23rd, he describes how immersed in his art he is.

As recalled by Adeline Ravoux decades later, she, the innkeeper’s daughter, was 12 at the time, van Gogh left the inn at breakfast on July 27th, and when he had not returned by dusk, they began to worry. He was a routine-oriented man.

He shambled in around 9 p.m., holding his stomach, to which Ravoux’s mother asked him if he had a problem. Vincent answered with difficulty, “No, but I have.” When Mr. Ravoux heard groaning from Vincent’s room, he went in and found him curled up in bed. At prompting, Vincent explained that he had been out in the wheat field painting and had attempted suicide by shooting himself.

Mr. Ravoux sent the young Dutch artist Anton Hirschig, who was also rooming there, to find a doctor. He could not find the local one, but found Gachet, who returned and dressed the wound, but soon thereafter left, finding it hopeless. Ravoux and Hirschig remained with Vincent through the night. He sometimes smoked, sometimes grimaced, but stayed silent all night, sometimes falling asleep.

When asked by police about the shooting that morning, Vincent said, “My body is mine and I am free to do what I want with it. Do not accuse anybody, it is I that wished to commit suicide.” An odd sentence. More on that in a minute.

Mr. Ravoux sent a telegram to Paris as soon as the post office opened that morning, and Theo hopped on a train and was with his brother as he slipped into a coma, after uttering, according to Theo, his last words: “The sadness will last forever.” He died at 1:30 a.m. on July 29th, 1890. Theo wrote to their sister Lies: “He himself wanted to die.”

Vincent van Gogh was not known to have a gun, nor was his painting gear, which he brought out to the field, ever found. Van Gogh, while very depressed and expressing indirect suicidality in letters, also described suicide as immoral and sinful. This has led to contentions that he did not kill himself.

The most famous and controversial of these came about in a 2011 book, calling into question what I just described, as well as how Vincent could have walked a mile with a bullet in him after shooting himself in the field.

Their theory calls on the angle of the gunshot wound, which itself is odd, and a modern chief medical examiner they consulted found that if van Gogh had shot himself in the abdomen as he did, he would have been left with black powder burns on his hands and, at that close angle, on the skin around the wound. None of these were present.

Drawing on old claims from Auvers, they discuss how van Gogh befriended one of the young boys in the village, one of the few who were kind to him, while his older brother was one of the chief tormenters of van Gogh. The older brother was a big fan of American Western dime-store novels, all the rage in the early 1890s, and was in the habit of pretending to be a cowboy. As such, he had gotten his hands on an old revolver.

While Vincent was off on his way to paint, their version goes, the boys were playing around, perhaps having had something to drink, and in some kind of incident, Vincent was shot. This led the authors, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, in their book Van Gogh: The Life, to conclude that “accidental homicide” was “far more likely.” Having been shot, a deeply depressed van Gogh welcomed it and took the secret to the grave, which makes the line “Do not accuse anyone” make a lot more sense.

This account is very interesting, and paints Vincent in an excellent light. But it has been criticized by several recognized van Gogh experts who are far more learned than me. This is the account shown in the 2018 acclaimed movie about van Gogh, At Eternity’s Gate, where he is played by my favorite Willem Dafoe. It is the account I want to believe, but I cannot say it is how he died.

He was buried on July 30th in the local cemetery of Auvers in a small ceremony attended by family and art contemporaries. Theo, heartbroken, died of syphilis just six months later. In 1914, his wife, Johanna van Gogh, had Theo’s body moved from the Netherlands to be reburied beside his brother. The man closest to Vincent van Gogh, who supported him and held him up throughout his life, lies beside him in death.

His career had been gaining steam very slowly. Artists had seen his talent first; art critics and dealers came later. When he died, it was a blow to the art community, and memorial exhibitions for his work were held in Brussels, Paris, The Hague, and Antwerp. Art critic Octave Mirbeau wrote, “Even though the populace has not crowded to a magnificent funeral, and poor Vincent van Gogh, whose demise means the extinction of a beautiful flame of genius, has gone to his death as obscure and neglected as he lived.”

His work was shown in several high-profile exhibitions in 1891, but he could have slipped away into further obscurity for a time, and maybe forever, if not for Johanna van Gogh. Despite not knowing him well, and despite having been married to Vincent’s brother for less than two years before Theo died, she was left with Vincent’s work after her husband’s death, and was now a single mother.

She was not on some grand crusade to make Vincent famous, but she played a huge role in circulating his work through exhibitions in the years to come. Friends van Gogh had made in life helped as well. Émile Bernard organized a small show of van Gogh’s paintings himself, while John Russell met a then-unknown Henri Matisse and introduced him to the work of his friend, an obscure Dutchman. It changed Matisse’s life and career, the styles of art that he popularized, fauvism and modernism, helped the world come to value Vincent.

There is no single great moment that led to the discovery of Vincent van Gogh, no sudden realization that the world had somehow missed a genius. His work was simply too good, and eventually, the art world had to catch up to it. By 1914, he was regarded in France, Germany, Austria, and the Low Countries as a great artist. The mythology helped, too: the tortured genius, the brilliant madman, the artist who suffered for his art. In 1934, novelist Irving Stone wrote a biography of Vincent based largely on his letters to Theo. Before then, van Gogh was virtually unknown in America. The book became a bestseller, and a film two decades later starring Kirk Douglas further cemented his fame.

Today, he is Vincent van Gogh: one of, if not the most famous artist in the world. His paintings are among the most valuable ever created, despite the fact that there are more than 2,000 of his works still out there, something that might dilute the value of an artist’s work, but somehow does not with van Gogh.

He truly gave his life to art. I would not say it killed him. Mental illness did, even if it was not him that pulled the trigger. I do think there is something to the idea that creative people can struggle with their mental health, but I don’t think his suffering drove him to create, nor do I think his art drove him to his death.

His story is tragic to me, and his fame and renown only make it sadder. Because now we know what the world eventually came to see in him, while knowing that Vincent himself never really could. And, honestly, I don’t think if he had received all this fame and renown in his lifetime it would have changed everything. Maybe it would have helped. Maybe it wouldn’t have. We can never know.

If anything, I wish someone could have simply given him a hug and told him what he spent his life desperately trying to believe: That he was loved. That his life mattered. And that what he created mattered, too.

Starving Artist Fund

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

The first, the Brownsville Affair, saw a reported rape and a white bartender killed, neither producing reputable evidence of who was responsible, and the townsfolk turned on the 25th Infantry Regiment, an all-Black unit. Despite the soldiers having been accounted for in the barracks during both crimes, a crooked investigation followed. In what might be his most shameful act as President, Theodore Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 soldiers, costing them their pensions, staining their records, and marring them for life. In 1972, after further investigation, the soldiers were pardoned and their records changed to honorable discharges. By then, however, only one man was still alive, and none of the families ever received their pensions. Little consolation.

What I’m talking about today, too, led to little in the way of consolation, resolution, or improvement. Today, join me in good ol’ Watts, as we look at the Watts Rebellion, or Watts Riots, depending on who you ask.

Los Angeles, California, is really, really fucking big. Throughout its history, it has hungrily swallowed up a dozen neighboring cities and towns, to name a few: San Pedro, Venice, Hyde Park, Eagle Rock, Hollywood, and, for our purposes, Watts.

Now, this is going to get very serious, but I want you to know that, in trying to establish where Watts is within LA, I have discovered how convoluted LA really is. The City of Los Angeles, not Greater Los Angeles (all the other towns like Inglewood, El Segundo, Compton, Torrance, Carson, all places we say are LA), on a map, is one of the most abominable things I have ever seen. It looks like it was gerrymandered.

San Fernando, Culver City, Beverly Hills, La Rambla, and West Hollywood are all themselves within the borders of the City of LA but are not LA, while the I-110 cuts down to Wilmington and San Pedro between Torrance, Compton, and Long Beach, jutting out kinda like the head and neck of a guitar. None of this has anything to do with anything we will be talking about, but Watts juts out from the central mass of LA just above the aforementioned guitar’s neck, like a tumor.

The area was long utilized as ranching land for cattle, and in 1904, the great metropolis had 65 people. That year, the man after whom the area was named, Charles H. Watts, was found dead, apparently by suicide, in the St. Elmo Hotel in Los Angeles. Interesting story, but I cannot lose myself down that rabbithole. The construction of Watts Station in 1904 saw people flood into the area, and just a year after totaling 65 people, by 1905 there were 1,651 people. Cityhood passed in 1907. But it was not that simple.

While the motion for cityhood was under discussion, three separate petitions objecting to the proposed borders of Watts were raised. One, came from ranchers who objected to the claiming of unimproved land that they could buy up. Usual land-ownership qualms. The next, though, came from residents who lived near the Palomar train station stop, the next one on the old Santa Ana line. These men, for reasons that escape me, I am not paying the Los Angeles Times for a subscription to read a nearly 100-year-old article, were so opposed to the name change that they outed themselves as nerds by using quotations ranging from Hamlet to Plato, and announced they would incorporate as Watts Park to protest.

Finally, and perhaps most saliently, the next petition against incorporation argued that most residents of Watts were “Mexican railroad laborers.” Their real complaint was against the property owners of Watts, but dressing it up in race and xenophobia was an attempt help to get the motion from being passed. It failed, and Watts became a municipality, with a PBR driver for mayor. Really.

The city grew from a hastily assembled collection of wooden shacks into a city with manufacturing plants, machine shops, public schools, churches, a $12,000 city hall (that was a lot of money back then), and I could go on. In 1926, LA came calling, and in a special election, the city elected to enter Los Angeles. Most were for the merger, while the Watts Chamber of Commerce and Taxpayers League, both of whom were opposed for money reasons, the Welfare League, opposed because of concerns that social issues might be ignored in a larger metropolitan area where their voices couldn’t be heard, and, because it was the 1920s, the fucking Ku Klux Klan were in opposition.

In a stroke, 23,000 more residents were added to the City of Los Angeles, the vast majority of whom were white. But then came the Second Great Migration.

The Great Migration was the large-scale movement of Black Americans out of the American South, where they faced prevalent racial segregation, discrimination, and violence. From the earliest U.S. population statistics, in 1780, until 1910, more than 90 percent of the Black American population lived in the South, for reasons of slavery, both before and after emancipation, when they had limited means to get out and then soon found themselves kept in place by Jim Crow laws, predatory land and employment deals, and trumped-up legal charges for things like vagrancy and debt, used to exploit their labor, as the 13th Amendment permits forced labor “as a punishment for a crime.”

In total, from 1910 to 1970, some six million Black Americans left the rural South. In the First Great Migration, primarily into the urban Northeast and Midwest, where conditions, on the whole, did improve, and places like New York, Chicago, D.C., Detroit, and Philadelphia saw the establishment or growth of culturally important Black American communities.

That being said, racism, discrimination, and violence were, and are, not bound by location. The influx of African Americans saw the stoking of white American fears, and race riots exploded across the country, particularly after the end of the First World War, when white Americans who went off to fight returned to find their jobs taken by Black men, thanks to racist practices that meant they were paid, and willing to be paid, a lot less. Rather than rise up against those who had given away their job and hired someone they could exploit, they fought against their fellow worker, a story as old as time.

The Second Great Migration increasingly saw Black Americans move west, particularly during the Second World War, when jobs in industrial and defense industries exploded on the West Coast for the Pacific theater of the war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which directed defense contractors not to discriminate in hiring, helping clear the path further. That’s great! Also, clearing the path was another Executive Order, 9066, the forcible relocation and internment of approximately 70,000 Japanese Americans from Los Angeles, with Black Americans predominantly filling the void. That’s not great!

Tens of thousands of African Americans from the South came to California, and Watts saw the construction of several large housing projects, apartment complexes like Jordan Downs, with approximately 700 units, and Imperial Courts, most famously known as the birthplace of the Crips, one of the largest street gangs in the country today.

Los Angeles, like, well, every other major city, had underhanded and outright illegal practices designed to keep Black people from renting or buying property in certain areas, thereby keeping them segregated. This practice is known as redlining: denying loans or restricting services to certain areas of a community because of the racial characteristics of the applicant’s neighborhood. The name comes from the maps that such companies used, with wealthier white neighborhoods in blue or green, less wealthy but still predominantly white neighborhoods in yellow, and impoverished African American neighborhoods in red.

This practice was made illegal after the Shelley v. Kraemer decision in 1948, but the companies easily found ways around this. Ninety-five percent of Los Angeles housing was in effect off-limits to minorities, finding themselves excluded from nicer suburbs and forced into cramped projects and what we derisively call ghettos in East and South Los Angeles, in neighborhoods like Watts. The real estate situation, combined with low wages, limited funding, and the sheer number of people living in such a small area, further restricted access to and strained the resources allocated to education, healthcare, and social services.

Black residents wanted out of these areas, leading to a cold war between white neighborhoods and Black neighborhoods, and the real winner was always real estate. Real estate speculators would sell a home on an all-white street to a Black family at an elevated price, leading to what we call white flight, with the same companies pushing the narrative of a “Negro invasion.” White families would scramble out to the suburbs, then the real estate agents would buy the remaining homes at a cut price and sell them at a higher rate to Black families.

Come the 1960s, there were 350,000 African Americans in the City of Los Angeles, and while I cannot find any data for 1965, in the 2.12 square miles that make up Watts, there were 41,028 people in 2008, I think likely more in 1965, and most of those people were Black. In 1963, the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 was passed by the California state legislature, trying to actually empower the earlier Supreme Court decision by making it illegal to discriminate in the sale, rental, financing, or leasing of housing based on race, religion, or national origin.

This real civil rights victory was met with Proposition 14, sponsored, funded, and pushed by the California real estate industry, arguing that this would “guarantee the right of all home and apartment owners to choose buyers and renters of their property as they wish, without interference by State or local government.” Outwardly, framing it as a states’ rights issue, something which was undermined by the fact that the proposition was supported by the American Nazi Party and the National States’ Rights Party, whose slogan was “White Men Unite.”

The Los Angeles Times endorsed it, stating, “One of man’s most ancient rights in a free society is the privilege of using and disposing of his private property in whatever manner he deems appropriate,” and that the ability to discriminate against home buyers or renters was a “basic property right.” The amendment was passed in 1963, to the immense and understandable anger of Black Americans in California.

It is just a fact that in impoverished, tightly packed areas, regardless of race, crime will be more prevalent. That is what can happen when people have little opportunity: they turn to crime to get ahead, or even just to make ends meet. Doesn’t excuse crime, but it explains why it can be prevalent in such communities. And so it was in Watts. This meant that police were disproportionately policing such communities. Two things here can be true. Such areas can indeed have more crime, and the presence of the police can lead to additional arrests for low-level things that might well be overlooked if the police were not so heavily present there, or if it were another neighborhood.

In 1950, then 45-year-old South Dakota-born, decorated World War II Captain William Henry Parker III was named the police chief of Los Angeles. The department was notoriously corrupt, with different political factions and organized crime alike bribing and influencing aspects of the force. Parker, who had a lifelong desire to enforce “civilized behavior,” concluded that the police needed to change drastically.

He militarized the force, establishing a standardized police academy and instituting military methods of peacekeeping that he had experienced during the war. He reduced the size of the force, cutting out corrupt officers in favor of better-trained ones, and also shifted toward a more mobilized force, moving officers from foot patrols to police cars. Rather than waiting for crime, they were out looking for it, stopping possible criminals based on their demeanor or appearance. What does a criminal look like? Ponder that for me.

Parker also turned the force away from being a tool of politicians and toward being a force under the chief of police, who was him. Because he seemed to deliver results, the public supported him and regularly voted for measures that enabled these changes. He also saw Hollywood as an effective tool to promote the police, and himself. He helped produce the show The Thin Blue Line, referring to how the police are the line between civil society and criminality, and gave his support to the early, pioneering police procedural Dragnet, which was both far more realistic about how the police actually worked while also cutting out any of the negatives of police work, which William H. Parker’s force definitely exhibited.

A tough, no-nonsense military man, Parker had declared a “war on crime” and took any measure to win that war, including police brutality, that is, the excessive and unwarranted use of force. Early in his tenure, on Christmas Eve of 1951, two officers responded to a report of minors drinking at a bar. The seven men they found all showed their IDs, proving they were of age. The men, were still told to leave by the responding officers. The men refused. They were legally there and just wanted to have a drink for Christmas.

This led to a fight, one that the seven men won. The LAPD arrested all seven men hours later on Christmas Day, savagely beating one on the way to prison and leaving him injured badly enough that he had to be diverted to a hospital. At the Central City Jail, the drunk officers on duty, thanks to a Christmas Party, in violation of protocol, beat the six prisoners. All the prisoners received major injuries, and at least 100 people in the jail knew of or witnessed this.

A major cover-up followed, only coming to light during the trial that followed for the beaten men. The judge reprimanded the police brutality and called for an independent investigation of the assault. Parker was pissed, arguing that any criticism damaged the police’s ability to enforce the law, basically saying, “If we can’t beat the criminals, we can’t protect you.” While eight officers were indicted, with more suspended and transferred, little changed.

Over the next decade, the LAPD continually faced criticism for its brutality, especially from the city’s Latino and Black populations. As I asked you to ponder before, the police went out looking for crime, and many young people of color were stopped. Most had done nothing wrong, and for one reason or another, they were hassled, beaten, and, if they resisted this, arrested, with the LAPD officers returning and being hailed as heroes by the public. Many officers recruited by Parker were from the American South, and like their chief, they shared an enthusiasm for being “tough on crime,” and, well, being racist.

Some Parker quotes for you, describing the activity of Latin Americans as “not being too far removed from the wild tribes of the inner mountains of Mexico,” and, live on television: “It is estimated that by 1970, 45% of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro. . . . If you want any protection for your home and family, you’re going to have to get in and support a strong Police Department. If you don’t, come 1970, God help you.” Good Ol’ Boy Parker looking exactly as you imagined.

By 1965, Watts was a place of contradictions. It was poor and overcrowded, its schools and social services were badly underfunded, and the building and industrial boom of the 1950s had largely passed it by. But this was not some wasteland of crime, drugs, and misery. Families lived there, raising their children the best they could. They worshipped there. They built a community there. And increasingly, they came together.

1965 came amidst the height of the Civil Rights Movement, directly after the Civil Rights Act had outlawed discrimination in public accommodations and employment. The Voting Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting, had been passed on August 6th of that year, and its protections were right around the corner. But these legal victories did not immediately translate into better lives.

In so many ways, these rulings were undermined, and the status quo remained, or changed subtly yet insidiously. Just because you could vote, or not be discriminated against in a hiring process, you could still struggle to get a job or an apartment, and be trapped in a neighborhood like Watts even with the formal system of segregation practices dismantled. But Black Americans, and white Americans devoted to the ideas of equality, were unwilling to wait patiently, and protested for Civil Rights.

And then there was the LAPD. For many residents, particularly young African Americans, the police represented the daily reality of living in a city, in a country, that did not trust, did not respect, and did not treat them as equals. Officers were everywhere in Black neighborhoods like Watts, stopping people, questioning them, searching them, overpolicing, and arresting them for minor offenses. There was a perception, not entirely without basis, that being a young Black man was enough to make you a criminal in the eyes of the LAPD.

But on the other side, for police officers, then as now, a lot of crime is in these areas, and when the people you keep arresting generally look the same, you are going to develop a bias. And when those people look at you with distrust, anger, and even hate, while you believe you are doing your job to keep people safe, well… Then as now, this is a complicated issue.

For the older generation of Black Americans in Watts, change was coming. Clashing with the police would solve little, and they emphasized the patience and nonviolence preached by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. While the younger generation, influenced by the work of the more radical Malcolm X and the burgeoning Black Power movement, clashed with the elders, less interested in being told to wait.

Watts was frustrated, full of resentment, and carrying decades of poverty, entrenched racial discrimination, overcrowding, limited opportunities, aggressive overpolicing, and a feeling that something had to give, while the August heat of LA burned and, if anything, stoked tensions further.

And then, on August 11th, 1965, 21-year-old Marquette Frye was pulled over at the intersection of 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard in Watts by California Highway Patrol rookie motorcycle officer Lee Minikus, a white man, for reckless driving. Frye, with his brother Ronald, had been out drinking, apparently a few cold beers on the warm California evening. Officer Minikus saw the 1955 Buick, owned by their mother, swerve and pulled them over. Smelling alcohol, he asked Frye to complete a sobriety test, which he failed.

It seems pretty cut and dry. He had been drinking and driving. Ronald ran home to inform their mother. According to officers, Frye was compliant as Minikus and fellow responding officers arrived, as did a crowd of around 50 people. The police called a tow truck, and just as it was about to arrive, Ronald Frye returned with their mother, Rena.

According to the officers, Marquette, perhaps overcome with emotion as his mother arrived, panicked and began resisting. His mother, Rena, began scolding him, and Marquette became almost hysterical, pleading with the officers. At one point, he reportedly said they would need to kill him to take him to jail. There are conflicting accounts in terms of the timeline and what exactly happened next. Dr. Perry Couch, then a 16-year-old in Watts, was on the scene, and he recalled:

“I was right there when [the officer] started calling him ‘nigger boy’ and all that stuff right here, and his mother says, ‘His name is Marquette. You don’t have to call him like that.’ He told her, ‘Shut up, you black bitch, stay in your place.’ And then people were like, ‘I know he didn’t say that.’”

He explained that more racial slurs were thrown around, and Marquette began resisting further, with his mother jumping on another officer’s back. He was bashed over the head with a baton, drawing blood, all the while a crowd grew, watching the white police officers, maybe (likely), throwing around racial slurs, beating the two, and then arresting them, along with Ronald as well.

The crowd swelled to around a thousand people in the residential area of southwestern Watts, and soon began to hurl their own insults, rocks, and chunks of concrete at the police. Direct physical clashes between the police and the crowd began. Rena and her sons were released on bail the next morning. But by then, on August 12th, Watts had begun to burn.

Not even an hour after the arrest, Watts became a virtual war zone. People battled the police, started fires, and looted businesses. Many white-owned businesses were targeted for practices that were seen as exploitative or discriminatory toward Black residents.

Things lulled somewhat on the 12th, and a meeting between the LAPD and community leaders was held to urge calm and develop an action plan to limit the destruction. It likely was not helped by Chief Parker, who referred to the rioters as “monkeys in a zoo.” The meeting failed, obviously, and the rioting picked back up that night.

Parker asked for the assistance of the National Guard. He believed the riots to be an insurgency against the country itself, akin to the Viet Cong in Vietnam, and called for a paramilitary response, that is, essentially, no holds barred. Democratic second-term Governor Pat Brown, no fan of Parker’s, declared that such a response from law enforcement would be like “guerrillas fighting with gangsters.”

On the 13th, the rioting intensified, and around 2,300 National Guardsmen joined the police in their losing battle to retain order. Sergeant Ben Dunn said, “The streets of Watts resembled an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country; it bore no resemblance to the United States of America.” Somehow, the first death came two full days after it began, on the night of August 13th, when a Black civilian was killed in the crossfire during a shootout between rioters and the police.

The rioting spread, and soon a 46-square-mile chunk of Los Angeles was a virtual combat zone. Pasadena, Pacoima, Monrovia, Long Beach, and even as far away as San Diego saw the beginnings of riots. About 200 law enforcement officers were sent to Long Beach to assist that city’s own police department.

To quell the riots, Chief Parker initiated a policy of mass arrests, setting up blockades and threatening the use of deadly force. One sign read, “Turn left or get shot.” A curfew was declared for a vast region of South Central LA, including Watts, and all residents found outside their homes after 8 p.m. were subject to arrest. Angered over this response, residents’ outrage and anger were only further fueled, and on Saturday night into Sunday, a full-scale battle between law enforcement and Watts residents began.

Rioters tore up sidewalks or took bricks from destroyed buildings and hurled them at the police, at times forcing them back, before destroying their vehicles. They blocked the Los Angeles Fire Department from extinguishing fires in the area, not necessarily out of cruelty, but because those same firefighters were deploying their high-pressure hoses on the crowd. At the same time, law enforcement sat back and watched the ghetto burn.

By the morning, the riots had finally begun to quell. Some 31,000 to 35,000 people participated in the riots, and nearly 3,500 people were arrested. Thirty-four people died. Twenty-three were directly killed by law enforcement, while three responders were killed: a firefighter trapped beneath a wall of a fire-weakened structure while fighting fires, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy accidentally shot by another deputy, and a Long Beach PD officer shot by another cop during a scuffle. Seven hundred and sixty-nine buildings were damaged, 208 completely destroyed, with over $40 million in property damage.

On the whole, white Angelenos were fearful. There were documented instances of innocent white motorists being pulled from their cars and beaten by a fed-up crowd, and the majority of businesses destroyed were white-owned. The prevailing view from white authorities was that the rioters were criminals, plain and simple.

Meanwhile, for the Black community, the riot came as the result of decades of underprivilege, discriminatory practices, and targeting by the LAPD. As civil rights activist Bayard Rustin put it:

“The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”

And the vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record whatsoever.

Debates about the riot were intense, and largely went along the lines you would expect. As this was 1965, the same year the Vietnam War intensified, a majority of people, as evidenced by public opinion polls, linked the riot to having been incited by communist groups.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed the riots were partly a response to Proposition 14, a view echoed by scholars and historians since. In a call with President Lyndon B. Johnson, recorded on August 20th, King discussed the outcome of a meeting he had with Chief Parker and LA Mayor Sam Yorty. He described Parker as a “very rude man,” and said of Yorty that he did not see “a willingness on the part of the mayor to grant just a few concessions to make, to bring about a new sense of hope.”

