Someone had a vendetta. This was one of the many thoughts that circled in the mind of archaeologists when they found the bones of two men with their legs chopped off and heads bashed in Cambridgeshire, England.
They were working at the site in advance of a major road construction project when they found the human remains in a gravel pit-turned-garbage dump. The two men were positioned next to each other in the shape of the letter T and their cut bones were placed beside them in their graves. Over 164 feet away, archaeologists unearthed the bones of another dismembered person, with no pelvis, in a Roman well.
“Somebody really, really didn’t like these guys,” said Jon House, a senior archaeologist at MOLA Headland Infrastructure to The Guardian.
Kasia Gdaniec, a Cambridge county council senior archaeologist, told the Guardian she suspects that their brutal deaths were meant to send a message. "Was it to keep them in their graves and stop them from running away? Or had they tried to run away and was this a punishment—and a warning to everyone else not even to think of it?"
As for whether these people could be linked to the Roman defensive ditch also found at the site, Gdaniec believes so. "The Romans arrive, the people who were here are completely subjugated, everything changes and is never the same again. We are not seeing trade and peaceful co-existence here, we are seeing enslavement." It possible, she theorizes, when these human were alive they were part of many forced to farm for the Romans.
House thinks the bone positioning might be the clue to this mystery.
“The practice of repositioning leg bones, as seen in a couple of graves recently discovered, is very rare and unusual. Further research is required but it would appear that these individuals were subjected to extreme violence ... the possibility remains that this was motivated by beliefs.”
The fiery marks were a way to keep track of tomes on the move.
When books hit the road, they don’t always make their way home again. Who among us doesn't have some rogue volumes on our shelves, pilfered from libraries or "borrowed" and then absorbed? In the 15th and 16th centuries, when book printing was in its infancy, this problem of books gone missing was especially pronounced when the volumes in question were expressly designed to roam.
In particular, texts tagged along as missionaries fanned out to proselytize across the New World. When it came to converting indigenous people to Christianity, religious texts were a powerful weapon in missionaries' arsenals, and psalms, confessions, and other liturgical texts—written in Spanish, Latin, and scores of indigenous languages—were printed in Europe and shipped across the ocean to New Spain. This land, encompassing present-day Mexico and other portions of Central and South America, was an epicenter of conversion efforts, and it soon became a hub for the printed word, too.
It’s easy to imagine how books could become casualties of a life that was itinerant by design. “Missionaries’ whole mission was to go out and constantly be on the move, and the books were, as well,” says Melissa Moreton, an instructor at the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa. Before they did, monasteries and convents often made a bold claim to ownership. With a scalding tool, they seared distinctive marks onto the pages.
These marcas de fuego were both insurance and warning, “marking them in case someone would try to steal it from the library or convent,” says Analú López, the Ayer Indigenous Studies Librarian-in-Residence at Chicago’s Newberry library. Each order had its own symbol, which drew upon the group’s iconography. The marks made by Dominicans contain a cross, while Augustinians’ include a heart pierced by arrows, and Franciscans’ feature two crossed arms, signifying the spiritual fellowship between St. Francis and Christ. And within a given order, brands varied further from place to place.
In some respects, Moreton says, the practice was related to a longstanding European tradition. For hundreds of years, manuscripts had carried inscriptions that variously browbeat and beseeched readers. One text might bear a curse said to befall anyone who did wrong by the volume; another would simply ask nicely for its safe return. In a New World twist, fire brands did one better: They were on the pages, not the binding—which could easily have been removed—and they were deep. One Franciscan book, which Moreton studied during a recent fellowship at the Newberry, is branded so deeply that she suspects that the flames may have caught on the pages. Someone “kind of did a hack job to saw away at the burned, charred area to get F to look like an F again,” she says. “Otherwise, it was just a black blob of charred paper.”
Stylistically and procedurally, the process evoked cattle branding, and that reveals the esteem with which missionaries held the books, says Will Hansen, director of reader services and curator of Americana at the Newberry. “Marking a book the same way you would an extremely valuable piece of property—livestock—shows how much value you place on it because you don’t want to lose it.”
As proof of where the books were kept, the marks also illustrate the squabbles and ruptures that dominated theological conversations of the day. The Newberry’s collection includes a 1502 text by a Dominican author that debates whether or not the Virgin Mary had herself been the fruit of an immaculate conception.
Contemporary readers can also mine these texts for information about existing indigenous belief systems, “but you have to read across the grain,” says Hansen. The texts were created with particular aims in mind, catering primarily to indigenous people in the course of being converted (or to the priests who had arrived to foist their own belief system upon them).
With colleagues at Biblioteca Lafragua and Biblioteca Franciscana in Puebla, Mexico, Mercedes Salomón Salazar is cataloging hundreds of the marks on an online database. Even as this trove grows, there are many more questions to answer. Fire-branded books are “this area of book history that has yet to be fully investigated,” Moreton says. Who was branding them, and where were they licked with fire—at the printers’ or at the convent? Was this exclusively a New World practice? And to what extent is it possible to use the brand to reconstruct a book’s journey from one pair of hands to another?
Sometimes, Moreton says, a book easily gives up its secrets as you flip the pages. “If you get lucky, you have a juicy one with lots of notes,” she says—perhaps even readers or owners who introduce themselves on the inside cover, and carry a consistent handwriting style throughout their annotations. If contemporary sleuths know where to look, “the books are talking to us today,” Moreton says. Fire brands are one way that these texts can narrate their lives, and the systems of power and oppression that they traveled within.
They welcomed women back when American restaurants prohibited dining without a man present.
On August 28, 1900, Rebecca Israel decided to treat herself to dinner at Cafe Boulevard, a fashionable restaurant in the heart of Manhattan’s Jewish theater district. Despite being polite and well-dressed, Rebecca was refused a table and asked to leave. The restaurant’s owner, Igantz Rosenfeld, had a strict policy against serving women who were unaccompanied by men. Rebecca sued him for discrimination, but the case was dismissed by the New York Supreme Court in 1903.
Throughout the 19th century, restaurants catered to a predominately male clientele. Much like taverns and gentlemen’s clubs, they were places where men went to socialize, discuss business, and otherwise escape the responsibilities of work and home. It was considered inappropriate for women to dine alone, and those who did were assumed to be prostitutes. Given this association, unescorted women were banned from most high-end restaurants and generally did not patronize taverns, chophouses, and other masculine haunts.
As American cities continued to expand, it became increasingly inconvenient for women to return home for midday meals. The growing demand for ladies’ lunch spots inspired the creation of an entirely new restaurant: the ice-cream saloon. At a time when respectable women were excluded from much of public life, these decadent eateries allowed women to dine alone without putting their bodies or reputations at risk.
The first ice cream saloons were humble cafes that served little more than ice cream, pastries, and oysters. As women became more comfortable eating out, they expanded into opulent, full-service restaurants with sophisticated menus that rivaled those at most other elite establishments. In 1850, a journalist described one ice cream saloon as offering “an extensive bill of fare … ice cream — oysters, stewed, fried and broiled; —broiled chickens, omelettes, sandwiches; boiled and poached eggs; broiled ham; beef-steak, coffee, chocolate, toast and butter.” According to the historian Paul Freeman, the 1862 menu of an ice cream saloon in New York ran a whopping 57 pages and featured mother of pearl detailing.
Ice cream saloons proliferated in urban shopping districts in the 1850s and were immensely popular with the growing number of wealthy women who spent their afternoons shopping and promenading along the avenues. After a long day at the department store, the carriage trade headed to the ice cream saloon, to, in the words of one commentator, “exchange a dish of scandal or gossip, as well as sweetmeats.” Towards the end of the century, department stores started to open their own restaurants. But as the New York Timesnoted in 1866, for a long time ice cream saloons were “almost the only place where ladies could go unattended by gentlemen and satisfy their appetites, rendered sharp by their shopping excursions.”
Beginning in 1839 with the Tremont Hotel in Boston, large hotels regularly set aside space for a ladies’ ordinary, a separate dining room for women and children. Men were only admitted if they were dining with women, generally their wives or other female relatives. But few establishments had the space or resources to provide unescorted women with such posh accommodations, and those that did were only accessible to the elite.
Unlike ladies ordinaries’, ice cream saloons didn’t formally restrict male patronage. Instead, they established themselves as respectable restaurants simply by catering to women’s culinary and decor preferences. Though many ice cream saloons offered hardy meals, they tended to emphasize oysters, ice cream, and other light bites. “Special pains are taken in many places to cater to these fair lunchers,” wrote the New York Times in 1890. “While women are not all light eaters, most of them are partial to dainty tid-bits, pastry and ice cream.”
In an effort to create a female-friendly atmosphere, many restaurants were outfitted with domestic decor. Heavy draperies, plush armchairs, and marble fireplaces were used to create a parlor-like atmosphere. Newspaper advertisements often used domestic language to signal that ice cream saloons were respectable places for women to dine alone. In 1888, an advertisement for a ladies’ lunch room in San Francisco claimed to be “the only quiet, home-like down-town Restaurant for Ladies and Gentlemen.”
According to food historian Cindy Lobel, this is why some women’s restaurants began to be referred to as parlors, or more specifically ice cream parlors. As a result, many Americans still go to “ice cream parlors” today.
In New York, the most famous ice cream saloon was Taylor’s Saloon, which was crowned “the largest and most elegant restaurant in the world” by Putnam’s Monthly in 1853. The 7,500-square-foot dining room was lavishly decorated with marble floors, mirrored walls, ceiling frescos, and a 17-foot tall crystal fountain. Bowl upon bowl of fruit and candy were displayed on large marble countertops, along with intricate sugar sculptures and freshly cut flowers. The magnificent scene was described by Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman visiting the United States, as “a perfect blaze of decoration … a complete maze of fresco, mirrors, carving, gilding, and marble.”
