Read The Second Book of General Ignorance Online
Authors: John Lloyd,John Mitchinson
The Second Book of General Ignorance (40 page)
Not harpoons, but lances.
For the early whalers, the harpoon wasn’t a killing weapon; it was used to attach a line to the whale. This was thrown by a specialist harpooner who stood up in a rowing boat with one knee jammed into a cut-out section of thwart called the ‘clumsy cleat’. He hurled the harpoon into the whale from up to 6 metres (20 feet) away. The harpoon was attached to a 150-fathom (275-metre or 900-foot) rope impregnated with animal fat to help it run smoothly, coiled in a huge bucket on the deck and kept wet to prevent it catching fire from friction as it paid out.
When it reached its limit, the whalers were treated to a ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’. This meant being pulled along by the whale at up to 42 kilometres per hour (26 miles per hour), the fastest speed any man had then reached on water. (Nantucket Island, off the coast of Massachusetts, was the centre of whaling in the North Atlantic in the nineteenth century.) Many hours later, the whale would eventually tire
and the boat would row over to it. An officer would then change places with the harpooner to deliver the death blow with a lance (only officers could lance a whale). The cry of ‘There’s fire in the chimney’ meant that blood was spouting from the whale’s blowhole and the end was near.
The carcass was then towed alongside the mother vessel and cut up or ‘flensed’ from the deck using long-handled tools. Often, this exercise was a race against teeming sharks, which tore pieces of blubber from the whale while it was being butchered. Harpooning was such a dangerous profession that the Norwegians allowed only single men to do it.
Things changed in 1868 when Sven Foyn, a Norwegian engineer, invented an exploding harpoon gun. This did kill the whale and could be used from the deck of large, steam-powered vessels. It transformed whaling, allowing the hunting of faster, more powerful species, such as rorquals like the blue whale (from the Norwegian
röyrkval
, meaning ‘furrowed whale’, after the long pleats in their underbellies). Because rorquals sank when they died, later versions of the exploding harpoon also injected air into the carcass to keep it afloat.
The blue whale became the most profitable of all whale catches: a 27-metre (90-foot) whale yielded 15,900 litres (3,500 gallons) of oil. By the 1930s more than 30,000 blue whales were being killed annually. When the International Whaling Commission banned hunting them in 1966, the population of blue whales had dropped from an estimated 186,000 in 1880 to fewer than 5,000.
The eponymous whale in Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
(1851) was named after a real albino sperm whale called ‘Mocha Dick’ who was often seen near the Chilean island of Mocha and who carried with him dozens of harpoons left embedded in his body from more than a hundred battles with whalers throughout the 1830s and 1840s.
In 2007 Alaskan whalers killed a Bowhead whale that had
the tip of a bomb harpoon dated to 1880 embedded in its blubber, which meant it was at least 130 years old when it died.
It’s not their rarity, but their relative commonness that sets them apart.
A staggering 69 million Penny Blacks have been in circulation at one time or other. Many have survived intact. This is because, instead of using envelopes, Victorian letters were written on one side of a sheet of paper, which was then folded and sealed, so the address and stamp were on the reverse of the letter itself. If the letter was kept, so was the stamp.
If you have a Penny Black in your collection, you’ll be lucky to get more than £100 for it. Even this is rather a lot considering how many of them there are – their value is kept artificially high by collectors sitting on hundreds of them and releasing them on to the market very slowly.
The world’s most valuable stamp, the Tre Skilling Yellow, was sold at auction in Zurich in 1996 for 2.88 million Swiss Francs (about £1.8 m) and again in Geneva in May 2010 for an undisclosed price, all bidders at the auction being sworn to secrecy. If the paper that the stamp is printed on were a commodity sold by weight, it would retail at £55 billion a kilo. The best-known rare stamp is the 1856 British Guiana 1 cent Magenta, which has been kept in a vault since it last changed hands in 1980. Its owner, John du Pont, heir to the Du Pont chemicals fortune, is currently serving a life sentence for murder.
The most valuable British stamp is a Penny Red printed from plate number 77 in 1864. Plate 77 was corrupt and a
few defective stamps went into circulation. There are only six known examples left. One is in the Tapling Collection at the British Library priced at £120,000.
Until Sir Rowland Hill (1795–1879), the social reformer and Secretary of the Post Office, introduced the Penny Black in 1840, it was the receiver not the sender of a letter who paid for the postage. MPs could send letters for free: they did this by stamping it with their ‘frank’ (a ‘true’ or ‘frank’ mark).