King was fearful of “retaliation in the white community,” and worried that things could get worse. He recommended that rather than simply fighting the Black rioters, they needed to fight poverty to prevent a “race war.” He also asked Johnson to speak with the well-regarded White House Counsel Lee C. White, a white man noted for his support of the civil rights movement.

Johnson accepted this, and while noting that he still had to publicly advocate for people to follow the law, he acknowledged the deeper problem: “There’s no use giving lectures on the law as long as you got rats eating on people’s kids, children, and unemployed, and no roof over their head, and no job to go to, and maybe with a dope needle on one side, a cancer on the other.”

Governor Brown set up an investigation headed by former CIA Director John A. McCone. The committee, which had only two Black members, it should be said, released a 101-page report on the causes of the riots that December. It found the root causes to be high unemployment, poor schools, inferior living conditions compared with white Angelenos, and other systemic inequalities. It recommended “emergency literacy and preschool programs, improved police-community ties, increased low-income housing, more job-training projects, upgraded health-care services, more efficient public transportation,” and much more.

While the California Supreme Court, and then the US Supreme Court, found Proposition 14 unconstitutional, few of the above recommendations were ever implemented. In part because of the atmosphere of racial tension and perceived lawlessness, conservative icon Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California the next year. The Watts Riot did not directly lead to that, but it certainly played a part in the political climate that made his victory possible.

By that time, Chief Parker was dead, having died of a heart attack at a dinner while accepting a commendation on July 16th, 1966. He was honored as a hero, and his handling of the riot was hailed by the public, even as the LAPD privately noted flaws in its response. His legacy today has been reevaluated. He modernized the LAPD into an effective and professional force, but he was unambiguously racist, and police brutality flourished under his watch.

The man whose arrest incited the riots, Marquette Frye, was convicted of drunk driving, battery, and malicious mischief, receiving a sentence of 180 days in county jail and three years of probation. He was viewed as a martyr in the Black community and a villain in the white one. His life would not improve.

He struggled to hold a job, and his young son would pass away. He tried to commit suicide at one point. He was arrested 34 times over the next ten years and died of pneumonia at just 42 years old. In an interview near the end of his life, he discussed how much being the face of the riots had hurt his life. He lived a terrible life, one I would not wish on anyone. But if you are arrested 34 times in ten years, we also have to be honest enough to acknowledge individual responsibility. But then again, maybe if he hadn’t been raised in those conditions, if he had access to services that could have helped him, that wouldn’t have happened.

Which leads us to the end. For many community members of Watts, it was a rebellion. They were reacting to decades and decades of racial covenants, unfair housing practices, police brutality, a deficient educational system, and countless other factors that were unfair, prejudiced, and wrong.

There is no debating that, at least to me. But did the rioting improve anything? No. In some ways, it only made things worse. But when people are subjected to such conditions for such a long time, this will be the result. Eventually, something gives.

There are no easy answers here, and that may be the most uncomfortable lesson of Watts. The riot was neither an eruption of criminality nor some uncomplicated righteous uprising. It was the product of decades of conditions that should never have been allowed to exist, followed by a response that often made those conditions worse. And over sixty years later, we are still dealing with many of the same conditions.

Coffee Fund

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

Some dream of being held.

Some dream of being loved.

I dream of being seen.

Just once,

I want someone to look at me

and not look away.

Someone who can see past

the mountains of mistakes,

the weight of expectations,

and past every version of me

they have decided I should be.

Someone who will not search my face

for the person they hoped I would become,

or hold me against the form

they made for me in their mind.

A lifetime of disappointment

teaches you to fortify yourself,

and to brace for the next one.

A lifetime of being told

you are not enough

leaves you afraid to ask

what enough might even feel like.

A lifetime of bending yourself

toward the shape others wanted

eventually teaches you

to mistake the broken pieces

for the whole.

And after enough years

of failing to become

what everyone else wanted to see,

you begin to wonder

if there was ever anything

worth seeing underneath it all.

But being seen

requires something too.

Being brave enough

to end the masquerade,

stop offering the safer version,

the polished one,

the one who asks for nothing,

and needs even less.

Risking opening the door

to discover that someone can finally see us,

and still choose to leave.

Hiding may keep us safe,

but it keeps us alone.

And aren’t you tired

of being known only

for the parts of yourself

you can bear to show?

So we will try,

to stand in the light.

To let someone see,

the tenderness,

the anger,

the shame,

the hope,

the pain

and all that

we have tried to hide.

To let them see,

the person beneath

the expectations,

the apologies,

the scars

we learn to call a face.

They may turn away.

But if they stay,

if they look at us,

and do not ask us

to become someone else,

then perhaps,

for the first time,

we will be brave enough

to look back.

To see,

and to be seen.

Sad Boy Writer Fund

Manson was born on November 12, 1934, to sixteen-year-old Ada Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati, Ohio. That was literally the name on his birth certificate. Maddox later filed a paternity suit against a man named Colonel Walker Henderson Scott. Ada believed “Colonel” was his military rank, but it was actually just his first name, a misunderstanding Scott exploited. When she told him she was pregnant, he claimed he had army business to attend to and disappeared. In 1937, the paternity suit was resolved through an agreed judgment, awarding Maddox a few dollars without Scott ever being legally recognized as the father.

Regardless, the child known as Manson, Charles Milles Maddox, never knew his father. Instead, his pregnant mother had married 25-year-old William Eugene Manson a few months before his birth. The teenager was, well, not a great mother. She went off on drinking and criminal sprees with her older brother, leaving Charles alone or with babysitters. William Manson put up with Ada for two years before divorcing her for “gross neglect of duty” in 1937, leaving Charles’ life forever. (Charlie Manson would be Charles Maddox legally and by others until 1967, but for my own sake, we are just going with Charles Manson).

On August 1, 1939, Ada and her brother were arrested for assault and robbery. Charles was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in West Virginia. His mother was paroled for good behavior in 1942, and he later characterized this as the happiest time of his life, playing hooky from school to spend time with his mother, who spent much of hers drinking. She was soon arrested for grand larceny but could not be convicted, and before long they fled the state for Indianapolis, where his mother met a man at an AA meeting and married him in 1943.

Suffice it to say, Charles Manson did not have a good childhood, and it would only get worse. In a much later interview, he claimed he had set his school on fire when he was nine. Whether or not that was true, he was frequently in trouble, both at school and with the police, for skipping class and petty theft. As a result, he was sent to the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana, a reform school run by Catholic priests. In very Catholic fashion, minor rule infractions were met with beatings from a wooden paddle or a leather strap.

Before long, Manson ran away, sleeping in woods, sheds, and under bridges before returning to his mother. She took him for Christmas to his aunt and uncle’s house in West Virginia before sending him back to Gibault. He lasted another ten months before running away again, committing his first documented crime in Indianapolis when he robbed a grocery store to find something to eat.

The child, he was fourteen, attempted to make an honest living and took a job as a messenger for Western Union, but that was always going to be short-lived, and he was arrested for theft in 1949. The judge, as sympathetic as a judge could be in 1949, sent him to a juvenile facility in Omaha, Nebraska. After just four days, he and a fellow student escaped, stole a gun and a car, and drove to Illinois, committing armed robberies along the way. The other boy’s uncle was a professional thief, and he took them on as apprentices. Just two weeks later, however, Manson was caught during the robbery of a store in Peoria, Illinois and this time sent to a stricter reform school outside Plainfield, Indiana.

According to Manson, while there, other students sexually assaulted him, apparently with the encouragement of a staff member. While everything Charles Manson said should be taken with a huge grain of salt, sexual assault was, and remains, a very real and all-too-common crime in American prisons and juvenile justice facilities and, as we saw with Clyde Barrow, can send an already damaged young person even further down a dark path. Manson ran away from the school eighteen times and, to defend himself, developed a technique he called the “insane game,” pretending to be crazy to scare off would-be assailants. In February 1951, he escaped for good and spent the next several months robbing gas stations and stealing cars until he was arrested in Utah.

Driving stolen cars across state lines was a federal crime, and Manson was sent to Washington, D.C.’s National Training School for Boys. Upon arrival, he underwent aptitude and psychological testing, which found him to be aggressively antisocial, that is, he didn’t give a fuck about anyone. He was also illiterate but possessed a slightly above-average IQ.

On a psychiatrist’s recommendation, the sixteen-year-old Manson was transferred to a minimum-security institution in Virginia. His aunt from West Virginia visited and told administrators she would look after him and help him find work, and it appeared he would be released at his parole hearing scheduled for February 1952. Instead, in January he was caught raping a boy at knifepoint and transferred to the Federal Reformatory in Petersburg, where he committed a further “eight serious disciplinary offenses, three involving homosexual acts.” Now somehow, perhaps simply because they wanted to rid themselves of him, he was released early for good behavior in May 1954.

In January 1955, he married a 15-year-old waitress and moved to Los Angeles, where, that October, he was arrested for driving a stolen car and once again charged with a federal crime. After a psych eval, for likely more reasons of “we just don’t want to deal with him,” he was given probation. However, his failure to appear at a hearing led to his arrest and a three-year sentence at Terminal Island in Los Angeles.

While in prison, his wife gave birth to his son, Charles Manson Jr., and spare a thought for him. His wife and son left him for good before he got out. After being released, he was arrested trying to steal another car and was sent back to prison. Somehow released again, while his wife was filing for divorce, he was out pimping a 16-year-old girl while also carrying on a relationship with another young woman from a rich family who was financially supporting him.

In September 1959, he plead guilty to attempting to cash a forged Treasury check, but another young woman, “Candy” Stevens, appeared at sentencing and made a moving, tearful plea to keep Manson out of prison, saying the couple were deeply in love and that they “would marry if Charlie were freed.” Both the freedom and the marriage followed, and the pair, along with another woman, went to New Mexico, where the scraggly-looking throuple drew attention. Charlie was detained and questioned for violating the Mann Act, transporting prostitutes across state lines.

Charlie was released, but he correctly realized he was still under investigation and decided to make a break for it, prompting the issuance of a bench warrant. He was arrested in Laredo, Texas, in June 1960 and returned to Los Angeles. For violating the probation tied to his check fraud conviction, he was ordered to serve a ten-year sentence. After unsuccessfully appealing, he was sent to the United States Penitentiary on McNeil Island, Washington. His second wife, Candy, divorced him in 1963, alleging she had borne him a son, Charles Luther Manson. Again, spare a thought for him.

To this point, Charles Manson was a criminal nobody. He had endured a horrific upbringing and trauma that undoubtedly shaped who he became, not excusing his crimes, but helping explain them. But here, at McNeil, came the first stirrings of what would transform him from a nobody into a household name within a decade.

There he took guitar lessons from famed Public Enemy No. 1, murderer, and gang leader “Creepy” Alvin Karpis. Manson showed some genuine musical talent and met future record producer and tour manager, Phil Kaufman. Kaufman later recalled a guard taunting Manson by saying he would never get out of prison. Unfazed, Manson simply looked up from the guitar he had become glued to and asked, “Get out of where?”

Manson desperately wanted to make it as a singer-songwriter and latched onto Kaufman, who already had minor Hollywood roles and industry connections. Kaufman found Manson charismatic and likable. According to Kaufman, Manson was a poor guitarist but a capable singer and a good enough songwriter to find work in the industry. He even gave Manson the name and contact information of a producer at Universal, advising him to wait until he had acclimatized after his release before reaching out, advice a grateful Manson agreed to follow.

Another man imprisoned with Charlie Manson was none other than the now-beloved actor Danny Trejo, who described Manson as “greasy, dirty, scrawny, so poor, he didn’t have a belt, and instead used a piece of string to keep his pants up.” Trejo felt sorry for the little white man, who stood just 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 meters) tall.

Only a few days after they met, Manson told Trejo he possessed hypnotic powers that “could get us high... It was like a guided meditation.” He then led them through what was essentially an ASMR session, vividly describing them smoking marijuana and injecting heroin using nothing but his words. According to Trejo, “By the time he described it hitting my bloodstream, I felt the warmth flowing through my body. If that white boy wasn’t a career criminal, he could have been a professional hypnotist.” Infamous 1968 mugshot of Manson.

By the time Charles Manson was released on March 21, 1967, he had spent more than half of his 32 years institutionalized. Very sadly, he reportedly pleaded with authorities to let him stay, saying prison had become his home.

Less than a month after his release, he moved to Berkeley, California, where he was transferred from regular probation to the supervision of criminology doctoral researcher and federal probation officer Roger Smith, who worked at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. Smith, along with the clinic’s founder, David Smith, was receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health and, allegedly, through the CIA’s infamous MKUltra program, which illegally experimented on the effects of drugs on human behavior. What exactly that meant for Charlie Manson is highly disputed.

Through them, Manson took LSD, and he took it frequently. Soon, he was bringing his new friends (more on that shortly) to the clinic for free drugs. David Smith, alongside Roger Smith, who was studying the effects of LSD, wrote that the changes witnessed in Manson “were the most abrupt Roger Smith had observed in his entire professional career.”

Manson, who had learned to read in prison, had also begun dabbling in religion and philosophy while incarcerated. His listed religion in prison? Scientology. A 1961 prison report found that, through the nascent “religious” movement, Charlie “appears to have developed a certain amount of insight.” After his release, he met local Scientologists and completed more than 150 hours of Scientology auditing, or “processing,” essentially a Scientologist using an E-meter to ask structured questions about a person’s past life. Ultimately, Charlie turned away from the Church of Scientology.

Scientology influenced Manson, but so too did the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, the Bible, self-improvement writer Dale Carnegie, the Process Church of the Final Judgment, which believed the forces of Heaven and Hell would reconcile on Judgment Day and judge humanity together, the ongoing Summer of Love in 1967 during his first year of freedom, and, you know, a lot of LSD and marijuana. All of this contributed to his laid-back persona and the beginnings of a philosophy he called ATWA: Air, Trees, Water, Animals, and All the Way. Basically, nature was good, and humanity was destroying the world, which it was and is. The philosophy would evolve over time, but this was its foundation during the Summer of Love and into the tumultuous year of 1968.

Now, Charles Manson lacked genuine empathy and exhibited a deeply complex personality with possibly even psychotic tendencies. He was a psychopath, lacking any real moral conscience. But, like many of history’s most infamous criminals, he was enthusiastic, charismatic, outwardly calm, good at giving the illusion that he could read, understand, and help you, and, in his own way, intelligent. Those qualities made him an excellent manipulator, and paired with his overwhelming desire to finally be seen as someone important, someone special, after a lifetime of being shut away and insignificant, they made him a dangerous man, a dangerous man who made friends quickly.

His first follower was 23-year-old graduate student and University of California, Berkeley library assistant Mary Brunner. Soon after arriving in the area, the homeless Manson made a living panhandling when he wasn’t tripping balls on LSD. The disheveled, 5-foot-2 drifter met Brunner and, through his charm and animalistic attractiveness, began a sexual relationship with her. Before long, she was letting him stay in her apartment.

The couple soon became a throuple when Charlie met 19-year-old Lynette Fromme, a former child dancer and runaway who had been kicked out of her family’s Redondo Beach home for smoking dope and drinking. Suffering from depression, she was sitting dejected on a curb when Charlie Manson stepped off a bus, looked at her, and said, “Your parents threw you out, didn’t they?” Fromme, maybe high and definitely deeply depressed, immediately decided this man was a psychic and followed him home.

Brunner was not happy about sharing either her apartment or her man with another girl, but Charlie convinced her. Before long, Brunner had quit her job and abandoned her studies at Berkeley. Soon, more young women, many of whom had left comfortable middle- and upper-class backgrounds, joined the growing “Family.” This was the Charlie Manson they saw.

Thanks to his ostensible parole officer, Manson was kept from being returned to jail. He and his “friends” were doing a lot of drugs and were frequently high in public, and it seems that, on some level, Charlie was also pimping out some of his female followers. In 1967, Charlie befriended former Protestant minister Dean Moorehouse, who picked him up while he was hitchhiking. He also took an interest in Moorehouse’s 14-year-old daughter, Ruth Ann, who reciprocated that interest, and soon she was a member of the Family after running away from home. This resulted in a confrontation that led to Charlie’s arrest, but thanks to the LSD dispenser that was his Parole Officer, Charlie got off.

Manson became something of a guru. The local, well, hippies all became acquainted with the charismatic, long-haired little man. He was well-liked and was generally seen as harmless. Meanwhile, an increasing number of young, naive, insecure, and outcast women moved into Mary Brunner’s apartment alongside Charlie Manson. This was the Summer of Love, and there was a lot of loving. Brunner became pregnant by Charlie. The group of more than a dozen young women were enthralled by the man.

It is alleged that Charlie taught these women they were the reincarnation of the first Christians, with himself, of course, as Jesus, and the nebulous establishment as the Romans. With no income, Brunner was eventually evicted from her apartment, but the group managed to buy an old school bus on the cheap. They filled it with painted rugs, removed the seats, replaced them with pillows, cushions, and loveseats, and lived in it while roaming Topanga Canyon, Malibu, and Venice.

On April 15, 1968, Brunner gave birth to their son, Valentine Michael, named after the protagonist of Charlie’s favorite science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, in a condemned house they were squatting in at Topanga Canyon.

Around this time, he ended his relationship with the Haight Clinic. Director David Smith later wrote that Manson attempted to reprogram his followers’ minds to “submit totally to his will” through “LSD and unconventional sexual practices,” turning them into “empty vessels that would accept anything he poured.” Now, regardless of whether that is entirely true, and there is certainly truth to it, this man had been feeding the group LSD for almost a year.

With the same charisma, and with a gaggle of nubile young women whom he did not reserve solely for himself sexually, similarly, lost young men also joined the nascent group. One of them, teenager Paul Watkins, who later testified against the Family, stated that Charlie encouraged everyone else to take large doses of LSD but took lower doses himself to “keep his wits about him,” and that “Charlie’s trip was to program us all to submit.”

Regardless, by mid-1968, no one outside the Family saw this, and everyone inside it was totally devoted. Charlie followed through on his promise to Phil Kaufman and reached out to Universal Studios producer Gary Stromberg. Like almost everyone else, Stromberg found Charlie strange but harmless, and very, very interesting. He even consulted Manson about a film adaptation he was working on, centered on a Black Jesus in modern America. Charlie, girls in tow, had the women kiss his feet to demonstrate to Stromberg what it would be like to be Jesus in modern America.

Stromberg continued consulting Manson and, one day at Venice Beach, listened as Charlie preached to followers and strangers alike about the hell that was capitalism and materialism. When someone in the crowd called him out over the decked-out school bus if he was so opposed to material possessions, Charlie nonchalantly tossed the man the keys and told him it was his. The man actually took it, and Charlie simply kept preaching. Later, Stromberg said Charlie possessed extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could read people, determine what they lacked and what they needed, and then exploit those vulnerabilities to manipulate them.

In the spring of 1968, 23-year-old Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson met 20-year-old Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Bailey, both members of the Family. Krenwinkel, an L.A. native, had been relentlessly bullied as a child for being overweight and for an endocrine condition that caused excessive body hair. She eagerly abandoned the office job she held after meeting Charlie Manson, the two having sex the very first night they met. Like so many others, Krenwinkel became enamored with Charlie. She later described the Family’s early days as idyllic: “We were just like wood nymphs and wood creatures. We would run through the woods with flowers in our hair, and Charles would have a small flute.”

While hitchhiking around Los Angeles on April 6, 1968, she and Bailey were picked up by another laid-back hippie, Dennis Wilson, while they were tripping on acid. He gave them a ride and dropped them off. Five days later, he happened to run into them again while driving around. Wilson invited them back to his place, where they hooked up, and the girls told him they “had a guru, a guy named Charlie who’d recently come out of jail after twelve years.”

Wilson then left for a recording session, leaving the two girls alone in his Sunset Boulevard home. They immediately phoned the Family, and when Dennis returned home, Charlie Manson emerged from inside the house and walked toward him. Wilson asked if he intended to rob him, to which Charlie dropped to his knees and began kissing his feet. Inside, Dennis found twelve strangers, mostly young women, and, well, sex and drugs followed, Good Vibrations if you will.

Between Manson, the LSD and the young women, Dennis Wilson was fascinated. For the next six months he housed the Family, referring to Charlie as both a friend and “The Wizard” in a Rave magazine interview. Wilson covered their expenses, more than $100,000, including a massive bill for gonorrhea treatments and another $21,000 for the destruction of one of his cars. The pair sang together, played guitar together, treated the women as free-use servants, and Wilson paid for studio time so Charlie could record songs, even performing some of Charlie’s compositions himself.

Wilson introduced Manson to entertainment industry acquaintances such as producers Terry Melcher and Gregg Jakobson. Jakobson was impressed by the “whole Charlie Manson package,” singer-songwriter, guru, and lifestyle leader, and also invested money into recording Charlie’s material. Another man Charlie met was producer and landlord Rudi Altobelli, who rented out the 3,200-square-foot house with a swimming pool and two-story guesthouse at 10050 Cielo Drive, a home Charlie himself visited.

One of Charlie’s songs, “Cease to Exist,” was reworked into “Never Learn Not to Love” and released by the Beach Boys, with Manson receiving no songwriting credit. By then, Wilson had grown fed up with him. Asked why Charlie received no credit, Wilson explained that Manson had surrendered the rights in exchange for “about a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stuff.”

Beach Boys frontman Mike Love recalled Dennis claiming he had seen Charlie shoot a Black man “in half” with an M16 and then hide the body. Wilson was, according to Love, “so freaked out he just didn’t want to live anymore. He was afraid, and he thought he should have gone to the authorities, but he didn’t, and the rest of it happened.” Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks recalled another incident:

“One day, Charles Manson brought a bullet out and showed it to Dennis, who asked, ‘What’s this?’ And Manson replied, ‘It’s a bullet. Every time you look at it, I want you to think how nice it is your kids are still safe.’ Well, Dennis grabbed Manson by the head and threw him to the ground and began pummeling him... I heard about it, but I wasn’t there. The point is, though, Dennis Wilson wasn’t afraid of anybody!”

Regardless, Wilson eventually abandoned his own house and moved into an apartment while the Family remained behind. They stole many of his remaining possessions before finally being evicted when the lease expired in the summer of 1968.

Charlie led the Family to the Spahn Movie Ranch, a 55-acre ranch in northwestern Los Angeles that had been used as a film set for decades. By the late 1960s, however, it had begun to fall into disrepair following the decline of filming, and its owner, George Spahn, was in his eighties and blind. With things in such a poor state, the Family seemed like a godsend to Spahn. The young, nubile women cleaned for him, guided him around the ranch, and had sex with him. Lynette Fromme was given the nickname “Squeaky” by Spahn for the sound she made when he ran his hand up her thigh.

One of the newest members of the Family was 22-year-old Charles Watson, a Texas native who had been an honor roll student, captain of the football team, and editor of his high school newspaper before becoming a fraternity brother at the University of North Texas. While visiting a fraternity brother in Los Angeles, he picked up a hitchhiker, Dennis Wilson. Hitchhiking used to be a lot more common. Through Wilson, Watson met Charlie Manson and, like so many others, became enthralled with him. He soon joined the Family at Spahn Ranch, where George Spahn nicknamed him “Tex” because of his accent.

Here, the group changed. What had begun as a, in a few words, problematic hippie commune evolved into a doomsday cult, with Charlie Manson becoming fixated on the idea of an imminent apocalyptic race war between white and Black Americans. As the Family watched the news throughout 1968 and saw race riots erupting across the country, it only strengthened their conviction in Charlie’s prophecies.

Charlie preached that Black people would rise up and kill all the white people, save for the Family. But, he argued, Black people were not intelligent enough to survive or govern on their own and would need a white man as their “master.” Naturally, that man would be Charlie, because, on top of everything else, Charles Manson was deeply racist. He also became obsessed with the Beatles, particularly their 1968 self-titled album, The Beatles, and its chaotic proto-heavy metal song “Helter Skelter.” He adopted the song’s title as the name for the coming race war. According to Paul Watkins, the Family, at Manson’s direction, even tried to create a musical album that would somehow trigger the race war.

In November 1968, for reasons I am not entirely sure of, perhaps to get out of Los Angeles because of the supposedly coming race war, Manson and part of the Family moved to Barker Ranch in Death Valley, isolated in the middle of the desert, while others remained at Spahn Ranch. Over the next several months, through late 1968 and into 1969, the Family became increasingly radicalized in their isolation while Charlie moved back and forth between the desert and Los Angeles.

On March 23, 1969, Charlie returned to 10050 Cielo Drive looking for Terry Melcher, only to learn from photographer and friend of the homeowners Shahrokh Hatami that Melcher no longer lived there. Inside the home was the 26-year-old actress Sharon Tate, who was pregnant. Her acclaimed but problematic husband (the serial cheating came first, the much worse revelations came later), 35-year-old director Roman Polanski, was away.

The likable and friendly Tate had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including Terry Melcher and her landlord, Rudi Altobelli. Seeing the scraggly-looking Manson approach, Hatami went to the door to find out what he wanted. He directed Manson toward the guest house beyond the main residence, where Altobelli sometimes stayed, then remained glued to the window to make sure the strange man left. Manson did depart shortly afterward.