Although ice cream parlors had an air of dainty domesticity, they also developed more sultry reputations. At the time, they were one of the few places where both men and women could go unchaperoned. As a result, they became popular destinations for dates and other illicit rendezvous. “Did a young lady wish to enjoy the society of the lover whom ‘Papa’ had forbidden the house?” the New York Times wrote in 1866. “A meeting at Taylor’s was arranged, where soft words and loving looks served to atone for parental harshness, and aided the digestion of pickled oysters.”
Innocent young couples weren’t the only pairs tucked together in the velvet booths. During a trip to Taylor’s, one writer observed “a middle-aged man and woman in deep and earnest conversation. They are evidently man and wife—though not each others!” Moralists were also outraged by the presence of pimps, prostitutes, and women “who were not over particular with the company they kept.” These scandalous scenes prompted rumors of ice cream “drugged with passion-exciting Vanilla” that seduced virtuous women into taking “the first step...which leads to infamy.”
These charges did little to dissuade respectable women from patronizing ice cream saloons. In fact, their reputation as “a trysting ground for all sorts of lovers” may have made the saloons all the more enticing. According to the Times, Taylor’s “always maintained its popularity, in spite of (or perhaps because of) rumors that it afforded most elegant opportunities for meetings not entirely correct.”
In time, restaurateurs came to recognize that serving women was a lucrative business. By the end of the 19th century, women had a variety of restaurant options to choose from, including more reasonably priced lunch rooms and cafeterias. To compete, the gilded ice cream saloons gradually evolved into more modest establishments, which made them available to working-class women. But while eateries such as Taylor’s served mainly the wealthy, ice cream—and the palatial establishments where it was served—played an important role in ensuring that American women could enter a restaurant with or without a man.
The musician's hometown plans to raise money to make this dream a reality.
A dream that first manifested more than 20 years ago may finally come true: A giant, bronze statue of the musician Nick Cave could go up in his birthplace, a small Australian town called Warracknabeal, reports Guardian Australia.
Cave had long ago dreamed up the idea of this statue, when he met the sculptor Corin Johnson by chance back in the mid-1990s. Johnson creates large-scale public art—his past work has included a memorial for Princess Diana and a relief for an anti-slavery monument—and he was intrigued by the project. The statue he designed has Cave astride a rearing horse. It’s not unlike a military statue, only Cave’s wearing a loincloth instead of a uniform. It’s silly and surreal and a little bit strange.
Initially, Cave’s vision was to have the statue made, turn up in Warracknabeal with it on the back of a truck, and try to leave it in the town’s center. If the town didn’t want the statue—screw it, he’d leave it in the desert.
At one point, a TV company offered to fund the statue’s creation, but Cave decided he didn’t want the process filmed. Still, the project went far enough that Johnson created a set of miniatures of the design. Cave and Johnson each have one, and a silver version is held by the Melbourne Arts Centre.
Without funding, the project went on hiatus. Now, though, a local group, the Warracknabeal Arts Council, has announced that it will be raising funds to erect the statue in the town, with the intention of drawing more tourists. If they succeed, Johnson will be involved in creating and installing the statue, and Cave’s vision will finally come true. His image will rear up high in the desert sun, memorializing the place where he came from.
Long before Europeans reached Australia, the two continents were connected.
The first time a European ship landed in Australia, as far as anyone can prove today, was in 1606. In the history of colonialism, Australia is often considered a relatively late European “discovery.” But a manuscript from the 13th century shows that, indirectly, Europeans had contact with this faraway continent for hundreds of years before they first landed there.
In the manuscript of De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Hunting With Birds), a treatise on falconry, a group of Finnish scholars recently stumbled across four images of a white bird. The manuscript is held in the Vatican Library, and the most used English translation doesn’t include these images.
The manuscript images, though, predated that one by 250 years. Dalton identified the bird as either a Triton or a subspecies of yellow-crested cockatoo. It would have come, she writes, from the northeast part of the Australia mainland, from New Guinea, or from nearby islands.
According to the manuscript, the cockatoo was a gift from the sultan of Egypt to the Holy Roman Emperor. The bird would have traveled for many years overland to reach Europe, Dalton's analysis revealed. Though Europeans may have only had a fuzzy idea of the lands of Oceania, the vast trade networks of the Middle Ages connected them long before European sailors made it there themselves.
Mike Holland, a bespectacled home winemaker, often arrives downtown several hours before starting his day job, at the Los Angeles City Archives. Before the sun rises over the Avila Adobe on Olvera Street— built in 1818, and considered to be the oldest home in the city—Holland will perch on a ladder pruning, trimming, and managing a tangle of leaves. His goal is to gather as many of these minuscule grapes as he can before 9 a.m., the Adobe’s opening time.
These aren’t your ordinary vines. Years ago, Holland, whose office is located near the Adobe, had been taken with these unusual vines, which lurch skywards and through a main artery in the building. He was curious, and offered to care for them, and make wine out of them. To find out more about their origins, he sent cuttings to the Foundation Plant Services at the University of California, Davis, whose staff came back with astonishing news: The vines were a hybrid between a local grape and a European grape, and they genetically matched what’s now known as the Viña Madre, or the “mother vine” grape that grew at the nearby Mission San Gabriel.
That meant that Holland had stumbled upon a relic, a vine that was perhaps the first in California to produce grapes to make wine. Since then, Holland has been using these grapes to make a special sherry-like wine, called Angelica, that has its origins in Southern California, too. It’s one of the sole remnants of a time when vineyards covered downtown Los Angeles.
Long before a maze of highways spliced through the city—preceding the cluster of gleaming skyscrapers that tower above downtown, as if making eye contact with the mountains—vineyards enveloped the now-urban center. Throughout the 19th century, many acres of grapevines grew right where contemporary landmarks, such as the Bradbury Building (seen in many films) and the Angels Flight now stand. Back then, Los Angeles was not only the birthplace of California wine country, but its beating heart, too.
Before California even became part of the United States, it was Los Angeles—not Sonoma, not Napa—that was poised to become the winemaking epicenter of the west coast. So much so that by 1850, the Los Angeles area boasted over 100 vineyards, and the city’s first-ever seal, drawn up several years later, dubbed it the “city of vines.” So how is it that L.A.’s northern neighbors won California’s winemaking crown, while the city’s own history as a land of vines faded into obscurity?
“It’s more of a tale of urbanization, unfortunately,” says Steve Riboli, who helps oversee winemaking operations at San Antonio Winery. Built in 1917 by Riboli's great-great-uncle Santo Cambianica, an Italian immigrant, San Antonio is the last surviving downtown Los Angeles winery. The timing was unfortunate—as it was built three years before Prohibition—but a local church allowed Cambianica to make sacramental wine, one of the loopholes during that dry era. “We were able to survive because he was a very devout Catholic,” Riboli says.
Before then, basement to full-fledged operations flourished in the area. But continuous population booms, especially during the Gold Rush era, both helped build and ultimately ended L.A.’s winemaking prospects.
The city’s history as a wine town started when California was colonized by the Spanish. Spaniards enjoyed drinking wine and Franciscans used it in religious ceremonies. One of the missionaries sent there, Father Junipero Serra, had grape cuttings sent up from Mexico in 1778 and began to produce sacramental wine. The vines thrived at Mission San Gabriel, a skip away from present-day Los Angeles.
Around then, wine production in Los Angeles began picking up. Winemaking wasn’t a commercial prospect for the region until a Frenchman, Jean-Louis Vignes (whose last name means “vines”) immigrated there. As journalist Frances Dinkelspiel writes in her book Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, he was the first “to recognize there was a market for wine outside the Los Angeles area.” Along the Los Angeles River, he built a stately, 104-acre vineyard that soon attracted visitors who wanted to drink and socialize there.
But Los Angeles’s winery days came too early to enjoy wide acclaim. “It was such bad wine for such a long time, and California was always trying to convince the East Coast to buy its wine, and not French wine,” says Dinkelspiel. “It took a really long time for people to be interested in buying California wine.” Americans were also far more partial to beer, and shipping was challenging. Even in the 1850s, California was still so isolated that residents were begging the government to build highways.
But in 1848, the Gold Rush hit. Many people who came looking for gold found themselves growing grapes. In her book, Dinkelspiel cites a journal of the time, the California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences, which informed farmers that they could rake in $200 per acre if they planted grapes. Coupled with a tax break from the California Legislature, it’s no wonder that the number of grapevines in the state swelled from just over 324,000 in 1855 to over 4 million just three years later. Soon, vines covered Los Angeles County, at least from Malibu stretching past Pasadena.
“By about 1870, when this area was starting to go through its first urbanization, that’s when the landscape started to change,” says Holland. “Once the railroad hit in 1875, the floodgates opened.” Los Angeles suddenly became a sizable city: In 1870, its population was 5,728, and by 1890, it had ballooned to over 50,000 residents. Part of that influx came from what a swarm of investors flooding the state, around the time a disease named phylloxera knocked out scores of European vineyards. “A lot of capital from England and around the world came to Southern California to try to take advantage of [it],” says Dinkelspiel.
But Northern California began developing, too. “They actually started vineyards there and started to make their wines locally,” says Holland, “So they didn’t need it brought on trains to San Francisco.” Worse, a strange ailment known as Anaheim Disease (later dubbed Pierce’s Disease) started to cause Los Angeles’s grapes to wither, then the roots to die altogether, starting in 1883. “Anaheim Disease, with its destructive and rapid rush through the vineyards, signaled the end of Southern California’s dominance in the wine industry,” writes Dinkelspiel. By 1890, Northern California had far surpassed its southern neighbors in winemaking production. Some former winemakers began planting other crops, such as oranges, instead.
That too came to an end with the last haul of urbanization in the 20th century. “When the aqueduct brought the water in from Owens Valley 200+ miles away in 1913, that’s when everything changed,” Holland says. “It went from being a small city to a big city, expanding and exploding and redefining itself ever since.” The post-war population sent land values skyrocketing, and the last of the vineyards were ripped out. “[During] that time period, the 1800s through the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, housing was just taking over everything downtown,” Riboli says. “So that’s what really destroyed the industry.” Soon enough, the only known vines in Los Angeles were the survivors clinging to old buildings, such as the grapevines Mike Holland found on Olvera Street.
Despite winemaking’s rich history in the region, there’s been little effort on Los Angeles’s part to reclaim that part of its identity. It may have to do with the industry’s dark past: Missionaries and winemakers alike essentially enslaved local Native Americans for their labor.
The mission system set up by the Spanish had drawn or conscripted many Native Americans to live there. They were lured by talk of Christianity, or were seeking shelter during a time of environmental change and disease. Upon Baptism, though, the Spanish controlled their lives and forced them to work the fields. When the missions disbanded after Mexican independence, they couldn’t go back to their land. So they went around Los Angeles in search of work.
But, as Dinkelspiel writes, one of the the first acts of legislation passed by the newfound state of California, in 1850, was the Indian Indenture Act. The law forbade Native Americans from voting, and allowed them to be arrested on the spot for not working or for appearing drunk. (Mandatory "apprenticeship" for Native Americans was justified as civilizing them.) Native Americans would be arrested on weekends. When they were released from jail, their labor was sold to the highest bidder, often a grape farmer. “At the end of the week, the vineyardists or farmers would pay two thirds of the fine to the city and the rest to the Indian worker—in high-alcohol aguardiente, ensuring the cycle would be repeated,” she writes. That cruel cycle lasted until 1862, when the California Legislature repealed the act.
The wounds of this ugly history still resonate today, and is "something we have to do some reconciliation with," Holland says. While Dinkelspiel says that these abuses are not yet widespread knowledge, "there is this gradual shift in public reception," thanks to more information being released and acknowledged.
Though winemaking itself remains a side note in Los Angeles's history, and one that’s not lauded due to the history of exploitation, its agricultural past and origins in viticulture remain curiously immortalized at the city’s most famous intersection: Hollywood and Vine, the symbolic crossroads of its two most influential industries.
Peek behind the curtain of once-magnificent venues and the back rooms where magicians share their secrets.
Fifteen of us are gathered in front of the counter, as Noah Levine pulls the green plastic wand from a bottle of bubble solution. He has urged us all to move in close. Slim and bearded, in a gray blazer that leaves his wrists exposed, Levine is friendly but formal, as if he’s only there to pour a bottle of champagne he’d just opened. He blows gently, raising a flight of bubbles from the wand, and they shimmer and float, rainbow-edged orbs suspended in the still air.
“There’s nothing like your first encounter with magic,” Levine says. He watches the bubbles drift before his eyes and lets them linger until the moment that it seems like there’s nothing more to see. Then he reaches out, and with his long fingers he plucks one from the air. In that instant it becomes an iridescent ball of glass, tangible, inarguable. Holding it still, he lets that sink in for a moment, then drops the ball on the glass counter.
It’s the first trick he’s performed for us, and he turns to the audience with an air of conspiracy: That was amazing, right?
We’re in Tannen’s Magic shop in Midtown Manhattan, after it has closed for the night and the whole building feels empty. Two or three nights a week, Levine hosts a show here in the afterhours, drawing in guests with the promise that, in this quiet, softly lit room, they can get a glimpse inside the closed world of magicians.
Before the show had started, Levine laid out a series of magic books. One was filled with small photos of Tony Slydini, demonstrating card tricks. As I paged through, Levine explained how Slydini, an Italian magician who came to New York in 1930, was a master of close-up magic, obsessed with the psychology that gives the best tricks their impact. He excelled at misdirection.
For the uninitiated, the books were less fascinating, perhaps, than Tannen’s wall of playing cards, their backs displaying more than one hundred bright designs. Or the aging set of specimen drawers filled with silk handkerchiefs, flash paper, sponge donuts, and other small, magical objects. Or the giant elephant, salvaged from a stage set, that dominates one corner of the store. Part of the way through the show, Levine piled the books into a stack and revealed that they contained the secrets for every trick he had and would perform. If we had wanted to, we could have discovered those secrets ourselves. But we had missed our chance. He set the books aside, in the same corner as the mysterious black door that led to Tannen’s back room, where only select magicians are allowed.
Even today, when it’s possible to learn the secrets behind many tricks online, a budding magician needs to make his or her way to a place like Tannen’s to find a community and be initiated into the depths of this art. Spend enough time in magic shops, Levine says, and “you start to realize there are deeper secrets here.” For more than a century, their back rooms have been clubhouses for the most talented prestidigitators, illusionists, and conjurers, legendary sites of innovation and bravado, where insiders such as the great Dai Vernon tried out methods to baffle even the most experienced magicians, and show off subtleties of technique and showmanship that can be appreciated only in intimate settings.
New York was once the center of gravity for some of the world’s greatest magicians, both professional and amateur, some known to the world, some famous only among their own kind. The magnificent venues where they performed and the back rooms where they chewed over the art of wonderment have pulled a very real disappearing act of their own. These places helped shape magic, as spaces for inspiration and communities of purists, wonks, obsessives, perfectionists, and charlatans. Levine had promised to reveal a glimpse of places an outsider might never notice, and I was hoping that, by traveling the city in search of a few of these spots, I would get a peek behind the curtain, into the magical past.
I learned my first trick on the Bowery, as we walked past stores stacked with salt shakers, giant pots, and industrial-sized mixers on a spring morning. “If you need a crazy prop,” Levine said, “these restaurant supply stores are the greatest.”
Levine once spent an afternoon in these shops looking for the perfect cocktail shakers to use in the cups-and-balls trick, in which balls appear where they shouldn’t and vanish just as mysteriously. This trick dates back thousands of years, and its methods are no longer secret. The magician starts with more balls than he shows the audience; one’s already hiding in or underneath a cup, and during the trick, while the audience’s attention is elsewhere, he swiftly secretes the others to spots where they’ll later be revealed. Penn and Teller perform a version with clear plastic cups and explain exactly what they’re doing. Levine had been hired to teach a famous actress to perform the trick for a movie, which was why he needed the shakers.
Even if you know how cups and balls works, in the hands of a skillful performer, you won’t see the movement of the balls, no matter how carefully you look. When Penn and Teller do it in full view it still feels like magic. The same principle applies to New York itself. However many times you walk down a street, paying close attention, some detail escapes your notice, or only exists for those in the know. The grave of Harry Houdini, perhaps the most famous magician in history, is part of a family plot in Queens, and though it might seem like an obvious attraction it spent years in disrepair. I’ve walked past the year-round Halloween costume store on Broadway countless times and never knew of the magic shop in the basement, stocked with throwbacks to the 1980s. Without an invitation, there’s no way to discover the illegal poker room hidden somewhere in Soho, where Levine was once asked to perform. New York itself is an engine of misdirection.
We finally arrived at our first stop, a dark gray building on the Bowery that looks like a converted garage. It seemed unremarkable. But Levine laughed when he saw the poster on the door. “This is a good start!” According to the sign, we were “standing on the former site of Tony Pastor’s Opera House, one of the legendary birthplaces of vaudeville.”
In the 19th century, a gig at Tony Pastor’s could jumpstart a magician’s career. Levine first learned about it in a biography of Houdini, who thought Pastor’s could be his big break. (Pastor’s measured review of Houdini: “Satisfactory and interesting.”) Opened in 1865, the Opera House put on variety shows meant to appeal to families, not just the men who patronized rowdy beer halls and saloons in the area. This was a revolutionary business model, and it transformed the possibilities for magicians who up until then had stuck to pocket tricks and close-up magic—the egg bag, the linking rings, simple card tricks, silk handkerchiefs that change color at a snap—that worked in smaller, less formal spaces. But given a stage and a captive audience, tricks could give way to large-scale illusions. At Pastor’s and theaters like it, objects, animals, and people changed color, swapped places and body parts, floated in the air, and vanished from sight.
“Coming from a tradition where magicians were making jokes and doing sleight-of-hand stuff, making people appear and disappear was a pretty amazing thing. Once you’ve got a nice vaudeville theater, you’ve got options. You can produce a bird and then have someone bring it offstage, so there isn’t a bird flapping all over the place,” Levine said. “It’s not necessarily about method. You’ve got a wing, you can put stuff there. You know what the setting will be like. The more control you have, the more consistent the venue, the better your magic is going to be. In a short period of time, you can really dumbfound people.”
Levine weaves his way casually around the specifics of magic, illuminating without revealing too much. He started to describe a trick called aerial fishing, in which a magician dangles a fishing pole in the air. All of a sudden a goldfish appears at the end. In 1902, Mahatma, a magician’s magazine printed by the magic shop Martinka & Company, noted that the already legendary trick—"the most ingenious trick ever conceived"—was seen for the last time at Tony Pastor’s very popular theater. At one time, performing here was a gig to brag about.
But outside of magician’s magazines, Pastor’s doesn’t mean much anymore. Its original location is occupied by a generic upscale restaurant and a condo building. We walked uptown, tracing Pastor’s moves to a venue on Broadway in 1875, then to 14th Street, a burgeoning theater district in the 1880s. At the site of that last theater, now home to a furniture store, only a small plaque hints at the past. Even with our eyes attuned to the history of magic, we almost missed it amid the distraction.
