This week, we step into the realm of metaphor to consider the historical stories that prove the heirs of Led Zeppelin needn't have stuck with Lord of the Rings: history provides us with better tales of bleakness, mortality, violence, vengeance, and gallows humor than fiction possibly can.
Next week: Sleep
This is a story of seppuku gone terribly wrong, or dramatically right, depending on your perspective. This topic's theme should already warn you, but the following is really gory and violent.
In March 1868, troops of Tosa domain massacred eleven French sailors in what is now referred to as the Sakai incident. These troops weren't on board with letting foreigners into Japan, but Tosa was supposed to be ensuring the foreigners' safety in the city. The French diplomats demanded the perpetrators be executed; the new Imperial government agreed.
The French diplomats who came to witness were expecting to see a quick round of beheadings, not a long drawn-out day of seppukus. And instead of a dignified apology, the Tosa men were allowed/encouraged to taunt the French witnesses.
The really dreadful thing was that in half the cases, the kaishaku (second) didn’t manage to cut off the head with the first stroke. Andrew Rankin’s book: Seppuku, translates the Japanese report of one of these:
Inokichi bravely ripped himself open with two crossed cuts. Then, thrusting his hand inside the wound, he pulled out a lump of his entrails and glared again at the French observers as if about to fling his guts at them. Flustered by this, his kaishaku, a man named Mabuchi Momotaro, hurriedly stepped forward and struck; but his aim was clumsy and the blade only achieved a shallow wound to the top of the head. Inokichi roared at him, “Steady yourself, Mabuchi!”
The second strike cut deep into his neck, and with a sharp ripping sound the head toppled forward - but only partially, for it was not completely severed. Inokichi, now drenched in his own blood, was able to scream. “I’m not dead! Cut again, cut again!”
His voice echoed far beyond the execution area to the streets outside. Everyone watching was mortified, particularly the French, who were very obviously scared out of their wits. When Inokichi reached again into his belly in an an attempt to put an end to his torments, the Frenchmen turned sickly pale and made the most peculiar noises, such as Oooo and Arrrr.
They were squirming in their seats as Mabuchi landed his third strike, which was successful. Thus Minoura Inokichi was dead. He was twenty-four years of age.
After eleven seppukus - including one where the kaishaku gave up trying to cut the head off after seven attempts, and just started sawing the head off - the lead French diplomat announced that he was leaving, and they could spare the lives of the other nine men. Eleven Frenchmen had been killed. Eleven of their killers were now dead. He’d call it even.
He imagined this would be seen as a fine act of mercy, but as a British diplomat smugly pointed out, it gave the whole thing the air of a brutal blood vengeance, one life per life, rather than a just punishment. The Tosa men's agonizing dramatic deaths gave them the status of martyrs. Plus it made the diplomat eternally famous as the queasy Frenchman who couldn’t sit through the seppukus he’d demanded.
The next incident in which a samurai killed a foreigner: a British subject, the British diplomats insisted on execution rather than seppuku.
Wilhelm V. of Bavaria was quite ambitious. He invited the Jesuits to Munich, he helped his brother to conquer the Erzbistum Köln from the Protestants back and, most importantly of all, he founded the Hofbräuhaus. There was just a little problem. Money. He was deeply in debt after all this.
But there was a certain gentleman from Cyprus to help him with that, Marco Bragadino. Who totally could make gold. Who, in unrelated news, had to leave Italy quite rapidly, totally not because he was a known fraudster.
Glad to have such a known expert in all things transubstantiation, Wilhelm invited Bragadino and paid him good money and other benefits (Bragadino wanted to be dispensed of his vows).
When after half a year, in March 1591, Bragadino still wasn't able to produce gold, the Estates had him arrested. And then tortured. After Bragadino confessed that he was a fraud, not even Wilhelm could save him.
On a day in April, Bragadino was lead to the gallows. It was errected on the Weinmarkt, which is today part of the Marienplatz. The gallow's scaffolding was painted red, and the rope was interwoven with Flittergold (brass based fake-gold).
The Weinmarkt was packed with people. But there was a surprise. As a mercy, the Jesuits had persuaded Wilhelm to change the sentence from hanging to decapitation. And what a mercy that was.
Bragadino was clothed in blue and white (the colors of Bavaria/the Wittelsbacher) and lead on the scafolding at 10 a.m. The executioner was borrowed from Landshut. His first strike split the Calvaria, so that Bragadino's brain was coming out. The second strike didn't cut the head off completely. Only the third strike did that.