But Charlie returned that evening. Finding no one in the main house, he walked to the guest house and, after first entering the enclosed porch, found Rudi Altobelli. Manson was looking for Melcher, presumably to discuss an album deal for the Family’s race war record, but Altobelli lied, claiming he had no idea where Melcher now lived. He also told Charlie he was leaving the country the next day, which he was, alongside Sharon Tate, flying to Rome.

When Charlie said he would like to speak with him upon his return, Altobelli replied that he would be gone for more than a year. Suspicious, he then asked Charlie how he knew he was staying there. Manson answered that the people in the main house had told him. Altobelli then asked Charlie not to disturb his tenants. Altobelli and Tate flew to Rome together the following day, and during the trip she asked him whether “that creepy-looking guy” had come looking for him the previous day. Tate in 1969.

The well-educated Texan, Tex Watson, left the group in December 1968, though his life didn’t exactly improve. He moved in with a woman who sold marijuana and LSD, becoming a drug dealer alongside her until he realized this was somehow worse than the Manson Family, and returned to the Family.

He was ordered by Manson to “find money for Helter Skelter,” and through his ex-girlfriend’s business dealings, he stole money from a man named Bernard Crowe. Crowe called the Ranch and threatened the Family, only for Charlie to invite him to his Hollywood apartment, On July 1, 1969, Manson shot Crowe non-fatally with a .22-caliber Hi-Standard revolver. As Crowe was Black, Charlie erroneously believed he was a member of the Black Panthers and convinced the Family that this was the beginning of Helter Skelter. He brought in members of the Straight Satans Motorcycle Club at night to act as security, paying them in part through sexual favors from the girls.

Still needing money, Manson ordered the mother of his child, Mary Brunner; 20-year-old Susan “Sadie” Atkins, a former introverted church choir singer; and 20-year-old musician-turned-Family-member Bobby Beausoleil to go to the home of Beausoleil’s former roommate, 34-year-old music teacher and UCLA graduate student Gary Hinman. Manson believed Hinman was wealthy.

The three beat Hinman and held him hostage until Charlie arrived with a sword and slashed his face. After that, Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death, allegedly, probably, on Manson’s instruction. Using Hinman’s blood, he or one of the women then wrote “Political Piggy” on the wall next to a panther paw, apparently attempting to implicate the Black Panthers. It should be noted that, according to Beausoleil, he went to Hinman’s house for a drug deal and the two women simply came along. He was arrested on August 6, 1969, for driving Hinman’s car, with the murder weapon found in the tire well.

Two nights after Hinman’s murder, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and 20-year-old Linda Kasabian arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive. Watson stated that Charlie had instructed him to go to the house and “totally destroy” everyone there, “as gruesome as you can,” and instructed the women to listen to Watson.

Inside were the 8½-month-pregnant Sharon Tate, Roman was away filming, her close friend and former boyfriend, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, Polanski’s friend and writer Wojciech Frykowski, and his girlfriend Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. The four had spent a pleasant evening together, going to the El Coyote Mexican restaurant on Beverly Boulevard. Also on the property were caretaker William Garretson and his friend Steven Parent.

Arriving just after midnight on August 9, Tex Watson climbed a telephone pole near the main gate and cut the phone line to the house. The group backed their car down Cielo Drive to the bottom of the hill and then walked back up toward the house. For some reason, they thought the gate might be electrified and/or equipped with an alarm, so they climbed over a brushy embankment to the right of the gate and entered the grounds.

Almost immediately, headlights beamed toward them. It was Parent, the groundskeeper’s friend, leaving the property. Watson barked at the women to remain hidden in the bushes and stepped out, getting Parent to stop. Watson leveled the same pistol used to shoot Bernard Crowe through the open window at Parent, who begged Watson not to hurt him, saying he would be silent about what had happened. Watson instead lunged at him with a knife, giving him a deep slash wound to the palm that severed tendons and cut the wristwatch he was wearing. He then shot Parent four times in the chest and abdomen, killing him.

Watson turned off the ignition and pushed the car away from the gate. The four gunshots did not register with or alert anyone inside the house or in the surrounding homes. The group then moved toward the house, Watson cutting the screen of a window before telling Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate. She did so, standing near Parent’s murdered body and his car.

Watson removed the window screen and entered the home through it, opening the front door to let Atkins and Krenwinkel inside, all without awakening anyone, including Wojciech Frykowski, who was asleep on the living room couch. Watson awoke him with a kick to the head. Frykowski came to and asked who he was and why he was there. Watson replied, “I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.”

He sent Atkins and Krenwinkel, both armed with Buck knives, to find anyone else in the home. They returned with the heavily pregnant Tate, Sebring, and Folger, forcing them at knifepoint into the living room, where they were ordered to lie down. Frykowski had his hands bound behind his back with a towel, while Watson began tying the women together by their necks with a length of nylon rope he had brought with him, slinging it over the living room’s ceiling beams.

Jay Sebring protested, pleading with them to consider Tate’s condition and the fact that she was extremely pregnant. Sources differ on what happened next. One says Sebring made a move on Watson while he was tying the nylon rope. Alerted by Susan Atkins, Watson shot Sebring and then, during a struggle, stabbed him seven times. Another account ends the same way, but without a struggle. Regardless, Jay Sebring was the first to be killed. His face was disfigured, and a long nylon rope was placed around his neck and then hung over the living room’s ceiling beams.

Folger attempted to talk them out of the senseless murder by appealing to their greed, and Krenwinkel took her to a bedroom to retrieve her purse.

Meanwhile, in the living room, Frykowski managed to break free from the poorly tied towel restraint and began struggling with Atkins, who stabbed him in the legs multiple times. He made it out the door and onto the porch, but Watson struck him twice over the head with the gun, then stabbed him repeatedly on the ground before shooting him. Frykowski continued fighting, struggling across the lawn before Watson finally killed him.

Inside the house, Folger escaped from Krenwinkel through a bedroom door and made it to the pool area before Krenwinkel caught her, stabbed her, and tackled her to the ground. The noise brought Tex Watson running, and the pair killed her.

At some point, I believe around here, Linda Kasabian told Susan Atkins that she heard someone coming and that they needed to leave, ostensibly in an attempt to get the killing to end.

Inside the home, poor pregnant Sharon Tate could do nothing but listen to the horrifying sounds of the murders. With her hands tied and the phone line cut, she pleaded not necessarily for her own life, but for the life of her unborn child, offering herself as a hostage until she could give birth. But the Family had no mercy. Tate was stabbed 16 times and then hanged next to Sebring. At the coroner’s inquest, it was determined that she was still alive when they did so, Tate ultimately dying from massive hemorrhaging.

Watson said that Manson had instructed the women to “leave a sign, something witchy,” and so Atkins wrote “pig” in Tate’s blood. Atkins later claimed she did this to imitate the scene of Hinman’s murder in the hope of getting Beausoleil out of jail.

The group left to return to Charlie. The five murdered people at 10050 Cielo Drive were discovered the following morning by Tate’s housekeeper. Police took the only “survivor,” property caretaker William Garretson, in for questioning. Garretson had said goodbye to his friend Parent and gone into the guest house where he lived on the property. The police interrogated him, but he was eventually released, and, obviously, as we now know, he had nothing to do with the murders. Body of Sharon Tate being removed.

The next night, those four, plus Charlie Manson, 19-year-old Leslie Van Houten, another runaway from a middle-class background, and 18-year-old Steven Clem Grogan, considered by others in the Family to be mentally disabled, went for a drive. Manson was displeased with the murders the previous night, the panic in the Family, and how they had allowed two of the victims to flee into the yard. He instructed Kasabian to drive them to 3301 Waverly Drive in Los Feliz, the home of supermarket executive 44-year-old Leno LaBianca and his dress-shop-owning wife, 43-year-old Rosemary.

Both Kasabian and Atkins testified that Manson disappeared up the driveway and returned saying he had tied up the home’s occupants. Watson, however, claimed that Manson returned to the house with only him, entering the house through an unlocked back door. Watson said Manson roused the sleeping Leno LaBianca at gunpoint and had Watson bind his hands with a leather strap, while Rosemary was brought into the living room from the bedroom. They covered the couple’s heads with pillowcases, binding them into place with lamp cords. Manson then left, and Krenwinkel and Van Houten entered.

Watson sent the women from the kitchen to the bedroom with Rosemary LaBianca. In the living room, he began stabbing Leno with a bayonet, the first strike entering his neck. He then heard noises coming from the bedroom and entered to find Rosemary somehow fending off the two women. He ended this resistance with several bayonet stabs before returning to the living room to continue the attack on her husband, eventually carving the word “War” into his abdomen.

Watson returned to find the two female Family members stabbing Rosemary over and over, many of the wounds inflicted after she was already dead. Watson cleaned the bayonet and took a shower in the home while Krenwinkel wrote “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” on the walls and refrigerator, all in LaBianca’s blood. She then went to the already dead Leno and stabbed him with a carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach. She also planted a steak knife in his throat.

Meanwhile, Manson drove the other three to the Venice home of actor Saladin Nader, leaving them, and the LaBianca trio, to hitchhike home. According to Kasabian, she deliberately led them to the wrong address. Regardless, Nader was not killed, while leaving, Atkins took a shit in the middle of a stairwell.

The murder of a high-profile actress, the wife of an even higher-profile director, as well as the heiress to a fortune, combined with the horrific nature of the killings, made it sensationalized national news. While detectives were quick to draw similarities between the Hinman killing and the Tate murders, noting the use of some of the same weapons, they initially believed the Tate murders were the result of a drug deal gone wrong, leading the investigation in the wrong direction. The LaBianca murders were discovered on the night of August 10, and two days later the LAPD ruled out any connection between the two killings.

Four days later, Spahn Ranch was raided, not in connection with the murders, but on totally unrelated auto-theft charges. While Manson and 25 other Family members were arrested and guns were seized, the search-warrant paperwork was misdated, and so the group walked.

Working totally separately, the teams investigating the Tate and LaBianca murders made little progress.

Now, I cannot dive into each assertion, but it is suspected and speculated that the Family committed many more murders. The LAPD believed they may have been responsible for as many as 12, while one detective asserted that Manson repeatedly insisted he had killed many more. Manson once told a cellmate that he was responsible for the deaths of more than 35 people. He also sent Sharon Tate’s younger sister a taunting map of the Panamint Range in Death Valley with crosses drawn on it, supposedly to represent buried bodies, though no bodies were ever found.

Manson would claim many more, doing anything for attention, but I think it is certain they killed more than the eight victims mentioned already. Then there was the late-August killing of a former Spahn Ranch stuntman who had become the de-facto foreman of the ranch. He initially got along well with the Family, but Charlie looked down on him because he, a white man, was married to a Black woman, and again, Manson was terribly racist. After the raid, which led Charlie to believe he was a “snitch,” he was killed on August 26, 1969. His remains were not found for eight years.

The end came rather extraordinarily through a completely unrelated investigation. The Family had burned an earthmover owned by Death Valley National Park, and there was evidence of the theft of dune buggies in the area. This resulted in a joint park ranger and Inyo County Sheriff’s Office raid on the Death Valley ranch, resulting in the arrest of two dozen people, including Charlie Manson, who was found hiding beneath a bathroom sink.

The LaBianca team, stumped, finally began asking around about similar crimes. This was how they learned of the Hinman murder in mid-October, and through that investigation they learned that Hinman’s murderer, Bobby Beausoleil, had a girlfriend who had been arrested at the desert ranch. They kept asking around about the Family, hearing about them from members of the motorcycle gang hired to work as bodyguards.

In jail, Susan Atkins talked to her roommates, one of whom told police what she had said. This led to Atkins being interrogated, and she let slip that she had been present and involved in the Hinman murder. She was sent to another detention center, where she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, and again told fellow prisoners, who then told authorities.

From this, on December 1, warrants were issued for the arrests of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian. None of the three had been arrested in the raid, and all had fled after the Family’s dissolution. Watson and Krenwinkel were picked up in McKinney, Texas, and Mobile, Alabama, respectively, while Linda Kasabian voluntarily surrendered to authorities the next day in Concord, New Hampshire.

Physical evidence tied Watson and Krenwinkel to the Tate murders. Kasabian, as it was learned, had no direct participation in the killings, and she was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony. It had not taken investigators long to tie the crimes to Charlie Manson.

The trial that followed was as farcical as their crimes had been horrific. Left to right, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and Susan Atkins arrive at the trial.

Charlie Manson was initially given permission to act as his own attorney, but due to his bizarre and nonsensical pretrial motions, that permission was withdrawn before the trial began. Manson responded by filing an affidavit of prejudice, which resulted in the original judge being replaced.

The trial began on June 15, 1970. The Family made their presence known, loitering around the entrances and corridors in their distinctive clothes and had to be subpoenaed as prospective witnesses simply to keep them from disrupting proceedings, which legally prevented them from entering the courtroom. They sat outside the courthouse carrying sheathed hunting knives, which, remarkably, was perfectly legal.

When Manson appeared in court with a buzz cut, he had an X carved into his forehead. He explained that because he was “considered inadequate and incompetent to speak or defend myself,” he had “X’d myself from your world.” His followers, both the defendants and those still free outside, followed suit and carved Xs into their own foreheads.

Some also threatened or attempted to prevent former members from testifying. Paul Watkins was badly burned when a fire was set to his van. Barbara Hoyt, who had reluctantly agreed to testify and was still debating whether to turn against the Family, was invited by Ruth Ann Moorehouse to accompany her on a trip to Hawaii. Hoyt later said she was drugged by Moorehouse with several doses of LSD, resulting in a hospitalization. She subsequently testified against the Family.

The prosecution argued that triggering “Helter Skelter,” Manson’s imagined apocalyptic race war, was the primary motive for the murders. The defendants, however, offered another explanation: the writing in blood was intended to copy the Hinman murder scene.

On August 4, despite precautions taken by the court, Manson somehow managed to flash the jury the front page of the Los Angeles Times, whose headline read, “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares.” This referred to a statement made the previous day by President Richard Nixon, who had condemned what he saw as the media’s glamorization of Manson. Judge Charles Older questioned the jurors individually, and they maintained that Nixon’s remarks had not influenced them. The next day, the female defendants stood up and declared in unison that, in light of Nixon’s comments, there was no point in continuing the trial.

On October 5, Manson was denied permission to question a prosecution witness. Manson responded by leaping over the defense table and attempting to attack the judge. Bailiffs wrestled him to the ground and removed him from the courtroom, followed by the female defendants, who had risen and begun chanting in Latin. Afterward, Judge Older allegedly began wearing a revolver beneath his robe.

On November 16, the prosecution rested its case. Three days later, the defense stunned everyone by resting as well. Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten screamed that they had a right to testify. Their attorneys told the judge that their clients wanted to testify that they had planned and committed the murders themselves and that Manson had not been involved. They were standing by Charlie until the end.

By resting their case, the defense attorneys had attempted to prevent this. Van Houten’s attorney, Ronald Hughes, vehemently stated that he would not “push a client out the window.” From the prosecution’s perspective, however, it was Manson who was advising the women to testify in this way as a means of saving himself. Krenwinkel later summarized in a 1987 documentary, saying, “The entire proceedings were scripted, by Charlie.”

The next day, Manson testified, with the jury removed from the courtroom. Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, writer of Helter Skelter, wanted to prevent Manson from making statements that might implicate his co-defendants or using his charisma and manipulative abilities to influence the jury. Speaking for more than an hour, Manson said, among other things, that “the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment.” He asked, “Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”

As the trial dragged toward its conclusion, defense attorney Hughes simply disappeared, resulting in a delay while a new attorney became acquainted with the case. Hughes was later found dead in a ravine; his murder remains officially unsolved, though the circumstances led to immediate speculation that the Family had killed him in retaliation.

Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten testified that the murders had been conceived as “copycat” versions of the Hinman murder. According to this version of events, the plan had been conceived and carried out under the guidance not of Manson, but of Linda Kasabian, who was supposedly acting out of love for Beausoleil. There were enormous holes in this story. Among them was Atkins’ inability to explain why, if the whole point was to imitate the Hinman murder, she had written “political piggy” at the Hinman house in the first place. The attempt to exonerate Manson failed. Midway through the penalty phase, Manson shaved his head and trimmed his beard to a fork. He told reporters, “I am the Devil, and the Devil always has a bald head.”

On March 29, 1971, the jury returned death sentences for all four defendants on all counts. On April 19, Judge Charles Older sentenced Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten to death. In 1972, the California Supreme Court ruled in People v. Anderson that the state’s death penalty was unconstitutional, invalidating all death sentences imposed before its ruling. Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Van Houten, and Watson therefore had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment.

The Family continued to exist in various forms. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme remained one of its most devoted members, writing letters to those still imprisoned and eventually moving to Sacramento to be closer to Manson, who was being held at Folsom State Prison. In 1975, Fromme made a farcical attempt to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford. She had managed to get a loaded pistol into position, but, as it turned out, she did not know she needed to pull back the slide to chamber a round. She was quickly arrested. Her attempted assassination was partly intended as a statement on pollution. She spent decades in prison before being paroled in 2009, after which she largely disappeared from public life. In a 2019 interview, she said she was still in love with Charlie Manson.

Mary Brunner, cooperated with authorities during the Hinman case but later served prison time for a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to free Manson. The former graduate student was released in 1977 and has lived almost entirely outside the public eye since. Linda Kasabian, whose testimony was instrumental in convicting the others, likewise lived a quiet life after the trial and died in 2023.

Steven “Clem” Grogan was eventually paroled after helping authorities locate the remains of Donald “Shorty” Shea. Bobby Beausoleil remains imprisoned; at his 2025 parole hearing, officials found that he continued to minimize aspects of his actions and lacked sufficient insight into the violence. Tex Watson took another path, becoming a born-again Christian and expressing remorse, saying, “My heart is filled with remorse,” though authorities have continued to question the depth of his rehabilitation. He remains imprisoned.

Leslie Van Houten spent her decades in prison trying to change. She earned several degrees, participated in rehabilitation programs, accepted responsibility for her actions, and repeatedly expressed remorse. In 2023, after more than five decades behind bars, she was finally released, with the parole board citing her insight and genuine remorse.

Patricia Krenwinkel has repeatedly expressed remorse, by accounts pursued rehabilitation, and worked to understand the person she was when she committed those crimes. In 2025, the parole board recommended her release. Governor Gavin Newsom rejected it. I have suspicions about the political calculation involved in keeping one of the most infamous Manson Family members behind bars.

I don’t know what I believe about second chances for murders, especially as horrific as these. The horror of what happened cannot be overstated. And that is worth remembering, because this entire piece has been about the Family. We have spent thousands of words on Charlie Manson, his followers, their beliefs, their crimes, their trial, and what became of them. The victims, meanwhile, have necessarily been reduced to names and moments in a much larger story.

But Sharon Tate was not simply the pregnant woman murdered at 10050 Cielo Drive. Jay Sebring was not simply another body in the living room. Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Gary Hinman, and Donald Shea were not supporting characters in the story of Charles Manson. They were people. They had families, friends, ambitions, loves, fears, personalities, and entire lives ahead of them. Those lives were brutally taken from them.

Like the Branch Davidians, the Manson Family contained people who were, in their own way, victims. They were vulnerable, they were isolated, they were manipulated, and many of them were psychologically warped by Manson and the environment he created. Understanding that matters. It helps us understand how ordinary, damaged, lonely, or searching people can become capable of extraordinary cruelty. But being manipulated does not erase responsibility. They still chose to participate. They still killed. And understanding why someone commits a terrible act should never become an excuse for the act itself.

The same is true of Manson. He was not well. He had a profoundly damaged childhood, spent much of his life institutionalized, and developed an extraordinary ability to identify vulnerable people and manipulate them. But rather than being an insane monster who had no idea what he was doing, Manson repeatedly demonstrated that he understood the power he had over other people. He leaned into the madness because it brought him attention. He denied responsibility, contradicted himself, mocked the crimes, manipulated the press, and continued the charade for decades.

A 1961 prison report described him as having a “tremendous drive to call attention to himself.” He certainly achieved that. Charlie Manson died on November 19, 2017, at the age of 83, after suffering cardiac arrest brought on by respiratory failure associated with colon cancer. He got what he wanted. He became famous.

More than that, he became a cultural icon. That may be the most disturbing part of the entire story. Lurid true crime can become crime porn very easily. We can become so fascinated by the murderer that the murderer becomes more memorable than the murdered.

I hope this piece has not done that, but there is value in understanding crime. There is value in understanding the psychology of people who commit terrible acts, the vulnerabilities they exploit, and the circumstances that allow those acts to happen. If we refuse to understand those things, we risk turning monsters into something almost supernatural, caricatures, fictional even, rather than recognizing that they are human beings who made horrific choices.

Understanding how Charlie Manson became Charlie Manson matters. But remembering what Charlie Manson did to other people, victims and followers both, and how he did it matters more.

Coffee Fund

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

The gathered guests are dressed in brilliant red, the traditional wedding color symbolizing joy, prosperity, and protection against restless spirits. A feast has been prepared, centered around the local delicacies of rich braised Wansan pork and glutinous rice balls. Inside the temple, draped in crimson cloth and festive streamers, a red wedding arch frames the ceremony. Tables overflow with gifts: dressers, clothing, red envelopes stuffed with cash, everything a newly married couple might need to begin their lives together.

But something feels... off. On closer inspection, the gifts are not real at all. The dressers, the clothing, even the money are all made of paper.

Then your eyes settle on the bride and groom.

They, too, are not real. They kneel silently before the altar, their bodies fashioned from bamboo frames and papier-mâché, their painted faces frozen in perpetual smiles.

A commotion rises at the temple entrance. You turn to see a procession of men carrying a coffin. This is no ordinary wedding. It is a Mínghūn.

Welcome to the 120th installment of Hare-brained History, a blog in which your intrepid host treats you to absurdities, follies, mind-fucks, and everything in between from the world of history. Today, we’re looking at something a little different. Not a single historical event, but a millennia-old practice. Join me on a journey to China as we explore the tradition of 冥婚 (Mínghūn- literally underworld marriage) or ghost marriages.

Dating back to the Han dynasty, the second dynasty following unification under friend of the blog Qin Shi Huang, ghost marriage, as we’ll refer to it, is a form of ancestor veneration, a funerary practice, and, in some ways, a form of bereavement or grief therapy. The origins of the practice, who started it, and exactly why are largely unknown, but like any seemingly strange custom, it makes sense within the culture from which it emerged.

But first, before I break down the beliefs that made this unusual practice possible, I should probably explain what it actually is. At its simplest, a ghost marriage is the marriage of two people, one or both of whom are deceased, symbolically uniting them so they may thereafter be regarded as husband and wife. Or, if I’m leaning into my romantic side, as one, forevermore, in both worlds: the human and the spirit.

This practice is rooted in traditional Chinese beliefs. Drawing from Confucian ancestor veneration, Daoist cosmology, and Buddhist ideas about the afterlife, death is not an ending, but a transition. The dead must continue to be respected, given offerings, and accorded a proper place of honor within the family. The relationship between the living and the dead is ongoing. They are separate, but remain connected. Even for me, an extremely white American, this makes sense.

This is, in many ways, an extension of the yīn-yáng philosophy: seemingly opposite cosmic forces are not adversaries, but complementary. Life and death coexist, flow into one another, and together create harmony. Within this understanding, ensuring that the dead remain content is important because restless spirits were believed capable of bringing illness, misfortune, poltergeist-like disturbances, and even death to the living. Part of that contentment meant ensuring that those who died unmarried would not remain lonely in the next life, which is, honestly, rather sweet.

But marriage in traditional Chinese society was about far more than romance or companionship. It was a familial obligation, a union between families, and the means by which a lineage continued. The importance of carrying on the family line in Chinese tradition cannot be overstated. If a man died without heirs, his spirit was thought to be particularly vulnerable to becoming restless. Through a ghost marriage, however, his family line could continue. A deceased married couple might symbolically adopt a living heir to carry on the man’s ancestral line, satisfying obligations to the dead while also providing the living heir with the deceased’s estate. Win-win.

In a society where marriage was considered a central milestone of adulthood, remaining unmarried carried a significant social stigma, even beyond death. This was especially true for women. While I won’t go so far as to say uniquely so, traditional Chinese society was (is) deeply patriarchal. A woman’s expected role was that of wife, mother, and homemaker, and remaining unmarried could bring shame not only upon her but upon her family as well. Ensuring that an unmarried daughter, whether living or deceased, had a husband was therefore seen as an important familial duty.

Finally, in the deeply family-centered Confucian tradition, it was considered improper for a younger sibling to marry before an older one. If an elder sibling died unmarried, a ghost marriage could resolve this imbalance, allowing the family hierarchy to remain intact.

For all of these reasons, a marriage involving the dead did not merely make sense within traditional Chinese society, it could be seen as entirely necessary.

Ghost marriages were typically arranged by the deceased’s family. They might enlist the help of Daoshi, Daoist priests, or Fashi, masters of ritual, who served as both matchmakers and officiants. Neither role saw ghost marriage as unusual, as the practice was deeply intertwined with the same religious and cultural understandings that informed their work.