Vaudeville ushered in a golden age for magicians. They came from around the world to be part of this business, and some found fame touring big cities and regional circuits. Wealthy professionals started learning the art, as a pastime. New magic shops manufactured tricks and magical apparatuses, and welcomed traveling magicians, who could use their back rooms to make repairs or store stage props. On Saturday nights, Martinka’s, the “Palace of Magic” on the edge of Greenwich Village, began to host a small group of professionals and dedicated amateurs to share stories and swap craft. In 1902, they formalized their club into the Society of American Magicians, which counted 24 members at its founding and grew quickly. Long after vaudeville went out of style and its stages were shuttered, this backroom legacy remained.
More than most histories, magic’s is slippery and impermanent. Magicians don’t always write their ideas down. New York’s Conjuring Arts Research Center in Midtown, where Levine used to work, collects rare texts from magic’s past, but many of the stories of people such as Vernon, Al Flosso, and Samuel Hooker—magician’s magicians and stalwarts of the insider community—are passed down as lore.
With his sharp mustache and debonair smile, Dai Vernon always looked like he knew more than he was revealing, and as his stature in the magic community grew, his life became legend. When he came to New York from Ottawa, Canada, in 1915, the vaudeville circuit was still feeding magicians steady income and fame, though Pastor’s heyday was long over. A kid obsessed with magic and card tricks, Vernon gravitated to the city’s magic shops. Martinka’s had already become legendary, though from the outside, one reporter wrote in 1916, it looked like “a little dingy shop … with one window full of dusty paraphernalia,” in the shadow of Sixth Avenue’s elevated train. Whatever wonders the shop had to offer were in the back room, off-limits to newcomers like Vernon.
But the city had other magic shops and other back rooms. When Vernon visited Clyde Powers’s shop on 42nd Street, he made an impression by spotting the technique Powers used in a complicated card trick—it had to do with the number of cards in each small pile cut from a deck. Powers asked what Vernon could do and, after seeing him work, invited him into the back room, the hangout of some of the era’s most famous magicians, Already, the young Vernon had mastered moves the other magicians couldn’t manage.
Vernon was supposed to be attending art school, not spending every afternoon in a magic shop. By summer 1916, he needed a job, and he was drawn to Coney Island, where magic and manipulation were core charms. In the amusement parks that had gone up on the city’s sandy edge, magicians created arcane illusions. An audience could see a woman’s head grafted onto a sword or the body of a spider. Dreamland, one of the strip’s most extravagant parks, once had a 30-foot statue of a topless angel at its entrance, advertising a Bible-themed spectacle by the illusionist Roltair.
In 1916, the trains out to Brooklyn’s southern edge had only recently been converted from steam engines to electrified subways, transforming Coney into an escape for masses of Manhattanites. On this sunny Friday in 2018, after visiting the site of Pastor’s theater, getting on the subway at Union Square and taking the long ride to the end of the line still felt like slipping out of the city’s chains. When we arrived at Coney Island around lunchtime, a breeze was blowing, and the tables outside Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand were already crowded. We ambled down the boardwalk, past a man trying to entice recalcitrant bird to sing along to his half-hearted covers. A hundred years earlier, this was “America’s Playground." “This was a fancy place!” said Levine. “I always kind of think of it as a big carnival, but look at old pictures. You’d get dressed up to go here.”
We stopped in front of a dirt lot occupied by construction equipment, next door to an aquarium exhibit featuring animated characters from the movie Ice Age. It’s where, in 1904, you would have seen Dreamland’s palatial central tower soar, an illusion all on its own, as gaudy and spectacular as a Las Vegas casino today, illuminated with thousands of electric bulbs.
Dreamland burned down in 1911, and by the time Vernon arrived, a large tent, the Dreamland Circus Sideshow, had gone up its place. There and at nearby Luna Park, magicians performed show after show, day after day out. Vernon didn’t get a job as a magician, though.
Magicians at Coney had to battle countless other diversions for the attention of the crowds. You can hear Coney Island showmanship in the voice of the Al Flosso, who began working there in 1915. When Flosso started his act, there was no pause in his rat-a-tat pitter-patter, no time for the kids he called “sonny” to lose focus or look away. “When an audience can walk away from you at any moment, you learn to hold their attention transfixed,” Levine said. But Vernon never made magic a full-time hustle. He was already becoming a purist. Rather than slather his subtle powers in ham, he started cutting silhouettes from black paper for passersby. Coney Island was a place to make a buck and meet other magicians.
Earlier, Levine had described what it meant for a magic trick to hit. On some level, people understand that they are watching demonstrations of planning and skill. But it’s also possible to set tricks up in a way that elicits uncontrollable emotional and mental reactions—eyes widening, head tilted in amazement, a gasp of “shut up.” Even the greatest skeptic or insider can be bowled over in ways they can never expect. “It’s almost,” Levine said, “like you’re rewiring someone’s mind.”
When he talks, Levine holds his hands with an unconscious care. Magicians sometimes refer to hands impersonally—“the hands” make a gesture, cards are held at “the fingertips.” They are tools, like a surgeon’s. People watch magicians’ hands closely, and even if they don’t see anything that reveals how a trick was done, they use “sleight of hand” as an explanation, without understanding what that actually means. For magicians, it is a vocabulary of movements—shifts, controls, transfers, ditches, and steals—on which they can build subtle touches, a word, or a way of touching the cards, that make a trick hit. Vernon pushed magicians to use more natural gestures, rather than sweeping, theatrical ones, that could manipulate the minds of the viewers as much as the objects they were moving.
“If I do a little sleight of hand such that the coin that was in my hand is now not in my hand, when I open it, and you didn’t catch it, you think—‘Oh wow, okay, that was a surprise,’” Levine explained. “But if you can get someone to a place where they viscerally feel that there’s a coin in my hand, deep in the back of their head they feel that it’s there, their brain has locked in on that assumption. Then I open the hand, and it’s like their mind does the magic.”
But people came to Coney Island to see grand illusions, not close-up magic, and today this place traffics in different kinds of larger-than-life thrills: rides, kitschy haunted houses, parades of mermaids. On the day we visited, the roller coasters were running, full of delighted kids, but the maze-like corridors of carnival games, hardly changed over a century, were a ghost town. To the extent there’s magic to be found, it’s at the Coney Island Museum, where magicians perform weekly on a stage on the second floor. Out front, a poster advertises a magic show. But when we peeked inside, there was little evidence of the magic community of old.
Our tour through New York passed from the Lower East Side, where new and old versions of the city sit side-by-side, to Coney Island, a simulacrum of its former self, to Brooklyn Heights, which feels like it hasn’t changed much in the past century. Starting around 1916, small cadres of magicians made their way down Remsen Street, past the same stately brownstones that still stand there, to see something amazing on the second floor of a chemist’s carriage house.
Amateur magicians were always part of the culture of backroom magic, and one of them, Samuel Cox Hooker, created a show so spectacular that for years many magicians had relegated it to the world of myth. Hooker was an imposing, detail-oriented man who, in his day job at a sugar refining company, essentially created the American beet sugar industry. He also collected scientific books and had an interest in photography, as well as an affinity for magic. But among magicians, he’s remembered for creating one of the strangest and most mysterious tricks ever devised: the Hooker Rising Cards.
Behind his Brooklyn home, Hooker had a detached carriage house, where he built a lab on the first floor and a small stage on the second, with room for an audience of 20 or fewer—almost always amateur or professional magicians. The stage was set sparsely, with a few small, round tables. On one of them was a houlette, a small frame that held a single deck of cards, vertically, with the face of the front card exposed to the audience. A chosen card starts to slide up, seemingly of its own accord, from the middle of the deck, gradually revealing its face. In theory, this trick is easy to perform. In its simplest version, the magician uses a hidden finger to push the last card in the deck slowly upward.
Hooker’s show was 90 minutes of rising card variations. He placed a deck in the houlette and a joker would rise, and then bob up and down, evading his grasp. An audience member would name a number, and that number of cards immediately rose from the deck. Hooker would borrow a deck from the audience—surely most of them had decks handy—and place it in the houlette; a selected card would rise. Members of the audience would call out cards, and the cards would rise. The whole deck would rise. Later in the show, Hooker upped the apparent difficulty. He put the houlette under a bell jar or on a book lifted up by three small legs, and he even suspended it from the ceiling on ribbons. He had the joker rise clear out of the deck and into the air. Throughout the performance Hooker would chat with the disembodied head of a toy bear named Miltiades III, who himself moved, floated, and helped Hooker read minds.
The magicians in the audience knew how a trick like this was supposed to work, with a secret string or lever or wheel. But Hooker had them mystified. Over the course of the show, Hooker kept adding conditions—variables—that should have made the trick increasingly impossible to perform. In fact, he called the show “Impossibilities.” No one ever guessed how it was done, and Hooker kept the secret close, training just a few people to perform the act before his death in 1935.
When we reached his address, the house, with a black door and brick front, had a looming presence, though nothing in particular distinguishes it from others on the block. Levine knows magicians who’ve driven past, curious to see the place that so many left baffled, but none have seen inside. So we decided to ring the front doorbell.
To our surprise, one of the current owners of Hooker’s house opened the door and invited us in. She preferred not to give her name, but she said she knows that there once was a magic show there and that Houdini had some connection to the house. She would have led us out back to the carriage house if there were anything to see, she added, but when they moved in a decade ago, whatever apparatus was used for the trick had already been stripped out. In ten years, no one’s come by to ask about it. There’s no magic left but memory.
We rounded the corner to skirt down the back alley and take a quick look at the carriage house anyway. (By New York standards, it’s a gigantic space, larger than many decent apartments.) “Houdini got fooled,” said Levine, animated over Hooker's prowess. “This guy comes up with the most genius magic tricks, and then it's … ‘Oh yeah, Houdini used to come here.’ He came to be a spectator.”
