“The Great Dismal Swamp, south of Virginia,  further discouraged potential settlers. It measured  twenty-two hundred square miles, constituting a  barricade to easy passage for anyone traveling by  horse or on foot from Virginia to Carolina. Travelers suffered through a wretched and dreadfully slow,  damp, and dreary journey. Even after nearly fifty  years of European settlement, the routes through  the swamp were not clear. Two of Virginia’s leading  gentlemen slogged their way around the area in  1711, trying to establish the border between the two colonies. Their journal gives us a taste of the long  and miserable trek through the wet-lands: “In this 6  mile we Crosst several miring branches in which we  were all terribly bedaubed . . . Having almost spent  the day in this toilsome tho short Journey.” Three  days later, they “were well soused in a myery  meadow by the way of which we crossed severall.”  At certain points they resorted to canoe travel,  disembarking two miles from their intended  destination and taking a long detour, “there being  no firm land nearer.” Another two days into their  trip, they recorded that they had “mist our way  being wrong directed, and rid 11 mile almost to a  myery swamp, almost impassible.” Finding no one  available to help them, the two wandering planters,  one already suffering from a fever, led their horses  “3 mile through a terrible myery Pocoson to a verry  great marsh to the River side.” Finally arriving at  their lodgings for that night, they reported, “to  comfort us we soon found that this little house  which was well filled was full of the Itch.”  Unaccustomed to such hardships, the gentlemen  surrendered their plans, “there being no passage  through the Dismall.”

Their admission of defeat is certainly understandable. Sprawling bald cypress and tupelo  gum forests grew in standing water and saturated  soils. The giant bald cypress trees measured more  than 5 feet in diameter and 120 feet high.  Mosquitoes and other biting flies loved the stagnant water and rotting vegetation, but worse awaited the sojourner. Lurking in the dark habitat, poisonous  species of cottonmouth moccasins, copperheads,  and canebrake rattlesnakes threatened all travelers.  Bobcats preyed on human interlopers, and howling  wolves terrified the uninitiated. The stench  overpowered the senses.

The Dismal Swamp comprised a mixed set of  terrains, most of them difficult to navigate.  Pocosins, or bays, housed evergreen shrub bogs.  These waterlogged soils, capable of sustaining only  low-growing shrubs, lay relatively open. However, plant life included a variety of briers and dense  stands of cane, all exceedingly difficult to penetrate.  Somewhat drier soils in the swamp gave birth to large Atlantic white cedar forests, yet even these soils remained wet enough to impede travel. One of  the few welcome geographic features for the traveler in the swamp was the hammock. Slightly elevated landforms that contained several species of oak as well as beech and tulip poplar, hammocks were navigable even on horseback. But these small  natural features were scattered only randomly  throughout the swamp. While travel on foot or horseback was exceedingly difficult, sustained travel on water proved almost impossible: although the vast majority of the swamp stayed saturated year-round, almost no waterways were navigable.” 

And somewhere among all this dwelled at some point the maroons, or runaway slaves. Some maroons were born to those who escaped slavery and lived in the swamp for their entire lives despite the hardships of swamp life: dense underbrush, insects, venomous snakes, and bears. The difficult conditions also made the swamp an ideal hiding place, not just for the formerly enslaved but also for free blacks, slaves who worked on the swamp’s canals, Native Americans, and outcast whites such as criminals. Maroons are known to have often interacted with slaves and poor whites to obtain work, food, clothes, and money. Some maroons plundered nearby farms and plantations, stole from anchored boats, and robbed travelers on nearby roads

Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713

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“We can best sum up the 1600s as a century of  dispossession for England’s peasants. Just as the  population soared, the landed gentry used  enclosures of agricultural land to mold those  peasants into wage laborers. Enclosure meant the  construction of high hedges to keep sheep confined  as the British wool industry developed. It also  meant that peasants who had worked those fields  for their own food supply for generations suddenly  found themselves without any land. The insecurity  of employment in a preindustrial economy led to  great numbers of poverty-stricken individuals and a  majority who lived on the brink. Young landless men and women might go into domestic service or  work in agriculture. Servants-in-husbandry in  England tended to be single eighteen- to  twenty-five-year-olds. They signed one-year  contracts with their masters and lived as a family  member in the household. But when they could find  no contracts, they drifted toward London in search  of employment and found whatever way they could  to survive. The potential social and political  consequences of this explosion of young landless  men terrified the ruling class who had created them,  and one solution was to pack them off to the colonies in the Caribbean or American mainland”.