Sometimes, a ghost marriage was performed between two people who had already been engaged when one died before the wedding could take place. This sounds more romantic than it often was, for a few reasons. First, arranged marriages were the norm throughout much of Chinese history and remain common in some rural areas today. A man whose fiancée died could choose to go through with the marriage, but he was under no obligation to do so, and even if he did, he remained free to marry again. For that reason, most men simply did not, and we have relatively few records of such cases.

For the family of the deceased woman, however, this was a much bigger problem. It cannot be overstated how important marrying off daughters was in traditional Chinese society, that is why I am saying it again.

As we’ve established, ancestor veneration was central to family life. Most households maintained ancestral altars where, alongside deities, sat spirit tablets: small memorial plaques believed to house or represent the spirits of deceased relatives. A married woman’s tablet belonged on the altar of her husband’s family. But if an unmarried woman died, tradition dictated that her natal family could not properly install her tablet on their ancestral altar. Without descendants to care for her spirit, she risked becoming a lonely or even vengeful ghost.

One solution was the construction of so-called “death houses,” small shrines or structures separate from the family home, where unmarried women could be commemorated. Some accounts even suggest that terminally ill unmarried daughters were forced into one so their spirits would remain outside the household rather than haunt it. Whether this was common or more exceptional is difficult to determine, but either way, finding your deceased daughter a husband was generally viewed as the preferable solution.

If a groom died before the wedding, his fiancée was frequently pressured, or outright compelled, to proceed with a ghost marriage. Doing so preserved the deceased man’s family line, relieved her own family of the shame associated with an unmarried daughter, and avoided the need for building her a death shack. Once married, she participated in the funeral rites and mourning customs, but unlike a widower in the opposite situation, she was expected to remain celibate for life and move into the household of her deceased husband’s family. Scholar Charlotte Ikels summarizes the cultural expectations well:

“Traditionally, girls who did not marry were regarded as a threat to the entire family and were not allowed to continue living at home. Even in contemporary Hong Kong, it is believed unmarried women are assumed to have psychological problems. Presumably no normal person would remain unmarried voluntarily.”

A spirit marriage ensured that a woman became part of a lineage, would receive ancestral worship, and could rest peacefully in the afterlife. In some cases, it may even have been seen as preferable to an unwanted marriage with a living husband. But while it spared her one fate, it often replaced it with another, turning her into a social instrument whose labor benefited the family she married into.

For the family of an unmarried son, arranging a ghost marriage served equally practical purposes. It allowed him descendants, ensured he would rest peacefully, preserved the family line, and, if he had been an only child, guaranteed that his parents themselves would continue receiving ancestral offerings after death. Marriage, above all else, was intended to benefit the family.

I mentioned adoption earlier, so how did that work? If a woman died before marriage but her fiancé survived, he could later have children with another wife while still carrying his deceased fiancée’s spirit tablet. This relieved her natal family of the responsibility for her ancestral rites while ensuring she continued to be venerated.

If, however, the groom died and his ghost bride had no descendants, the deceased’s family could adopt a younger male relative, often a brother or nephew, to continue the ancestral line. The adoption was formalized through a written contract placed beneath the deceased’s spirit tablet, essentially declaring, “The responsibility for worshipping this ancestor now falls to you.”

I know that was a lot of explanation, but this was (is) an intricate and, frankly, confusing practice. Other times, and apparently quite often, ghost marriages were said to be arranged at the deceased’s request. This usually came through dreams, or at least claimed dreams, in which the dead complained of loneliness. Other supposed signs included unexplained illness in the family, crop failures, spirit tablets mysteriously falling over, or other misfortunes interpreted as supernatural messages. Of course, it’s also entirely possible these “messages” conveniently disguised the wishes of the living, who had familial or financial reasons for arranging the marriage in the first place.

Dowries and bridewealth remained just as much a part of ghost marriages as ordinary ones. For wealthy families, this could involve substantial exchanges. Recent reports, remember, this practice has not entirely disappeared, describe one case in which the groom’s family provided a house for the deceased bride. In another, the groom’s family gave the bride’s relatives wedding cakes and NT$120,000 in Taiwan. The bride’s family, in turn, presented a dowry consisting of a gold ring, a gold necklace, several pairs of shoes, and six dresses, all “for the use of the groom’s living wife.” A lot to unpack there.

When both bride and groom were deceased, these exchanges often took the form of elaborate paper offerings rather than physical goods. They still reflected the customs surrounding dowries and bridewealth, but their primary purpose was to satisfy ritual obligations, honor the ancestors, and ensure the spirits rested in peace.

Poorer families might simply exchange a hóngbāo (red envelope), the familiar red packet filled with money and traditionally given during holidays, celebrations, and weddings. Red symbolizes joy, prosperity, vitality, and protection from evil spirits in Chinese culture, which is fittingly one of the central purposes of a ghost marriage.

That same red envelope could also serve as an invitation to one. Amusingly, there are documented cases of families leaving a red envelope in the middle of a road before hiding nearby. When some unsuspecting passerby inevitably stopped to pick it up, the family would emerge to announce, in effect: “Surprise! You’re marrying a dead person.”

In a ghost marriage, the typical rites of a traditional Chinese wedding are observed, including the presence of the deceased. Thankfully, this is typically, though not always, through effigies rather than the actual bodies.

When both the bride and groom are deceased, they may be represented by figures constructed from paper bodies over bamboo frames with papier-mâché heads (like the rather disturbing image at the beginning of this article). Their spirit tablets are placed inside the effigies so that the ghosts symbolically inhabit them. Paper servants may be positioned on either side, while the room is filled with paper replicas of the possessions the couple might have enjoyed had they lived: dressers, tables, safes, refrigerators, trunks filled with paper clothing, bolts of cloth, and countless other household goods. At the conclusion of the ceremony, these are all burned, sending them to the spirit world for the couple’s use.

When the groom is living but the bride is deceased, the effigy might instead be assembled with a wooden backbone, newspaper arms, and a head cut from a smiling girl in a magazine before likewise being burned after the ceremony.

These effigies could even wear real wedding clothing, the same garments used in ordinary ceremonies. If a living person was marrying a ghost, they would traditionally wear some black alongside the usual wedding attire rather than entirely white. Throughout the ceremony, the deceased are treated as though they are still alive. They are formally invited in, “fed,” and their arrival is announced just as it would be at any other wedding.

Now, while, you know, insensitive as it may sound, this is certainly strange to modern Western eyes, if the practice stopped here, it would simply be an interesting, somewhat unusual, and, viewed through a more critical lens, partly patriarchal tradition. But it doesn’t stop there. It gets much darker.

As reported by the BBC, Hong Kong Cable TV News, and several scholars, some ghost marriages require more than symbolic effigies. In certain instances, the literal bones or physical remains of the deceased are exhumed and reburied together, most importantly the remains of the bride, so that her spirit may properly pass into the groom’s family.

In recent years, this has given rise to a gruesome black market. As the practice has declined, those who still adhere strongly enough to these traditional beliefs have found it increasingly difficult to locate suitable remains with which to marry off their deceased, unmarried sons. The result has been the theft, and, in some cases, murder, of women so their bodies can be sold as ghost brides.

In the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi, and Shaanxi, a thriving illicit trade has been reported. One report cited prices of around 7,000 renminbi (roughly US$1,000 at the time in 2019) for the body of a deceased woman. Research conducted by Shanghai University between 2008 and 2010 found that the remains of a young woman could fetch between 30,000 and 50,000 renminbi (roughly US$4,500–7,500).

The sale of corpses has been illegal in China since 2006, which is far too late, but criminalization has not eliminated the black market surrounding a disappearing, yet still culturally significant, practice. One man arrested for murder in Liangcheng County reportedly told police he had killed a woman in order to sell her body to a family seeking a ghost bride.

The reasons this market persists vary from place to place. In the mountainous province of Shanxi, for example, many young men have historically worked in coal mines, where fatal accidents were tragically common. Many died young and unmarried, leaving desperate families searching for ghost brides so their sons could rest peacefully in the afterlife.

At the same time, suitable female remains are comparatively scarce. Traditional expectations encourage/push women to marry early and, you know, while alive, reducing the number of unmarried women available for such rituals. Added to this is China’s long-standing imbalance in the sex ratio at birth, around 109 to 110 boys for every 100 girls. Although that gap has actually narrowed in recent years, it remains unusually high.

For families who genuinely believe that an unmarried son’s spirit will remain restless or bring misfortune unless properly married, the pressure to obtain a ghost bride can become overwhelming, even if it means paying enormous sums. Whether those families know the bodies they purchase have been stolen, or, in the worst cases, obtained through murder, is often impossible to determine. Some cemeteries in Henan Province have responded by installing CCTV cameras and reinforcing graves with concrete coffins to deter grave robbers.

It should go without saying that, whatever cultural or religious beliefs underlie ghost marriage, this criminal trade is genuinely horrific.

The wonderfully named feng shui master Szeto Fat-ching told the BBC that “such ghost weddings are very touching, showing the perseverance of love.” The BBC itself observed that “at the core of these rituals is the universal human dilemma of how to deal with bereavement.”

And I suppose that is true. I am generally reluctant to condemn a practice so deeply intertwined with another culture’s traditions and worldview. Ghost marriages arose from sincere beliefs about family, ancestry, grief, and ensuring that loved ones were not left alone in death. Those motivations are understandable, even if the practice itself can feel alien to those of us on the outside looking in.

But once a tradition creates a market for stolen corpses and murdered women so another family can provide a spouse for their deceased loved one, whether or not they realize how those remains were obtained, calling it “the perseverance of love” becomes, for me at least, a bit of a stretch.

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

Ghost Marriage Fund

On August 3, 1492, the Santa María, Pinta, and Niña set sail from Palos de la Frontera in search of a western sea route to East Asia. Instead, the Genoese goober stumbled upon continents previously unknown, then spent the rest of his life refusing to believe it. Today, join me on a journey from Genoa to the Caribbean and finally to Valladolid as we examine Christopher Columbus.

A brief note on names: I usually prefer using historical figures’ names in their native language. Columbus presents a unique challenge because there was no standardized Italian language in the fifteenth century. Cristoforo Colombo is the modern Italian form. He grew up speaking Ligurian, in which his name would have been Cristoffa Combo, admittedly hilarious. His Latin name, Christophorus Columbus, ultimately became the Anglicized “Christopher Columbus,” which I’ll use for the remainder of this article.

Believe it or not, there are many competing claims about the familial origins of Christopher Columbus, each attempting to claim him for a different country. Imagine that, people wanting to associate themselves with Columbus. His second-born son would claim Italian aristocratic descent. Others have argued he was Catalan, Portuguese, Galician, Byzantine Greek, Polish, Corsican, and much more. Several authors have even claimed he was of Jewish descent. Why don’t we just ask the man himself?

“Siendo yo nacido en Genova” (”As I was born in Genoa.”). Good enough for me.

Columbus was born in either August or October of 1451 in the Republic of Genoa, one of the wealthiest and busiest port cities in the world. He was the first child of Domenico, a weaver and bartender and Susanna Fontanarossa, the scion of a wealthy Genoese family who had most definitely married down. Domenico was generous, charismatic, and respected, but he was a poor provider, too open-handed in business and too happy to spend what little money he had on a drink. As the Columbus family grew, they repeatedly fell into financial hardship. Their eldest son was forced to work from an early age to help pay off the family’s debts.

By his own account, Columbus fell in love with the sea the first time he went out on the water at the age of fourteen, though we do not know in what capacity. As a young adult, he accompanied the rest of his family in a move to Savona, likely inspired by Domenico’s mounting debts. For the first twenty-two years of his life, Christopher Columbus was a nobody. He was simply a young man from a lower-middle-class family working to help feed his mother and siblings, likely in his father’s new tavern in Savona or perhaps as a sailor aboard a merchant vessel.

In 1473, Columbus began an apprenticeship as a business agent for some of the wealthiest Genoese families. Over the next three years, he sailed to Chios in the Aegean Sea and to northern Europe, possibly including England and Ireland. In August 1476, the vessel on which Columbus was sailing was shipwrecked off the coast of Lagos, Portugal, after being attacked by French privateers. For the better part of the next decade, he lived in Lisbon, where he reunited with his younger brother Bartholomew, and together the two continued working as agents for wealthy merchant families.

In 1478, Columbus was sent to Madeira to purchase sugar. This is not particularly notable, but, as you may have noticed, there was not much of significance going on in his life. There, the following year, Columbus married Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, a noblewoman of Lombard origin. The twenty-five-year-old had never married, and despite their noble status, her family had little money. Marrying a Genoese nobody with a few coins in his pocket was apparently the best match they could secure.

Their son, Diego, was born in 1480, while Christopher was away trading at the Portuguese outposts along the West African coast. Columbus eventually returned to discover that his wife had died. He took his son, attempted to settle her estate, discovered that her family was deeply in debt, and departed Portugal. In 1485, he crossed into the neighboring Kingdom of Castile.

Spain at this time was a collection of Christian kingdoms gradually driving the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, a process known as the Reconquista. By the time Columbus arrived, only the Emirate of Granada remained under Muslim rule along the southern Mediterranean coast. Though formally a tributary of the Crown of Castile, both sides had ignored that arrangement and had fought one another for centuries.

Castile was ruled by the thirty-four-year-old Isabel (Isabella) I: ultra-pious, prudent, blunt, and very un-Spanish in appearance, with blonde hair and fair skin. After the death of Isabel’s brother, Enrique IV (Henry IV), Castile descended into a succession crisis between Isabel and Enrique’s daughter, Juana, whose legitimacy was questioned because Enrique was widely rumored to have been impotent. The thirteen-year-old Juana was married to the thirty-three-year-old King of Portugal by her supporters, while Isabel had married Fernando, heir to the Kingdom of Aragon.

Fernando, much more Spanish-looking, with dark hair and olive skin, was every bit as devout as his wife but possessed a darker temperament. He was an intelligent and ruthless political schemer. Together they won the war, and set about completing the Reconquista, expelling the Muslims and the many Jews who had found refuge in Granada, all in pursuit of a unified Catholic Spain.

This was the world that greeted the thirty-three-year-old Christopher Columbus when he and his young son arrived in Castile in 1485. A 19th-century statue of a young Columbus, which, because we have no contemporary portraits of him, could really be of anyone.

Columbus likely continued working as a business agent for wealthy merchants and noble families while in what is now Spain. Again, we are unsure of many of the intricacies of his life, but we do know some things.

In the Andalusian city of Córdoba, a Genoese mercantile community thrived. Columbus lived there for a time with his son and took a mistress: a twenty-year-old peasant woman named Beatriz Enríquez de Arana. The two established a household together, with Beatriz raising his firstborn, Diego. In 1488, Beatriz gave birth to his second son, whom Columbus named Fernando after the King of Aragon in an obvious attempt at flattery. By this point, Columbus had hatched a plan.

Columbus was not educated, but to his credit, he undertook an immense project of self-improvement. He taught himself Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian, and read widely on navigation, geography, and history. He devoured the works of Ptolemy, Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, Pliny the Elder, Pierre d’Ailly, and Pope Pius II. Columbus filled these books with notes, many of which survive today. It was genuinely impressive. Columbus transformed himself into a well-read and knowledgeable man.

The problem was that Columbus built his understanding of the world upon ideas that were simply wrong, and because he had read them in books, he became utterly convinced they had to be true. His certainty, more than his intelligence, fueled his great quest.

Now, thanks largely to the work of the thirteenth-century Venetian merchant and explorer Marco (Marco!) Polo (Polo!) Europeans had a far better understanding of Asia’s great powers and stronger connections to the network of trade routes they called the Silk Road. Thanks in part to Polo’s successful diplomacy with the Great Khagan of the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan, Christian merchants had enjoyed relatively safe passage across Asia, bringing silk, spices, and countless other luxuries back to Europe.

Then, in 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, and the routes became far more expensive, politically complicated, and uncertain. Access to the lucrative eastern markets had become far more difficult, and any nation capable of discovering an alternative route stood to become unimaginably wealthy.

The elderly Florentine polymath Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli proposed to the King of Portugal that Asia might be reached by sailing west across the Atlantic. The king, however, was rather preoccupied with helping his child bride win her throne (see above).

Contrary to enduring myth, neither Columbus nor educated Europeans believed the Earth was flat. The Earth’s spherical shape had been accepted since antiquity. The prevailing concern was not that sailors would fall off the edge of the world, but that the Atlantic was simply too vast. Sail west and you would find nothing but more ocean until storms, starvation, disease, or your ships failing killed you.

Today, we know the Vikings had already sailed west from Greenland centuries earlier, reaching Newfoundland in the early eleventh century. We also know that the Malian Emperor Mansa Musa claimed that one of his predecessors launched a fleet of 2,000 ships into the Atlantic, never to return. Europeans had no conception whatsoever of another continent lying between Europe and Asia. Least of all, Christopher Columbus.

As early as 1481, Columbus and his brother Bartholomew began developing a plan to reach the East Indies by sailing west. Columbus is said to have written to the eighty-four-year-old Toscanelli outlining his proposal. The polymath allegedly replied with encouragement and sent Columbus a map, which the Genoese almost certainly carried with him.

Some historians have suggested that Columbus’s ambitions extended beyond wealth. They argue he was a Christian millenarian, convinced the world was approaching the Last Judgment and that it was his duty to help prepare it. Columbus frequently wrote of obtaining enough gold that “the sovereigns will undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulchre.” On another voyage, he declared that “Jerusalem and Mount Sion must be rebuilt by Christian hands.” Columbus was, and this is true, a militant Christian fundamentalist. He sought converts not out of compassion, but because his understanding of Scripture demanded it, and those who were not Christians were, in his eyes, enemies.

In 1484, Columbus presented his proposal to the new King of Portugal, João II. The king was intrigued and referred the scheme to his advisers. They quickly identified several rather serious problems. Chief among them was Columbus’s estimate that the voyage would require only about 2,400 nautical miles. As admirable as his self-education had been, it mattered little when the knowledge he had acquired was incorrect and or he just misunderstood it

Columbus underestimated the Earth’s circumference by roughly a third. He misunderstood Pierre d’Ailly’s calculations because he confused Arabic miles with the shorter Roman mile. He rejected Ptolemy’s accepted estimate of Eurasia’s width, believing Asia extended much farther east than it actually did. In reality, the distance from Europe to Asia across the Atlantic was roughly 10,600 nautical miles. No ship on Earth could carry enough food and water to make that journey.

The Portuguese court understood Columbus’s calculations simply did not add up, and João rejected the proposal. Undeterred, Columbus presented the same scheme to the court of Fernando and Isabel in 1486. Once again, he received an audience, this time with Queen Isabel herself, who promised to consult her advisers. These learned men, once again, informed Her Majesty that, approximately speaking, “he is out of his tits.”

Isabel declined to fund the expedition. She did, however, grant Columbus an annual allowance of 14,000 maravedís, roughly a sailor’s yearly wage, which was probably helpful, considering he was now making a living asking monarchs to bankroll an expedition based on faulty mathematics. More importantly, it signaled, “Maybe.” Isabel was wealthy enough and intelligent enough to throw the Genoese a few coins. If he did discover a new route to the East, the rewards would be extraordinary. Moreover, as a devout and militant Christian monarch, she likely recognized something of a kindred spirit in the Genoese dreamer.

Part of the arrangement required Columbus not to shop his proposal around to other European rulers. He ignored that immediately. In 1488 he returned to Portugal, where João II heard him out once again. Before any decision could be reached, however, Bartolomeu Dias returned from his voyage around the southern tip of Africa, proving there was already a practical sea route to Asia.

Columbus quietly slunk back to Castile. Fortunately for the Genoese, Isabel once again sent him money and ordered that towns throughout her domains provide him with food and lodging free of charge. This is entirely speculation on my part, but perhaps the queen simply liked him. Columbus was described as tall, fair-skinned, freckled, with striking blue eyes, strawberry-blond hair and beard (later turning to white), and an aquiline nose. By all accounts, he was a handsome man. There are no authenticated contemporary portraits of him.

Throughout 1489 and 1490, Columbus largely sat on his hands, drawing maps and waiting for someone to take his proposal seriously. Isabel continued sending him money and even instructed him to buy himself some new clothes, which supports my theory that she had a crush on him. She also instructed him to return after she and Fernando had finally forced the surrender of Granada, which they were then besieging.

Growing increasingly frustrated after more than half a decade of waiting, Columbus dispatched his brother Bartholomew to England to petition King Henry VII. Unfortunately, Bartholomew was captured by pirates, had to ransom himself, and, once he finally reached England, was informed by yet another panel of learned men that their scheme was, in fact, a terrible idea. Map made in the workshop of the brothers about 1490.

Columbus sat around in his spiffy new clothes at the Spanish war camp outside the walls of Granada, waiting for Fernando and Isabel to hear his proposal. After nearly ten years of continuous war, the Christian monarchs accepted the surrender of the last Emir of Granada on January 2nd, 1492, taking possession of the city and its mighty palace-fortress, the Alhambra. The victorious royal couple established their court within its walls, and there Isabel once again listened to Columbus’s proposal to sail across the Atlantic in search of gold, spices, a route to the East, and converts to Christianity.

And once again, a council concluded the plan was preposterous. This time, for good, Isabel turned him down. Columbus packed his maps and papers and set off for France when fate intervened. For reasons we are still not entirely sure of, King Ferdinand stepped in. Perhaps riding the high of the Reconquista and believing Spain could now broaden its horizons while challenging Portugal’s growing overseas empire, he sent the very same councilors who had advised his wife against the scheme back to persuade her to reconsider. A royal guard was dispatched to fetch Columbus.

On April 17, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabel signed the Capitulations of Santa Fe. In exchange for royal funding, Columbus would claim any lands he discovered for Spain. Should he succeed, he would be ennobled, named Admiral of the Ocean Sea, appointed Viceroy and Governor of any newly discovered territories, granted the right to nominate candidates for offices in those lands, and receive one-tenth of all revenues generated from them.

It was an extraordinary deal for the Genoese, who had spent nearly a decade begging Europe’s monarchs to fund his voyage, and he immediately set about preparing for the expedition. Royal orders were dispatched to the Andalusian port town of Palos de la Frontera to give him ships, and

“...therefore we command all of you, and each one of you in your respective places and jurisdictions, that whatever the said Christopher Columbus should have need...”

These decrees enabled Columbus to obtain ships and provisions. Unfortunately for him, the monarchs had neglected to order anyone to sail with him. Between being a pale-skinned foreigner and asking experienced sailors to head west into the unknown, volunteers were in short supply. Columbus scoured local prisons and managed to recruit a convicted murderer...and three other men.

Fortunately, royal favor and promises of gold helped persuade the wealthy and respected fifty-one-year-old shipowner and sailor, Martín Alonso Pinzón of Palos de la Frontera, to join the venture. Martín Alonso first convinced his younger brothers, Francisco and Vicente, both accomplished sailors in their own right. Together, the three Pinzón brothers lent their reputations to the expedition and, with promises of immense wealth, persuaded many local sailors to sign on.

When additional funds were needed for supplies, Martín Alonso reached into his own pocket. He also took one look at the ships Columbus had assembled and determined they sucked. Spending roughly half a million maravedís of his own money, Pinzón secured two caravels: the fifty-six-foot, square-rigged vessel whose true name has been lost to history, better known as La Pinta, the fastest of the three ships, and the fifty-foot Santa Clara, nicknamed La Niña. The flagship was the largest vessel, the three-masted carrack La Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción, though thankfully everyone simply called her the Santa María.

Columbus would captain the Santa María and her crew of forty. Martín Alonso Pinzón captained the Pinta, with his middle brother Francisco Martín serving as first mate to its crew of twenty-four, while their youngest brother, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, commanded the twenty-three-man crew of the Niña. In truth, the assembly of the expedition owed far more to the Spaniards than to Columbus.

On the morning of August 3, 1492, the little fleet departed the port of Palos, their destination lay somewhere far to the west. Frankly, Columbus was completely wrong about where that destination actually was.

But Columbus was not completely incompetent. He successfully took advantage of the trade winds, a technique known to the Portuguese as volta do mar- “turn of the sea.” Columbus had lived and worked in Lisbon, and his late wife’s father had served in the Portuguese navy, leaving behind nautical charts and sailing logs. Columbus planned to first sail to the Canary Islands before catching the northeast trade winds westward across the Atlantic.

It is worth pointing out that Columbus’s sailing experience up to this point was, at best, questionable. He had certainly spent time at sea, but to our knowledge, he had never captained a ship before. Now he was leading an expedition no one had ever attempted before, commanding a crew that, by and large, had very little respect for him.

It immediately got off to a terrible start. Three days into the voyage, the rudder of the Pinta broke. Its captain, Martín Alonso, loudly insisted that the ship’s owners, who had chosen not to accompany the expedition, had deliberately sabotaged her before departure. Watching the crippled ship from aboard the Santa María, Columbus wrote that he was “less worried knowing that Martín Alonso Pinzón was a vigorous and ingenious person.” Pinzón soon lashed the rudder into place with ropes, a makeshift repair that held until the fleet reached the Canary Islands. The three ships lingered there for several weeks. Finally, after nearly a month, they departed San Sebastián de La Gomera and headed west.

Columbus kept two separate records of the voyage’s progress: one using his own measurements and another using the Portuguese maritime leagues familiar to his crew. Some historians have suggested he intentionally reported the shorter distance to reassure increasingly anxious sailors about just how far they were venturing into the unknown.

