Wednesday

                      Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“When you come to a fork in the road...take it.”

Yogi Berra

Yesterday I mentioned the Battle of Belleau Wood being in Belgium...that is not correct Belleau Wood is in France.

I am once again reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It is a book about how the human species have changed and/or adapted to their environment.

The very first grain identified as being raised as a crop rather than wild was in the “Fertile Crescent”. That is in present day Iraq, Syria and Turkey primarily on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and their tributaries. Some may find this reading very boring but it is exciting for me to realize that the workers building the pyramids in Egypt were fed grain raised in the Fertile Crescent. Certain cereal grains were being farmed for over 2,000 years before the pyramids were built.

The oldest human bi-ped (walking upright) yet identified was a fossilized skeleton named “Lucy” that is about 3 ½ million years old. It was found in east-central Africa by an expedition led by Mary and Louis Leakey . From this location to the Fertile Crescent is about 1,800 miles. This means that humankind migrated north and east to the Fertile Crescent learning how to raise their own food as they went...I guess. The rise of mankind is an amazing montage of enigmas.

             This Date in History April 27

4977BC This is the date that German mathematician/astronomer Johann Kepler named as the date the Universe came into being. It was Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus that promoted the idea that it was the planets orbiting the sun rather that the Earth being the center of the Universe as taught by the all powerful Catholic Church. Kepler was correct in determining that the sun was the center of the “universe” but he was wrong in supposing the earth was created on April 27, 4977BC. Anyone can go out into their backyard and pick up a rock that is a million years old. Kepler was fortunate in that he was able to study with another genius astronomer in Nicholas Copernicus. Kepler also came up with laws of motion one of which is that the orbits of the planets are ellipses and tend to speed up when closest to the sun and slow down as the travel away from the sun. Another law was that ratio to how long a planet takes to orbit the sun as to its distance from the sun. Kepler was able to continue his research unhindered because he joined the brilliant Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in Prague. Brahe died and left all of his writings and notes about observations Brahe had made with the naked eye. Kepler became the chief astronomer for Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor. Kepler and Copernicus had been communicating with Galileo and found that Galileo had improved upon a telescope and Galileo had sent them instructions on how to make one of their own and indeed Kepler had a telescope made for him. Galileo was forced to recant any teaching about the earth orbiting the sun because the Pope did not see it that way and promised Galileo a life of torture if he didn’t recant. After the telescope a light came on in the mind of Kepler. It was Kepler that described in detail the operation of the human eye. Kepler died in Regensburg, Germany in 1630. Then 13 years later the sun rose over the scientific and mathematical community with the birth of Isaac Newton. Newton utilized many of Kepler’s theories in defining his own laws of motion that are still in use to this day. Even though Kepler made gigantic contributions to the scientific world, he was wrong about the age of the earth. Since the universally accepted beginning of the universe is the so-called “Big Bang” theory, Kepler was only off by a mere 13.7 billion years.

1805 For the past few years a powerful leader in the North African country of Tripoli had been sending raiders out of his ports to prey upon American merchant ships crossing the Mediterranean. US President Thomas Jefferson got a belly full of this and tasked a company of the recently formed US Marines to put a stop to it. An American mercenary named William Eaton was put in charge and formed up a company of Marines and a few Berber tribesmen and landed about 500 miles east of Tripolania (in present day Libya), as it was called then. Eaton led the small force to Tripolania and sent in the Marines under the command of Lieutenant Pressley O’Bannon to take care of business. And take care they did. The Marines attacked from the southeast in two columns and two US gun ships in the Mediterranean, the USS Argus and the USS Hornet, open fire from the north. It was all over but the shouting in very short order when the Tripolania leader, Hemet Karamanli, had his ass handed to him by the Marines. Karmanli was so impressed with the bravery of Lieutenant O’Bannon that he presented him with a fancy-schmantsy sword that every Marine sword to this day is modeled after. It was from this expedition that the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli” appears in the Marine Corp Hymn. By the way, the frequency of attacks on American shipping in the Mediterranean dropped precipitously.

1865 Just a few days after the end of the Civil War one of the worst marine disasters in history occurs. The steamboat Sultana had departed New Orleans headed for Cairo, Illinois via the Mississippi River. The Captain of the ship was offered money per person by the US Army to take Union soldiers that were in the south at the end of the war, especially those poor souls that endured the Andersonville Prison, back up north an let them off in Cairo. The Captain saw dollar signs and began loading more and more soldiers aboard his vessel at each stop. After a while he was more than doubly overloaded. His chief mechanic came and told the Captain that the steam boiler had a leak in the plating and they needed to stop, bleed off the steam and make repairs. The Captain could not see anything but dollar signs and ordered a temporary repair and he continued up the river. The temporary repair was made and on they went with about 2,100 people aboard on a boat made for 1,100 passengers and crew. Just above Memphis the Sultana’s boiler exploded and all but 400 are either scalded to death in the steam or drown in the swift river which was just under flood stage after heavy rains. Nearly all of the victims were Union soldiers from Andersonville prison.

1521 Earlier the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan had departed Spain in the search for a westward passage to the Molucca, or Spice Islands. He sailed south to West Africa, crossed over to South America and began searching for a passage west. He searched several South American rivers to no avail and finally he found a passage near the tip of South America that is named for him to this day, the Straights of Magellan. It took 38 days to make passage but Magellan wept when he sailed out onto the broad Pacific knowing he had succeeded. His first stop was Guam and just in the nick of time because the crews of the remaining two ships were near starvation. From there he sailed to the Philippines just 400 miles from the Moluccas. While in the Philippines he met with a friendly tribesman that requested his help in suppressing another nearby village that had been raiding his village. Magellan foolishly agreed. So the raiders appeared and Magellan took a poison dart in the leg and was dead in a matter of hours. Here he was, had sailed ¾ of the way around the world and is killed by a poison dart. Anyway, his navigator took command and sailed to the Moluccas, loaded spices to the gunnels, and sailed across the Indian Ocean, around the tip of Africa and back to Spain. This was one of the most important expeditions ever undertaken. It was too bad that Magellan was not there to accept the accolades.

              Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow