Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

27 October 2023

Historical Inaccuracy


Historical Inaccuracy in movies is nothing new. It's called poetic license.

Historical Inaccuracy in non-fiction articles is not usual and not good. If there are facts, get them right.

Case in point was the article put up on Google Alerts from The Loveland-Reporter Herald of October 21, 2023. A review of the movie THE BUCCANEER (Paramount Pictures, 1958) with historical notations.

There's no problem with the writer expressing opinions about the movie. I agree with many of them. The casting of Yul Brenner as Jean Lafitte was a good choice, so was Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson, Charles Boyer as Dominique You and Claire Bloom as pirate Bonnie Brown. However, the wonderful Inger Stevens, who plays Louisiana Governor William C. C. Claiborne's daughter who has a love affair with Lafitte, well, Claiborne did have a daughter at the time but she was three years old.

However, the article describes the "well done" battle scenes, which were clearly filmed on a Hollywood sounds stage where the dialogue and sounds of horses and bagpipes echo from the walls of the sound stage. British troops wearing kilts march slowly in a wide line to their deaths, when in fact they marched at the quick-step in two long columns. There were no kilts worn at the Battle of New Orleans. The Scottish 93rd Regiment of Foot (Sutherland Highlanders) wore trews, tartan trousers – their winter uniform as the Battle of New Orleans, The battle itself involved six engagements from December 14, 1814, through the climactic battle on January 8, 1815, to the final engagement south of New Orleans at Fort St. Philip, January 9-17, 1815. It occurred in one of the coldest winters in Louisiana history. Hence, no kilts.

As much as the writer of the article suspects "there is a grain of truth in the song" The Battle of New Orleans sung by Johnny Horton, the British did not run after the battle as the song goes, “They ran through the briers and they ran through the brambles/ And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go/ They ran so fast that the hounds couldn’t catch ’em/ On down the Mississippi to the gulf of Mexico.” This is untrue.

In fact, the British withdrew to its original position at the start of the climactic battle, the de la Ronde Plantation, and waited to see if General Jackson was dumb enough to come out from behind his formidable fortifications to try and destroy the British army. Jackson was too asute to try this. His job was to protect New Orleans and he remained behind his fortifications between the British army and the city.

The new commander-in-chief of the British Expedition (Generals Pakenham and Gibbs were killed at the battle and third-in-command General Keane so severly wounded he was supposed to die), GeneralJohn Lambert conducted a disciplined, orderly withdrawl of his defeated army back through the swamp to the Royal Navy ships outside Lake Borgne. He was decorated for this strategic withdrawl. He left Louisiana to capture Mobile, which highlights the fallicy (restated in the article) that The Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war ended.

While U.S. and British representatives agreed to end hostilities, initially signing a peace treaty at Ghent, Belgium, on December 24, 1814, the British and Americans were already fighting outside New Orleans. They just finished the second engagement on December 23, 1814 and fought again on December 28 and January 1, before the climactic battle on January 8. The Treay was not ratified by the U.S. Senate and Parliament until February 17, 1815, ending the War of 1812.

OK, it's a review of an inaccurate movie. Just don't add historical inaccuracies in an analysis.

I worked long hours accumulating 72,000 words of historical research before I wrote my epic novel BATTLE KISS. I made it as accurate as I could make it, so much so, my 16,303 word  January 8 battle scene was published in the historical journal SOUTHEAST LOUISIANA REVIEW (Vol. 4, Winter 2012/2013).

The article THE BUCCANEER can be found at: https://www.reporterherald.com/2023/10/21/trivially-speaking-the-buccaneer-seized-a-place-in-movie-history/

The book:

https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Kiss-Novel-New-Orleans-ebook/dp/B0069VMOI0/

Thanks all for now.

  www.oneildenoux.com 


17 August 2023

The Ambassador's Fancy Boots


 It happened that a certain Janus Imperial of Genoa lay slain."

                                                – Coroner's Inquest Report, City of London, August 27, 1379

At first glance it appeared that the altercation began over boots.

Like these, perhaps?

By the time the dust had settled, two London juries, the royal government, the city of London, London's powerful trading elites, the king and his uncle/chief advisor were all involved, and what had first seemed a street fight over boots quickly showed itself to be a bloody skirmish in a vicious economic war.

For starters, the victim was not just any Genoan. "Janus Imperial" (in Italian, "Giano Imperiale") was actually Genoa's ambassador to England. And the two thugs detained and charged with his murder weren't just any street toughs: they were rough-and-tumble street merchants. More on that in a bit.

First, the particulars of Imperiale's murder, then the background which showed it to be vastly more than a killing during a street brawl.

The altercation started in front of Imperiale's London residence, located in St. Nicholas Acton Lane. Imperiale was seated in front of his house, when two local men, John Kirkby and John Algor, crossed in front of him, once, twice, and finally a third time. Each time one of the men trod, supposedly innocently, on Imperiale's fancy boots. According to later court testimony, Kirkby "went past Giano Imperiale's feet and came back three time, on each occasion stumbling over his feet. for the sake of picking a quarrel between them."

The third time was the proverbial charm, and a brawl broke out between the two men and several of Imperiale's retainers. Imperiale was cut down, stabbed twice in the head, the coroner's report noted the cuts were "seven inches long and deep into the brain."

Imperiale, as it turned out, had come to London on a safe passage guaranteed by the government of King Richard II, in the person of the king's uncle and most influential courtier, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The purpose of Imperiale's visit to England was a diplomatic mission. He had come to London to negotiate a new trade agreement between the merchant guilds of Genoa and Richard's government. And since the king was a minor and his uncle influential (if not particularly well-liked), the Duke of Lancaster would be negotiating on his nephew's behalf.

A highly speculative portrait of John of Gaunt commissioned two centuries after his death.

The agreement was intended to cover the export of England's most lucrative product at the time: wool. The Duke of Lancaster was intent on cutting out the wool trade's middle men (in this case the established merchant guilds in London) as part of an on-going feud between the duke and his supporters within the royal government and not just the merchant guilds, but the city government of London itself.

The merchant guilds and their leaders had become vastly wealthy as a result of their participation in the exportation of wool. John of Gaunt found these captains of industry–who provided the royal government with massive loans intended to financially support the English crown's on-going and decades-long war with France–far too independent for the country's good. Worse, as many of these "lords of wool" did their civic duty by holding elective office within the city of London, they also infected the city government with their "independent streak." The root of their feud with the Duke of Lancaster was at their determination to keep the Duke from interfering in London's city government, and in Lancaster's equal determination to involve himself in the city's government whenever and however he saw fit.