Weeks passed. The crew of the Santa María, tired, homesick, increasingly worried about dwindling supplies, and thoroughly frustrated with their Genoese captain, began voicing their grievances. Before long, open talk of mutiny spread through the ship. As the crew began refusing orders and the Santa María slowed, the Pinta drew alongside. Columbus asked Martín Alonso Pinzón what he thought should be done. According to testimony given decades later, Pinzón replied:

“Sir, hang half a dozen of them and throw them into the sea; and if you dare not, I and my brothers will come aboard and do it, that an armada sent by such high princes should not return without good news.”

After making sure everyone aboard had heard him, Pinzón quietly advised Columbus to alter course instead. Columbus agreed, and the compromise temporarily calmed the crew. The following day, the sailors spotted what Columbus described as “immense flocks of birds.” Several landed aboard the ships, where the sailors naturally caught and ate them. Believing the birds must be flying to nearby land, Columbus altered course to follow them.

Two nights later, however, the crew of the Santa María once again confronted their captain, now openly demanding they turn back for Spain. Again, had it not been for the Pinzón brothers, Columbus might well have been forced to abandon the voyage, or simply thrown overboard. The brothers reached a compromise with the sailors: if no land was sighted after three more days of sailing, they would return home.

The next day, October 11, they passed what Columbus called “artifacts,” likely driftwood, raising hopes even further. Columbus altered course due west and ordered his men to maintain a careful watch throughout the night. At around ten o’clock that evening, Columbus later claimed he saw a distant light, “like a little wax candle rising and falling.”

Roughly four hours later, in the early hours of October 12, a sailor aboard the Pinta sighted land and cried out. Martín Alonso Pinzón confirmed the sighting and fired a cannon to alert the rest of the fleet. To show you that, in addition to everything else that was to come, Columbus was a tool; he claimed that he had been the first to spot land.

On the morning of October 12, Christopher Columbus stepped ashore on the island he named San Salvador, “Holy Savior.” His boat carried the royal banner of Ferdinand and Isabel, bearing the arms of Castile and Aragon with a pomegranate below. Martín Alonso Pinzón and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón landed shortly afterward in their own boats, each carrying banners marked with a green cross and the letters F and Y for the Spanish monarchs.

In Columbus’s mind, he had done it. He had reached the Indies. In reality, he had landed on an island known to its inhabitants as Guanahaní, a Taíno name roughly meaning “small upper waters land.” In one of history’s ironies, despite this being one of the most famous landfalls in history, we still cannot say with certainty which island Columbus first set foot on. Many historians identify it as modern San Salvador Island in the Bahamas, but that remains far from universally accepted.

Regardless, the Spaniards soon encountered the local Taíno people, whom Columbus called Los Indios “Indians,” a name that would endure. The initial meeting was peaceful. The lightly clothed, clean-shaven islanders were just as astonished by the heavily dressed, bearded, pale-skinned strangers with their enormous ships, steel weapons, and firearms as the Europeans were by them. According to Columbus’s journal, the Taíno asked whether the newcomers had come from Heaven. I have absolutely no idea how Columbus arrived at this conclusion, given that there was no one in the world at the time who could have translated back and forth. As he wrote:

“...and we understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven; and an old man came into the boat, and others in loud voices called everyone, men and women: ‘Come see the men who came from heaven; bring them something to eat and drink.’”

Landing of Columbus(1847) and a map of the north coast of Hispaniola attributed to Columbus

In a foreshadowing of deals to come, Columbus gave the islanders some European knick-knacks, and they gave him their gold jewelry. He also noted in his journal that day:

“ They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them.”

Columbus seized several Taíno people who wore gold earrings and demanded that they lead him to the source of the gold. Again, because of the language barrier, that did not happen. He also noted that “the people here are simple in war-like matters,” and, in another chilling bit of foreshadowing, wrote, “I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men, and govern them as I pleased.”

Through gestures and broken communication, I don’t know, perhaps Columbus didn’t either and simply made it up, the “Indians” supposedly told him of another people who were fierce warriors and cannibals, raiding their villages, capturing their women, and eating the men. This may well have been misunderstood, fabricated, or simply become a convenient pretext for the Spanish.

From San Salvador, the expedition sailed on, discovering more small islands, which Columbus named after saints or the Spanish monarchs, until they reached a much larger island they called Juana. It was later renamed by King Fernando after himself, offended that only a small island bore his name while the largest in the region did not. Today we know it as Cuba.

They landed there on October 28 and slowly explored the northeastern coast. On November 2, Columbus sent four men inland: two Spaniards and two of their “Indian” companions. One of them was his interpreter, the Jewish converso Luis de Torres, who, after being forced by the Spanish Inquisition to convert to Christianity or die, spoke Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean. Their mission was to find the ruler of the island and gather information about the Great Khan Marco Polo had described.

While waiting for their return, Columbus used his quadrant to determine his latitude and somehow concluded he was at 42° north. He was not.

When the men returned on November 12, de Torres reported that they had been welcomed with great honors in a village. There they observed the inhabitants drying and wrapping leaves, placing them in a cane tube, lighting them, and inhaling the smoke, the first recorded European description of tobacco smoking. It wasn’t gold, however, so Columbus largely ignored it.

For the next week he debated what to do, disoriented by his wildly inaccurate calculations. On November 21, Martín Alonso Pinzón sailed away aboard the Pinta for reasons historians debate. What exactly the Pinta did afterward remains uncertain. Some accounts claim Pinzón searched for an island the natives called Babeque. Others suggest he discovered gold or explored additional islands. We do know his crew found valuable red pearls before eventually sailing south.

Columbus continued along Cuba’s coast before sighting the large island he named Hispaniola. He landed there on either December 5 or 6, near modern-day Santo Domingo. There, he established friendly relations with Guacanagaríx, the cacique of the Marien people in the island’s northwest. On Christmas Day 1492, near modern-day Caracol, Haiti, the Santa María ran aground on a sandbank and had to be abandoned. Guacanagaríx and his people helped rescue the crew and salvage the cargo, presenting Columbus with gifts that included a box of gold. It is almost certain the cacique hoped to ally himself with these obviously powerful newcomers against his rivals, the Maguana cacique Caonabo.

Columbus decided to leave thirty-nine men behind and established the first European settlement in the Americas, La Navidad. Constructed with the assistance of the Marien people from the timbers of the wrecked Santa María, the settlement’s construction concluded with the Spanish firing one of the ship’s cannons, presumably as a demonstration of European military power.

The Niña then continued along the northern coast of Hispaniola. Two days after deciding to sail home, Columbus unexpectedly encountered the Pinta. The two captains argued bitterly. Pinzón objected to leaving so few men behind “so far from Spain...because they could not be provided for and would be lost.” Columbus responded by threatening to hang him. Regardless, the expedition sailed for Spain on January 8. Pinzón would be proven right. The men left at La Navidad were later killed by the forces of Caonabo.

On January 13, the two ships made their final stop in the Americas at the Bay of Rincón in northeastern Hispaniola, where they encountered the Ciguayo people. Columbus offered them the same knick-knacks that had worked elsewhere. The Ciguayos refused. A fight broke out, the Spanish prevailed, and on January 16, they finally turned east for home.

On the night of February 13, a violent storm scattered the Niña and the Pinta. Believing death imminent, the crews vowed that if they survived, they would make a pilgrimage at the first land they reached. On the morning of February 15, land appeared. Columbus believed they had reached the Azores, while his crew insisted they were far too far north. For once, Columbus was right.

On Santa Maria Island, the crew went ashore to fulfill their vow, only for the Portuguese governor to arrest them. A standoff followed aboard the Niña. Columbus explained where he had been and what he had discovered. The Portuguese response was, hilariously, that they neither believed him nor cared. After two days of accomplishing absolutely nothing, the governor released the prisoners. Columbus next sailed to Lisbon, where he received a distinctly chilly reception, before finally returning to Spain. He arrived back at Palos on March 15, 1493, then traveled to Barcelona to meet Fernando and Isabel and present what he believed he had found in Asia.

His collection included gold, gold jewelry, pearls, several enslaved natives, flowers, a hammock, tobacco, pineapples, and a large bird we now know as the turkey. He had failed to find the spices white people prized above all else, though he proudly reported finding “plenty of ají, which is their pepper, which is more valuable than black pepper, and all the people eat nothing else, it being very wholesome.” Ají, a name still used throughout much of the Spanish-speaking world, simply means chili peppers.

In his first letter to the monarchs, Columbus confidently insisted these islands, las Indias, lay off the coast of Cathay, China. He proudly declared that “all of which I took possession for our Highnesses...and no one objecting.” He described the islanders as living “without any sort of government.” Though “like beasts” and “excessively cowardly,” they had no organized religion, seemed eager to embrace Christianity, and would make suitable laborers. Yet he also admitted they were “not slow or unskilled, but of excellent and acute understanding.”

Physically, he observed that they had straight hair, were neither white nor “black like those in Guinea,” wore little clothing, ate food “with many spices which are far too hot,” possibly the whitest thing I have ever read, and generally practiced monogamy, “each man is content with only one wife, except for rulers and kings.” He also noted they traveled in canoas, preserving the Taíno word that eventually entered English as “canoe.”

Although Cuba proved far more mountainous than he expected, Columbus raved about Hispaniola: “Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and beautiful...the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers of which the majority contain gold...There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals.”

This was precisely what Fernando and Isabel wanted to hear. They confirmed Columbus as Admiral of the Ocean Sea and showered him with additional honors. Thanks to the newly invented printing press, news of Columbus’s discoveries spread rapidly across Europe, creating a sensation bordering on hysteria. Unlike Marco Polo’s travels, which had largely circulated among scholars and royal courts, Columbus’s letters reached ordinary people. For the first time, many Europeans believed they were catching a glimpse of an entirely unfamiliar civilization somewhere in Asia, and no one could conclusively prove otherwise. The Savoyard historian Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, writing in the service of the Spanish Crown, described Columbus as the discoverer of a novi orbis, a “new globe,” meaning a new part of the world.

To avoid conflict between Europe’s two great maritime powers, the Spanish, orgy-loving (for another time) Pope Alexander VI issued a series of papal bulls dividing future overseas conquests between Spain and Portugal. This arrangement eventually became formalized in the Treaty of Tordesillas, which, broadly speaking, gave Spain the New World and Portugal much of the Old. Obviously, none of the people already living in those places were invited to the negotiations. Depiction of Columbus upon his first return.

Just over six months after returning to Spain, an ennobled and enriched Christopher Columbus once again set sail for the Indies. This time his express mission, as directed by Fernando and Isabel, was not merely to explore, but to convert the inhabitants to Christianity.

Departing Cádiz on September 25, 1493, Columbus commanded a fleet of seventeen ships carrying over a thousand men. In addition to lovingly converting the indigenous population, they were also to establish a permanent colony and reunite with the men left behind at La Navidad. They found them, you know...dead. In part because this article is already too long, we’ll move through the remaining expeditions a little more quickly.

The second colony, La Isabela, named after the queen who had patronized Columbus for years, fared better than La Navidad. Barely. Founded on the “miracle” island of Hispaniola, the settlement quickly encountered hurricanes, tropical diseases, poor harvests, and, perhaps most disappointingly, nowhere near as much gold as Columbus had promised. He eventually abandoned La Isabela during his third voyage, and a new settlement, Nueva Isabela, was founded nearby. The settlers later renamed it Santo Domingo, a city that survives today as the capital of the Dominican Republic.

During this voyage Columbus also discovered Jamaica and Puerto Rico. On Hispaniola, however, he instituted a tribute system requiring the Taíno to deliver gold or cotton to the Spanish or face mutilation, enslavement, or death. When he sailed back to Spain, hundreds of enslaved natives sailed with him. Columbus had imagined himself another Marco Polo. Instead, he found himself governing disease-ridden, failing settlements at the edge of the known world. And, well… Columbus was a shit administrator.

He imposed harsh discipline, executing, flogging, or mutilating settlers for comparatively minor offenses. He chose poor locations for settlements, ignored experienced advice on agriculture and logistics, and continually reassured increasingly frustrated colonists that vast quantities of gold were surely just over the next hill. At the same time, he showed favoritism toward the small circle of Genoese who had accompanied him while expanding the tribute system and dispatching armed slave-raiding expeditions across Hispaniola. Thousands were enslaved, the Taíno were beaten and tortured for information about gold, executed for resisting Spanish authority, and women were routinely assaulted. So much for friendly and loving relationships.

This was, unquestionably, a different age, and the historian’s responsibility is to understand events within their historical context. Yet even many of Columbus’s contemporaries considered his rule excessively cruel and despotic. Back in Spain, however, Ferdinand and Isabel knew only what their governor chose to tell them. Columbus returned in June 1496 and remained in Spain for nearly two years before setting sail again. His third voyage would combine governing with further exploration.

This time he discovered Trinidad and sailed into what he called the Golfo de la Ballena, the Gulf of Whales. There, amid the lush tropical landscape, he encountered the mighty Orinoco River, flowing from what we now know is northern South America. This presented Columbus with a problem that even he could not ignore. No island could produce a river of such immense volume.

Correctly recognizing that he had encountered an otro mundo “another world,” Columbus nevertheless reached the wrong conclusion. Rather than accepting that he had discovered an entirely new continent, he convinced himself he had found the Earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden itself. He even sketched a map depicting the Earth not as a sphere but as pear-shaped, with Paradise resting atop its highest point. At the same time, Columbus himself was beginning to deteriorate. He suffered from chronic insomnia, debilitating gout, recurring bouts of influenza, and an eye condition that left them perpetually bloodshot and increasingly impaired his vision.

He returned to his colony only to find it in open rebellion against him. Columbus brutally restored order and appealed to the Catholic Monarchs for assistance. In response, they dispatched Francisco de Bobadilla, an experienced royal administrator in his fifties whose family enjoyed close ties to Queen Isabel. The moment Bobadilla arrived in Santo Domingo, he was inundated with complaint after complaint about Columbus, his brothers Bartholomew and Giacomo, and even Columbus’s eldest son, Diego, all of whom were accused of abusing their authority.

Bobadilla’s investigation painted a grim picture. He learned that Columbus had ordered a man convicted of stealing corn to have his ears and nose cut off before being sold into slavery. He was told that Columbus had congratulated Bartholomew for “defending the family” after Bartholomew had paraded a woman naked through the streets and cut out her tongue for having “spoken ill of the Admiral and his brothers.” Native uprisings had likewise been suppressed with extraordinary brutality, rebels being killed, dismembered, and their bodies publicly displayed as a warning. Bobadilla acted swiftly. Columbus was arrested, placed in chains, and sent back across the Atlantic in irons.

Fernando and Isabel had once been Columbus’s greatest champions. From their perspective, he had discovered Asia, brought them gold, opened countless souls to Christianity, and promised unimaginable wealth, both earthly and heavenly. Over time, however, the venture had proven far more expensive than profitable, while Columbus now stood accused of genuinely monstrous crimes. Perhaps even worse, word had reached Spain that the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama had successfully rounded Africa and arrived in India. You know… Actually Asia.

Summoned before Ferdinand and Isabel at the Alhambra, Columbus deliberately wore short sleeves so the monarchs could see the marks left by the chains he had worn for months. In proper Christian fashion, he admitted his faults, begged forgiveness, and portrayed himself as a loyal servant unjustly humiliated. The performance tugged at the monarchs’ heartstrings. They ordered him released, restored many of his titles, wealth, and privileges, but they refused to return his greatest office. The governorship of the Indies, and it’s wealth, would belong to someone else.

For the next fourteen months, Columbus tirelessly petitioned the Crown to finance one final expedition. He remained convinced he could become the first man to circumnavigate the globe and prove, once and for all, that he had reached Asia. Unfortunately for him, events had already begun moving beyond Christopher Columbus.

By this point, the Spanish had sponsored another expedition, one that included the Florentine merchant Amerigo Vespucci. That voyage had also encountered an immense continental coastline with colossal rivers, the Amazon and the Pará, emptying into the Atlantic. In 1501, the King of Portugal commissioned another voyage under Vespucci himself. Increasingly, educated Europeans were beginning to suspect that these lands were not the eastern shores of Asia, but something entirely new.

Finally, in March 1502, Columbus was granted permission to undertake a fourth voyage, though with one important condition: He was forbidden from landing on Hispaniola, where he was no longer welcome. Columbus departed with four ships, 147 men, and his two sons. By now, the aging admiral was sickly and in constant pain, yet he demonstrated that he had always had some semblance of talent.

His seamanship. Correctly reading the weather, Columbus predicted an approaching hurricane and begged the authorities on Hispaniola to allow his fleet into harbor. They refused, dismissing both the disgraced admiral and his warning. The hurricane arrived exactly as Columbus predicted. While much of the Spanish fleet was devastated, Columbus survived by remaining at sea. Unfortunately, another disaster soon emerged. His ships were riddled with shipworm and literally rotting beneath his feet.

Obsessed with finding a passage into what he believed was the Indian Ocean, Columbus explored the coasts of modern Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, searching desperately for the Strait of Malacca. Ironically, at one point he came within only a few dozen miles of the Pacific Ocean.

He never knew it. Blocked by land, battered by storms, and refusing to abandon his belief that he was sailing the outskirts of Asia, Columbus pressed on until, after what he described as a sea where “eyes never beheld the sea so angry,” his fleet was forced ashore at St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica.

There the expedition remained stranded for over a year while the new governor of Hispaniola deliberately refused to rescue them. On February 29, 1504, Columbus played perhaps his greatest trick. Using the astronomical tables compiled by the German astronomer Regiomontanus, he correctly predicted an upcoming lunar eclipse. Through interpreters, he warned the islanders that his God was angry with them for refusing to aid his men.

That night the Moon slowly turned a deep blood red. Panic spread. Consulting the same astronomical tables, Columbus then announced that God had accepted their repentance. Moments later, exactly as predicted, the eclipse ended. It was one of the most impressive demonstrations of scientific knowledge in the Age of Exploration. It was also, of course, an extraordinary act of manipulation. Eventually, a rescue arrived, and Columbus returned to Spain. He would never cross the Atlantic again.

By that time, Isabel was dead, and Amerigo Vespucci had returned from his second voyage. The Florentine merchant had replaced Columbus in prestige and standing at the Spanish court, entering the service of the Crown. His published accounts argued convincingly that these lands were not the eastern fringes of Asia but a Mundus Novus, a New World, an entirely new continent. Whether Vespucci lived to see it become commonplace is uncertain, but his name would ultimately be attached to these lands: the Americas.

Columbus denied this until the day he died. He insisted the islands lay off the coast of China, perhaps near Japan, or somewhere not far from the Indies described by Marco Polo. Reality bent before Columbus’s convictions far more readily than his convictions bent before reality.

He continued petitioning Fernando to honor their original agreement by granting him a tenth of the wealth produced by the lands he had claimed for Spain. Technically, he had a case. Practically, after...well...everything I have spent the last section describing, Fernando had little interest. The dispute dragged on through years of lawsuits, continued by Columbus’s heirs long after his death.

During these two final years, Columbus also wrote the Book of Prophecies, a strange work in which he stitched together Biblical passages to argue that his voyages had fulfilled divine prophecy and advanced God’s plan for history. On May 20, 1506, Christopher Columbus died in Valladolid at the age of fifty-four.

His remains then embarked on perhaps an even stranger voyage than he had. They traveled from Valladolid to Seville, then to Santo Domingo, then to Havana, before finally returning to Seville. DNA analysis has made it reasonably certain that at least some of the remains in Seville are indeed Columbus’s.

Complicating matters, however, in 1877 a priest in Santo Domingo uncovered a lead box inscribed “Discoverer of America, First Admiral,” containing human remains. Those bones were eventually interred in the enormous Columbus Lighthouse Mausoleum in the Dominican Republic, a somewhat ironic resting place, considering Columbus inaugurated European rule on Hispaniola through conquest, enslavement, and policies that helped destroy the Taíno people. Alongside warfare and forced labor came diseases for which the Indigenous population possessed virtually no immunity, devastating the island’s inhabitants. Dominican authorities have long resisted DNA testing of those remains, fearing the tests would show they do not belong to Columbus after all.

Columbus died disappointed, disgraced, and convinced that history had treated him unfairly. History, however, was not finished with Christopher Columbus. In time, Europeans came to celebrate him as the man who had “discovered” a New World that would make their kingdoms unimaginably wealthy. Across the Atlantic, his memory became even grander, celebrated by the descendants of those who had settled the Americas. Statues were raised. Cities, rivers, and countries bore his name. A federal holiday followed.

In recent decades, that image has been challenged. Greater attention has been paid to what Columbus’s voyages unleashed: conquest, enslavement, epidemic disease, and the destruction of Indigenous societies. Some dismiss this as “woke.” I don’t.

First though, the conquest of the Americas was probably always going to be violent, whoever first linked the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. That is not an excuse for what followed. It is an explanation rooted in the political, religious, and economic realities.

What often gets lost in the argument is that Columbus himself was, stubborn to the point of delusion, a poor governor, and a cruel ruler. Most remarkably of all, he never understood what he had actually accomplished. Yes, Columbus permanently connect two worlds that had been separated for millennia, setting in motion one of the most transformative, and catastrophic, periods in human history. And he died believing he had sailed to Asia.

So the next time someone starts arguing about Columbus Day, you can smile and tell them that Colombo really was a Dumbo.

Horchata Fund

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

Dragging myself free from the tangled sheets, I crawl into another morning, careful to keep my eyes from the waiting mirror. It watches from across the room, patient as the grave, eager to remind me what remains.

The day looms over me already, heavy with its familiar litany of obligations, disappointments, and little humiliations. Before I’ve even dressed, my bones ache with exhaustion. My hands tremble with the knowledge of what comes next.

I shuffle to the old oak dresser. The top drawer slides open with a sigh. They are waiting for me.

Rows upon rows of faces stare back, stacked carefully atop one another like pressed flowers or funeral masks. Their painted expressions never falter.

I run my fingers over them, tracing the familiar curves. They remember the shape of my face better than I do. Each a reflection of someone I used to be.

The first beams with impossible delight, eyebrows lifted, mouth open in carefree laughter. I remember where it came from. Summer. Saltwater. The smell of long-lost innocence clings to it in my mind. Riding freezing waves beneath a blazing sun beside a man whose name now feels almost foreign on my tongue. I cannot remember the sound of his voice anymore, nor the exact shade of his eyes. The memory has faded like an old photograph left too long in sunlight.

Beneath it rests another. The smile is smaller, restrained, but stronger somehow. The eyes are steady. The chin lifted with quiet pride. Accomplishment. Satisfaction. The certainty that life was finally becoming something worth living. Dust clings to its edges.

When I lift it, a gray film coats my fingertips. I search my mind for the moment that gave it shape, but nothing comes. Whatever gave this face its shape has long since rotted away. Only the expression remains, preserved after the memory itself has died.

One by one I turn them over. The hopeful face. The one that forgives. The one that believes.

Some are cracked. Others have grown brittle with neglect. A few I no longer recognize, though I know with dreadful certainty they all belonged to me once.

Finally, I find the one I came for. It is worn, fading, and almost smooth from use. The face was still warm, as though someone had only just taken it off.

A practiced smile rests upon its lips, not too wide, not too sincere. Just enough to reassure strangers and comfort coworkers. The eyebrows sit low in carefully measured concern. Faint shadows pool beneath the eyes. Those shadows are the only honest thing about it.

If anyone ever looked closely enough, they would see them. They would see the exhaustion. The emptiness. The shell beneath.

I lift the face and hold it before my own. It fits with a soft, wet sound, as flesh remembers flesh. The smile settles into place. When I finally dare to glance at the mirror, a pleasant stranger smiles back.

No one at work ever notices the seams. At least they never mention them.

My gaze lingers on the face in the mirror. The smile is convincing. The sort people trust without ever questioning. But I know what festers beneath it. I know the resentment buried behind the eyes, the exhaustion packed beneath the skin, the quiet contempt for another day spent pretending to be someone worth speaking to.

I wrench my eyes away before the mirror can betray me again, before it shows me the face beneath the face, the one I buried so long ago I no longer know whether it was ever mine.

The work face will not be enough today. I return to the dresser. The drawer greets me with its familiar haunting silence and stony stares.

My fingers drift over rows, each one waiting with an impossible patience. I sort through them as though leafing through an old book. Memory and emotion connect for the briefest instant before snapping apart again.

I remember carving this smile. I forget why. I remember the joy that shaped it. I cannot remember the joy itself.

My hand settles on the broad, carefree grin of childhood. The moment my fingers touch it, the room fills with the sharp scent of salt and seaweed. I hear waves breaking against the shore. Somewhere beyond them, my grandfather laughs, a deep, effortless laugh that once made the whole world feel safe.

For one impossible heartbeat, I almost remember what it was like to love being alive.

I peel away the work face. It comes loose with a damp, reluctant sound, stretching from my skin as though it would rather remain attached. Cool air kisses the flesh beneath, leaving me feeling strangely naked.

I press the smiling face of youth against my own. It fits… Poorly. The contours no longer match. My jaw has changed. My cheeks have hollowed. The smile pulls awkwardly at the corners of my mouth, as though trying to force itself onto someone else’s skull.

It isn’t simply unfamiliar. It is wrong in the way a corpse smiling is wrong. The happiness inside it has nowhere to go. The mask remembers. I don’t.

