When William Harrison disappeared from Campden, England, in 1660, his servant offered an incredible explanation: that he and his family had murdered him. The events that followed only proved the situation to be even more bizarre. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe “the Campden wonder,” an enigma that has eluded explanation for more than 300 years.
We’ll also consider Vladimir Putin’s dog and puzzle over a little girl’s benefactor.
About 150,000 years ago, a Neanderthal man was exploring the Lamalunga Cave in southern Italy when he fell into a sinkhole. Too badly injured to climb out again, he died of dehydration or starvation. Over the ensuing centuries, water running down the cave walls gradually incorporated the man’s bones into concretions of calcium carbonate. Undisturbed by predators or weather, they lay in an immaculate state of preservation until cave researchers finally discovered them in 1993.
This is a great boon for paleoanthropologists — “Altamura Man” is one of the most complete Paleolithic skeletons ever discovered in Europe — but there’s a downside: The bones have become so deeply involved in their matrix of limestone that no one has found a way to remove them without destroying them. So, for now, all research must be carried out in the cave.
Something significant happened in Tandil, Argentina, on Feb. 29, 1912 — a 300-ton stone that had perched impossibly on the edge of a local hill suddenly tumbled to the bottom and broke into pieces.
Whether this happened due to vandalism or to blasting at a local quarry is unknown — there were no witnesses.
In 2007 the town replaced it with an exact replica. To date, it’s still there.
Stranded in Java after the Japanese invasion of 1941, the Dutch minesweeper Abraham Crijnssen found a unique way to sneak out: The crew covered the decks with jungle foliage and painted the hull to resemble cliffs, giving the ship the appearance of a small island.
Traveling only at night and anchoring near shore, the minesweeper gradually made her way to West Australia, becoming the last Allied vessel to escape Java and the only one of her class in the region to survive.
(Thanks, Paul.)
Germany’s Heidelberg Castle is home to a famously enormous wine barrel, capable of holding 57,853 U.S. gallons. This is actually the most recent of four enormous wine barrels that the castle has housed, the first built in 1591. Unfortunately it’s empty — today it serves mostly as a tourist attraction and a foundation for the fanciful dance floor above it.
“Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun,” wrote Mark Twain in A Tramp Abroad, “and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me.”
This is the so-called Droeshout portrait of William Shakespeare, engraved by Martin Droeshout as the frontispiece for the First Folio, published in 1623. In his 1910 book Bacon Is Shake-Speare, Edwin Durning-Lawrence draws attention to the fit of the coat on the figure’s right arm. “Every tailor will admit that this is not and cannot be the front of the right arm, but is, without possibility of doubt, the back of the left arm.” Compare this with the figure’s left arm, where “you at once perceive that you are no longer looking at the back of the coat but at the front of the coat.”
If that’s not enough, note the line beneath Shakespeare’s jaw, suggesting that he’s wearing a false face. The engraving is in fact “a cunningly drawn cryptographic picture, shewing two left arms and a mask” and proving that Shakespeare is a fraud and not the author of the plays attributed to him.
I’ll admit that I don’t quite see the problem with the coat, but apparently I’m just not discerning enough: In 1911 Durning-Lawrence reported that the trade journal Tailor and Cutter had agreed that Droeshout’s figure “was undoubtedly clothed in an impossible coat composed of the back and front of the same left arm.” Indeed, the Gentleman’s Tailor Magazine printed “the two halves of the coat put tailor fashion, shoulder to shoulder” and observed that “it is passing strange that something like three centuries should have been allowed to elapse before the tailor’s handiwork should have been appealed to in this particular manner.”
Aceldama
n. a field of bloodshed
abreption
n. the action of snatching something away
tutament
n. a means of defence; a safeguard
Strange freaks these round shot play! We saw a man coming up from the rear with his full knapsack on, and some canteens of water held by the straps in his hands. He was walking slowly, and with apparent unconcern, though the iron hailed around him. A shot struck the knapsack, and it and its contents flew thirty yards in every direction; the knapsack disappeared like an egg thrown spitefully against the rock. The soldier stopped, and turned about in puzzled surprise, put up one hand to his back to assure himself that the knapsack was not there, and then walked slowly on again unharmed, with not even his coat torn.
— Franklin Aretas Haskell, The Battle of Gettysburg, 1908
In 1924 a curious network of catacombs was discovered in Washington D.C. They were traced to Harrison Dyar, a Smithsonian entomologist who had been industriously digging tunnels in the city for almost two decades. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Dyar’s strange hobby — and the equally bizarre affairs in his personal life.
We’ll also revisit balloons in World War II and puzzle over a thief’s change of heart.
In May 1864, Union corporal James Denn was hit in the hand by a Confederate minie ball in the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse. Denn survived the fighting, but the ball remained lodged in his now-useless hand, and he was discharged from the service in December.
The ball remained in Denn’s hand for 38 years, during which time he would often rattle it to entertain (or appall) visiting children. In 1902 he moved into the Soldiers’ Home in Washington D.C., where surgeon Louis A. LaGarde finally removed it, arguably performing the last surgical operation of the Civil War.
“Missile was loose in a thick sac under palmar fascia,” LaGarde memorably reported. “Sac contained about 1 ounce of hemorrhagic fluid, the blood being no doubt the result of frequent traumatisms from shaking the hand violently near the ears of his friends to cause them to hear the ball rattle in the cyst. The succussion sound made by the loose ball and the fluid in the unyielding sac was very perceptible to the sense of hearing.”
On June 15, 1936, A. Dean Lindsay of Ocilla, Ga., visited a Pittsburgh notary public and presented a claim for
[a]ll of the property known as planets, islands-of-space or other matter, henceforth to be known as ‘A.D. Lindsay’s archapellago’ [sic] located in all the region visible (by any means) upward, (or in any other direction) from the city of Ocilla, Ga, together with all planets, islands-of-space or other matter (except this world, the Moon and the planet Saturn) visible from any other planet, island-of-space or other matter.
“On a May night in 1936,” he explained later, “I was watching the full moon. It seemed so large and beautiful that I thought of it as real estate, and said to myself, ‘Nobody owns it!’ Then I decided to acquire it by original claim deed.”
He left Earth to its inhabitants but in two separate deeds claimed
All of the property in ‘A. Dean Lindsay’s archapellago’ (commonly called the sky, or heavens) known as the planet ‘Saturn’ and periodically seen from the city of Ocilla, Ga.
and
All of the property in ‘A. Dean Lindsay’s archapellago’ commonly called ‘The Moon’, a planet in the sky.
He sent the deeds and the required payment to R.K. Brown, clerk of the Superior Court in Ocilla, and accordingly on June 28 Brown recorded them in Deed Book 11, pages 28-29, at Irwin County Courthouse in Ocilla.
So that’s that. “Can you believe it?” Lindsay wrote in a letter to Ramon P. Coffman. “That I own the Moon and the Sun, the stars, the comets, meteors, asteroids — everything, everywhere beyond this world?”
Occasionally thereafter he would receive requests to purchase the moon, a constellation, or a star. He sent them all the same answer: “Henry Ford is not rich enough to buy them, so I know that you cannot.”