"Gold on the hoof"

Lancaster's plan to cut his opponents out of the wool trade involved a treaty with Genoa calling for that trading city's merchant vessels to cease sailing up the Thames River and calling for their cargoes at the port of London. Instead they would call at the smaller, more easily controlled port of Southampton. Said agreement would be more convenient (and thus more profitable) for the Genoese and the  English crown would directly receive the cut of the trade London's wool merchants had counted on as their own for more than a century.

This all came to naught with Imperiale's murder. No Genoese ambassador, no trade negotiations, and therefore, no new trade deal. And the answer to the question of cui bono pointed a finger straight at London's merchant elite.

Throw in the fact that Kirkby and Algor were eventually run to ground, tossed in jail, and indicted on murder charges arising from Imperiale's death. Two successive London juries found the two men not guilty of murder. The fix was clearly in.

After nearly a year of legal maneuvering, Gaunt managed to have the two "street merchants" taken from London to await a trial before the duke himself and a picked "jury" of his closest allies among the English nobility. Dragged before this assemblage of lords after nearly a year in jail, Algor cracked.

The two men had acted on orders of London's governmental and trading elites, Algor said. Recruited through the very guilds which sponsored and protected men such as themselves, they had been sent by their masters to target Imperiale because a number of wealthy and influential men in London had begun to hear rumors of the deal the Genoan was negotiating with the Duke of Lancaster, and "in the event that he could bring his plans to conclusion, Giano Imperiale would destroy and ruin all the wool merchants of London."

Algor also named names, including that of the serving lord-mayor of London, the popular (and very wealthy) Sir John Philpot. It had been Philpot himself who, acting in his capacity as lord-mayor, arrested both Algor and Kirkby for Imperiale's death.

Because he provided evidence against several of his masters and his accomplice, Algor's life was spared. He reminded in jail until released in 1384, after which he disappeared from the public record. 

As for Kirkby, he was dragged still protesting his innocence to the gallows, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered-the traitor's death. This was Gaunt's final card to play. Plotting against a diplomat who enjoyed the Crown's protection was not just criminal, he insisted, but treasonous.

And while Philpot and the rest of the wealthy wool elite of London never faced any formal charges of treason, they were tarred with the same brush, and the taint of "treason" on their parts undermined these men and their peers in their public positions, making it more difficult for them to continue to rule in London.

The Duke of Lancaster celebrated this victory over the City of London, but it proved to be a short-lived one. Within two years Gaunt would be barred from holding direct royal authority as a result of his mismanagement of the on-going war in France, his own person ambitions to win the crown of Portugal for himself (in a disastrous and expensive military operation financed by the nearly bankrupt royal treasury), and his part in mismanaging the royal government's budgets. War, after all, could prove very expensive, especially losing one, as he did in Portugal.

So, in the end, the whole fracas was not over shoes, but over wool, which is to say, over trade, which, in turn is to say, over money, and the power it brings.

And that's it for me. See you in two weeks!

14 August 2023

What was, what could be, and everything in between.


One reason I love reading history is it’s already happened.  No need to fear impending catastrophe; we already know how the story turns out.  At least in the opinion of the historian, who may differ from others in the field.  And some historical commentary is energetically revisionist.   But generally, you’re safe from new, alarming events suddenly cropping up.  

I especially enjoy history where things worked out well for us, an outcome that at the time was seriously in doubt.  The big daddies of these stories focus on the American Revolution and World War II.  In fact, you could start reading books on these subjects when you’re ten years old and never live long enough to exhaust the supply. 

I like reading about all the stress and worry flooding the nervous systems of people like George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, whom we think of as implacable, irresistible over-achievers, fully confident that things like crossing the Delaware River in December, in open boats, to attack a bunch of well-trained German mercenaries was a swell idea that was sure to work out just fine.

Eisenhower wrote an apology for the failure of his planned Normandy invasion and stuck it in his pocket the night before D-Day:

"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

It’s powerful reading, also poignantly written.  I’ve never undertaken anything close to what he faced, though I’ve had plenty of moments when I prayed to a God I’m not sure I believe in, “Oh please, Lord, don’t let me f**k this up.”   

I also like to learn that something we all thought had happened one way, has turned out to be something entirely different.  This results from either fresher, better research, or the historian re-examining an event unblinkered by the prejudices of prior commentators.  Or both. 

Despite the fulminations of people unhappy about academics rethinking American history, since much of it throws treasured, self-congratulatory tropes overboard, I’d much rather know.   A good example is the Revolutionary War. Historians like Rick Atkinson are explaining that it was really bloody and awful, with plenty of gruesome excess on both sides of the conflict.  Well, yeah, all wars are like this.  And rather than making our success ignoble it should instruct us that it was one hell of a fight, one over which our ancestors gave their all.

Another benefit of reading history is it reminds us that our humanity hasn’t changed that much, if at all, since people started writing things down.  While technology has evolved, the thoughts, feelings, anxieties, hopes and dreams are all pretty much the same for the Mesopotamian grain merchant as the Wall Street Master of the Universe.  The grunt hauling stones to the pyramid or the slob on the subway trying to make his way home.

How is this germane to the fiction writer?  First off, history has a steadying influence over creative writing.  Things that have happened provide the context for what could have happened, even in science fiction.  Especially. 

Plausibility, credibility, believability.  Some writers hate the notion of being pinned down by the reality of human experience, but any editor will tell you that otherwise promising fiction can be utterly thwarted by flights of fancy launched from unsteady moorings.  You know when you’re reading it that the author is confusing invention with absurdity.  The great jazz musicians knew their scales and classic harmonic relationships.  Joyce, Pound, Stravinsky and Picasso never said abandon all prior structure, but to adapt, modify and innovate within established forms. 

Listeners and readers know this instinctively.  It’s an agreement with the artist.  Know your history, and trust the creators to know it as well.  And it goes both ways.  New Journalism was premised on describing real events with the flair and artistry of fiction.  The historians we love today understand this, and eagerly employ novelists’ techniques to power their tales of the past.  

Everyone’s better for it. 

01 June 2023

Rumors of the Lost Ark


History is a mystery, and I think that's why there's a number of us - Rob Lopresti, Doolin' Dalton, myself, and others - who are fascinated with history, archaeology, and all that old, old stuff.

Rob Lopresti wrote a great blog post a couple of weeks ago about hypnogagia, literal patterns that your eyes see just before you sleep (or when you shut your eyes extremely tight:  mine are black patterns on a yellow background), and their relationship to the symbols at Newgrange burial chamber in Ireland. (HERE) I've had hypnogagia all my life - in fact, last night I was awakened by a rattling, like of bones in a cup; twice.  

And Rob's piece yesterday was on archaeologists' interpretations of what they find, which (especially in the olden days) sprang more from their own ideas of what they should find and not what was already there.  And this post is sort of along the same lines - stick with me on it.