The radiant grin of childhood stares back from the body of a broken man. For a moment, I think it has worked. Then a single tear escapes from beneath the mask, winding its way across the laughing cheek.

The smile never changes. Only the man beneath it does.

I rip it from my face with a cry of frustration and hurl it across the room. It strikes the floor. Instead of shattering like porcelain, it cracks like bone. The sound echoes through the room long after it has come to rest.

I kneel before the dresser once more. Another face. The uncertain confidence of a first date. Hope disguised as charm. I lift it carefully, and immediately her perfume fills the room. Beneath it comes the smell of wind and salt rising from cliffs above a restless sea. I can almost feel her fingers entwined with mine. I can almost taste the kiss we shared before either of us knew how our story would end. Almost. The memory slips away before I can hold it.

The perfume fades. The cliffs dissolve into darkness. Her face is the first thing I lose.

I lower the mask without trying it on. At the very back of the drawer, hidden beneath all the others, waits another face. I have not touched it in years. It is twisted by a heartbreak so absolute that even looking at it makes my chest tighten.

The mirror waits. It has all the patience in the world. It neither judges nor pities. Waiting for me to witness the thing that no mask can hide. It cuts through every smile, every grimace, every carefully rehearsed expression as though they were smoke.

It watched me wear the face of perfect grief to funerals, tears running down cheeks that felt nothing at all. It saw beneath the hollow mourning to the numbness that had already hollowed me out. It watched me fasten on the face of shattered heartbreak the last time she told me she was leaving, though the man beneath had disappeared long before she walked out the door. It watched me don the face of righteous fury when they came to take away every poison I had mistaken for relief. Beneath the anger, it saw only fear.

The mirror remembers every face I have ever worn. More terrifying still… it remembers the one beneath them.

The face I was born with. The one no one else has seen in years. I no longer know whether it has become unrecognizable, or whether I have simply forgotten what it ever looked like. The mirror, I suspect, remembers.

I reach for the work mask once more. Its familiar smile settles over me with a damp embrace, hiding the ruin beneath. In an instant I become pleasant. Approachable. A stranger anyone would trust.

I step into the street among the others.

Pleasant smiles. Practiced laughter. Polite nods. Perfect faces.

None of them fit quite right.

For a moment I wonder how many of them opened a drawer this morning. How many stood before a mirror, weighing one borrowed expression against another before choosing who they would be for the day. How many have forgotten the shape of the face beneath them.

Or perhaps they are luckier than I am. Perhaps they can still bear to look upon the faces they were born with.

Then again... Perhaps they’re afraid I’ll recognize the faces they’re wearing.

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Coffee for my faces

My first thought was Amun-Her-Khepesh-Ef, everyone’s favorite Amun-Her-Khepesh-Ef, the young prince who died around 1883 BC and is supposedly buried in Middlebury, Vermont. As delightfully bonkers as it sounds, it’s almost certainly not the prince. Then I considered writing about the Great Stink, the sweltering Victorian summer when London somehow smelled worse than usual. The unbearable stench ultimately prompted the construction of the first modern sewer system. It’s a fascinating story, but that will become a discussion of engineering poop tunnels.

No, today we’re taking a detour to a heartwarming absurdity amid the worst war humanity has ever inflicted upon itself. Join me as we travel from Hamadan, Iran, to the battlefields of the Second World War, and finally to Edinburgh Zoo, to meet Wojtek, the Soldier Bear.

Seen above is not Wojtek. Obviously, that is not a bear, that is a man. That specific man is Władysław Anders.

Anders was born on August 11, 1892, in occupied Poland (stay focused, Aidan; you are not doing a deep dive on Poland). Thanks to the asshole Prussians, asshole French, and then asshole Russians, Poland ceased to be an independent nation for 123 years. This changed after the First World War, but the Poles, including a young Anders, had to fight for it.

Born into a military family, Anders entered a Russian military school and, like many other Poles, joined the Imperial Russian Army as an officer. Things did not go especially well for either the Russian Army or Russia itself, and soon the Empire collapsed. Really, all of Eastern Europe descended into disarray, violence, and wars between communism and anti-communism.

One of the great victors of that struggle was the Second Polish Republic, which successfully fought off the Soviets, free-roaming German forces, Czechoslovaks, Lithuanians, Silesians, and, well, just about everyone else in the area, forcing the hand of the League of Nations and the wider world to recognize an independent Poland.

Władysław Anders served with distinction throughout these conflicts. He was awarded the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest military decoration, and was sent to the prestigious French École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. Returning to Poland, he served on the General Staff of the Polish Army, navigating the intricate and dangerous political landscape of interwar Poland as a general of growing renown.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, which, as you (hopefully) know, began with the German invasion of Poland, Anders commanded the Nowogródzka Cavalry Brigade and, like the rest of the Poles, fought exceptionally hard and bravely. It is often lost in retellings just how fierce the Polish defense was. Poland was invaded not only by the full strength of the Nazi Wehrmacht, but also by the full strength of the Red Army, the two powers agreeing to divide the country between themselves. Both the Nazis and the Soviets immediately began culling the Polish population, murdering and deporting thousands to make room for their own citizens. Anders and his men fought on, attempting to break through to neutral Hungary or Romania so they could continue the fight, but they were intercepted by Soviet forces and, after suffering heavy losses, captured on September 29, 1939.

Anders was tortured and interrogated for information in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison for over a year, until June 22, 1941, when the Nazis invaded. There was a remarkably quick heel turn from the Soviets, who reached out to the Polish government-in-exile and the Poles languishing in their prisons and gulags with what amounted to, “Yeah, we’re really sorry about that. Want to help?” With really no other choice, the Poles agreed. Anders was released from prison and placed in command of the Polish Armed Forces in the East.

More than 25,000 Polish prisoners of war and deportees held in Soviet camps were recruited, but the process was difficult. Large numbers of Polish officers were missing, having “disappeared,” i.e., been massacred by the Soviets, while Soviet authorities prevented the recruitment of many who were not considered fully Polish by their standards.

This all unfolded in the midst of the German invasion, and the Soviets quickly realized they were in no position to feed and supply a ragtag Polish army. An agreement was reached with the British to transfer the force through British-occupied Iran, where it would come under British command. Soldiers crossed the Caspian Sea from Krasnovodsk to Pahlavi or traveled overland from Turkmenistan to Mashhad. Alongside the official Polish Armed Forces in the East, another hundred thousand or so deported Polish civilians and POWS were effectively pushed out by the Soviets. Thousands died during the journey.

The so-called Armia Andersa, Anders’ Army, regrouped in Tehran. During this journey, on April 8, 1942, a group of Polish soldiers and the civilians they were sheltering stopped in Hamadan and encountered a young Iranian boy with a very peculiar pet: a Syrian brown bear cub.

Through translators, the boy explained that he had found the cub beside its mother, who had been shot and killed by hunters. One of the civilians, 18-year-old Inka Bokiewicz, the niece of famed general Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski, immediately fell in love with the cub. She begged Lieutenant Anatol Tarnowiecki to buy it from the boy, and the lieutenant, likely just to quiet the persistent 18-year-old with a famous and powerful Uncle, did exactly that. They bought the cub for a Swiss army knife, a chocolate bar and a tin of beef.

The group walked the 325 kilometers to Tehran with the cub, and Inka cared for him for the next three months in a Polish refugee camp. The young bear was remarkably friendly and seemed to enjoy the company of people. Like many babies, he was endlessly curious, once sticking his nose a little too close to a scorpion to investigate the creepy-crawly. The resulting sting to his snout left him bedridden for days.

As a cub, and, you know, a bear, he required milk, and a lot of it. The traveling column, and later the refugee camp, struggled to find enough, relying largely on tins of condensed milk, which they fed to him, naturally, from a vodka bottle. It quickly became clear that a refugee camp was no place for a growing bear cub. Where would be? With a company of soldiers, of course.

In August 1942, the cub was adopted by what became the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, and they gave him the name by which he would be remembered: Wojtek, a diminutive of the Polish name Wojciech, meaning either “he who enjoys war” or “joyous warrior.” Our happy warrior as a baby.

Sweetie Woj became a favorite of the soldiers, and in addition to receiving generous rations of fruit, marmalade, honey, and syrup, was, and please don’t test this with your local bears, rewarded with beer and wine. The Polish soldiers (Poles do love to drink) poured extra booze into the growing bear’s own mug. Wojtek loved beer, and when he finished it, he would make a show of staring mournfully at his empty mug until someone filled it up. He was also given bottles, which he punctured with his claws before drinking the contents. He drank coffee as well, again because it was given to him.

Speaking of which, he also enjoyed smoking cigarettes, taking a puff or two before swallowing them whole. Suffice it to say, cigarettes should not be smoked by anyone (especially bears), let alone swallowed whole. The soldiers of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company probably should not have been giving their adopted bear cigarettes and alcohol, nor, in all likelihood, should they have had a bear in the first place. Then again, as we’ll see, it all turned out rather well.

Part of this was that Wojtek was still a cub. He was mimicking those around him. His primary caretaker was a Polish soldier named Peter Prendys, who grew very close to the bear and oversaw his training. Wojtek drank and smoked because his friends did, and so he also learned to march with them, standing on his hind legs. He even learned to salute, rising onto his hind legs and putting a paw to his head.

As a growing bear, he greatly enjoyed wrestling and boxing with the soldiers, and, as best I and history can tell, the rapidly growing bear never seriously injured a sparring partner, seeming perfectly happy with the game, whether he won or lost, licking his sparring partner’s face afterward.

One of Wojtek’s favorite activities was taking long, cold showers, eventually learning how to turn the water on himself. He loved doing this so much that his excessive use of the camp’s water led to shortages, so he was barred from showering alone, with the soldiers locking the showers to keep the bear out. Then, one day, a local man snuck into the camp looking to steal something, whether food or weapons is unclear. Unfortunately for him, a growing bear noticed the stranger and wandered over, probably delighted at the prospect of a new friend to wrestle with. The man, quite reasonably, panicked and ran for his life. Wojtek earned unlimited shower time and two bottles of beer.

During grenade practice, the soldiers lobbed oranges to mimic grenades, and the bear enthusiastically chased after them. I’m not entirely sure if they were trying to teach him to dive on grenades, and I sincerely hope they weren’t. Regardless, Wojtek became the company mascot and a beloved member of the unit. Other soldiers and civilians came just to visit the bear, who, as best a bear could, recognized his own name, along with words like beer, cigarette, and food in Polish.

Much like a dog, he loved riding in trucks, sitting in the passenger seat as a cub before graduating to the back as he grew too large. Eventually, he was given his own truck. He became known for climbing forward from the back to loom directly behind the driver so he could get a better view of the countryside. At this point, you might be thinking I’m making all of this up. I’m not. Here is Wojtek wrestling.

If you have read my blog, or know anything about history, you will know that World War II was not a great time, and the 22nd Artillery Supply Company did not spend all its days enjoying fun and games with Wojtek. The ragtag Anders Army spent over a year training to become a legitimate fighting force, allowing Wojtek to grow from a cub into the young adult you see above. He traveled with the company as they moved through Syria, Palestine, and into Egypt in early 1944.

In Egypt, the force officially became the Polish II Corps and was incorporated into the British Eighth Army, the force that had spearheaded the victorious Allied North African Campaign. By this stage of the war, the Allies had successfully invaded Sicily and were painstakingly fighting their way up the Italian mainland. Italy had surrendered in September, but the Germans had entrenched themselves behind a formidable system of fortifications known as the Winter Line.

The Allies identified the line’s weakest point around the imposing Abbazia di Monte Cassino, a Benedictine monastery perched atop a rocky hill in the Liri Valley, roughly 80 miles south of Rome, overlooking the town of the same name. To break through the line and open the road to Rome, the Allies assembled a truly cosmopolitan force: principally the American Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army, but troops from France, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the Italian Co-Belligerent Army, and Poland all took part.

On January 17, 1944, the British X Corps launched the first attack. Over the next month, they, alongside the Americans and the French Expeditionary Corps, met fierce resistance. Attempting to cross the Garigliano River, littered with uncleared mines and booby traps, and then assault the imposing monastery, even when only lightly defended, meant crawling inch by inch up slopes that were, at times, nearly vertical. Barbed wire blocked their path, while they could hear German machine-gun crews talking above them before the guns opened fire.

The American assault launched on the night of January 22 was a disaster. Within 48 hours, it had suffered 2,100 men killed, wounded, or missing. Of the 141st Infantry Regiment, only 40 men made it back to the Allied lines. For weeks, the Americans, British, and French continued their costly assaults, accomplishing little beyond leaving more bodies scattered across the slopes and the valley leading to the abbey. They earned plaudits for bravery, but that means very little to the dead.

The First Battle of Monte Cassino ended in mid-February. On the 15th, Allied bombers dropped 1,400 tons of explosives on the abbey, reducing much of it to rubble and devastating the German positions around it. Yet the highly trained German Fallschirmjäger paratroopers soon occupied the ruins themselves and once again repelled the next Allied assault.

More troops were needed to break the German defenses around Monte Cassino, including the Polish II Corps, and within it, the 22nd Artillery Supply Company. There was just one problem. The Poles were now under direct British command, and the British Army had rather rigid regulations regarding pets and the transportation of animals aboard military ships.

They were not about to leave Wojtek behind. So the bear was officially enlisted as a private in the Polish Army, issued a serial number, and, after a tense bureaucratic standoff over whether a bear could board a troop transport, Private Wojtek boarded the MS Batory in Alexandria and sailed for Italy with the II Polish Corps.

The Second Battle, in mid-February, and the Third Battle, lasting from March 15 to March 30, met the same result as the first: heavy casualties. The Allies lost enormous numbers of men, but so too did the Germans. By late April, when the Polish II Corps under Lieutenant General Władysław Anders was finally deployed in the fighting over the mountainous region surrounding the now-ruined abbey, the Allies had lost some 55,000 men to the Germans’ 20,000.

But not pushing through was impossible, not only to liberate Italy and ultimately advance into Germany, but because by now the Allies knew of the coming Normandy invasion. As General Harold Alexander said of the planned fourth attack, the goal was to “force the enemy to commit the maximum number of divisions in Italy at the time the cross-channel invasion is launched.”

The British Eighth Army, including the Polish II Corps, was assigned to hold the right flank of the attack. Their objective was to isolate the monastery and push around the German positions in the valley, linking up with the other Allied forces. This was the key to the assault. The attack began on the night of May 11 with a massive artillery barrage from more than 1,600 Allied guns. Then, in the early hours of May 12, the infantry attack began.

In the mountains above the monastery, the Polish II Corps captured Monte Calvario under fierce fire and at heavy cost, only for more Fallschirmjäger to drop, counterattack and retake it. For the next three days, Poles and Germans fought over Monte Calvario in brutal ledge-to-ledge and, at times, hand-to-hand combat. The Polish Corps lost 281 officers and 3,503 other men, the mountain becoming so pockmarked by artillery and littered with corpses that it was described as a “miniature Verdun.” Segments of the division were all but wiped out, and yet they fought on, eventually securing the mountain overlooking the abbey.

It was suggested to Anders by his British superiors that he withdraw his exhausted men. He refused. By now, the Soviet Union had reneged on its agreements. It no longer recognized the Polish government it had begged to help earlier in the war and was refusing to allow more Poles to leave the Soviet Union. Anders believed that the only way to gain recruits, and ultimately free Poland, was to keep fighting.

Additionally, for Anders and his men, the stakes were deeply personal. Their country had been invaded from both west and east. Both the Nazis and the Soviets had sought to destroy Poland, the Polish people, Polish culture, everything. They had more at stake than most, and they fought like it. As one British historian noted, “In the Allied camp the Poles were probably unequalled in their willingness and determination.”

One who showed equal determination under fire was no man at all, but Wojtek. Now, while the veracity of the story is still debated, at least one British soldier, in addition to Polish soldiers, verified the account. The now 200-pound bear reportedly carried 100-pound crates of artillery shells without ever dropping one, moving boxes that ordinarily required four men. Just as he had as a cub, he mimicked the soldiers around him, lifting the crates and stacking them onto waiting trucks to be delivered to the artillery batteries pounding the mountain.

On May 17, General Anders ordered the final assault on Abbazia di Monte Cassino itself. Under constant artillery and mortar fire, the Poles descended the rocky slopes with little cover, meeting German units in brutal hand-to-hand combat as they forced them back. Early on May 18, the British and Poles linked up in the Liri Valley to the west, cutting the mountain off from the rest of the German line. But the abbey itself remained.

The survivors were battered and exhausted, but they fought on. Finally, after five months of fighting, the Polish 12th Podolian Cavalry Regiment reached the abbey, overcame the remaining German resistance, and captured the wounded left behind. A Polish flag was raised over the ruins, and a bugler played the Hejnał Mariacki, announcing the victory. The German line soon collapsed, and Rome was captured a few weeks later, on June 4, 1944.

An imposing Polish military cemetery was established at Monte Cassino, as was the Monte Cassino Commemorative Cross for the men who survived. Wojtek was promoted from private to the rank of corporal, and the 22nd Artillery Supply Company adopted a new emblem: a bear carrying an artillery shell. The Polish Flag over the ruined Abbey and Wojtek on a truck with the new emblem of the 22nd Artillery.

Hearing tell of the bear, numerous visiting Allied officers sought out the large Polish corporal. All came away impressed by his strength and apparent valor, though wary of his enthusiasm for beer. Wojtek and the 22nd Artillery Supply Company enjoyed a period of much-needed rest and recuperation along the Adriatic coast. While there, Wojtek reportedly gave several Italians heart attacks, figuratively at least, maybe literally, when they spotted a bear happily swimming offshore.

Remarkably, Wojtek never attacked a human, at least not one he was sparring with. He had been raised by people from the time he was a cub, and everyone who knew him remarked that he was about as friendly as an apex predator could possibly be. He did, however, enjoy stalking and chasing horses and donkeys. As best as I can tell, he never caught one. He had not been raised to hunt; he had been raised to carry artillery shells and eat cigarettes.

That was effectively the end of Wojtek’s meaningful military service. The Polish II Corps continued fighting through Italy, taking part in the successful capture of Bologna in April 1945, one of the final Allied offensives in the Italian campaign.

Unfortunately, there was no happy ending for Poland. The Soviet Union occupied the country and installed a pliant communist regime. Returning soldiers were often branded as agents of Western imperialism, harassed, imprisoned, or worse. Poland would remain under communist rule until 1989.

The overwhelming majority of soldiers in the Polish II Corps chose exile instead. To assist them, the British government established the Polish Resettlement Corps, which provided housing and helped veterans integrate into life in the United Kingdom.

No one was about to send Wojtek back to communist Poland, where his fate would have been uncertain at best. Instead, he remained with his comrades at Winfield Airfield near the Scottish-English border. There, the Soldier Bear continued as the beloved mascot of the unit and something of a local celebrity. Visitors flocked to see the beer-drinking bear, who now enjoyed unlimited rations and happily splashed about in a swimming pool the Poles had built for him. Not that Wojtek was entirely retired. He helped carry fence posts as the soldiers constructed their temporary camp.

As more and more Poles were demobilized and began new lives across Britain, the men of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, with the bear carrying an artillery shell now proudly serving as their emblem, faced an unavoidable question. What do you do with a bear who thinks he’s a soldier?

He had spent virtually his entire life among humans. He could never be returned to the wild; he simply would not survive. The only real option was obvious. On November 15, 1947, Corporal Wojtek was honorably discharged from military service and entrusted to Edinburgh Zoo. Speaking personally, zoos generally make me a little sad. But in Wojtek’s case, I struggle to imagine a better outcome.

He became one of the zoo’s most beloved attractions, and I’m happy to report that his old comrades visited often. They spoke to him in Polish, which he still recognized, and brought him old favorites, beer, candy, and, cigarettes, which he continued to eat with enthusiasm. Some even wrestled with their old friend, who by then weighed nearly 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms). Several explained that being in his presence helped them deal with their PTSD. Wojtek remained a favorite of the Edinburgh community and even appeared on the BBC’s Blue Peter, the longest-running children’s television program in the world. On December 2, 1963, at the age of 21, Wojtek the Soldier Bear died of natural causes.

Today, his memory endures. There are statues of Wojtek across Europe; a street in Poznań, ulica Kaprala Wojtka, bears his name; memorials commemorate his service; and in 2024, his story was retold in the animated short film A Bear Named Wojtek.

History is often an inventory of humanity’s worst impulses. World War II certainly was. But every now and then, amid all the death, cruelty, and destruction, a story emerges that reminds us that there is heart and kindness in this world as well. Sometimes it comes from a Syrian brown bear who drank beer, smoked cigarettes, carried artillery shells, and was a beloved comrade.

Coffee

HBH IG

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

Had the roles been reversed, we would almost certainly remember this as one of history’s great atrocities. That probably makes it sound like I’m doing Oppenheimer. Instead, today we return to Nazi Germany as we look at the bombing of Hamburg.

Hamburg, namesake, in a roundabout way, of the American hamburger (for another time), or, as it is officially known, the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, is the largest German port. It lies at the southern tip of the Jutland Peninsula, standing on a branch of the River Elbe at the head of a 68-mile (110 km) estuary leading to the North Sea. If you have ever looked at a map, you may be aware that Germany is a mostly landlocked country, and that a city occupying one of its few major ports at the mouth of a river cutting through the heart of the country was enormously important. Its official name hints at this historical significance.

Founded as a fortress, it grew into a prosperous trading settlement thanks to its location. The port city became one of the most important members of the Hanseatic League, the enormously powerful late medieval commercial and defensive entity. Even before then, the city had been granted the status of a Free Imperial City, self-ruling and exempt from many taxes, by friend of the blog, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. This free status enabled Hamburg’s merchants to thrive, creating enormous wealth that filtered down into a prosperous middle class and a remarkably high standard of living.

Unlike much of the Holy Roman Empire, which was devastated during the Thirty Years’ War, which, believe it or not, lasted thirty years, Hamburg’s great fortifications discouraged attack, and the city continued to grow. Likewise, it escaped destruction during the wars of succession and empire that plagued the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Unlike some great trading cities, industrialization did not pass Hamburg by. Its location was simply too good to let that happen. Shipyards, steelworks, chemical factories, and engineering firms transformed the city into an industrial giant. An extremely wealthy upper class and a prosperous middle class lived alongside the many industrial workers who kept the city running. Compared to London or Paris, where industrial-era conditions could be unimaginably grim, being poor in Hamburg was probably one of the better places in the world to be poor.

That is not to say nothing bad happened. The Great Fire of Hamburg, which naturally began in a cigar factory (smoking kills), destroyed some 1,700 residences, three churches, the town hall, and countless businesses. One of the world’s last great cholera outbreaks claimed more than 8,000 lives and was catastrophically mismanaged by the city government. A visiting Mark Twain wrote that people were “snatched from their homes to the pest houses... a good many of them... die unknown and are buried so.” So, Hamburg was hardly angelic.

By the 1890s, the time of that cholera outbreak, the city had become the premier port of the German Empire. The Prussian militarization of Germany only benefited Hamburg. Massive arms factories, warehouses, dry docks, and canals were constructed, and some of the era’s most renowned shipbuilders established themselves there. It became one of the world’s busiest ports.

Just as it had during the Thirty Years’ War, Hamburg endured the privations brought about by Allied blockade and rationing during the First World War, but remained, structurally if not on a human level, largely untouched by the conflict.

By the time a rotten Austrian racist with a bad mustache came to power, Hamburg was indispensable to Germany. Hamburg became central to rebuilding the German Navy, its shipyards churning out U-boats and warships for the Kriegsmarine, while the city’s factories produced aircraft, oil products, munitions, and machinery as Germany set itself on the path to the war the Nazis had been itching to fight.

By September 1939, Hamburg was a sprawling metropolis of roughly 1.7 million people, its streets lined with buildings that had survived for centuries alongside new structures erected in the truly garish Nazi architectural style. Its skyline was dominated by medieval and Renaissance church spires, warehouses, cranes, and smokestacks stretching for miles along the harbor. More than 46 square miles of docks, canals, and industrial facilities produced, stored, and shipped enormous quantities of goods, making Hamburg one of the most valuable cities in all of Europe.

The Second World War was bad. An understatement of the highest order. More than any other conflict in human history, it embodied the concept of total war. A nation’s entire economy, population, and infrastructure become part of the war effort. Everything is utilized: a farm, its wheat, its cattle, and its labor all become assets in service of victory. The government best able to mobilize its resources toward the war effort gains an enormous advantage over its enemies.

But if those resources, including civilian labor, are considered military assets, then destroying or diminishing them becomes militarily legitimate. The distinction between combatant and civilian begins to erode. While war has always been hell, and armies have committed atrocities against civilians for as long as armies have existed, there remained, at least in theory, an understanding that innocents should be spared. Total war strips that away.

Although the term itself was coined only after the First World War, the concept predates it. The Mongols practiced a form of total war, organizing not only their own resources but those of conquered peoples, soldiers, slaves, horses, gold, food, and intelligence, to fuel further conquests. Surrounded by hostile monarchies after the French Revolution, France militarized. The Republican armies swelled to nearly 1.5 million conscripts. Older men forged weapons, women sewed uniforms and tents, and staffed hospitals, children gathered supplies, and the produce of farms was redirected to the military.