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“To the Trustees of the new colony, the chief purpose of their  enterprise entailed the uplifting of the downtrodden, and the rules they crafted for the colony reflected that goal. With alcoholic spirits forbidden, they designed land-tenure regulations to prevent the amassing of huge plantations or estates (one of the provisions was to prevent women from inheriting land so that it could not then pass on to another man in marriage), and most firmly held of all, the use of slaves was absolutely prohibited. All these measures should avert  “idleness and vice in the people,” the biggest risk to  the success of the colony”.

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Life was hard. Challenges including tropical diseases, personal security, having to figure out what crops to grow in the new climate. And

“in the late 1740s, Ebenezer children started eating dirt. They did not stop at raw earth; suddenly, “linen, coal, leaves, paper … ashes, clay” looked delicious, too, and Rev. Bolzius despaired. Lacking any knowledge of modern medicine, of course, the community could not grasp that an iron deficiency (whether attributable to hookworm infection or an overreliance on corn) might bring on what doctors today label geophagy, a subset of pica, the eating of traditionally inedible substances. As more children died, adults confessed that they, too, found themselves drawn to consuming raw rice, beans, and corn. All the pastor could do was lecture on the sin of suicide. He realized the behaviors were not entirely voluntary, but remained mystified that while surrounded by an “over-abundance of peaches,” someone might choose sand. The tragic loss of small children broke Ebenezer’s heart and their pastor’s only comfort at such funerals was that distress and adversity sent by God should bring “contrition” and “humility.” Later the children of Ebenezer gradually lost their taste for eating clay, but the practice would continue among the landless.”

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Unable to source enough poor volunteer settlers, the upper class leadership and richer settlers of Georgia found themselves suddenly surrounded by uppity and fractious plebs. Where the poor in England, due to their great numbers, were happy to take any employment for any pay, and sometimes no pay at all, just room board and clothing, the plebs of the new colony, scarce relative to the size of task at hand — the amount of land to be cleared and cultivated, the amount of infrastructure to be constructed — demanded dear wages for their labor and when they did not get it, they did not hesitate to walk away. The gentlemen found the resulting difficulty in maintaining status divide between themselves and the no-longer-so poor outrageous and demeaning. They formed a lobby which argued for introduction of slavery: unlike their uppity servants, slaves would work for free and there were ways to make them not talk back to their employers.

The argument made to authorities back in London was that whites were constitutionally unable to work in the difficult climatic conditions of low country rice plantations or resist the tropical diseases. The obvious fear of the working poor that introduction of slavery would depress their wages, was dispelled by more nuanced arguments: that introduction of slavery would make rice plantations more profitable and this would cause accumulation of wealth locally which wealth would then trickle down to the poor in the form of general economic development; that the colonial charter needed revising anyway, so that the small land holders may will their land to their widows and daughters; and the promise that slaves would not be allowed to take skilled jobs, like shoemakers or cart-wrights.

In the end, when slavery was at last introduced, the wages of the poor did collapse, slaves were often put to skilled work, and the sole avenue of advancement of the landless whites was slave-drivery. The rich gentlemen got their plantations and the poor got the substitute empty reward of the haughty pride of being better than blacks.

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The principal spirutus movens behind the drive to introduce slavery was James Habersham. Originally a church activist and the right hand man of George Whitefield, one of the two founders of the (strongly anti-slavery) methodist church, he eventually made his peace with the mammon and slavery and went on to become one of the biggest plantation owners in Georgia, with 15,000 acres of land and 200 slaves.

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“Timothy Lockley’s work Lines in the Sand traces  the interactions of non-slaveholding whites and  African Americans in Georgia after the Trustee era.  “Poor farmers and laborers often found themselves economically marginalized, forced by slavery into a subsistence existence,” he explains, often forced to supplement their diet through hunting. Held in complete disdain by the planters, the “tattered  appearance and hand-to-mouth existence of rural nonslaveholders” laid bare the reality of the  [lobbyists for slavery] false theories. The extremes of class stratification in Georgia until after the Civil War prove slavery’s evils served a tiny percentage.  Although much of the North brought in some level  of free and compulsory education after the Revolution to guarantee an electorate with powers of critical thinking, southern planters refused to introduce such a system. Instead education came from the pulpit. The evangelical churches, founded in Savannah on a theology of the lowly Christ and once a major source of the questioning of  deference, contorted themselves into “the ideal  forum for the dissemination of a message [that] …  slavery and social hierarchy … were divinely  ordained.”

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Mary Musgrove was born Coosaponakeesa in Coweta (Alabama) about the year 1700. She was the daughter of a Creek Native American woman and Edward Griffin, an English–Carolina trader from Charles Town, South Carolina. Her mother died when she was 3 years old and, soon after, she was taken into the custody of her grandmother. She later became known by her Christian and married names, Mary Musgrove Matthews Bosomworth.