Most people know only a few magicians by name, and Houdini is often first among them. Some magicians love him, but others see him as a genius self-promoter rather than a talented magician. “Houdini didn’t do any magic,” Vernon once said in an interview. “He did escapes! There’s nothing strange to seeing a guy get out of a straitjacket.”
Vernon wasn’t being entirely fair. Before making his name as an escape artist, Houdini performed card tricks, and he prided himself on his ability to suss out the method behind any card trick if he could see it performed three times. In February 1922, when he was at a magician’s meeting in Chicago, Vernon approached him with a challenge.
Vernon had Houdini write his initials on a card and place it back in the deck. In a split second, Vernon made the card rise to the top of the pile and revealed it. Houdini had no idea how it happened.
In some versions of this story, Houdini placed the card second from the top. In another, he placed it at various spots within the deck. All versions agree that Vernon performed the trick seven times, and Houdini was stumped. From then on, Vernon piggy-backed on Houdini’s talent for promotion and advertised himself as “The Man Who Fooled Houdini.”
Today, the method behind this trick—a switch, a gesture that exchanges one card for another, or a gaff, a specially made version of an object—is no longer a secret. It’s easy enough to find the details online, although among magicians it’s still considered gauche to talk openly about exactly which switch or which gaff can be used. But the Hooker Rising Cards remain a mystery, even to most magicians, with only a few select people in on the trick. Sometimes, the secret behind a trick is that there isn’t just one secret, but a series of them that a magician can swap out as circumstances dictate. And once you’ve astounded an audience, even one composed entirely of magicians, it becomes easier to keep fooling them.
By the 1930s, Vernon was at the center of his own group of magicians, both professional and amateur, who had come to revere him as the best close-up magician in the world. Along with one of his students, a well-off lawyer named Garrick Spencer, he started his own magic organization, the Academy of the Art of Magic, which planned to assemble the most accomplished magicians into a league of honor. By then, the primary forum for magic had shifted again. Vaudeville had fallen to radio and, eventually, television. The Great Depression had stripped the middle class of money to spend on leisure at places like Coney Island. Soon the Hippodrome, the Midtown theater where Houdini had famously made an elephant vanish, would be torn down and replaced with an office building. Martinka’s had merged with another magic shop, and in 1938 Flosso, the Coney Island magician, bought it and changed the name to the Flosso-Hornmann Magic Shop.
Magicians found refuge in nightclubs, classier versions of the beer halls that had preceded vaudeville. Elaborate illusions were on the outs again, as magicians were often left exposed in the middle of a dance floor, backed by a band. “You were surrounded,” says Levine. “The acts had to be lightweight and attention-grabbing.”
In the late 1930s, Spencer had been urging Vernon to develop an act that he could take to a famous nightclub—the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center. Vernon was used to performing in rarified settings; for many years before the Depression he had worked parties for some of New York’s wealthiest people. But he wasn’t a stage magician. With Spencer’s urging (and money) he developed an elaborate routine, his “Harlequin Act,” in which he portrayed a commedia dell’arte character, a medieval demon of sorts. Choreographed to classical music, the routine updated classic tricks—the cups and balls, the linking rings, changing gloves into a dove.
The act premiered in 1938, and at first it was a success. Newspapers hailed Vernon as card master who’d finally figured out how to communicate his genius on a larger scale. A one-week engagement at the Rainbow Room was extended to more than two months.
Unlike Pastor’s theaters, or Dreamland, or Hooker’s private venue, the Rainbow Room still exists, in a form. It’s now an event space, available for rent. Not that long ago, Levine performed there himself at a fundraising gala, where magicians walked the floor, approaching small groups of guests. In that situation, lightweight tricks that can be held in a magician’s hands and pocket work best: Levine might guess a card someone has picked from a deck, or have them think about their favorite book from childhood and divine what it is. The space still has room for more dramatic stage sets, though, and another magician made a person levitate into the air.
But Vernon’s success at new venues was short-lived. When he tried to scale the act up, to perform at Radio City Music Hall, it didn’t work. He was disappointed, but the purist and experimentalist in him was also bored. He didn’t like doing the same show over and over; he felt his own limits as a performer. He was happier tracking down a new sleight-of-hand technique from card shops. Just like in his Coney Island days, he preferred to do magic without muddling it with show business.
In the 1940s and '50s, he performed close-up magic on cruise ships and at parties, and he started giving lecturers to other magicians. He shared some of his never-before-seen techniques, and always pressed on the idea that magic should look as natural as possible. He rethought age-old tricks, and the versions he created became canon. “If you see someone do the cups and balls or linking rings or any card trick, most of the time, they’re doing his version,” says Levine. At that time, in New York’s back rooms and the restaurants that magicians haunted, Vernon was the one who determined who had the opportunity to gather around insiders’ tables.
In the 1960s, he moved west, to Los Angeles, where he took up residence at a private magician’s club, the Magic Castle. “When he lived in New York, New York was the epicenter of insider magic,” says Levine. “And when he moved to Los Angeles … ” Vernon took the center of gravity with him.
“All of my memories of magic are—I was already obsessed with it,” Levine says. There’s a video of him at age five, giving a magic show using tricks from a kit. “I didn’t know how to do any of the stuff,” he says. “But I kind of have the schtick down, like—‘You, over there, you pick this card.’”
He met the current owner of Tannen’s, Adam Blumenthal, when both were early teenagers, attending the magic camp the shop still runs each summer. Back then, most people assumed a young magician’s dream was to have a television special like one of David Copperfield’s. “Sleight of hand was just a thing magicians did to amuse themselves or entertain people before or after a show,” says Levine. When he got excited about close-up magic, the type of tricks Vernon obsessed over, it wasn’t for its commercial potential. But in recent years, sleight of hand has become more popular. David Blaine’s Street Magic, which filmed audiences’ reactions to close-up magic, showed how it could work on television. And it’s also the perfect type of magic for the quick-hit YouTube age.
“You can do a lot of things, when you can drop out of frame,” said Blumenthal, standing behind the counter at Tannen’s. Outside the Midtown building where Tannen’s is hidden, there’s no hint of what you’ll find upstairs—no window full of tricks, no sign, no poster. On the sixth floor, the elevator opens into a white hallway, and the store is around the corner and at the end of the hall. After our day walking through the city, the shop was dark and cool. People bustled in and out, as Levine ducked into the back room and returned. Two young magicians came in, planted themselves at the center table, and started working with decks of cards. “But there’s also a lot of things that don’t work for camera,” Blumenthal continued. “The camera doesn’t blink. And context is really important. The kind of things that Noah can do in a show are also different than the things you’re going to do socially at a bar.”
Steeped as it is in oral history, magic is full of legends, and when Levine first came here, he didn’t quite believe the story that the Flosso-Hornmann Magic Shop had once been located in the same building. But then one day a long-time building employee asked him if Jackie—Flosso’s son, who took over the business—was still around. The old elevator operator once asked Blumenthal about it, too. That store had its own mythology: two counters against a white wall, piled with magic stuff and navigable only by the employees, who decided what you needed when you visited. Blumenthal worked out that it must have closed just a few years before Tannen’s moved in. Today the spot where it was located is a blank wall, right next to Tannen’s.
Levine designed his afterhours show specifically for Tannen’s, and he imagined the first half would be the best version of what it can be like to visit a magic shop. In the second half, after he whisks away the magic books, he gathers the audience around the black table in the center of the room, to give, he says, a sense of what it’s like to be in the back room. He talks about Vernon and a trick in which he scattered a deck of cards off a boat and into the water. Only one card landed face up—the one that Vernon had chosen. Levine then explains the holy grail of backroom magic—to make a card appear without touching the deck. As he speaks, he makes no mention of what his hands are doing—moving cards around the table with a pen alone.
At the end of the night, he performs a version of “any card at any number.” An audience member thinks of a card, and Levine asks another to pick a number—31, in this case—and then he counts down as he deals cards from the deck. He turns over the 31st card, and the audience member assents: That’s the card. We may not know what the secret is behind the trick, or any of the amazing things that magicians can do today, absent theatricality and a dedicated stage, but we know exactly where to find it: somewhere in the back room.
Atlas Obscura partnered with Sotheby's to create a four-night NYC event showcasing extraordinary maps, letters, ephemera and more up for auction.
Over the course of four evenings last weekend a select group of people drawn by a shared love of literature, history, cartography, and Bruce Springsteen gathered in The Woolworth Tower Residences in lower Manhattan for a rare and exclusive peek at items included in Sotheby's current auction: Fine Books and Manuscripts Including Americana. Exclusively online, the auction runs until Thursday, June 28 at 12 p.m. EST.
The weekend kicked off with Secrets of the Script: an evening spent examining letters penned by iconoclasts ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Tennessee Williams. The night included an ink-making demonstration and a personal exercise, wherein guests were directed to pick up a pen, start writing, and continue until a timer sounded.
Friday's Bruce Springsteen and "Born to Run" drew a musically inclined crowd, eager to take a closer look at Bruce Springsteen's legacy by examining a hand-written, early draft of "Born to Run." Pitchfork Executive Editor Mark Richardson and author Amanda Petrusich helped contextualize the release of Springsteen's seminal work through a discussion of his creative process and the cultural environment of the mid-1970s. Capping the evening, musician Kevin Morby performed a series of Springsteen covers.
Edgar Allan Poe reigned on Saturday night, with his favorite libation (absinthe) on tap and an array of performers paying tribute to the grim hero through dramatic readings and avant-garde burlesque acts. The evening's lynchpin was a once-in-a-lifetime, intimate viewing of a first-edition print of Poe's Tales.