A while ago, I wrote a blog post on Paleolithic Languages (Older Than You Think), where paleolinguists have determined that there are 23 ultra-conserved words, "proto-words," that don't just still exist in almost all current language families, including Inuit-Yupik, but still sound remarkably alike. They go back at least 15,000 years, and are a window into a time of hunter-gatherers painting in Lascaux and trying to survive the end of the Younger Dryas (the next-to-the last mini-Ice Age):

thou, I, we, ye, who, what, this, that, not,
man/male, mother, hand, old, black,
give, hear, pull, flow, spit,
bark, fire, ashes, worm

BTW, I've always wondered what worm they meant– a snake (like in the Newgrange / Knowth sculptures)? A garden worm? The dog's worms?  The worm you put in uisce beatha (whiskey) to make it stronger?

So, a very long time ago, almost everyone in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe spoke the same language.  Or at least the same trading language.  The exceptions might be Australia (which had been cut off from the rest of the world back around 50,000 BCE) and the Americas, about whose isolation from the rest of the world is undergoing more and more under debate.

NOTE: Everyone talks about the Bering Land (really Ice) Bridge being the way that people got from Asia to Alaska to drifting down the Americas to Tierra del Fuego, BUT – there's more and more evidence that people settled across the Americas earlier than is allowed by that theory.  (Latest evidence is 23,000 year old footprints at White Sands, New Mexico.)  Plus they'd have been freezing all the way.  

Much more likely is by boat.  Our modern world is obsessed with land travel because (unless you cruise a lot) that's what we do.  Planes, trains, and automobiles. But before the combustion engine, most major hauling and travel was done by boat, barge, canoe, ship, skiff, etc.  And Thor Heyerdahl, for all his quirks, proved you could sail from South America to the Polynesian islands.  

And I say, why not from / to China?  For one thing, while Africa and Europe see a human in the Moon, Chinese, Aztec, and much Native American lore sees a Rabbit in the Moon.  

But the real mystery isn't how a tiny core of hominids communicated with each other via a common language.  The real mystery is why, once the Last Glacial Period (c 115,000-11,700 years ago) ended, all across the globe - husbandry and agriculture begin? By 9,000 BCE, From the Fertile Crescent to Papua New Guinea to the Yangtze Basin, people we have hard-core evidence of humans growing crops.  Raising domesticated animals for food.  And that's probably not the true date of the beginning the "revolution", because pottery for storage and processing (including the fermenting of certain grains, i.e., alcohol! Something to drink, people!) dating back 20,000 years ago has been found in China and Japan.  We don't know the half of it.  

So:  how did everyone know what to do, in such widely disparate places, once the weather let up?  We don't know.  One Hundred Thousand Years of Ice is going to grind up a lot of evidence that we will simply never find.  But we have the oral traditions...

Well, my old friend and frequent thinking / drinking buddy John Franklin and I have discussed this many a long hour, and we both believe that 

(1) Humans (of any species / subspecies) have been in touch with each other for a very long time.  

(2) Before the Last Glacial Period (c 115,000-11,700 years ago), there were technologically advanced hominid civilizations.  For all I know, advanced enough that they caused a nuclear winter, because that is apparently what civilizations do: we grow and grow and grow and then one day we grow ourselves right out of our habitats.  As Jared Diamond once wondered, what was the man who cut down the last tree on Easter Island thinking?  Probably about the [equivalent of] money he was about to make selling it.  

(3) Anyway, over 100,000 years ago, something happened, and what followed was 100,000 years of Ice.  

But we have the stories of what came before:  stones walking themselves to their sites (Egypt and Easter Island)! People flying through the air on magic carpets! Rings / stones (Solomon's Seal) that allowed people communicate with the animals and around the world!  Stones that talk!  And the myths / fairytales!*  Those are memories, passed down for so long they became myth, of technology that used to exist. Just as in 10,000 or 100,000 years people (should the human race survive) will remember planes, cell phones, Zoom meetings, etc., as stones, rings, rooms, etc. 

John Franklin says the civilization(s) undoubtedly knew what was coming.  So, you're facing extinction by massive climate change, and it's a crapshoot as to how long it will last and who's going to survive it.  What do you do?  Give up? Or try to out ways to condense important information to something that will be understandable for literally millennia, and training people how to pass it along?**  (Of course, there's always denial...  If you don't think about it, Maybe it will go away.)

And we've discussed what powered these ancient civilizations.  Most of technological history has been humans trying to replace muscle power with anything else that will work.  Windmills, waterwheels, levers & fulcrums, railroads, cars, computers, etc.  But to run these things you have to have some kind of fuel.  So what did they use 100 millennia ago?

Franklin says that the best way to figure out what fueled pre-Last Glacial Period technologies is to look at what's considered rare but valuable today. He plumps for gold.  Gold is an excellent conductor and holder of electricity.  I remember reading once that the Ark of the Covenant could well be a description of how to build a battery:

“First let them make a Chest using acacia wood: make it three and three-quarters feet long and two and one-quarter feet wide and deep. Cover it with a veneer of pure gold inside and out and make a molding of gold all around it. Cast four gold rings and attach them to its four feet, two rings on one side and two rings on the other. Make poles from acacia wood and cover them with a veneer of gold and insert them into the rings on the sides of the Chest for carrying the Chest. The poles are to stay in the rings; they must not be removed.  Place The Testimony that I give you in the Chest. Now make a lid of pure gold for the Chest, an Atonement-Cover, three and three-quarters feet long and two and one-quarter feet wide.  Sculpt two winged angels out of hammered gold for either end of the Atonement-Cover, one angel at one end, one angel at the other. Make them of one piece with the Atonement-Cover. Make the angels with their wings spread, hovering over the Atonement-Cover, facing one another but looking down on it... I will meet you there at set times and speak with you from above the Atonement-Cover and from between the angel-figures that are on it, speaking the commands that I have for the Israelites.  (Exodus 25:10-22, The Message Bible)   

I pointed out to Franklin that the Ark is empty, except for "the Testimony," and usually a battery has more technical stuff in it (look it up yourself) than a scroll.  

His reply:  "Who says 'the Testimony' was a scroll? That could be a code word for some practical knowledge. And those aren't angels: they're cherubim.  Fairly frightening creatures - four faces, two wings, definitely nonhuman. Transmitters? Receivers? Perhaps. Consider that no one's supposed to touch the Ark, except the specially trained Levites, and even they're only supposed to carry it using poles overlaid with gold.  No hands on.  Uzzah, the one man we know of who reached out and touched it dropped dead. Sounds like electrocution to me."  

I've heard worse theories.  

So say he's right, and before the Last Glacial Period, their technology was fueled by gold. It would explain why the racial memory of gold as the source of power and wealth.  Granted, it's beautiful, but it's not especially useful... Anymore. And yet, since ancient times, alchemists have tried to transmute lead into gold (Zosiumus of Panopolis, c. 300 CE provides the earliest record to survive) via the philosopher's stone, which is / was ...????  Who knows? 