Sir Rowland Hill also invented postcodes. He divided London into ten districts each with a compass point and a central office. The original ten areas were EC (Eastern Central), WC (Western Central), NW, N, NE, E, SE, S, SW and W. All were contained within a circle of 12 miles’ radius from central London. The present system was introduced in Croydon in 1966. It is made up of the outward code (e.g. OX7 – needed to sort from one town to another) and the inward code (e.g. 4DB – required for sorting within the town).
The first letterboxes were set up in Jersey, thanks to the novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–82). Hill sent Trollope to the Channel Islands in 1852 to see how best to collect mail on the islands, given the unpredictable sailing times of the Royal Mail packet boats. Trollope suggested using a ‘letter-receiving pillar’ that could be picked up whenever there was a sailing. The first box, erected in November 1852, was olive green. It worked so well that the Post Office rolled them out across the nation. By 1874 so many people had walked straight into the green boxes that red was settled on as a better choice. The Royal Mail still has a trademark on the colour ‘pillar box red’.
STEPHEN
Do you know Jimmy Tarbuck? He was doing one of
those Royal Command performances, and as he was going off,
he looked up into the royal box and said, ‘Ooh, that reminds me.
I must buy a stamp.’
Not until 1946.
Until then cleavage was a word used exclusively by geologists to describe the way a rock or crystal splits.
In the 1940s, the British film studio Gainsborough Pictures produced a series of raunchy bodice-rippers collectively known as the ‘Gainsborough Gothics’.
The Wicked Lady
(1945) was an eighteenth-century tale of a husband-murdering, society-beauty-cum-highwaywoman, starring Margaret Lockwood (then Britain’s most bankable female star), James Mason and Patricia Roc. It was a huge hit in Britain, but the revealing costumes caused problems in the USA.
The Motion Picture Production Code Administration, popularly known as The Hays Code, was a voluntary system of movie censorship introduced in 1930 by Will Hays (1879–1954), the US Postmaster General. Its job was to spell out what was and wasn’t acceptable to show on the screen. In 1945 it changed its name to The Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA is still with us today: it’s the body responsible for rating films as PG, PG-13, R and so forth.
When
The Wicked Lady
hit the USA, the MPAA demanded changes, but it seems they were overcome by coyness. They hid their embarrassment by using a dry geological term as a
euphemism for ‘the shadowed depression dividing an actress’s bosom into two distinct sections’.
In 1946
Time
magazine picked up the word when it reported:
Low-cut Restoration costumes worn by the Misses Lockwood and Roc display too much ‘cleavage’. The British, who have always considered bare legs more sexy than half-bare breasts, are resentfully re-shooting several costly scenes.
A new usage was born. Until the end of the Second World War, the partial exposure of a woman’s breasts was covered by the French term
décolletage
, first recorded in English in 1894 and derived from
décolleté
, ‘low-necked’ (1831), from the verb
décolleter
, ‘to bare the neck and shoulders’.
It’s arguable that
décolletage
is still the prettiest way of putting it. In Middle English the ‘cleavage’ was bluntly called ‘the slot’ and, today, the best the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists can manage is the intermammary cleft or intermammary sulcus (
sulcus
is the Latin for ‘fold’ or ‘furrow’).
So it seems cleavage is here to stay: and the way it’s used is proliferating. A lateral view of breasts is ‘side cleavage’. A glimpse beneath is ‘neathage’ or ‘Australian cleavage’. Bottom cleavage – a visible buttock cleft – has been known as ‘builder’s bum’ since 1988. Toe cleavage, the partial exposure of toes by ‘low-cut’ shoes, is considered both sexy and stylish. According to shoe guru Manolo Blahnik, ‘The secret of toe cleavage, a very important part of the sexuality of the shoe, is that you must only show the first two cracks.’
The back of a thong peeking over the top of a pair of jeans (which implies cleavage without revealing it) is called a ‘whale-tail’. In 2005 the American Dialect Society voted it the most creative new word of the year.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s a
lack
of testosterone that makes people aggressive; if anything, surplus testosterone seems to make them friendlier.
Both men and women make testosterone, though the levels in women are, of course, significantly lower. It helps grow muscle mass, increases bone density and prevents osteoporosis.
In 2009 Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich gave 120 women either testosterone pills or placebos, and then involved them in a role-playing situation. The mythic reputation of testosterone is so powerful that those women who
thought
they had been given it acted aggressively and selfishly (even if they’d actually received the placebo), whereas those who really
did
get testosterone behaved more fairly and were better at interacting socially, whether they believed they had received the pill or not.
Testosterone is linked to aggression in animals, so until very recently it was assumed to have a similar effect on humans. This seems not to be the case. It appears that
low
testosterone levels are more likely to cause mood disorders and aggression. Studies into testosterone have only been going on for ten years, so its function is not yet fully understood. Oddly, in the first few weeks of life, baby boys are pumped full of as much testosterone as they’ll have in their teens, though this reduces to barely detectable levels by four to six months.
In 2004 Donatella Marazziti and Domenico Canale of the University of Pisa measured testosterone levels in two groups, each composed of twelve men and twelve women. The ‘Love Group’ consisted of people who had fallen in love in the previous six months, and the ‘Control Group’ were either single or in stable long-term relationships. The study found
that men from the Love Group had lower levels of testosterone than men in the Control Group, while women from the Love Group had higher testosterone levels than their Control Group counterparts. The researchers theorised that, in the falling-in-love stage of a relationship, this apparent balancing act may serve to temporarily eliminate or reduce emotional differences between the sexes.
Testosterone is a hormone. Hormones (from the Greek word for ‘impulse’ or ‘attack’) are chemicals released by glands in one part of the body that use the bloodstream to transport messages to, and have an effect on, cells elsewhere.
Progesterone, a hormone associated with pregnant women, is also present in both willow trees and yams, which suggests it has a role that predates the evolution of modern animals.
Oxytocin is a hormone associated with maternal bonding, affectionately referred to by biologists as ‘the cuddle chemical’. It can reduce fear, anxiety and inhibitions, and promotes social and sexual bonding as well as parenting. Neuroeconomists (who combine psychology, economics and neuroscience to study how decisions are made) have experimented on subjects participating in a game called ‘Investor’. They found that a squirt of oxytocin up the nose doubled levels of trust among players.
No, we thought that as well – but it’s not the dead bodies. It’s the survivors.
The World Health Organization (WHO) states unequivocally:
It is important to stress that the belief that cholera epidemics are caused by dead bodies after disasters, whether natural or man-made, is false.
Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal infection, caused by the bacterium
Vibrio cholerae
. It is transmitted from infected faeces to the mouth, or by food or water that are contaminated. It kills through dehydration and kidney failure. In Europe in the nineteenth century, cholera was so common that it proved a great boon to unscrupulous heirs. People poisoned by means of small quantities of arsenic – known as ‘inheritance powder’ – were often assumed to have died of cholera, which has similar symptoms.
It can take mere hours to incubate – which is why it spreads so rapidly, overwhelming attempts to contain it – and can kill a healthy adult within a day. Although around 75 per cent of people infected with cholera don’t develop symptoms, the germs can be present in their faeces for up to a fortnight, thus helping to spread the disease. People with damaged immune systems – through malnutrition, for instance, or HIV – are the most likely to die.
Most horribly of all, the perfect situation for cholera to spread is a refugee camp, where survivors of disasters are huddled together with inadequate supplies of clean water, and where human waste isn’t safely processed. The same applies to a city where the infrastructure has been damaged by, say, an earthquake, a flood, or a ‘humane intervention’ with so-called ‘smart bombs’.
Dead bodies don’t come into it: cholera pathogens in a corpse rapidly become harmless. Yet the myth that the disease is caused by ‘bodies piling up’ is almost universally believed, with even the most respectable news outlets repeating it every time there’s an outbreak of cholera following a disaster.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy – or disgrace, depending on
your point of view – is that cholera is far from incurable. Effective treatment – a solution of sugar and salts taken by mouth called oral rehydration – is simple and cheap. Given promptly, it saves the lives of more than 99 per cent of sufferers. And yet the WHO estimates that 120,000 people die of cholera every year.
Not that we want to alarm you, but we feel you ought to know: the seventh cholera pandemic in history began in Indonesia in 1961 – and it’s still going on, having spread through Asia, Europe and Africa. In 1991 it reached Latin America – which hadn’t seen cholera for more than a century. It is, by some margin, the longest of the cholera pandemics so far, probably because modern transport spreads infected people and foodstuffs with such rapid efficiency.
A pandemic is a worldwide epidemic. Pandemics generally end when there aren’t enough people left to keep them going – because they’ve developed immunities, or been vaccinated, or (if you’ll pardon the expression) died.