Following Saturday's deliciously macabre proceedings, the weekend ended on a more subdued note with The Cartographer's View, an exploration of mapmaking from past to present featuring items like the oldest known, authentic map picturing and using the term "America," and the first printed map to show the entire world from the poles. Guests were invited to peer through telescopes for a glimpse into the processes of the earliest cartographers.
All events took place in the landmark Woolworth Building, on a floor where F.W. Woolworth himself chose to set up his offices for its magnificent views. The events, though diverse, were bound by their stunning environs and the rare opportunity to simply be in The Woolworth Tower, surrounded by precious artifacts as the sun set over the city.
An ancient game known as "hnefatafl" held immense symbolic and religious significance.
The Icelandic saga Hervör and Heidrek abounds with tropes instantly familiar to modern fantasy fans. Regarded as a key influence on classic early-20th century works in the genre, the 13th-century tale features dwarves, a tragic curse, a magical sword, and, perhaps most recognizable of all to fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, a fateful contest of riddles.
The contest begins in the saga’s closing chapters when Heidrek, King of the Goths, summons to court his enemy, Gestumblindi. Fearing execution, the latter resorts to desperate measures: He seeks help from Odin, the most powerful and notoriously capricious Viking god. Seemingly content with Gestumblindi’s subsequent sacrifice, Odin agrees to transform himself into a doppelgänger and take the man’s place at court. Rather than submit himself to the judgment of Heidrek’s council, the disguised god convinces the king to settle the matter through a game of wits.
The story’s subsequent riddles illustrate countless facets of life during the Viking Age—most notably riddle 13, which provides rare insight into an intriguing Nordic pastime. “What women are they,” asks Odin as Gestumblindi, “warring together before their defenseless king; day after day the dark guard him, but the fair go forth to attack?” For centuries, Heidrek’s answer to this riddle has fascinated archaeologists and historians alike. “This is the game of hnefatafl,” he says, “the darker ones guard the king, but the white ones attack.”
Heidrek’s reference, here, is one of several in the Icelandic sagas to an ancient board game known as hnefatafl (pronounced “neffa-tafel”). Ubiquitous among Nordic settlements during the early Middle Ages, Vikings played the game on a checkered wooden tablet similar to the modern-day chess board. Once a relative mystery to researchers, archaeologists now believe it held immense symbolic and religious significance.
Over the past 150 years, excavators have unearthed large quantities of gaming material from Viking boat burials. Dating from the 7th to the 11th centuries, most of it consists of checker-like pieces constructed from glass, whale bone, or amber. These pieces range from ordinary discs to ornate figurines and are usually uniform in shape and size, save for one prominent king piece, known as the hnefi. The archaeologist Mark Hall recently chronicled the contents of 36 burials containing such pieces in a 2016 article for The European Journal of Archaeology. This material, he says, indicates the game was much more than a frivolous way to kill time between raids. “Its presence in these burials suggests it was an aspect of everyday life that was desirable to see continued,” he says, as well as “a significant element that helped define the status of the deceased.”
That archaeologists and game historians can confidently make such claims is a testimony to more than 100 years of painstaking research. Indeed, until the early 20th century, few scholars differentiated hnefatafl from other contemporary board games. Early published editions of the Sagas relied upon wildly disparate translations of medieval Icelandic texts, which also confused the matter. Because the oldest extant copies of these documents often refer to the game as “tafl”—a Germanic word denoting “board” or “table”—translators regularly mistook references to it for generic allusions to chess. This resulted in ill-informed interpretations among 19th-century researchers not only of Odin’s riddle for King Heidrek, but also of a notable scene in Frithiof’s Saga, in which the titular hero uses the game as an elaborate metaphor for military strategy.
According to the archaeologist David Caldwell, author of The Lewis Chessmen Unmasked, such mistakes among early chess historians are not surprising. Chess, he says, dates to sixth-century India, and its origins are possibly even older. By the Viking Age, it had also reached Europe. “Both hnefatafl and chess were played side by side,” he says. “It is not always clear from early sources which game is being referred to, but double-sided boards are known with one side suitable for one game and the other for the other game.”
It wasn’t until the early 20th century that historians realized the games shared little in common beyond a checkered board and a prominent “king.” In his 1905 monograph Chess in Iceland and in Icelandic Literature, the scholar Willard Fiske devoted dozens of pages to how the games differed. “For whatever we may not know about hnefatafl,” he concluded, “we do know it could never have lain in the same cradle as chess.” Instead, he suggested, it belonged to a family of “tafl” or “table” games played in Europe throughout the Middle Ages.
Eight years later, the historian H.J.R. Murray confirmed this theory. While researching his classic A History of Chess, he isolated an arcane reference to a game called tablutin the diary of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist. Linnaeus encountered the game during a 1732 trip to Lapland, at which time he jotted down its basic rules. After comparing these rules to the game mentioned in the Sagas, Murray hypothesized that “it is extremely probable that [tablut] is identical with the old hnefatafl.”
As described by Linnaeus, tablut pit an offensive player against a defensive opponent. The latter placed a king piece in the central square of a checkered board and surrounded it with defenders. This player attempted to win the game by maneuvering the king to one of the four corners of the board. The game’s rules awarded the opposing player a superior number of pieces, which were placed in formation around the king’s defense. This player won by occupying all four squares around the king. All pieces in the game moved horizontally and vertically, like the rook in chess.
Wherever hnefatafl falls on this genealogical chart, it seems to have meant much more to the Vikings than its offshoots did to their neighbors and descendants. According to Hall, this is evidenced not only by its inclusion in boat burials, but also by where Vikings placed the material within these graves. “The majority were placed mid-ship, but it depended on the size of the boat and the nature of the deceased,” he says. The symbolism inherent in this placement had “less to do with where in the boat than where in relation to the body.”
In many cases, Vikings placed a hnefatafl board on or near the deceased’s lap. Others seem to have placed gaming pieces on top of the grave itself. In 2005, the archaeologists Martin Rundkvist and Howard Williams excavated 23 amber game pieces buried in this manner at a site in southern Sweden. In a subsequent article for Medieval Archaeology, they speculated that Vikings may have seen this placement as “a means of assisting the transformation of the deceased into the afterlife or ancestral state.” These same Vikings, they added, might also have anticipated “future games, perhaps imagining a lordly lifestyle of gaming, feasting, and fighting in the next world.”
According to the historian Helène Whittaker, this “lordly lifestyle” is important to understanding what hnefatafl meant to the Viking hierarchy. “Gaming pieces were sometimes made of prestigious materials,” she says. “This suggests that there was a connection between conspicuous leisure and the playing of board games.” Additionally, Viking Age board games were predominately modeled after war. That most hnefatafl pieces are found in male as opposed to female graves “suggests that there was a recognized connection between [board games] and the warrior ideology of elite men.”
This connection between hnefatafl and war only adds more fodder to a recent debate regarding a controversial grave within a famous mass burial site on Björkö Island, just west of Stockholm, Sweden. Among the 1,100 graves at the site, a team of researchers reevaluated a tomb last year thought to have belonged to a high-ranking Viking warrior, after DNA analysis revealed its remains belonged to a woman. Skeptics suggested nothing about the grave proved its occupant held authority in her community—but the lead researcher Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson believed otherwise. The hnefatafl board on the occupant’s lap, she told the New York Times in 2017, suggested this warrior made “strategic decisions, that she was in command.”
Whatever the presence of hnefatafl pieces meant in this particular grave, it’s undeniable the game was highly symbolic in any burial in which it was included. “In life, strategic thinking and fighting ability were fundamental to success on the gaming board and such success accentuated the status of a warrior,” Hall wrote in 2016. “Placing the gaming kit in the grave served to remember or commemorate that status and skill and to make it available for the deceased in the afterlife.”
It’s not surprising, then, that hnefatafl permeated Viking literature like Hervör and Heidrek, Frithiof’s Saga, and the origin myth Völuspá. Storytellers of the era saw the game as an apt but accessible metaphor—one their audience would immediately recognize as important. Indeed, imbued with real-world and existential meaning, hnefatafl seems not only to have resided at the center of contemporary burials but also at the very heart of Nordic culture in the Viking Age.
Singlish, a creole, is spoken all over the country, but politicians want citizens to "speak good English."
Imagine that the language you speak with your friends, with your family, with people on the street, a language unique to your country and objectively very interesting and cool, is, officially, considered lesser and unworthy. This kind of thing has happened around the world throughout history: African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers in the United States, for example, have also had their language marginalized and demeaned by the ruling power. Now, it’s happening in Singapore.
Singapore is an immigrant country with four official languages: English, Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin. Officially, English is the most commonly spoken language in Singaporean homes, having recently and just barely edged out Mandarin. Unofficially? That’s completely wrong. Because what’s likely the actual most common language spoken does not appear on the census. That language is called Singlish.
Singlish can broadly be categorized as a creole, which is a full language that arises suddenly, usually with one language as its base, but with unique grammatical features and many words from at least one other language. This kind of language comes about when people who don’t speak the same language are suddenly living in the same place. Many creoles came from the slave trade: one person speaks one language, another speaks a second language, and they’re both moved to a place where they have to work together and live together and communicate. The base language is usually the language of the ruling class or imperial power; it’s a language that those two slaves need to understand a little, but they bring elements of their own languages into it. At first, this kind of language is classified as a pidgin, which is sort of a shorthand that exists solely for necessary communication alongside other full languages. But in some cases, it evolves into a full language of its own, one that can handle all the tasks any other language handles, at which point it’s called a creole.
Singlish has its base in English, because Singapore was a British colony for most of its modern history. But the vast majority of the population came from countries where English was not the dominant language, mostly mainland China, Malaysia, and India. Thus Singlish was born.