It would also explain why gold today is generally hard to find, in low concentrations, and expensive to process - the Old Old Ones*** used most of it up.  

Franklin:  "So, imagine a world, ten thousand, fifty thousand years from now, where there are whispers of a powerful energy source, that gave immense wealth and power to those who could control it. A dark energy, a black energy, dark oil, night coal, that harnessed the dark forces of the universe and gave unimaginable power. And there are still remnants of it:  the Tears of Saturn and the Blood of the Moon, the Night Gifts are horded by Kings. The nobility and wealthy wear it, in their hair, on their faces. Priests sacrifice it to the gods, kings are embalmed in it, buried in caskets with it. A vial of it is immensely precious. A necklace of jet or obsidian is like diamonds today. And no one has any idea that these once fueled an entire civilization. They just know it's valuable. Powerful."   

"Okay," I said. "So they revere oil and coal. But what are they using for fuel?"

"Something we've never thought of, of course." Franklin said. "Depends on what survives the Pyrocene."


Global map of average annual area burned (percentage of cell burned) 
for 1960 to 2000; data from Mouillot and Field (2005). LINK


* And all the old myths.  And some new ones.  There's a Great Flood in every oral tradition, along with a blind king, a Cinderella, and the oldest are of a blacksmith cheating the devil.  

** BTW, Gregory Benford's non-fiction Deep Time:  How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia (1995) is worth a read. I recommend the first part (Ten Thousand Years of Solitude), about a government project he was involved in, trying to figure out how to communicate the danger of buried radioactive material to people far in the future. The last part (Stewards of the Earth) is about what future peoples (say, 100,000 years from now) will think of what we leave behind. 

*** With apologies to Cthulhu…



Now for some BSP:

Josh Pachter's Paranoia Blues is one of the five finalists for the Anthony award in the Best Anthology category, and Ed Aymar's "Still Crazy After All These Years," from it is a finalist in the Best Short Story category! And I am honored to have "Cool Papa Bell" in it!

Available at https://downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/pachter-paranoia-blues/

And on Amazon HERE

21 May 2023

The Mound Builders


Wednesday, Rob wrote about Neolithic graves in Europe. We hear about burial mounds, bogs, and even buried boats, mostly in the British Isles, but we know less about our own prehistoric Native Indian culture that preceded what we consider First Nation.

I grew up a short distance (a brief bicycle ride or a longish walk on little-boy legs) from an Indian mound called Hogback. It’s one of the simpler prehistoric Indiana burial sites, especially compared to the Serpentine Mound many miles east. The region was known as a finder's gold mine of points (arrowheads), spear tips, and birdstones.

The latter was a throwing weapon carved into an elongated form to fit the hand. While most birdstones were simply shaped without regard for museums that might come long after, a few have been found carved into the likeness of a bird with folded wings. An ancient craftsman had taken the time and effort to indulge in aesthetics, an astonishing reach across time and space.

Mounds

Indian mounds dotted the landscape through the Illinois, Indiana, Ohio belt, but also could be found in New England and New York. Some have been bulldozed, flattened for farming, or simply, disgustingly, used for easily obtained road-building material. Fortunately, others remain, some accessible by the public.

A curious question has arisen. Genetic research has shown the four major native American bloodlines descend from migrants traversing the Bering Land Bridge, a fifth strain suggests a prehistoric European migration. Not only is the DNA distinctive, but napping technology and burial practices differed. Were the mounds from this ancient group?

Classmates, Lela, Diane, and Kristi, found this fascinating documentary.

That Which Remains

One day I mounted an expedition to search the mound (no digging, just scoping the ground) and I made a find. It was a perfect, miniature axe head. I rushed home to show my parents.

brachiopod
brachiopod

My dad took one glance and said, "Not an axe head." I must have looked stricken because he handed it back and smiled. "It's much, much older. It's a brachiopod."

That was cool. And emblematic of Dad, an encyclopedic Google before Google. How many fathers could instantly identify a brachiopod by name?

Credit

Inspiration and following links are thanks to bright, beautiful, and brainy classmates Diane, Lela, and Kristi. They are an amazing resource.

Distant European ancestry isn’t unique amongst anomalies. Melanesian and Australian genes have unexpectedly popped up indigenous American populations.

23 July 2022

Women in the Military: From History to Mystery


 Okay, this post isn't really by moi.  I'm merely fronting for my good friend here.

It is my pleasure to introduce Alison Bruce to all you SleuthSayers!  Alison is the Executive Director of Crime Writers of Canada (yes, she took over from me a few years ago, bless her!)  With a dad who was in the Canadian Navy, and a British mother who was in the Royal Observer Corp during WW-II, her take on using history to embrace story-telling is particularly inspiring, I think.  Take it away, Alison!

Women in the Military:  From History to Mystery

by Alison Bruce

My favourite teacher of my favourite subject knocked the academic wind out of my sales in grade thirteen.  He told me, "You'll never be an historian."

I was hurt, angry, and determined to prove him wrong.

It turned out he was correct.  After graduating with a double major in history and philosphy, I finally got it.  I write stories, not history.

I decided to do my undergraduate thesis on women in the military in World War 1 and 11.  The focus would be World War 11 because my aunt was in the British Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS).  I grew up listening to the war experiences of my aunt, mother (Observer Corps) and grandmother (first time in the workforce.)  Unlike Nana and Mum, however, my aunt kept in touch with the women she served with. With their help, the bulk of the paper was going to be based on the stories of women in the military.

They were able to reach out to friends of friends and post my call for volunteers locally, something I couldn't do in Canada.  (This was the 1980s.  No World Wide Web to access.)

If I'd had enough time to gather more stories,I might have written a good popular history book.  But, as my academic advisor pointed out, I didn't have enough primary research other than stories.

That was okay.  By this time I had added Philosophy as a second major, and had given up on the idea of teaching because of the horror stories I was hearing from friends.  (What do you mean I would be expected to wear  pantyhose and a skirt or dress?) I had also started my second novel.  (I lost the first one in the woman's washroom at college.)

Fast forward a quarter century.  I still love to research history, or almost anything else, but prefer to write stories.  I've used research to write a mystery set in the old west, a romance set in the American Civil War, three mysteries set in Canada, and one in the Arctic Ocean involving the US and Canadian Navies.  Now I'm going back to the stories that put me on the road to becoming a writer.

I don't know of any author who has written about being in the Royal Observer Corps.  If you do know of such a book, fiction or nonfiction, please let me know in the comments.  It was made up of volunteers except for a few naval officers who ran the outfit.  My mother's tales of her service were largely self-deprecating, but that just makes them tailor-made for storytelling.  And all those stories I listened to when I was writing my paper?  Grist for the mill.  I only wish my professor was still alive so I could send her a copy of the book...when I finally finish it.