“From the beginning, Mary used her abilities to speak both  English and Creek to make herself indispensable to Oglethorpe (leader of the newly founded colony of free-labor Georgia) and the colony in general, but  maintained a position independent of the Trustees.  A succession of husbands came and went, but she thrived and continued to jealously guard her autonomy. She claimed that Tomochichi (Indian chief of the area which later became Savannah) had  granted her three of the coastal islands in 1737, and  despite heavy opposition from Trustees and their  officials, would not relent on her land claims for over twenty years. Eventually she would be recognized as owner of one of the most beautiful spots in North America, St. Catherines Island.”

Noeleen McIlvenna, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South

Hugh Bryan (a South Carolina planter) had been converting his own slaves, and those on other plantations, allowing them to gather for worship. But went further. Bryan sent prophecies to the South Carolina Assembly, predicting that unless southern society was reborn, “Charles Town should be destroyed by fire and sword, to be executed by the Negroes”. Immediately, the Assembly ordered the arrest of Bryan and his “Abbetors and Accomplices” in what sounded ominously like a conspiracy. Was Bryan sharing this revelation with the slaves? Would it be a self-fulfilling prophesy? Evangelism seemed to beckon the most serious social discourse.

South Carolina’s planters closed ranks to deliver the strongest of messages to one of their own and indicted Bryan. Threatened with not only complete ostracism, but prosecution and jail, he quickly repented. In a statement to the Assembly, published in a newspaper, he apologized for “the Disquiet I may have occasioned to my Country.”

Noeleen McIvenna, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery and the Colonial South

Pharaoh Djedefre, like all Pharaohs, had five names; his Horus name was bikw nebw — “Golden Horus with 3 falcons, written like this:

At some point, his burial complex has been vandalized and all his statuary broken up and thrown into a pit — motivating theories that perhaps he had been overthrown in a civil war. It’s too bad about the statuary. He had talented stone workers:

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Zahi Hawass, Mountains of the Pharaohs

According to “Liquid Assets,” a  history of the city’s water system by Diane Galusha, natural groundwater made the rock so soft that the  shafts which allowed sandhogs to descend into the  tunnel became watery death traps. Engineers were  forced to build on each bank a giant inverted box  called a caisson—a risky device that was pioneered  during the laying of the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge. About fifteen feet on each side and weighing  as much as two thousand tons, the  steel-and-concrete boxes were sealed on all sides except the bottom. As they were lowered into the  soft ground, compressed air was pumped into the caissons, pushing out the mud and water. To get  into the caisson the sandhogs were lowered in a bucket down a steel shaft; from there they entered  an air lock, much like a diving chamber. Air was  pumped in, and the sandhogs could feel their  eardrums strained to bursting, the blood rushing to  the center of their bodies. Many assumed that they  were dying.  Once the pressure in the air lock was equal to that inside the caisson, the sandhogs crawled  through a trapdoor into the caisson, where,  standing ankle-deep in mud, they began to dig from the bottom, removing the muck in a bucket through  a hatch in the ceiling. As they dug, under pressure  that was so great they could work for only two hours at a time, the caisson would slowly sink, allowing the sides of the box to carve the lining of a shaft. An engineer who had been in a caisson during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge described the sensation this way: “The pulse was at first accelerated, then sometimes fell below the  normal rate. The voice sounded faint, unnatural, and it became a great effort to speak. What with the flaming lights, the deep shadows, the confusing  noise of hammers, drills, and chains, the half-naked  forms flitting about, with here and there a Sisyphus  rolling his stone, one might, if of a poetic  temperament, get a realizing sense of Dante’s Inferno.” 

On the construction of the fresh water tunnels under the city of New York, in David Grann, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession

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The game of Castle Falkenstein never quite became a hit — in part, I think, because, being rules-light, it did not appeal to the rules-minded dice rolling combat-gamers. There are monsters to kill and treasure to grab, who cares about character development, right?

Still, a few get into it. Henri Glass (Marie-Aurore-Amelie de Saxe) is just the sort of fun character development in action. The love child of George Sand and Frederic Chopin (yes, his boys could swim, after all!), she dresses as a man and uses her walking stick as her principal offensive weapon.

My own contribution to this genre was Prescott Stanhope-Dormer (above, left), an upper class English doff, with exceptional wealth, great connections, great manners, good education, but poor perception and poor physique. This accident-prone loser, obliviously offering snuff to the leader of murderous looking goblins, then tripping over his own walking stick as that leader aimed a vicious blow to his head, was ever other gamers’ darling. You guys need a yacht? Here, let me write the cheque. Oh, you want to talk to the first secretary of the Home Office? Why, I went to school with him, he is my mother’s second cousin twice removed!

His trusty Welsh butler — Richards (above right) — an Afghanistan veteran, with exceptional fisticuffs, fencing and sharpshooting, and a good knowledge of oriental languages — was Anthony’s indispensable (and infinitely patient) life-saver.