“Singlish itself, in its full-blown version, can get quite hard to understand [for non-Singaporean English speakers],” says Jakob Leimgruber, a sociolinguist and assistant professor who wrote his thesis on Singlish. Singaporeans are rarely monolingual, and conversations can often include bits and pieces, or full sentences, in multiple languages, which can make trying to isolate Singlish a bit tricky. But, despite the fact that Singapore is made up of multiple ethnic groups who speak different languages, Singlish itself is “remarkably consistent,” says Leimgruber, across the entire populace.
At least, it’s consistent across all ethnic groups. Socioeconomically, it’s more likely that poorer and/or older Singaporeans would speak Singlish more often; younger and wealthier Singaporeans are more likely to be able to switch between Singlish and more widely understood varieties of English. But Leimgruber says that few, if any, Singaporeans would be completely unfamiliar with Singlish, largely due to the country’s compulsory military service, which places people from all economic backgrounds together.
The language includes lots of loanwords from the other major languages spoken in Singapore, especially Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. These are really, really common, to the point where sometimes it can sound as if the speaker has simply switched languages mid-thought. And there are some pronunciation things; words that end with a lot of consonants, for example, tend to get simplified, so a word like “texts” would be pronounced more like “tex.” But it gets much more interesting than that; it has a whole mess of totally distinct grammatical features that make it unusual.
An easy one to understand is the word “lah,” which is what’s known in linguistics as a tag. It’s attached, often but not exclusively, to the end of sentences. It’s roughly similar to the Canadian “eh,” and various other English words or phrases used around the world (“right,” “you know,” “innit”). It is ubiquitous in Singapore, as associated with Singlish as the Canadian “eh” is with Canada, although interestingly there is no pause between the end of the sentence and “lah,” as there is with “eh.” Imagine it as just...not having a comma. “So you’d just race into it lah”? Singlish has so, so many of these lightly modifying tags: leh, mah, lor, hor, har, ar. They all convey slightly different things about the relationship between the speaker and listener, or the way the speaker wants the listener to interpret what was just said.
Singlish speakers use the present tense when referring to people who are alive, or probably still alive. In English, you might say, “I went to Thailand last year, and the guide spoke fluent Spanish.” In Singlish, it would be, “the guide speaks fluent Spanish.” The thinking is that the guide continues to speak Spanish; whether you are in Thailand does not affect the guide’s ability to speak Spanish.
Then there’s the word “kena,” which is pronounced something like “kih-NAH.” There are words like this in Asian languages such as Malay and Hokkien, but not really in English. It’s a grammatical word used to mark the passive and usually right before or even instead of a verb; it means something, some verb action, happened to the subject of the sentence. Interestingly, it’s only ever used for negative things; you could say “the teacher kena scolded him,” but not “the teacher kena praised him.” “Tio” is similar, though it can be used for positive actions as well, like “She tio money on the ground.”
The English word “then” has, in Singlish, been changed to “den,” and its meanings have been pretty radically changed. It can be used to describe an action that will happen in the future, as in ”I den talk to you.” It can be used in about a dozen other ways, meaning “therefore,” as a link to a previous sentence, or alone as a sarcastic sort of “oh yeah?” meaning. The pronunciation might subtly change as well, by lengthening or dragging out the final consonant, to indicate the way in which the word is being used.
“Den” is one of many examples of ways in which Singlish sort of sounds like English, but actually packs a whole other bunch of meanings into it. If you were to just translate “den” as “then,” you wouldn’t really be getting it; you can’t use “den” in some places you’d use “then,” and vice versa, and it sometimes means something other than what “then” would mean.
Singlish also uses a lot of reduplication, which is repeating the same word. English doesn’t do this much; it might have a phrase like “very, very big,” in which the repetition is used to amplify the word “very.” “Very, very big” is even bigger than “very big,” which is bigger than “big.” In Singlish, that’s not at all how reduplication works. Take a sentence like this: “Your son short short.”
For one thing, that’s not a typo; Singlish, like Hebrew and a few other languages, simply doesn’t use the verb “to be.” (Singlish also often omits articles like “the” and “a/an.”) But the reduplication thing: “short short” doesn’t mean “very short.” Instead the reduplication of the word is a dampener, taking the whole phrase to something more like “short-ish.” This kind of reduplication can be used with both adjectives and verbs; you can take a walk walk, which would be a very mild stroll.
Anyway, that’s just a brief survey, and it might even underplay exactly how different from English Singlish really is. Leimgruber says Singlish is mostly mutually comprehensible with English, but I’m not so sure. Take a look at the Singlish dub of Beauty and the Beast.
Singlish is spoken across all ethnic groups in Singapore, even across economic strata. But the government hates it. Since the year 2000, the Singaporean government has been conducting a campaign called the “Speak Good English Movement,” which is specifically designed to discourage the use of Singlish and encourage the use of standard English.
Interestingly, the Singaporean government does not have a firm definition of what “standard English” means; they aren’t strictly teaching British Received Pronunciation or New England Prep School English or Australian English or anything else. By “standard,” they seem to simply mean “English that can be readily understood by English speakers outside Singapore.”
The campaign is not overtly violent or racist in the same way marginalization of Irish Gaelic or AAVE speakers was and is. The Singaporean government does outreach, posting signs around public transit telling people the “correct” way to pronounce words, hosting writing competitions for kids in school, that kind of thing. “These words are very similar and many often get them confused, but do you know when it's more appropriate to use a particular word? Put your grammar skills to the test and see how you fare!” reads one quiz. Is it “The mother put her children to sleep at night” or “the mother put her children to bed at night”?
The government’s reasoning is that English is the international language of commerce, and that Singapore has an inherent advantage because, it being a former British colony, English is already widely spoken. But if instead it’s Singlish that people are speaking, this could make for a serious obstacle to international financial success.
Since the early 1980s, the idea that any one language can be “correct” or “good,” while others are “incorrect” or “bad,” has been widely panned by linguists. Bill Labov, pioneering linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, was among the first to study AAVE as a regular language, one with rules that can’t be broken and unique features and an evolution, rather than as some mangled form of standard English. Since then, the idea that all languages are just, you know, different, rather than good or bad, has been the norm. Singapore’s shunning of Singlish is, from that perspective, retrograde and maybe even offensive.
Singlish itself is pretty well-studied, though a lot of the publications—dictionaries, for example—are more jokey than serious academic works. And Singaporeans have not risen up to protest the marginalization of Singlish. “There’s much less of an advocacy for Singlish in Singapore,” says Leimgruber. There are some—again, jokey—organizations, like the Speak Good Singlish Movement Facebook page. (“Harlow, welcome to the Speak Good Singlish Movement. Our Gahmen has been damn siao on, trying to tell us to speak good engrish, good chinese. This is the Facebook Singlish Speaker's Corner, let it all out my friends. Don't be paiseh.”)
But Singaporeans seem fairly comfortable switching between Singlish and Singapore-inflected English, or Mandarin or Malay or any of the other languages spoken in Singapore. Leimgruber says that Singaporeans don’t disagree that some mutually comprehensible form of English is important to learn, and in many situations (speaking to foreigners, job interviews) will switch to English. The degree to which people are aware of the differences between Singlish and English varies; most Singlish speakers will probably not use the many Mandarin or Malay words when speaking a more standard English, but some of those grammatical differences would likely remain.
But, says Leimgruber, Singlish is not really in any danger of dying out, despite the government’s hopes. (He says that in cases where the government really feels the need to connect with the populace, like in elections, government officials will sometimes lapse into Singlish.) It’s as close to a unique national language as Singapore gets lah?
The pretty, tiny town of Estella, Spain, lies 60 miles south of the French border. It is home to just under 14,000 people; a selection of wineries, eateries, and monasteries; and a painted wooden effigy of San Jorge, dating from the 16th century. Located in the Chapel of San Jorge, the saint sits astride his wooden horse, his arm aloft as if in victory.
But despite this triumphant stance, in recent years, the statue has shown its age. Paint flaked from his nose and eyelids, and his horse had seen better days. And so, much like the amateur restorer Cecilia Giménez, of Ecco Homo fame, a local handicrafts teacher stepped into the fray, paintbrush in hand. The polychrome statue now has the rosy glow of a Pixar character, with arching eyebrows in a near-constant state of surprise.
Speaking to The Guardian, the local mayor Koldo Leoz expressed his dismay with the work. “It’s not been the kind of restoration that it should have been for this 16th-century statue," he said. "They’ve used plaster and the wrong kind of paint and it’s possible that the original layers of paint have been lost." Restoring anything of that age usually requires expertise, or at least familiarity, with antique conservation, which the teacher seems to have lacked—experts are now trying to see whether the statue could be "unrestored," he said.
The prognosis is poor, however. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper ABC, the art restorer Carmen Usua suggested that it might be impossible to bring the statue back to its original state, due to incorrect sanding, questionable coloring, and dodgy work on the plaster. The culprit now faces a fine from the Spanish association of art conservators and restorers, who plan to bring the issue to the Prosecutor’s Office of Navarra. Somewhere, a local handicraft teacher is wringing their hands—while poor old San Jorge continues to stare, terrified, into the void.
Clones and descendants of the famed tree grow on 6 continents.
At Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, England, the ancestral home of Sir Isaac Newton, sketches drawn by the revolutionary physicist, mathematician, and astronomer still adorn the house’s walls. Outside, a gnarled apple tree has been growing for centuries.
A genetically identical tree is growing at Newton’s alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge. Several more grow at Parkes Observatory in Australia, and another at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Descendants and clones of the Woolsthorpe Manor tree dot college campuses and research centers on every continent, except Antarctica. I myself took long college naps under one such tree at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Newton’s Apple Tree,” the plaque read, like many others across the globe. “Grown From An Apple From The Estate of Sir Isaac Newton, Lincolnshire, England.”