The first oft-cited example of total war came during the American Civil War. Union General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea saw the systematic destruction of railroads, infrastructure, crops, and food stores across Georgia. The campaign was condemned by many as barbaric, prompting Sherman to defend his methods by arguing that the Union was “not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”

The First World War provided the world’s first true taste of industrialized total war. For perhaps the first time on a large scale, civilians became deliberate targets of military operations, not violence for its own sake, but violence intended to achieve strategic objectives. The War also shattered many of the assumptions behind the laws of war. International agreements intended to limit brutality and protect civilians increasingly gave way to military necessity. To justify this shift, governments on every side turned to propaganda, portraying the enemy as monsters undeserving of sympathy.

Few embraced this more completely than German First World War veteran, Nazi legal scholar, and political philosopher Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that total war required total politics: every aspect of government had to be directed toward victory. The state should control the economy, mobilize every social and industrial resource, shape public opinion, demand sacrifice, and strip away moral hesitation by portraying the enemy as less than human. Individual rights and legal protections became secondary to the survival of the state.

Schmitt was, of course, a Nazi, an advocate of dictatorship, racial hierarchy, and the suspension of constitutional rights. Not a good guy. But he accurately described what the next global conflict would become. The Second World War would take the logic of total war further than anyone before had imagined.

The Second World War saw not only a disregard for collateral damage, unintended civilian deaths while destroying military targets, but civilian deaths themselves became an objective like never before. This is distinct from the very real genocides committed by the Nazis against those they deemed Untermenschen or the war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese (principally, all sides committed atrocities, of course). Those were not principally military strategies. Rather, the death and devastation inflicted upon civilians became a strategy of war itself, intended to shatter morale and convince an enemy population that continued resistance was hopeless. The easiest way to do this was bombing.

Despite widespread condemnation by the press and public alike, international law did not explicitly outlaw the bombing of cities. What it did prohibit was the deliberate targeting of civilians. This led to a series of euphemisms. The Allies referred to the bombing of cities as area bombing; bombing areas, not people. The Nazis, meanwhile, called the Allied bombing campaign Terrorangriffe, “terror attacks.” Just don’t ask them about their own bombing campaigns. Both civilian and military targets were bombed on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War.

Initially, both Britain and Germany concentrated on military installations, factories, railroads, and air bases. Both quickly discovered the limitations of precision bombing. Flying high enough to avoid anti-aircraft fire, navigating in darkness, locating a specific factory, and destroying reinforced industrial buildings that could often be repaired quickly proved extraordinarily difficult. Destroying workers’ homes, however, was comparatively easy.

Studies conducted by both sides concluded that destroying workers’ housing and, well, the workers themselves, often had a greater impact on production than damaging the factories they worked in. The Luftwaffe embraced this logic during the Blitz, intended above all else to terrorize and kill civilians. The Allies, proved more than willing to return the favor.

Churchill was enthusiastic, as ever straddling the line between chaotic good and lawful evil. Roosevelt, in typical Roosevelt fashion, publicly appealed to the Nazis to refrain from bombing civilians while privately believing that bombing civilian populations possessed genuine war-winning potential.

In February 1942, fifty-year-old First World War veteran Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris assumed command of RAF Bomber Command. With a nickname like that, he was always going to. Harris became the leading advocate of area bombing over precision strikes against individual military targets. That same month, the United States Army Air Forces established the Eighth Bomber Command in Britain, preparing to coordinate a strategic bombing campaign with the RAF. Yet this was still early 1942. The Allies were fighting for survival. They lacked the infrastructure necessary to sustain a massive bombing offensive and enough evidence that bombing cities would produce decisive results. The Americans would not have the required forces in place until 1943, while the British needed much of their air power elsewhere.

But they were thinking. The Allies carefully studied the Blitz, examining how they might improve upon the strategy. German housing construction was analyzed in remarkable detail. Model neighborhoods were built and deliberately burned to determine what kinds of bombs would inflict the greatest destruction.

Incendiaries and fire bombs quickly proved the most effective. Fires spread. If enough were ignited simultaneously, they could merge into a single inferno, creating a firestorm. To maximize the effect, firefighters themselves had to be hindered. High-explosive bombs fitted with delayed-action fuses were therefore included in bombing runs, detonating only after first responders had arrived. To put it plainly, they were researching how best to start a fire capable of destroying areas inhabited by innocent people. But in the logic of total war, this war, there were no innocents. This was a war unlike any the world had ever seen.

The next step was deciding where the Allied strategic bombing campaign of a city should begin. Every factor pointed toward Hamburg. Germany’s second-largest city possessed one of the Reich’s most important shipbuilding and industrial bases. It lay closer to British bomber bases than many other targets, reducing exposure to German fighters and anti-aircraft defenses. Its location on the coast, straddling the broad Elbe River, meant that even from 20,000 feet it was almost impossible to miss.

That altitude mattered. Early in the war, bombers and their fighter escorts flew lower because it improved bombing accuracy. It also exposed them to anti-aircraft guns, and losses were catastrophic. Bomber crews suffered some of the highest casualty rates of the entire war, and it is easy to understand why. Bombers were large, relatively slow, and obvious targets from both the ground and the air as they penetrated some of the most heavily defended airspace on Earth. Packed with crews of ten or eleven men, a single direct hit could kill everyone aboard, either instantly or during the long plunge back to earth.

The work was hell. Missions could last ten or even twelve hours, carried out in freezing temperatures, thin air that required oxygen masks, and under the constant knowledge that your life could end at any moment. These men also became, almost necessarily, desensitized to what they were doing. They rarely saw the results of their bombs. And from their perspective, what did it matter? They were killing the enemy.

Perhaps the most important reason Hamburg was selected was the city’s extraordinary vulnerability. According to the 1944 Guide to the Economic Importance of German Towns and Cities, its susceptibility to fire was “outstanding.” Centuries of construction had left much of Hamburg densely packed with wooden buildings and narrow streets. It was, quite simply, one of the most flammable major cities in Europe.

Hamburg was hardly the first German city to be bombed. As the tide turned against Germany in 1943, the Allies had already begun extensive strategic bombing campaigns, the largest of which targeted the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. Home to immense coal-coking facilities, steelworks, armaments factories, and synthetic oil plants, cities such as Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, and Essen suffered repeated attacks. Thousands of civilians died. Officially, industry remained the primary target. Unofficially, civilian casualties were an added benefit.

The Ruhr campaign began in March 1943. With German attention increasingly divided across multiple fronts, the Allies decided to strike Hamburg in late July. Part of the objective was to cripple German industrial and naval production. The other was psychological, to terrify the German people and undermine their faith in the Nazi regime’s ability to protect them. The quiet part was that achieving both those goals required killing civilians, and a great many of them. The codename chosen for the operation hinted at precisely that. Operation Gomorrah, named after one of the two biblical cities destroyed by divine fire, had a simple objective: As the Bible puts it, “to destroy this place.”

The first night of bombing was scheduled for July 23rd, but the raid was delayed by a day due to weather. So, on the evening of July 24th, between 9:45 and 11:00 p.m., 791 Royal Air Force bombers took off from their airfields across Britain and flew east toward the sleeping German city. Guided only by primitive radar, at 12:57 a.m. on July 25th, the Pathfinder Force began dropping yellow target indicators and flares over Hamburg. The night was clear, with good visibility. Five minutes later, the main force began bombing with relatively good accuracy. The attack continued until 1:50 a.m. in six waves.

Less than half the bombers actually dropped their bombs within the radius of the intended aiming point, and creepback, the tendency of bomber crews to release their bombs slightly early, often because they feared flying through the explosions of the aircraft ahead of them, helped prevent the entire city from being engulfed in flames. Even so, districts north of the city center were set ablaze, fires burning so fiercely that some continued for three days. Early in the raid, bombs struck the Blohm & Voss shipyard, destroying three U-boats, sinking one, and damaging two beyond repair.

Hamburg was as prepared as any city could be in a war of annihilation. The authorities had long understood the city would inevitably become a target. Decoy lights had been established around the city, playing a role in misdirecting part of the Allied bombing, while some 40,000 firefighters stood ready, battling hundreds of blazes despite the constant danger posed by delayed-action explosive bombs. The city’s telephone exchange caught fire, and rubble from the bombing prevented fire engines from reaching it. Hamburg authorities estimated that around 1,500 people were killed in this first raid.

It was only the beginning. A few hours later came the second attack, this time by the United States Army Air Forces. A force of 323 aircraft crossed into Germany, 127 assigned to bomb the Blohm & Voss shipyard and the Klöckner aero-engine factory. Around thirty Luftwaffe fighters intercepted the formation, shooting down two bombers and forcing several others to turn back, but the overwhelming majority reached Hamburg.

Because much of the city was still burning, thick smoke obscured the bombers’ view, making the raid only partially successful. Although some bombs struck the shipyard, its most vital facilities escaped serious damage. The aero-engine factory was completely hidden beneath smoke, forcing many crews to divert to secondary targets instead. Among them was a major electrical generating station, which was completely destroyed. Two large ocean liners, serving as depot ships and floating barracks, were also hit and sunk.

German anti-aircraft batteries proved far more effective against the Americans attacking in daylight than they had against the RAF the previous night. The British had introduced a remarkably simple yet effective new technology, what they called Window, now known as chaff, thousands of strips of aluminum foil dropped from aircraft that flooded German radar screens with false returns, making it vastly more difficult to track and engage the bombers.

RAF aerial reconnaissance at 8:30 that evening revealed Hamburg remained hidden beneath a vast pall of smoke from smoldering buildings. As a result, the planned raid by 705 British bombers that night was redirected to the Ruhr city of Essen instead, while a small force of De Havilland Mosquitos, aptly named, conducted a nuisance raid over Hamburg, if only to deny the exhausted city a night’s rest.

By July 26th, newspapers across Britain and the United States were reporting that a massive coordinated bombing campaign against Hamburg was underway. As those newspapers circulated, the second American daylight raid began. Many of the same crews who had flown through heavy anti-aircraft fire the previous day climbed back into their bombers. This time, many formations were diverted to Hanover, leaving only fifty-four bombers to attack Hamburg. The Germans released artificial smoke screens to obscure the harbor, largely succeeding, but the power station at Neuhof was destroyed, depriving Hamburg of roughly forty percent of its electrical generating capacity at perhaps the worst possible moment.

That night, much of the city sat in darkness as families crowded into basements and air raid shelters, praying they would be spared. They were. The RAF gave its crews a night’s rest. Three consecutive nights of bombing had pushed both men and machines close to their limits. Nor did another raid come during the day on July 27th. Perhaps some citizens dared to believe the worst was over. Surely the destruction of power stations, ships, U-boats, factories, and military installations had been enough.

It had not. Shortly before midnight on July 27th, 787 RAF bombers approached Hamburg once again. This time, their principal target was not the docks or shipyards, but the densely packed working-class neighborhoods east of the city center.

The final weeks of July had been unusually hot and unusually dry. The city had been seasoned like kindling. Thousands upon thousands of incendiary bombs rained into those crowded districts. Combined with the dry weather and centuries of tightly packed construction, they ignited almost instantly. The accompanying blockbuster high-explosive bombs leveled buildings, shattered water mains, blocked roads with rubble, and kept firefighters at bay.

The result was a firestorm, the likes of which the world had never seen. The individual fires merged into a single inferno. Winds fed by the flames accelerated to nearly 150 miles per hour, creating what became known as an orphan wind as the fire consumed every source of oxygen around it. Temperatures reached roughly 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800°C), incinerating more than eight square miles of Hamburg.

The asphalt streets appeared to catch fire. In reality, it was phosphorus from the incendiaries burning across their surfaces. Fuel oil leaking from damaged ships, tanks, and barges spread across the harbor and ignited as well. The storm became so powerful that anyone unfortunate enough to be caught outside could literally be swept off their feet before being burned alive. Within thirty minutes, four square miles of Hamburg were engulfed in flames.

The eyewitness accounts are almost impossible to read. They describe something approaching the biblical conception of Hell. People trapped beneath collapsed buildings burned where they lay. Others were sucked into the flames by hurricane-force winds. Some caught fire while still running through the streets. Those sheltering in basements and air raid shelters often fared little better. The inferno above consumed the available oxygen while filling underground shelters with carbon monoxide. Thousands suffocated where they hid, clawing desperately at their throats in search of air that no longer existed.

A 1943 Newsweek report, interviewing Swedish laborers who escaped the city, described the aftermath:

“Inhalation of super-heated air was the prime cause of death... In areas where there was no wind, raid-started fires created what the Germans called ‘fire blizzards’... Bodies were dehydrated, and when shelter-tombs were opened, the victims’ skins were found to be shrunk and their brains, in some instances, reduced to the size of a man’s fist.”

An estimated 18,474 people died that night, though those were only the deaths that could be confirmed. The true number was almost certainly higher. Once again, the immense smoke generated by the destruction made the planned bombing raid on the night of July 28th impossible. Hamburg was engulfed beneath a vast black cloud, making any attempt at accurate bombing nearly impossible. A handful of Mosquitos carried out another nuisance raid, but otherwise the city was left to settle into its own ruins. As one Swede in the city later reported:

“Outside the half-demolished apartment buildings, the surviving tenants cook food on brick ovens they have built from the wreckage of their homes. People share linen and bed clothing, and if one has more than one pair of shoes he shares the rest with his friends and neighbors.”

The following day, July 29th, an RAF reconnaissance aircraft flew high over Hamburg and reported that the weather was good and the smoke had cleared enough for bombers to find their targets. A third major RAF raid was ordered.

Seven hundred and seventy-seven aircraft took off, and more than seven hundred reached Hamburg. Despite the reconnaissance report, the bombers still relied heavily on their primitive H2S radar. Combined once again with creepback, this meant the residential districts of Barmbek and Wandsbek were hit particularly hard. By now, Hamburg’s firefighting effort had effectively collapsed. There were simply too many fires, too many collapsed buildings, and too many dead.

German authorities did not, or, more accurately, could not, compile reliable casualty figures for this raid. It was recorded, however, that in one large public air raid shelter alone, 370 people died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Then, at last, Hamburg received a reprieve. British bombers were redirected to other targets, only for those operations to be canceled too late for a raid on July 30th. The following day, violent thunderstorms swept across Britain, grounding the bomber force until August 2nd.

By then, the weather front had moved east across the North Sea toward Hamburg. Despite reports of poor conditions, the RAF launched a fourth major raid on the night of August 2nd. Of the 737 bombers dispatched, more than 300 were forced to turn back or divert after flying into the very storms that had grounded them days earlier.

Roughly 400 aircraft reached Hamburg, but this time the Germans were far better prepared. Remarkably quickly, they had developed countermeasures to Window, or chaff. Ground stations broadcast a running commentary of the bomber stream’s location, while many night fighters abandoned reliance on radar altogether, instead using those broadcasts to hunt the bombers visually. Five RAF bombers were shot down over the North Sea, another eight around Hamburg itself, with eleven more lost to other causes.

The scattered bomber formations struggled to identify their targets, and their bombs fell across a wide area rather than in the concentrated pattern that had created the devastating firestorm days earlier. The damage, though still severe, was comparatively limited.

Operation Gomorrah was over. In little more than a week, roughly 3,000 Allied bombers had dropped around 9,000 tons of bombs on Hamburg. Around 250,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged. Nearly one million people fled the city during or immediately after the raids, while approximately 61 percent of Hamburg’s housing stock was destroyed.

As for the dead, the true number will never be known. The figure most widely accepted today is around 37,000. The Nazis claimed 40,000 at the time. Many victims were burned so completely that no identifiable remains survived. Only 15,802 bodies could ever be identified. Those civilians met an almost unimaginable end. Some were consumed by a man-made hell that swallowed entire neighborhoods. Others suffocated in the darkness of cellars and shelters, holding tightly to the people they loved as the oxygen disappeared around them.

Photo of the residential and commercial buildings of the Eilbektal Park taken years later, likely after Victory in Europe Day in 1945, the rubble has been cleared, and the skeletal remains of the building sit quietly.

More than the reverses suffered in the East or the defeat in North Africa, the bombing of Hamburg profoundly shook both the Nazi leadership and the German people. Adolf Hitler reportedly remarked that continued raids on the same scale could force Germany out of the war, whether the Nazi leadership wished it or not. The cowardly Dr. Joseph Goebbels went even further, privately suggesting that the logical next step might be to discuss surrender. He quickly abandoned such talk when it became clear sein Führer had no interest in hearing it.

Historians debate exactly when the Third Reich’s defeat became inevitable, but there is broad agreement that by the summer of 1943 the tide had turned decisively against Germany. Operation Gomorrah, followed scarcely a month later by the Allied invasion of mainland Italy, reinforced that realization within the Nazi leadership. For the German people, too, something changed. For years, whether through genuine belief or relentless propaganda, many had been convinced Germany would ultimately prevail. Now there was fear that nowhere was safe.

Hamburg itself never recovered during the war. Around 590 industrial and armaments facilities were damaged or destroyed, while much of the city’s transportation network lay in ruins. Nor did the bombing end with Operation Gomorrah. Hamburg would endure another sixty-nine air raids before Germany surrendered, with the RAF alone dropping nearly 23,000 tons of bombs on the city during the course of the war.

The attacks forced Germany to adapt. Resources once devoted to building bombers capable of leveling enemy cities were increasingly redirected toward fighter aircraft and air defense. Anti-aircraft gun production rose by more than twenty-five percent. For the Allies, this was an important, if unintended, benefit. Every gun, fighter, and shell committed to defending German skies was one that could not be used to equip soldiers on the ground.

Abroad in Allied nations, many observers greeted the destruction with satisfaction. Newspapers described Hamburg as having been obliterated, much like the biblical city of Gomorrah from which the operation took its name. One correspondent for the Newspaper Enterprise Association wondered how long it would take before Berlin suffered the same fate. Neutral observers painted a very different picture. Like the Swedish witnesses who entered the city after the raids, they described scenes beyond comprehension. A Swiss merchant told the United Press that it was “hell released,” a “devil’s concert” amounting to “Hamburg’s ceaseless, inescapable destruction on a scale that defies the imagination.”

Rumors flourished in the aftermath. Some German accounts, though never officially endorsed by the Nazi regime, claimed that more than 100,000 people had died. Even after the war, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey repeated German estimates ranging from 60,000 to 100,000 deaths before later research settled on figures closer to 37,000.

Hamburg, nearly destroyed and partially depopulated, nevertheless endured, as it had for centuries. Rebuilding was slow, and a devastating North Sea flood in 1962 destroyed thousands more homes and damaged much of the city’s newly reconstructed industry. Yet, Hamburg would be just fine. Today, it remains Germany’s second-largest city, home to nearly two million people and renowned for its science, research, culture, and remarkably high standard of living.

But back to the bombing of 1943. In the United States after the war, as scientists, politicians, and military leaders debated the morality of the atomic bombings and the development of the hydrogen bomb, Hamburg repeatedly entered the conversation. If it was acceptable to burn tens of thousands of civilians to death with conventional incendiaries, what exactly was the ethical distinction between that and a single nuclear weapon? It is an uncomfortable question.

The deliberate killing of civilians is wrong. It always has been. Yet the Second World War pushed nations into a form of industrialized conflict in which civilian populations, factories, homes, transportation networks, and entire cities became military objectives. The Allies hoped bombing Hamburg would shorten the war. Germany had already embraced terror bombing years earlier, and Japan was devastating Chinese cities long before the Western Allies adopted similar methods. Total war had made civilians into targets.

The lesson of Hamburg is not that such bombing was good, nor that it was uniquely evil. It is that once societies accept total war, the distinction between soldier and civilian disappears. Factories become targets because workers produce weapons. Homes become targets because workers sleep there. Cities become targets because they sustain armies. In an industrialized and interconnected world, governments fighting for survival will seek to mobilize everything they possess. That is why preventing total war from beginning is so important. Once it starts, history shows that almost everything becomes permissible. Civilization and savagery become difficult to tell apart.

Coffee

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.

They wander my avenues in quiet procession,

reading one weathered name after another,

as though memory itself could be summoned from stone.

They may linger for a moment,

trace a finger across the letters time has nearly erased,

wondering who once laughed beneath these skies,

who loved,

who wept,

who dreamed impossible dreams.

Then they move on.

I remain.

I keep all entrusted to me.

The king whose monument reaches toward Heaven,

the pauper whose crooked marker sinks into the earth,

the infant wrapped before life had learned its name,

the old who outlived every soul they ever loved.

Marble and slate,

bronze and rotting wood.

I make no distinction.

The rain wears them equally.

The frost breaks them equally.

The earth receives them all equally.

You fret so over how you shall be remembered,

as I have watched proud obelisks crumble,

while long-forgotten fieldstones endure another century.

Even the grandest epitaph is just another meal for time.

The living mistake remembrance for immortality.

There is no immortality here.

Only silence.

Only roots drinking where hearts once beat.

Only worms threading through the ribs of merchants and beggars alike.

Only the patient turning of ash to earth,

earth to grass,

grass to flower,

flower to ash again.

Your children gather after you are gone,

sorting your books,

your letters,

your clothes still carrying the scent of your skin.

They divide your treasures.

They tell your stories.

They promise never to forget.

And they mean it.

For a while.

Years become decades.

Faces become photographs.

Photographs become boxes in forgotten attics.

Names become uncertain.

Then only dates remain.

At last,

not even those.

I have watched wives laid beside husbands,

sons beside fathers,

entire bloodlines folded into my keeping,

until no tongue remains to speak the family name.

Who was the miser?

Who the saint?

Who kissed their beloved beneath the summer stars?

Who died alone?

Who was feared?

Who was forgiven?

The stone no longer answers.

Nor do the bones below.

Perhaps they ache to be remembered.

Perhaps they dream.

Or perhaps oblivion is too deep even for longing.

It matters little now.

The ivy climbs without reverence.

The crows perch without ceremony.

Winter buries every monument beneath the same shroud.

Spring uncovers them without apology.

One by one,

all who walk my winding paths

shall someday pass through my gates,

not as mourners,

but as guests.

Some arrive having made peace.

Others claw at the air until the very end.

Death listens to neither plea.

So tell me

What comfort is your palace?

What triumph is your fortune?

What pride is polished marble

when every monument is destined to bow before time?

You spend your lives worrying over the house that shall shelter your bones,

while neglecting the heart that shelters your days.

The grave is not what gives life meaning.

It is what gives it measure.

You fear me because I wait.

You should fear the hours you spend believing I do not.

Go.

Love without reserve.

Forgive before silence makes it impossible.

Laugh while your lungs still draw breath.

Hold those who still possess warmth enough to return the embrace.

Do not envy the dead.

The dead have all the time in eternity.

You possess the day.

Spend it well.

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Coffee

Italian shipping was in a bad place after the Second World War. Wait, let me rephrase. Italy was in a bad place after the Second World War. Even with the Marshall Plan’s financial assistance, the country lay in ruins, and its economy was in even worse shape. Italy had lost more than half of its merchant fleet through wartime destruction and, you know, having much of it seized by the Allies for being very naughty boys during the war.

The country’s prize ship before the war, the SS Rex, had been struck and sunk in 1944. She had been built in Italy’s premier shipbuilding city, Genoa, by one of the country’s foremost shipbuilders, Ansaldo Shipyard. To show the world that Italy had recovered from the war, and to reestablish a sense of national pride, that was the thought process anyway, two luxury ocean liners were commissioned to sail the Italian Line’s “Sunny Southern Route” from Genoa to New York by way of Cannes, France, then Naples, Gibraltar, and finally across the Atlantic.

Illustrating that these ships were meant to restore Italian pride, they were named after two of the country’s, and Genoa’s in particular, favorite sons. The second ship was named Cristoforo Colombo, after that dumbo who stumbled upon the “New” World. The first, was at least named after a great man, in the context of success, Andrea Doria. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century admiral was likely the greatest naval commander of his day and Pater Patriae (”Father of the Fatherland”) of the Republic of Genoa, preserving its independence at the expense of its republicanism.

Construction of the ship began when she was laid down on February 9, 1950. Designed by the super-Italian-sounding architect Giulio Minoletti, the ship was not intended to be the largest or the fastest afloat. Those distinctions could go to the British and the Americans respectively. No, in Italian fashion, the Andrea Doria was to be the most luxurious.

Even still, she was large and fast: 695 feet 6 inches long (212 meters), with a beam of 88 feet 7 inches (27 meters). She measured 29,083 gross registered tons, a measurement that doesn’t mean much to me, but she was heavy. She could reach a top speed of 26 knots (30 mph), though her normal cruising speed was 23 knots (26 mph), not numbers to sniff at. Nor should you sniff at things.

By all accounts, the ship was beautiful, a marvel of mid-century craftsmanship, with specially commissioned artwork adorning her cabins and public rooms. Among it stood a life-sized bronze statue of her namesake, wearing the armor and cape he was said to have worn in life, one hand resting upon his sword as he stared ahead in steely eternal silence, now overlooking a luxurious lounge rather than the deck of a galley. More than $1 million was spent on artwork alone, nearly $14 million today.

The ship was divided into first class, cabin class, and tourist class. Like the Titanic, she was created to be a floating hotel. Each class was among the most luxurious at sea, with its own dining rooms, lounges, social halls, swimming pools, and verandas. Again, each class, even tourist class, which carried many immigrants traveling to America.

Dining aboard resembled a modern restaurant. Sections included farinacei: buttered macaroni, macaroni alla Nicotera, curried tomato sauce with spinach and mushrooms, and a wide variety of rice dishes. Separate sections covered potatoes, seasonal vegetables like cavolo nero (black cabbage), meats, fish, desserts, and, very Italian, the entire back page was devoted to wine. Watercolor illustrations of edelweiss or fish adorned the menus.

The ship could accommodate 1,241 passengers, served by a full-time crew of 563. She was built with a double hull and eleven watertight compartments. Any two of them could flood without endangering the ship. Since our last maritime disaster, radar had been invented, and the Andrea Doria carried one of the latest early-warning radar systems. The ship’s sixteen steel lifeboats were capable of holding 146 people each and ensured that everyone aboard could, in theory, be accommodated. Because of this, while no Italian Line executive was foolish enough to publicly declare the ship unsinkable, many believed she was.

Of course, there were problems. Model testing predicted that she would develop a severe list if struck with significant force, a problem made worse when her fuel tanks were nearly empty. Her watertight bulkheads extended only as high as A Deck, meaning that a list greater than 20 degrees could allow water to spill over the tops of flooded compartments into neighboring ones. Worse still, the lifeboats were designed to be launched only up to a 15-degree list. Beyond that angle, as many as half of them could not be lowered.

The ship was launched on June 16, 1951, though her maiden voyage did not come until January 1953. During that crossing, off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, she was struck by a rogue wave and rolled 28 degrees to port. She recovered without incident, but had anything else gone wrong in that moment, nearly half of her lifeboats would have been unusable.

Three years later, after that inauspicious beginning, the SS Andrea Doria was just fine, having successfully completed fifty more round trips since. In July 1956, the ship concluded a voyage from New York on July 14 and, after a three-day turnaround, was scheduled to depart her home port of Genoa on July 17. The ship was booked to roughly 90 percent of her total capacity for the crossing, with 1,706 people aboard in all.

The first passengers boarded in Genoa at 8:00 a.m. on the morning of the 17th, and the ship departed at 11:00 a.m., her steam turbines powering twin-screw propellers that churned the harbor waters as she made quick work of the 140 miles to the French Riviera city of Cannes that afternoon. There, more passengers boarded, including Hollywood sex symbol Ruth Roman and songwriter Mike Stoller, who produced countless early rock-and-roll hits. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and is still alive today. You go, Mike.

The ship then sailed roughly 400 nautical miles southeast to Naples, arriving the following morning. There she took on the largest number of passengers of any stop, 744 in total, the vast majority of them impoverished southern Italians emigrating to the United States. Departing that evening, the ship reached Gibraltar two days later, embarked her final passengers, and set off across the Atlantic for New York.

At the helm was the 58-year-old Captain Piero Calamai. The Genoese lieutenant commander had served with distinction in both World Wars, as one of the good guys in the first and one of the bad guys in the second. Following the war, he joined the Italian Line, eventually commanding twenty-seven ships over the course of his career. In Calamai, the Andrea Doria had an experienced and capable master.

At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, July 25, Captain Calamai stood on the bridge staring westward, the afternoon sun descending toward a deep haze on the horizon, the unmistakable summer fog that forms off the coast of Massachusetts when the warm waters of the Gulf Stream collide with the icy North Atlantic. The Andrea Doria sailed into the fog, which enshrouded the ship like a dark blanket.

The ship had radar, of course, but two things are important to note. First, it was by no means perfect. Second, captains, especially seasoned veterans like Calamai, still preferred to trust their eyes over blinking lights on a screen. It was less than twenty-four hours before the ship was due in New York. Calamai reduced speed by 1.2 knots, which was still faster than regulation in maritime fog, ordered the ship’s foghorn to sound a six-second blast every one minute and forty seconds, and stationed an able seaman on the forecastle at the tip of the bow to watch and listen for approaching hazards.

At 9:30 that evening, Junior Third Officer Eugenio Giannini spotted a pip on the radar seventeen miles away. He notified Second Officer Curzio Franchini, who took a long-range navigation fix on the Andrea Doria’s position before listening with the radio direction finder for the expected signal of the Nantucket Lightship, the vessel that guided ships through the treacherous Nantucket Shoals where the Andrea Doria found herself. Franchini reported to Calamai. “We are headed directly toward the lightship.” Calamai altered course, taking the ship one mile south of it.

Fifty minutes later, the lookout on the forecastle reported hearing a foghorn off the starboard bow. Taking this as confirmation, Franchini analyzed the radar once more before informing Calamai that they were passing the lightship at a distance of one mile. Satisfied, Calamai altered course again. The Andrea Doria was now heading almost due west, directly toward New York. Twenty minutes later, Franchini suddenly called out, “It’s a ship. We can see a ship! Seventeen miles distant, four degrees on the starboard bow,” as he bent over the radar screen.

The unknown vessel lay almost directly ahead of the Andrea Doria, steaming east at considerable speed, some twenty miles north of the recommended eastbound shipping lane. It appeared to be slowly drifting to the right, setting up for a safe starboard-to-starboard passing. Both ships maintained their courses. When they were seven miles apart, Franchini switched the radar range to eight miles. Every indication suggested the vessels would pass safely, with the stranger about one mile off the Andrea Doria’s starboard side.

“How close will she pass?” Calamai asked.

“About one mile to starboard,” Franchini replied.

When the other ship was three and a half miles away, bearing fifteen degrees to starboard, Calamai ordered a four-degree turn to port. He reasoned that the slight swing to the left would widen the gap even further, making the starboard-to-starboard passing safer than the radar already suggested.

Calamai and Giannini watched the starboard horizon intently. It was important to establish visual contact as soon as possible. Radar was, at best, an imprecise aid to navigation. They did not expect to see the other vessel until it was very close, but something was wrong. The other ship was not sounding its foghorn.

Giannini watched the radar as the target closed to a mile and a half away, thirty to thirty-five degrees off the starboard bow. He stepped outside and searched the darkness through binoculars. Suddenly, a blur of lights appeared exactly where the radar had indicated. The ships were about one mile apart when the hazy glow resolved into visible masthead lights. Giannini focused his binoculars. There were two white lights, the lower one slightly to the right of the upper.

For a brief instant, Captain Calamai believed the other ship would pass safely to starboard. It was perhaps the last peaceful moment he would ever experience. The approaching vessel was the MS Stockholm.

In case the flag, blue-and-yellow color scheme and, well, name, hadn’t given it away, the Stockholm was a Swedish passenger liner, roughly half the size of the Andrea Doria and far less opulent. The Swedes, being smart, understood that airplanes would soon become the preferred means of crossing the Atlantic, and so the comparatively inexpensive Stockholm was built to accommodate only 395 passengers. What they did not foresee was the tourism boom of the 1950s, fueled by a roaring American economy. The ship was quickly extensively refitted, increasing her capacity while making her considerably more luxurious for the American tourists she typically carried from New York to her home port of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Stockholm had departed Pier 97 in New York at 11:31 that morning under the command of Captain Harry Gunnar Nordenson, a stern 63-year-old who had actually been born to Swedish immigrant parents in Quincy, Massachusetts. Nordenson had been at sea since the age of eighteen and had served under contract with the United States government during the Second World War, commanding diplomatic missions and earning numerous commendations for his seamanship. By July 25, 1956, he had captained every ship in the Swedish American Line’s fleet and was a well-regarded, respected, if not particularly loved, commander, known as a strict disciplinarian.

After leaving the bridge at 8:30 p.m., Nordenson paced the bridge wings in quiet contemplation. What was he contemplating? Who’s to say? Perhaps why the Swedes enjoy surströmming.

Now on watch was 26-year-old Third Mate Johan-Ernst Carstens-Johannsen, described later by Time magazine as “handsome and boyish.” Poor Carstens was exhausted. He had been on duty since six that morning and had spent much of the day being drilled by his captain on proper bridge procedure: never leave the bridge without the standby sailor serving as lookout, never pass another ship closer than one mile, and, in the event of fog, snow, sleet, or any unusual occurrence, place the engine telegraph on standby and notify the captain immediately.

At 9:30, Nordenson went below, instructing Carstens to maintain a course of 87 degrees. For the Stockholm, the night was clear. Visibility was excellent, the moon shone brightly overhead, and the only real difficulties were the ocean currents slowly pushing the ship off course and the duty helmsman, who, as Carstens later remarked, seemed “more interested in surrounding things than in the compass.”

Shortly before 11:00 p.m., just after the Stockholm entered the fog surrounding Nantucket Shoals, Carstens was informed of a radar contact about twelve miles off the port bow. The vessel was running south of the westbound traffic lane established by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Tracking the contact, Carstens calculated that it would pass safely to port somewhere between half a mile and a mile away.

He was wrong. The overtired third mate misread the radar. Believing the display was set to the fifteen-mile scale when it was actually set to five, every distance he estimated was effectively tripled. When he saw the contact two miles away on the five-mile scale, he believed it was still six miles distant. Confident there was ample room, Carstens altered course to make what he believed would be the standard port-to-port passing. Both ships had now misinterpreted the other’s intentions, and neither attempted radio contact.

At 11:09 p.m., the two ships finally made visual contact. Aboard the Andrea Doria, Third Officer Gianni immediately realized the approaching ship was not passing safely, it was bearing directly toward them. Captain Calamai reached the same conclusion only moments later.

“Hard left!” The order rang across the bridge as Second Officer Franchini sounded two short blasts on the whistle to signal the maneuver while the Andrea Doria strained into a sharp turn.

Aboard the Stockholm, Carstens received a frantic telephone call from the forward lookout warning of a rapidly approaching ship. He rushed onto the port wing of the bridge, where, out of the darkness and fog, loomed the brilliantly illuminated shape of a great passenger liner crossing directly ahead of his bow. “Hard starboard! Full astern!” he shouted desperately. It was already too late.

At 11:11 p.m., Calamai cried out, more in astonishment than outright terror, “She is coming against us!” Instinctively he stepped back from the bridge wing railing as the Stockholm’s reinforced bow loomed nearly forty feet below him. For the briefest instant, he found himself wishing he were down there at the point of impact, killed instantly rather than left to witness what he knew was about to happen.

The Stockholm crashed into the side of the Andrea Doria at nearly a perfect right angle, her steel-reinforced icebreaker bow penetrating almost forty feet into the luxury liner like a giant battering ram. Hollywood starlet Ruth Roman was sitting in the Belvedere Lounge when the tremendous impact hurled her to the floor. Throwing off her high heels, she sprinted to her cabin to find her young son. Five men aboard the Stockholm, all crewmen working in the bow, were killed instantly.

Aboard the Andrea Doria, the Stockholm had driven through five passenger decks, obliterating eight first-class cabins in an instant. Ferdinand Melly Thieriot, circulation director of the San Francisco Chronicle, and his wife Frances were killed immediately. Their son Peter, occupying another cabin, survived.

Colonel Walter Carlin survived only because he happened to be brushing his teeth. The collision threw him violently to the floor. When he opened the bathroom door moments later, his cabin, and his wife Jeanette, were simply gone. Crewmen aboard the Stockholm later searching the shattered remains of their bow discovered a mangled body matching Mrs. Carlin’s description, but before she could be recovered, the wreckage to which she was pinned broke free and slipped beneath the sea.

On A Deck, eleven passengers were crushed to death by the tremendous force of the collision. B Deck housed the Andrea Doria’s fifty-car garage, which was completely destroyed along with every automobile inside. On C Deck, twenty-six people, most of them Italian immigrants bound for a new life in America, were killed instantly. Entire families, or members of them, were wiped out in a matter of seconds.

Above them, in first-class Cabins 52 and 54 on the Upper Deck, were Camille Cianfarra, foreign correspondent for The New York Times, his wife Jane, their eight-year-old daughter Joan, and Jane’s fourteen-year-old daughter Linda Morgan from her previous marriage to journalist Edward P. Morgan.

Joan was killed instantly. Camille suffered catastrophic injuries and died in agony shortly afterward. Jane was seriously injured and trapped beneath twisted steel alongside Martha Peterson in the adjoining Cabin 56. Both women were eventually freed by Martha’s husband, Dr. Thure Peterson, who tore apart the mangled structure with his bare hands. Martha succumbed to her injuries a few hours later. Jane survived, having lost her 8 year old daughter, and her 14 year old daughter Linda was missing and presumed dead.

At first glance, the Stockholm appeared to have suffered the worse of the collision. Nearly her entire bow had been ripped away, reducing her freeboard, the distance between the waterline and the upper deck, by almost three feet and leaving the ship frighteningly exposed to the sea. Once the vessels separated, water poured into the mangled bow.

Captain Nordenson, who had rushed back to the bridge, immediately ordered the freshwater tanks emptied to lighten the bow and raise it higher in the water. A rapid inspection revealed astonishingly good news. Although the damage looked catastrophic, it did not extend aft beyond the bulkhead separating the first and second watertight compartments. The Stockholm was battered, but she was not in danger of sinking.

Crewmen exploring the shattered bow discovered a frightened fourteen-year-old girl. Linda Morgan had been asleep in Cabin 52 when the ships collided. Somehow, the Stockholm’s bow had scooped her from her bed, carried her across the gap between the two ships, and deposited her safely behind a bulwark aboard the Swedish liner with only minor injuries, the worst being a broken arm. Born in Mexico City, Linda was dazed, bruised, and crying for her mother in Spanish. An equally bewildered Swedish sailor carried her to the cabin of another crewmember who happened to know Spanish.

“What happened? Where am I?” she asked.

“You are aboard the Stockholm.”

“Impossible,” she replied. “I am a passenger on the Andrea Doria.”

The following morning, Linda’s father, ABC radio journalist Edward P. Morgan, reported on the collision live on air. By then, his daughter had been listed among the missing, yet he delivered the news with remarkable professionalism and almost no outward emotion. Hours later, when word arrived that Linda had been found alive, he reported that news as well, this time unable to contain his relief.

The Spanish-speaking crewmember continued caring for Linda until she could be transferred ashore for treatment and later visited her and her reunited father at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Grasping the sailor’s hands, Morgan simply said, “Hombre, hombre, how can I ever thank you?” Linda Morgan struggled with survivor’s guilt for many years afterward. She went on to become curator of the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, later served as the city’s First Lady through her husband, and is still alive today.

Morgan in hospital with her father, and Stockholm’s spanish speaking crew member. Then Stockholm after the collision.

Below the waterline, five fuel tanks on the Andrea Doria’s starboard side were ripped open and rapidly filled with thousands of tons of seawater. Meanwhile, trapped air in the empty fuel tanks on the port side made that side more buoyant, contributing to a list that, within minutes, exceeded twenty degrees.

Although the collision had directly breached only one watertight compartment, the severe list gradually pulled the tops of the watertight bulkheads on the starboard side below the waterline, allowing seawater to spill over into adjacent compartments. The collision had also torn open an access tunnel leading from the generator room to the forward tank compartment housing the controls for the ship’s pumps. Water flooded rapidly into the generator room, accelerating the flooding and causing the ship to lose electrical power. The Andrea Doria immediately transmitted an SOS:

SOS DE ICEH [this is Andrea Doria] SOS HERE AT 0320 GMT LAT. 40.30 N 69.53 W NEED IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE

It was through that distress call that the two ships finally learned one another’s identities.

The Andrea Doria lay only about forty-five miles south of Nantucket, close enough that her distress call was heard up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Help would arrive quickly. It just needed to arrive quickly enough.

Captain Calamai ordered the engines stopped and immediately began assessing the damage. Engineers in the engine rooms attempted to pump out the flooding compartments, but the effort quickly proved hopeless and was abandoned. As the list passed twenty degrees, Calamai realized his ship was doomed. The decision was made to evacuate.

There was one terrible problem. The list had rendered the port-side lifeboats unusable. Attempting to launch them would have smashed them against the exposed hull, spilling their occupants into the sea beneath the sinking liner. Even launching the starboard boats proved difficult. They had to be lowered empty before passengers climbed down ropes and Jacob’s ladders into them.

Even so, Calamai refused to give the order to abandon ship until assistance had arrived, fearing that panic would claim more lives than the flooding itself. Second Officer Guido Badano calmly instructed passengers over the loudspeaker to don their life jackets and proceed to their assigned muster stations.

Thankfully, the Andrea Doria had suffered her mortal wound in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The first vessel on the scene was, naturally, the Stockholm. Captain Nordenson had no intention of abandoning those aboard the Italian liner. His crew immediately lowered their lifeboats and ultimately rescued 545 survivors from the Andrea Doria. Shamefully, 234 of those rescued were members of the Italian crew, whom abandoned ship before their passengers. Captain Calamai was not among them. He remained aboard, directing the evacuation with determination and composure, staying until there was little left he could do.

The first outside ship to arrive was the 390-foot (120-meter) freighter Cape Ann, owned by the notorious United Fruit Company, though we won’t hold that against her crew. With only forty-four crewmen and two lifeboats, there was little they could accomplish alone, but with more than a thousand people still aboard a dangerously listing ship, every pair of hands mattered. Within minutes came the troop transport USNS Private William H. Thomas, carrying 214 American servicemen home from Italy, of all places. Captain John Shea assumed command of the rescue effort and ordered all eight of his lifeboats launched. The destroyer escort-turned-training ship USS Edward H. Allen was also dispatched from Massachusetts.

Even together, however, these ships lacked the capacity to accommodate everyone. Fortunately, another ocean liner was nearby. The French luxury liner Île de France, had departed New York only just before the Stockholm. At 44,500 tons and 791 feet (241 meters) long, she dwarfed every vessel already at the scene, including the Andrea Doria. She carried 940 passengers and an astonishing crew of 826, hardly an economical ratio, on her voyage to Le Havre.

Her captain, the 53-year-old Baron Raoul de Beaudéan, was a respected and jovial veteran known for his wit, his trademark monocle, and his ability to charm passengers. He had served the French Line for more than thirty-five years and was only commanding the Île de France because her regular captain happened to be on vacation. When word of the collision first reached him, the Baron was skeptical. Great passenger liners were not supposed to sink anymore. A veteran of the notoriously penny-pinching French Line, he also knew that if he turned around unnecessarily, the company would lose money, passengers would be delayed, and he might well lose his command.

His attempts to contact the Andrea Doria failed, the Italian liner had already lost power, but after speaking with the ships already on scene, de Beaudéan wasted no further time. He turned back. By the time the Île de France arrived, just before two o’clock on the morning of July 26, remarkably few passengers had actually been evacuated. Most of those rescued thus far had come aboard the Stockholm, many of them panicked crewmen.

The Baron faced a daunting challenge: maneuvering a massive ocean liner through dense fog among two damaged ships, several rescue vessels, dozens of lifeboats, and possibly people in the water. Then, almost miraculously, the fog lifted. Beaudéan expertly positioned the Île de France alongside the Andrea Doria’s starboard side, shielding the stricken liner from the wind and sea. He then ordered every light aboard his ship switched on. The brilliantly illuminated liner became a floating beacon in the darkness, greeted with cheers from those still trapped aboard the Andrea Doria.

The Île de France’s lifeboats shuttled continuously between the two ships, collecting passengers directly from the Italian liner via ladders while also receiving survivors ferried over by smaller rescue vessels. Her passengers voluntarily surrendered their cabins to the exhausted survivors.

Once everyone had been evacuated, Calamai and the handful of officers who remained briefly considered attempting to save the ship by towing her into shallow water. It was quickly obvious that there was no hope.

By six that morning, Captain Calamai reluctantly stepped into a lifeboat bound for the USS Edward H. Allen. In all, 1,663 passengers and crew were rescued from the Andrea Doria. Somehow, only fifty-one people had died: forty-six aboard the Andrea Doria and five aboard the Stockholm. The final person rescued was an American crewman who had somehow slept through the entire disaster. He emerged onto the deck only just before the ship began her final plunge and was spotted, by extraordinary luck, by the passing freighter Robert E. Hopkins.

For nearly nine hours, the Andrea Doria had flooded steadily while stubbornly remaining afloat. But at 9:45 a.m., her final descent began. By ten o’clock, her starboard rail slipped beneath the Atlantic, and her three swimming pools could be seen filling with seawater. As the bow disappeared, the stern rose gently, exposing the port propeller and shaft. One by one, the unused port-side lifeboats broke free from their davits and floated upside down across the surface. At 10:09 a.m. on July 26, 1956, ten hours after the collision, the Andrea Doria finally slipped bow-first beneath the Atlantic.

Above the scene, Boston Evening Traveler staff photographer Harry A. Trask circled in a light aircraft, capturing the liner’s final moments. One of those photographs, taken just nine minutes before she vanished into 162 feet (49 meters) of water, would win the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Photography.

Because the collision did not occur in U.S. territorial waters, and because neither vessel was American, the United States washed its hands of the disaster, declining to conduct a formal investigation. It was, however, more than happy to let the lawyers for both shipping lines, the officers of both ships, and the attorneys representing the victims’ families make use of New York boardrooms for the resulting legal proceedings.

An abrupt out-of-court settlement was reached. Each company agreed to absorb its own losses. For the Swedish American Line, damages were estimated at roughly $2 million. The Italian Line lost the Andrea Doria outright, a loss estimated at $30 million, about $368 million today. Heavy fog was identified as the primary cause, but both ships played a role in the disaster.

The Andrea Doria’s officers, particularly Second Officer Franchini, failed to properly plot the Stockholm’s course and speed using the radar plotting equipment available to them. Likewise, aboard the Stockholm, Third Officer Carstens misread his own radar, likely due to exhaustion, and failed to summon Captain Nordenson as regulations required.

Whereas the Andrea Doria had been navigating through fog for much of the day, the Stockholm had only just entered it and had not yet begun sounding her foghorn, delaying recognition of the danger until it was too late. The Andrea Doria also failed to follow the long-established rule that two vessels meeting head-on should both alter course to starboard. While the Stockholm turned right, the Andrea Doria turned left, never communicating that intention.

The Andrea Doria also continued at excessive speed for the prevailing conditions. While Captain Calamai had slowed the ship, the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (hell of a title) required vessels in restricted visibility to proceed at a speed that allowed them to stop within the distance they could see. In practice, that often meant far slower than commercial schedules allowed.

Responsibility did not rest solely with the officers, however. The Andrea Doria’s fuel tanks had been left only partially full and had not been ballasted according to Italian Line procedures, worsening the list after the collision. The ship’s own design flaws turned a survivable collision into the loss of a great liner.

There were also financial reasons to avoid a prolonged public inquiry. The Swedish American Line had another ship under construction at Ansaldo Shipyard in Genoa, the very yard that had built the Andrea Doria. Neither the shipbuilders nor the Italian Line had any interest in publicly examining the vessel’s design shortcomings, making a quiet settlement attractive to everyone involved.

Captain Harry Gunnar Nordenson was completely absolved of responsibility. He had not been on the bridge and should have been summoned before the collision. Captain Piero Calamai was not publicly vilified, but neither was he ever entrusted with another command. He carried the weight of those deaths for the rest of his life. After the disaster, he once told a friend, “I used to love the sea. Now I hate it.” His reported final words were, “Are all the passengers safe?”

Subsequent studies, aided by a far better understanding of marine radar, ship handling, and the collision itself, have partially exonerated Calamai. He was by no means the villain of this story.

Who is? Well, she likely still rests at 40°29.408′ N, 69°51.046′ W, in 162 feet (49 meters) of water.

Often called the “Mount Everest of scuba diving,” the wreck lies just shallow enough to tempt recreational divers. Tempt is the operative word. While the depth is technically within recreational limits, the short bottom time, frigid Atlantic water, strong currents, and rapidly deteriorating structure make the wreck extraordinarily dangerous. Its accessibility has lured many divers who lacked the technical skills the site truly demands.

Several professional salvage expeditions have recovered artifacts from the wreck, including the bronze statue of Andrea Doria himself, his ankles cut away so the enormous sculpture could be raised, the stern bell, and the bridge bell. The forward bell has never been recovered and is now likely lost forever as the wreck continues to collapse.

After visiting the wreck, the late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush remarked, “When you look at the shape of the hull, it appears a lot has come off.” He neglected to mention that during one OceanGate expedition, a submersible struck the wreck and damaged the port side of the bow. That submersible was piloted by Stockton Rush. Tells you a lot about what became of him.

Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, Bismarck, and countless other wrecks, has noted that the greatest danger today is no longer poor visibility or sediment stirred up from the seabed. It is the abandoned fishing nets draped across the wreck, many nearly invisible underwater. They can entangle divers in seconds, condemning them to the same watery grave as the forty-three victims whose bodies were never recovered from the ship. At least twenty-two scuba divers have died exploring the Andrea Doria. That figure seems low, and it probably is. The true number may well be higher.

In the end, what else is there to say?

I’ve now covered four, perhaps five, major shipwrecks. They all share something in common. Every one of those ships was built with humanity’s confidence, if not outright hubris, in mind. The largest. The fastest. The safest. The most luxurious. Some were even quietly thought to be unsinkable. Every one of them sank.

The natural conclusion?

Don’t go on the ocean.

Coffee and Shit

Note: Thank you for making it to the end! As I’ve said before, this was always meant to be entertaining rather than academic. My goal is to make history both educational and entertaining, the kind of history that first captured my imagination as a kid. Thank you for reading and for coming along on this journey. If you’ve made it this far, just know, I love you.