The interior chambers of the “Bent Pyramid” can be entered either from the north or west.

From the northern entrance, high up on the north face of the pyramid, a long passageway slopes down to the bedrock. Here an antechamber was built and roofed with a corbelled vault. Above this is the burial chamber, which must have been reached by stairs or a ladder. It also has a corbelled roof. The entrance in the western face of the pyramid slopes down to a point above the bedrock and ends in another passage leading to another corbelled chamber. At some point, somebody who knew exactly where both chambers were, hacked out a rough passage between the two.

A very strange discovery was made by British archeologists John Perring and Richard Howard Vyse who excavated this pyramid in the 1830s. Their workmen were clearing the interior passages and suffering greatly from the interior heat. On October 15, 1839, they opened a tunnel that led to one of the interior chambers. Suddenly, they were greeted by a refreshing draft of cool air, so strong that it blew out their torches. The wind continued for 2 days and then stopped as suddenly as it had started, leaving the archeologists completely mystified as to its source. The only reasonable explanation is that there is a connection between this room and the outside of the pyramid. We know that it could not have come through the western tunnel, as this was not opened until 1951, by Ahmed Fahri.

Fahri, during his work in Dahshur, made another strange discovery. Sometimes, as the wind blew through the pyramid, it could make an eerie wailing, clearly audible inside the pyramid, especially from the western end of the passage. The noise would continue for 10 second and then stop. The only explanation Fahri found satisfying was that some parts of the interior have not yet been discovered, and that these parts connect with the outside.

I recently took twelve of my students from the American University in Cairo to explore the interior chambers of the unique pyramid. We climbed up to the northern entrance, then climbed down the passage 80m long and only 1.1m high. We had to hunker to make our way to the first corbelled chamber. From there we had to climb 6.25m up some rather rickety wooden stairs to reach the level of the lower burial chamber. Inside we found two tunnels leading from the south wall to a shaft: they did not seem to continue. We saw another tunnel, about 12m long which led to another tunnel, oriented east-west. We headed west and found the second burial chamber. We could see the ancient cedar beams that Snefru’s expedition to Byblos had brought back millenia before, still in good shape. We could also feel cold air coming from the exterior of the pyramid via some indeterminate source. One clue that this pyramid still holds mysteries to be solved.

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(My own guess would be that by clearing the passage, Perring’s workers suddenly unlocked an area of heat-compressed air, which, expanding, caused wind; and, as any expanding air, felt cool. It still is a — er — cool story all the same).

Zahi Hawass, Mountains of the Pharaohs: The Untold Story of the Pyramid BuildersLink opens in new window

We traveled back in time, on some sort of quest, to America of 1979, somewhere in Mid West. To establish a base, we began to negotiate on a house rental (here elaborate details of the architectural features of the house). As we negotiated, I realized that the America of 1979 we were in, was not the America of 1979 we had planned to go to. Nixon was still in power, a raging inflation has killed the currency and we were negotiating in millions of a 6 month rental.

Later in the dream, on the deck of a large cruiser sailing down a much larger Grand Canal of Venice, I discovered that moving my arms and hands just so, I could levitate: it my first flying dream ever.

Every year, two girls from seven to eleven years old were chosen by the king-archon from among the most ancient families of Athens and made to live for a certain period of time near the sanctuaries of Athena Polias and Pandrosos. (Pandrosos was the only one of Cecrops’ daughters who had obeyed the Athena and had not looked inside the basked with which the sisters had been entrusted by the goddess). The girls were given a small enclosure where they could play ball, and in the middle of the enclosure was a statue of a boy on horseback. They were called Arrhephoroi or the Hersephoroi, the name beain taken to mean “the bearers of the unspeakable” or “bearers of the dew”. In fact, they were both. One night, the priestess of Athena comes to the girls: “They carry on their heads what the priestess of Athena gives them to carry; she who gives, knows not what she gives, nor do those who carry know what they carry”. The two girls then walk along an underground tunnel that skirts the sanctuary of Aphrodite in the Gardens, going down the steep northern slope of the Acropolis. At the bottom of the passage, “they lay down what they have carried and pick up another thing, all wrapped up, which they bring back to where they began”.

A swapping of bundles, an underground walk in the dark, two little girls on their own: it was the enacting of a religious mystery.

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

On a freezing night, through high drifts of snow, I returned from a trip to Istanbul to my childhood home where I now lived alone. Snow was piled up to my hips against the frozen gate. I broke through the ice, and worked my way up the terrace stairs to the door. There, in shadow, against the door, stood leaning, frozen stiff like a log, a dead man at attention. I had to shift him aside and shuffle the snow away to get inside.