Alison Bruce is the Executive Director of Crime Writers of Canada. She writes history, mystery, and suspense.  Her books combine clever mysteries, well-researched backgrounds, and a touch of romance. Four of her novels have been finalists for genre awards.


 
GHOST WRITER 

In her role as ghostwriter, Jen Kirby joins a Canadian Arctic expedition to document and help solve a forty-year-old mystery involving an American submarine station lost during the Cold War. The trouble is, there are people—living and dead—who don't want the story told, and they’ll do anything to stop her.

https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Writer-Alison-Bruce-ebook/dp/B07Q6SS1K3 

31 March 2022

The Murder of Sir Thomas Overbury Part III: the Killing


(This is the final installment of a three-part series on a notorious murder during the reign of King James I of England [James VI of Scotland]. For the first part of this post, with general historical background as well as a fair bit about the victim, click here. For the second part, which deals mostly with the conspirators, click here.)

When is an "honor" not really an honor?

Everyone knows that sometimes an "honor" is precisely that. A great occasion for the honoree, and the sort of thing to be welcomed–if not outright eagerly anticipated– when it comes your way. Oscar nominations. Getting named to the board of a prosperous Fortune 500 company. Making the New York Times Bestseller list (I should live so long!).

Not always easy to quantify, but like the late, great Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography, "I know it when I see it." The same is also true of the kind of thing frequently called an "honor" when it really isn't.

Here's one example


And even worse than this type of infamous "non-honor honor" is the sort of honor that could be hazardous to your health. In an example from American history, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, first black regiment in the United States Army, received the "honor" of leading the charge during an attack on rebel fortifications at Fort Wagner, South Carolina.

Led by their heroic commander, one Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the 54th did itself proud, spearheading the Union charge into the teeth of murderous cannon fire, in an attempt to take the strategically important fort situated on an island in Charleston Harbor.

But the net result? The 54th Massachusetts Infantry numbered six hundred men at the time of the charge. The regiment suffered nearly a fifty percent casualty rate in this single action alone (two hundred seventy-two killed, wounded or missing)! Among the dead was Shaw, the colonel who led the way.

When it's an offer to serve as ambassador to Russia!

While not necessarily a death sentence, a 17th century example of an "honor" along these lines was serving as an ambassador to Russia. Especially during the early part of the century, when Russia was pretty much the "Wild West" (without the "West" part) of Europe. Anarchy. Lawlessness. A devastating famine that began in 1601 and lasted for years afterward. Invasion and extended occupation by Polish armies, culminating in a teen-aged Polish-Swedish nobleman briefly taking the throne in 1610!

By February of 1613, things had gotten a little better, with the Russians kicking the Poles out and electing a new (Russian-born) tsar, Mikhail, who established the Romanov dynasty. Barely twenty, Mikhail faced a long, grinding battle getting Russia's nobility to mind their manners and unite behind him in anything other than name. So even though there was a new sheriff in the Kremlin (and if his coronation portrait is any indicator, one with superb taste in spiffy red boots!), there was still plenty of lawlessness, crime, war, famine and pestilence to go around.

Even with the Poles gone, Russia was an impoverished, backward country on the periphery of what most Europeans considered civilization. For government functionaries such as Overbury, it was the type of diplomatic posting where careers went to die.

So how did he come to be the recipient of such a signal "honor"?

What happens when you piss off a rival and that rival has the queen's ear.


As mentioned previously, Overbury seems to have consistently overestimated his own cleverness, andsystematically underestimated that of nearly everyone around him. He had expended a great deal of time and effort steering his pretty boy puppet Robert Carr into King James' orbit so as to profit by a successful pulling of Carr's strings. When the king began to entrust Carr with a number of duties involving fat salaries attached to a slew of confusing paperwork (Carr was pretty but not too bright), of course Carr relied heavily on his friend and mentor Overbury to help out with the details. Overbury in turn took his own considerable cut. Pretty standard stuff, where court preferment was concerned.

All that changed when the king's favorite minister Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury died, and a power vacuum opened close to the throne. Salisbury oversaw James' foreign policy, and with his death the king saw an opportunity to begin to set that policy himself, as long as he had someone along for the ride who could handle the intricacies of diplomatic language (and paperwork). He decided that his favorite Robert Carr was perfect for the gig.


Of course Carr was not remotely suited for such work. But his mentor Overbury was.

With Carr's elevation to his new role there were people lining up to try to win influence with him, and through him, with the king. This included members of the already powerful and well-connected Howard family. Namely Henry Howard, earl of Northampton and his niece, Lady Frances Howard, already married in a teen-aged and allegedly never-consummated hate-match with the young earl of Essex.

As Overbury had done with Carr, placing him in King James' path, now Northampton did to Carr, placing his still-married and barely into her teens niece in Carr's. Her tender years notwithstanding, Lady Frances had already acquired a reputation for bed-hopping, and while Carr seemed capable of wrapping a king around his little finger, he seems to have been no match for Frances' feminine wiles.

The two were soon openly consorting, and there was talk of marriage after first seeking an annulment of Frances' marriage to Essex, on the grounds of non consummation. (The earl detested his new bride nearly from the moment he met her and fled on a tour of the continent rather than sleep with her. And he stayed away for a good long while afterward!).

Overbury was furious at being frozen out of the lucrative gig of pulling Carr's strings, and published a  widely-read poem pretty effectively slandering Lady Frances. He had made a powerful enemy.

What's more, this enemy was a favorite of the queen. She managed to prevail on Queen Anne to convinceher husband the king to offer Overbury the "honor" of serving as His Majesty's man in Moscow.

Now Overbury found himself outfoxed. If he accepted the posting, he'd be away from court, with no influence and no money. To the people of Jacobean England, Russia was only slightly closer to home than the New World, which was to say one step closer than the moon!

However, to refuse such an offer of appointment was flat-out dangerous. Such refusal could be taken as an insult, and history is replete with examples of how well royals tend to take insults from those ostensibly in their service. (Newsflash: it ain't lying down!)

Overbury's thoughts along these lines are not recorded. And there's no way of knowing whether he seriously considered the possibility that the choice before him could possibly wind up being between a trip to Russia or a trip to the Bloody Tower. Regardless, he chose to refuse the "honor" of serving as English ambassador to Russia, and apparently managed to come off as so high-handed that in April 1613 an infuriated King James had him tossed into the Tower for his trouble.

By September, Overbury was dead.

Ten days later Lady Essex received her wished-for annulment, over Essex's protestations that he was not, in fact, impotent, as the papers requesting the annulment claimed. Within a couple of months, Lady Frances and Robert Carr, now no longer earl of Rochester, but "promoted" to an even more plumb title with vastly more substantial holdings as earl of Somerset, were married.