Reacting to the now menacing atmosphere of the crowd, the magistrate reminded them that it was punishable by death to lay hands on the executioner while he was doing his job. This seemed to scare them enough to leave the executioner alone and let him leave.
At 5 p.m. six hooded men finally took Bragadinos head and body away and buried him at an undisclosed location.
All the news of the Southwest blows through San Antonio. For instance, I’ve done a lot of reading on a certain subject here, and a letter from the hill country far away from here proved a strange coincidence. I’ll quote it, in part.
“Dear Bob:
The feuds seem to be at a low ebb, about the only thing that happened was one brawl out on the high way between here and Burkett which ended by Odie L— nearly cutting one bozo’s arm off. Two more guys were threatening to fight, Odie urged them to let him have their knives, some way Odie got mixed up in the following encounter and did his whittling.
We went fishing Tuesday. One of the boys sat down by a rattlesnake when we first arrived, but the snake was too cold to move, so we killed him without any trouble, he only had two rattles and I didn’t bother to take them. We were on the San Saba river first; a short distance up the river from us a gang of outlaws or gold prospectors were camped, they had enough guns to do credit to any army, they seemed to be digging for some reason or other. Every time one of us would get in sight they would go for their guns. I always despised a man who didn’t have any confidence in me, so I didn’t go near them.
[Lindsay "]Pink[" Tyson]"
Typical letter from the postoak country. I know what those gun-toting gents were after. Gold — tons of gold. Enough gold to sink a battleship. No, it’s not the liquor talking now, though this San Antonio booze kicks like an army mule. Gold. Los Almagres, Las Amarillas, La Mina de las Iguanas, the Lost Llano Mine, the Lost San Saba Mine, the Lost Bowie Mine. They won’t find it, not if they blast apart the hills till the sky splits like Judgment Day. But it’s there.
“They were there, in the distance dreaming
Their dreams that were worn and old;
They were there, to his frenzied seeming,
Still burrowing down for gold.”
[- "The Valley That God Forgot" by Henry Herbert Knibbs]
The only way to find a lost mine is not to look for it. If it’s meant for you to find it, you’ll stump your toe on it, or your horse will throw you into a bed of nuggets as big as ostrich eggs.
Coincidence, though, that just after I should have been reading so much about the San Saba mine, I should have heard tidings of its searchers from a man who did not suspect its existence. [...] The Lost San Saba Mine. They showed it to Jim Bowie. That was the doings of Tres Manos, the Lipan chief. His sight was stunned and dazzled by the immensity of the treasure — Bowie, I mean. He reeled, and his wits went from him like light flicked from a candle by a rifle bullet. His mind was numbed by what he had seen. Not the main vein; only the store room; gold bars stacked in a cavern from floor to roof, catching the sunlight glinting through the leaves and reflecting it like a sheet of pulsing flame. He rode all night; his horse fell under him, and he staggered on afoot. Tres Manos missed him from the tribe and was on his trail, but Bowie won that race. He was a Lipan by adoption. He had seen the red men trading silver and gold armlets to the merchants near the Presidio. For months he fought and hunted with Tres Manos’ braves. At last they showed him the cavern stacked with golden bars that caught the beams of the sun in a net of flame. Tres Manos was brave. He followed Bowie into San Antonio, met him and called him a traitor. Only his quickness saved him when Bowie’s knife flashed from its sheath. They went back into the hill country but the Indians were waiting them. They never reached the mine. They fought all day and all night. Three or four Texans fell, fifty Indians. The white man retreated. They were far outnumbered. They fell back to San Antonio. Bowie fought his last fight in the Alamo. No white man since has seen the Lost Mine. But it’s there, with untold millions waiting for the man who’s meant to find it.
The story of the San Saba Mine is perhaps slightly less romantic (and bloody) than Howard has painted it, and it is perhaps more interesting in what it reveals of his character than for historical value - the idea of lost treasure that has to be found by luck, for example, was very common as a superstition, and might have owed something to Howard's interest in Scotch-Irish legendry. The emphasis on gold as a synonym for wealth displays some of his hard-money prejudices - which were common, and shared by Lovecraft. Clark Ashton Smith and his father once mined a small claim on their land in California, and many years later Smith was very bitter about being forced to fill in the mine they had dug.
You can separate gold dust from rock dust by adding mercury. The two metals combine as an amalgam.
One crude way to separate the mercury back out is to bake it inside of a potato. The mercury vaporizes and spreads through the potato while the gold solidifies in the middle.
(edit: I seem to have misunderstood "history is metal", although mortality and bleakness would result if you ate that potato.)