That might well have been the end of the story. But Robert Carr was an idiot, and it quickly became clear that he was now as much the Howards' puppet as he had earlier been Overbury's. Plus, the king was fickle in his affections where his favorites were concerned, and apparently within a year or so, Carr began to lose his hair and his looks. James soon tired of his pet earl, and let it be known to certain influential members of his inner circle that he would welcome an excuse to be shut of him, so he could focus his attentions elsewhere (namely George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham).

And that was when rumors began to surface about Carr's frequent visits to the Tower to see his erstwhile friend and mentor Overbury in the months preceding his death. And of Carr's possible connection with the gifts of possibly tainted food and drink a certain jailer pressed upon the unfortunate man.

The Investigation

Whispers of "poison" were nothing new during the reign of James I. Invariably when anyone of any importance died quickly and without violence, some gossip, somewhere began to murmur in the ears of friends that the circumstances certainly seemed suspicious. And as much as James wanted to be rid of Carr, the last thing he wanted was a scandal. So he set his two brightest advisors to work on the investigation, ensuring it was handled right from the start.

These two were none other than the greatest legal minds of the age. Two great names that survive even today: Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Edward Coke.

The first thing they did was have Overbury's corpse exhumed and subjected to an autopsy. He was indeed found to have been poisoned. Not by food, or drink, it turns out, but by a combination of emetics and enemas.

Overbury's jailer and the lord lieutenant of the Tower were immediately confined and questioned. It all came out in their confessions and the confessions of those they named as co-conspirators.

Apparently Lady Frances and her uncle the earl of Northampton dreamed up the scheme to have Overbury dispatched in a manner which might not look suspicious, and pressed her dupe of a husband into service, getting him to visit his "friend" Overbury regularly, and impress upon him the only way out of the Tower was through touching the heart of the king and moving him to pity at Overbury's lowly state.

Confinement did not agree with Overbury, and he was already ill. But a combination of emetics andenemas would help make him seem even more piteous and enfeebled, certain to prod James into an act of clemency, Carr argued. Overbury, desperate to escape the Tower, agreed to this course of action.

In furtherance of the Howards' plan, the Tower's lord lieutenant (the government official overseeing the operation of the Tower) was removed in favor of a notably corrupt one named Helwys (recommended by none other than the earl of Northampton, to whom he paid a customarily hefty finder's fee), who in turn assured that a jailer named Weston agreeable to Lady Frances' plan was placed in position to oversee Overbury's "treatments."

Lady Frances' connection to the plot was laid bare by the confession eventually wrung from her "companion," a seemingly respectable physician's widow named Anne Turner. In reality Turner was anything but.

While her husband was still alive Anne Turner carried on a prolonged affair with a wealthy gentleman, and bore him a child out of wedlock. After her husband's demise she "made ends meet" in part by running a secret red light establishment where couples not married to each other could go to have sex. She had also served as her deceased husband's assistant on many occasions and possessed some skill with chemicals–especially poisons. She quickly developed a black market business selling them to many of the "wrong people."

So when her employer Lady Frances came to her seeking help, Anne Turner was more than willing to assist. Together with an apothecary she knew and worked with, Turner came up with several doses of emetics and enemas laced with sulfuric acid. Weston in turn administered these to an unsuspecting Overbury, who soon died.

The Outcome

Possessing not much in the way of either money or influence, the quartet of Turner, Weston, Helwys and the apothecary (whose name was Franklin) were quickly tried, convicted, condemned and hanged.

The earl and countess of Somerset, who did possess both money and influence, were immediately arrested and thrown into the Tower. The earl of Northampton only escaped a similar fate by having had the good timing to die the previous year.

The resulting scandal, far from merely ridding the king of a tiresome former favorite, caused James no end of embarrassment. He repeatedly offered to pardon Carr in exchange for a confession to the charge of murder.

For her part, Lady Frances quickly admitted her part in Overbury's murder. Carr, however, insisted ever afterward that he knew nothing of the plot (given his demonstrated lack of smarts, hardly difficult to believe that he was little more than the dupe of his extremely cunning wife). The earl and his wife were tried and eventually convicted on charges of murder and treason. Obviously concerned that Carr might implicate him in the murder and no doubt also nervous about what Carr might say about the nature of their personal relationship, James let them languish in prison for seven years, eventually quietly pardoning both the earl and the countess, and equally quietly banishing them from court.

Apparently the bloom came off the rose for this star-crossed couple during their long confinement, and their burning passion cooled into a dull hatred. If Carr's protestations of innocence are true, it stands to reason that the revelation of the part she played in killing his friend and mentor Overbury may have had something to do with his seeing her in a different light.

The next ten years after they were pardoned in 1622 were spent quietly loathing each other on Carr's estate in Dorset, far from the pomp of James' court in London. Lady Frances died aged 42 of cancer in 1632. Carr followed her to the grave in 1645.

10 June 2021

Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Speculator, Spy...Murderer?


Edward Bancroft
[The natives of the South American mainland prepare poisons] which, given in the smallest quantities, produce a very slow, but inevitable death, particularly a composition which resembles wheat-flour, which they sometimes use to revenge past injuries, that have been long neglected, and are thought forgotten. On these occasions they always feign an insensibility of the injury which they intend to revenge, and even repay it with services and acts of friendship, until they have destroyed all distrust and apprehension of danger in the victim of the vengeance. When this is effected, they meet at some festival, and engage him to drink with them, drinking first themselves to obviate suspicion, and afterwards secretly dropping the poison, ready concealed under their nails, which are usually long, into the drink.


—Edward Bancroft, An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana in South America

Two weeks ago I discussed the strange circumstances surrounding the career and sudden death of American diplomat and merchant Silas Deane. This time around I delve into the backstory of the man who may well have murdered him.

As I mentioned previously, Connecticut-born Edward Bancroft was briefly a student of Deane's a number of years before the American Revolution. Apprenticed by his step-father to a doctor, Bancroft rebelled by running away to sea. He wound up in Surinam (known at the time as "Dutch Guiana."), where he worked as a surgeon on the plantation of a British subject named Paul Wentworth (more on him later).


Bancroft quickly established himself as an expert on the local flora and fauna, and after a brief return to Connecticut to square things with his family, moved on to London where, at the age of twenty-five he published the above referenced book-length "essay," which dealt, among other things, with South American curiosities such as a completely new method of dyeing wool/cloth, and poisons such as curare, and in which he offered proof that the shock generated by a local variety of eel really was a result of a type of bioelectricity they generated.

Benjamin Franklin in London
This work quickly established Bancroft as a man of letters, and with his background studying electric eels, he soon made the acquaintance of, and became friends with, another American-born intellectual who was conducting experiments with electricity: Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had been living in London for nearly twenty years, ostensibly serving as the colonial agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly. It was Franklin who eventually recommended Bancroft to Deane as a possibly useful personal secretary when the Continental Congress sent Deane to France to negotiate a treaty of alliance with the French crown.

To Franklin Bancroft was the ideal choice: still living in London, he would be able to come and go between England and France without attracting the attention someone like the firebrand Thomas Paine (who was English-born) would. And he could likely be enticed to pass on what he could learn of British war plans to his employer, Silas Deane.

So that's what Deane did, asking Bancroft, whom he knew, but not especially well (not having seen him since 1758, the year Bancroft ran away to sea), to cross the Channel and meet him in the French port of Calais, ostensibly to reminisce over old times. When Bancroft returned to England, he had agreed to work for Deane, and, in turn, to spy for the Americans.

And once back in London, Bancroft then wasted no time getting in touch with his old friend and mentor Paul Wentworth, who had returned to England from South America, and was now working in some capacity for Britain's intelligence apparatus. And Wentworth, in turn, introduced Bancroft a couple of government department secretaries, who quickly struck a deal with Bancroft.

Bancroft would spy on Deane and the American delegation in Paris, and in return he would received an annual pension of £200 per year.

For life.

Bancroft and Lord Stormont, the British ambassador in Paris, quickly worked out a system whereby he would pass information about the American negotiations with the French over the question of a potential French entry into the war with Britain on the American side. Every Tuesday morning Bancroft would take a walk in Paris's famed Tuileries Gardens, and place a bottle containing information about the aforementioned negotiations in the hollow of a tree. One of the ambassador's aides would retrieve the bottle, while in turn passing along useless information that Bancroft could in turn pass along to the Americans.

And this went on for over a year. Although there were those among the American delegation who suspected Bancroft of being less than honest (and they included John Adams, who once wrote of Bancroft that he was, among a host of other sins, "a meddler in stocks as well as reviews, and frequently went into the alley, and into the deepest and darkest retirements and recesses of the brokers and jobbers...and found amusement as well, perhaps, as profit, by listening to all the news and anecdotes, true or false, that were then whispered or more boldly pronounced."), none of them apparently suspected him of selling them out to the British.

Silas Deane when he still just a wealthy merchant
As I mentioned in our previous installment on Deane's death, Bancroft had a profound interest in this relationship with the British intelligence services not being found out, especially after the war, around the time that Deane intended sailing to America to rehabilitate his own reputation. Bancroft was still receiving his secret pension (which had subsequently been raised to £1,000 per year), and had applied for a potenially lucrative patent for dyeing wool and cloth using the techniques he'd learned in Surinam.

But, as laid out by historians James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle in their 1992 book After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, Bancroft and Deane also shared some unsavory secrets about Bancroft's time in Deane's employ:

It turned out Deane's arrangement worked well—perhaps a little too well. Legally, Deane was permitted to collect a commission on all the supplies he purchased for Congress, but he went beyond that. He and Bancroft used their official connections in France to conduct a highly profitable private trade of their own. Deane, for instance, sometimes sent ships from France without declaring whether they were loaded with private or public goods. This if the ships arrived safely, he would declare that the cargo was private, his own. But if the English navy captured the goods on the high seas, he labeled it government merchandise and the public absorbed the loss.

Deane used Bancroft to take advantage of his official position in other ways. Both men speculated in the London insurance markets, which were the eighteenth-century equivalent of gambling parlors. Anyone who wished could take out "insurance" against a particular event which might happen in the future. An insurer, for example, might quote odds on the chances of France going to war with England within the year. The insured would pay whatever premium he wished, say £1,000, and if France did go to war, and the odds had been five to one against it, the insured would receive £5,000. Wagers were made on almost any public event: which armies would win which battles, which politicians would fall from power, and even on whether a particular lord would die before the year was out.

Obviously, someone who had access to inside information—someone who knew in advance, for instance, that France was going to war with England could win a fortune. That was exactly what Bancroft and Deane decided to do. Deane was in charge of concluding the French alliance, and he knew that if he succeeded Britain would be forced to declare war on France. Bancroft hurried across to London as soon as the treaty had been concluded and took out the proper insurance before the news went public. The profits shared by the two men from this and other similar ventures amounted to approximately £10,000. Like most gamblers, however, Deane also lost wagers. In the end he netted little for his troubles.

So Bancroft, angling for a patent that could well be the foundation of a fortune, had to be worried that his speculation on "sure things" alongside Deane would come to light at precisely the right time to sink his patent application. Such behavior was ungentlemanly, and Bancroft, as Adams had said, carried the stench of someone who hung out with unsavory back-alley money men.

On top of this, Bancroft had already been forced to flee to France once before to escape hanging in the years since he'd worked for Deane. Many in the British government did not trust him, with his having publicly worked for one of the Americans negotiating with France, and this included King George III himself. 

So while Bancroft was outwardly prosperous and seemingly headed for more wealth and fame at the time of Deane's return to London en route to America in September of 1789, he had plenty to lose, should Deane open his mouth about their adventures in insider trading in the run-up to the Franco-American alliance of 1777. 

And Bancroft knew how to use curare.

While we'll never know for sure whether Bancroft had a hand in Deane's sudden death, there is plenty to consider in the case that can be made against him.

See you in two weeks!

27 May 2021

The Strange Death of American Diplomat Silas Deane


Silas Deane
Silas Deane

Silas Deane's career began with one of those rags-to-riches stories so much appreciated in American folklore. In fact, Deane might have made a lasting place for himself in the history texts, except that his career ended with an equally dramatic riches-to-rags story.

— James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle


You know his ambition… his desire of making a Fortune… You also know his Art and Enterprise. Such Characters are often useful, altho always to be carefully watched and contracted, specially in such a government as ours.

— John Adams writing of Silas Deane


The over-achieving son of an ambitious Connecticut blacksmith, Silas Deane was by turns a graduate of Yale, a teacher/law student, merchant, politician, and the first "minister plenipotentiary" from the rebelling British colonies of North America to the Kingdom of France. By the time he died in 1789, aged fifty-one, he had long since experienced a complete reversal of his fortunes: for the final decade of his life Deane remained a discredited pauper, hounded by scandal, plagued by declining health, and eventually forgotten by history. A puzzling turn of events for a man who racked up success after success during the early years of his life.

And yet nothing about Silas Deane is more puzzling than the manner of his death.

After graduating from Yale in 1758, Deane supported himself by teaching school while simultaneously studying law. One of his pupils from this period, a tavern-keeper's son named Edward Bancroft, figures prominently in the final years of his life, first as Deane's secretary during his negotiations with the French over the question of a possible alliance with the rebellious colonies against the British, and later as his benefactor: one of the few people who would advance the penniless Deane money. 

Bancroft was Deane's pupil for only a brief amount of time (he ran away to sea), but the two remained friends, and when Deane needed a private secretary to assist in negotiations with the French, he contacted Bancroft, now a physician and scientist of some note, then living in London, and invited him to come work for the American delegation which by then consisted of three men: Deane, Benjamin Franklin, and the dour William Lee.

But more on Bancroft and the American diplomatic mission to France in a bit.

After being admitted to the bar in 1761, Deane briefly practiced law in Hartford, Connecticut, before eventually moving to the town of Wethersfield, where he married Mehitable Webb, the wealthy widow of a merchant, took over the family business, and built a big new house next door to the one where his wife and her children had lived with her first husband. His wife gave him a son, Jesse, in 1764, and died herself not long afterward, in 1767.

On the left is Deane House, the house Silas Deane had built for his new family. On the right is Webb House, the one his widow had lived in with her children during her marriage to her first husband.

Deane remarried, this time to the wealthy and politically-connected granddaughter of a former governor of Connecticut, and decided to go into politics. When the first Continental Congress was convened, Deane found himself a member of the delegation appointed by the Connecticut legislature to attend. 

However, Deane was not without his enemies, especially those who envied him his wealth and the swift rise in his political fortunes, and he was not selected to return to Congress the following year. Instead, members of Congress approached Deane about acting as minister to France, and securing badly needed military supplies for the Revolutionary cause.

Deane agreed, departed immediately for Paris, and began throwing quite a bit of his own money around trying to raise more money, and secure a treaty of alliance with France. By the time he called on Bancroft to join him from London, Deane had spent a considerable sum of his own private fortune on this mission for which he drew no salary. 

And at this point things began to go south.

Franklin shortly after arriving in France in 1777
While Benjamin Franklin remained a friend to Deane for years, Arthur Lee, the other member of the American delegation in France, seemed far too disagreeable to have much in the way of friends. A member of the wealthy and powerful Lee family, one of his elder brothers—Richard Henry Lee—later served as president of the Continental Congress and senator from Virginia, another brother, Francis Lightfoot Lee, was a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. Along with being accomplished, the Lee brothers had in common the fact that neither of them much cared for their irascible, ill-tempered younger brother Arthur.

Not surprisingly, Arthur Lee took a distinct dislike to ever-on-the-make Deane, who, in addition to working on an alliance with the French, was also attempting to line up investors in a possible canal linking Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence River, and a scheme to secure steam engines of the type he had seen being used in England a use them in American grist mills.

To complicate matters, negotiations with the French slowed down, likely due in no small part to the fact that Bancroft, whom Deane trusted implicitly, was in fact a British spy. Every Sunday for well over a year Bancroft would drop a parcel containing his weekly reports of the progress of Franco-American relations into a hollow tree in the Tuileries Gardens, whence it was retrieved by another British agent and posted to London.

The Disagreeable Arthur Lee
It wasn't long before Arthur Lee denounced Deane to Congress, claiming he had used his position in Paristo enrich himself to the tune of £50,000. This charge resulted in a heated debate, which in turn resulted in Deane being recalled from France.

When Deane returned to America he had not been apprised of the nature of the recall. He had come back from France on a French warship, accompanied by the first French ambassador to the United States—treaty secured. As a result he had left his account books in Paris, and was left to defend himself without the documentation of his considerable expenses.

Things went downhill from there. After a long, public and ugly back-and-forth, both in congressional session and in the press, Congress rebuffed Deane's requests for reimbursement, and he returned to France a much poorer man than he had been, thoroughly embittered by the experience. 

Shortly before Cornwallis' hugely consequential surrender  to Washington's Continental/French forces at Yorktown in 1781, letters written by Deane to friends back in America—in which he denounced the Congress and suggested the best course of action for Americans might be to patch things up with Britain—fell into the hands of Sir Henry Clinton, the commander of British forces in New York City. Within days they had been published by a Tory newspaper in that city.

Now unwelcome in America, and with France getting too hot for him, Deane moved to Ghent, in Belgium and spent his time drinking and importuning old friends and acquaintances for money. This continued until 1789, when Deane decided enough time had passed that he might be able to restore both his reputation and his fortune at home.

He went to London, where he visited Bancroft (who continued to supply him with money) and the American painter John Trumbull. From there Deane booked passage to America on the Boston Packet in September. The ship departed London, but soon ran into fierce winds and laid to in order to make necessary repairs.

During a stroll around the deck with the ship's captain, Deane suddenly became violently ill. The captain put him to bed, where he soon died.

As recently as 1787 Deane had been bedridden by a protracted bout of ill health, so not much was made of his death by the British authorities who investigated it. He was buried in Kent, and for them that was the end of the matter.

In American circles the rumor ran riot that Deane might have been a suicide, what with his poor fortunes and shattered reputation. Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine both referenced the event and the possibility of suicide in their correspondence.

Deane's fortunes were eventually posthumously restored. in 1841 Congress paid $37,000 to Deane's granddaughter as compensation for his expenses, along with admitting that the process by which his claims had been initially denied was rushed, shoddy and unprofessional.

As for Deane's death: natural causes? Suicide? Absent an exhumation and an autopsy, who can say what really happened here.

However, in 1959 historian Julian Boyd advanced a theory that Deane was, in fact, murdered. The most likely suspect? Deane's old pupil and secretary, Edward Bancroft.

Edward Bancroft
The Duplicitous Edward Bancroft

Because when Bancroft ran away to sea, he washed up in Barbados. While there he took a position as a surgeon for one of the sugar plantations on the island.

During his sojourn there Bancroft learned quite a bit about the science surrounding textile dyes. It was how he would make his name later. The plantation owner took a liking to Bancroft and sent him all over the Caribbean as his representative. During that time Bancroft became an expert in the making of dyes, and set about perfecting the process.

He also became an expert on poisons. While in Surinam he came in contact with native peoples who tipped their arrows with all manner of nasty concoctions. And Bancroft took notes. More than that, he touched on the subject in a book he wrote about his travels in the Caribbean.

As Boyd's theory went, Deane managed to work out the fact that Bancroft was a spy. Bancroft, by now drawing a hefty pension from the British government in exchange for his efforts in its behalf during the Revolution, also hoped to be awarded a lucrative patent for his dyeing process. 

Said patent might not be forthcoming in the event of Bancroft being unmasked as a spy. And Bancroft saw Deane on his final day in London. Oh, and the initial source of all of those rumors about Deane committing suicide? You guessed it. Edward Bancroft. Apparently he spread the word far and wide.

So...natural causes? Suicide? Murder? History is mute on the subject.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

See you in two weeks!