Newton’s apple tree holds a special place in the annals of science. In 1665, the just-graduated Newton fled to his family home to avoid a plague outbreak. After observing an apple fall from the then-young tree, Newton considered what force could pull objects in a straight line towards the earth. It was the first step towards his theory of gravity, which he would publish in 1687.
The story is widely believed to be false, like the myth of a child George Washington chopping down a cherry tree with a little axe. But Newton himself said his theory arose from seeing a falling apple while he stayed at Woolsthorpe. In physicist R.G. Keesing’s exhaustive history of Newton’s apple tree, he records sources (from the writer Voltaire to Newton’s niece) relating the tale of the apple tree. Newton may have embellished his story. But due to multiple sources of the tale, Keesing writes, there’s little doubt that there’s a seed of truth to it.
Which tree exactly inspired the theory of gravity? Keesing examined the apple tree still standing in the garden at Woolsthorpe Manor. Regular sketches of Woolsthorpe Manor after Newton’s death continuously show an apple tree in the same spot as the current tree. With no other aged apple trees recorded as growing in the garden, before or after Newton, the Woolsthorpe Manor tree is now widely considered “the one.”
The tree has led a long, interesting life. Likely planted around 1650, it partially collapsed after a storm in 1816. While it re-rooted itself, Newton’s fame and that of his apple tree were increasingly mythologized. Part of the fallen tree was made into a chair, and chunks of the wood were taken as souvenirs. Living wood was also taken and propagated elsewhere. One shoot was taken to nearby Belton Park in 1820. The Fruit Research Station in East Malling took part of that tree in the 1930s. From there, the tree spread across the world, as universities, observatories, particle accelerators, botanical gardens, and research centers clamored for a Newton tree of their own.
These institutions receive a piece of history—not delicious fruit. Whether the trees are clones made by grafting or descendants grown from seeds, they are Flower of Kent trees, a variety that is rare today. Their fruit is green-red and big, but the texture is mealy and the flavor undistinguished. Mostly, it was used for cooking.
Getting a Newton tree can be hard. East Malling still is the main source, but getting trees over borders can be difficult. Fears about invasive pests and plant diseases can hold up plant deliveries for inspections or even quarantine. Worse, Newton trees are sometimes proven to be inauthentic. In 2016, the National Research Council in Canada discovered that their prized Newton trees were neither original nor Flower of Kent. Uncovering the truth felt like “killing Bambi’s mother,” joked the NRC’s secretary-general Dick Bourgeois-Doyle. York University in Toronto quickly offered the council offspring of their Newton trees, which are growing there today.
The greatest apple-tree sagas, though, come from people trying to grow a tree far from Newton’s temperate, shady garden. One hopeful grower was the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India. Statues of famous thinkers—Albert Einstein, Galileo, and Aryabhata, a 6th-century Indian mathematician and astronomer—decorate an inner courtyard of the campus. A statue of Newton is there too, beneath a banyan tree. According to IUCAA director Somak Raychaudhury, the visual incongruence of Newton beneath a banyan rather than an apple tree spurred a past director to act.
Starting in 1994, then-director Jayant V. Narlikar received Woolsthorpe tree descendants at the Centre. But a combination of long post office delays and the Pune heat meant successive trees withered over and over. Finally, in 1997, they rooted two apple trees in the courtyard. Raychaudhury remembers the enthusiasm. “Everybody thought that it would be a wonderful thing” to grow the trees, he says, especially since so much astronomy is rooted in Newton’s thinking. Like the tale of Adam and Eve, he says, “the origin of physics also has an apple.”
The trees lived like kings for a while. Raychaudhury’s wife Aleika McAllister, who is from Vermont (“she grew up with apple trees”) volunteered to maintain them, and the Centre built canopies to shade them from the sun. One tree even bore fruit, which the academics sliced up and shared. Raychaudhury found the moment meaningful and symbolic, even though he thinks the apple story is “probably apocryphal.”
IUCAA's Newton trees lived for a decade. But then they withered again. Raychaudhury believes Pune’s increasing heat, due to the city’s booming population and pollution, was the culprit. “Today, it was 105 degrees,” he says. “Twenty years ago, when this was being done, it wasn't this hot.”
Yet Raychaudhury wants to grow the apple trees again. The IUCAA is currently experimenting with making Flower of Kent hardier, one idea being to graft a Newton tree shoot onto Indian apple trees. It’s almost a trend: Institutions that have lost their Newton trees, whether due to drought or disease, usually plant new ones in even greater numbers. Some universities and research centers now have tiny groves of Newton trees. Raychaudhury thinks that with the increased heat, that might not be possible in Pune. Yet, due to the tree’s symbolic meaning, they’re going to try. Countless others who work in fields touched by Newton—and live in places far from England—feel the same. Mathematics and physics are often seen as dry. But the worldwide love of Newton’s apple tree is almost romantic.
It’s ironic that a fruit tree is so influential to Newton’s legacy, since one reason why Newton received a higher education was that his mother thought he would be hopeless as a farmer. Instead, he pioneered optics and calculus. He set down the three laws of motion, essential for calculating the movement of earth and of the planets. He invented the reflecting telescope, and his work paved the way for astronomers today. Perhaps it’s fitting that seeds from Newton’s tree even visited the International Space Station in 2016, making it one of history’s most well-traveled trees.
Sailors would sometimes come back with stories of imaginary isles.
As a composer, Andrew Pekler aims to make music that uses synthetic sounds to build real-seeming places. With electronic instruments, he creates the sound of wind, waves, bird calls, and insects.
“The sweet spot for me is when a piece I have made can be simultaneously heard as both a field recording and as a completely composed, synthetic construct,” he says.
In his new work, an online, interactive soundscape called Phantom Islands, he marshals that idea to create a tour of islands that mapmakers once believed were real, but do not actually exist. Working with the web designer and developer Flavio Gortana, Pekler drew a map of imagined islands and filled each one with an fictional auditory atmosphere.
When European ships were traveling the world during the Age of Exploration, the men on board would come back with tales of the islands they’d come across, previously unknown to their societies. Usually these reports would be accurate enough, but sometimes this system went awry. Ship captains would conjure up imaginary islands to please their funders; their senses miscalibrated by months at sea, sailors would report seeing land where none existed.
Over time, these reports would be corrected, although sometimes it would take centuries; reports of phantom islands are still being debunked in this century. They’re strange relics of a human attempt to better understand the world, with all the flaws that came along with that project.
That’s part of what fascinates Pekler. “These nonexistent places are connected with real stories of human avarice, bravery, piety, cruelty, fallibility, and arrogance,” he says.
The islands on his map each have their own unique, synthetic sonic landscape, anchored in reality. For example, the islands located in southeast Asia and the Pacific incorporate sounds that evoke the instruments of that region. But the phantom islands on the map have their own internal logic as well: Neighboring islands have overlapping soundscapes, and moving from one to another can be like playing through an album.
Set to map to Cruise, and it will take you on a tour, bubbling with uncanny sounds. Or you can explore on your own, hopping from one island to another, imagining places that never existed.
Explore the world’s hidden wonders with us next year.
If you travel with Atlas Obscura in 2019, you can retrace the voyage of Sir John Franklin's legendary Arctic expedition, explore the Forbidden Zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, and peer into a Lisbon bookseller’s secret basement.
At Atlas Obscura, we have a mission: to inspire curiosity about this incredible planet we all share. Nothing makes us more excited than taking our community on adventures around the world, exploring hidden wonders along the way.
I’m Mike Parker, the General Manager of Atlas Obscura Trips. I recently joined Tao Tao Holmes, the team’s founding member and our Director of Trip Design, in an effort to turn the best of Atlas Obscura into a collection of real-world experiences. We’re so excited to take travelers on new kinds of adventures.
Consider our trip to Rome in April, which will explore the city’s deep relationship to magic and secrets. At the Vatican, we have the keys to an ancient necropolis buried five stories below. In a secret garden controlled by the Order of the Knights of Malta, we’ll discover a magnificent view of St. Peter’s Basilica through the keyhole of a nondescript green door. And we’re flying in one of our favorite magicians from Milan for a show inspired by Renaissance magic at an art gallery that doubles as a cabinet of curiosities.
That sort of special access, both to hidden places and the people who can open their doors, is the animating force behind all our trips. Our travelers are exceptionally engaged and adventurous—as interested in the unusual places as the iconic ones, as up for meeting the eccentrics and outsiders as the experts and insiders. Without these qualities, our guides simply wouldn't be interested in giving us the keys to the hidden and unusual places we visit. They do it for us because they know they'll be leading passionate, deeply curious Atlas Obscura travelers.
In total, we’ll be running more than 70 trips to 30 countries next year. We invite you to check out our lineup and, above all, to come along for the ride! Please email us at trips@atlasobscura.com with any questions. We can’t wait to explore with you.
At dawn, a fleet of orange-robed monks float through the streets of Luang Prabang, Laos, during tak bat, the Buddhist morning alms ritual. Thirty minutes outside town, the staff at Laos Buffalo Dairy gear up for another day, but to a decidedly different rhythm. For them, there might be time dedicated to mozzarella-making, buffalo-milking, and calf-raising. Any given day could also include farmer education, veterinary training, government agency meetings, tours, and one afternoon, a visit from the country’s former President.
It all started with a need for cheese. In 2014, Rachel O’Shea and Susie Martin opened a guest house in Luang Prabang, the former royal capital, as a way to stay in Asia after their expat postings in Singapore ran out. O’Shea, a chef, and Martin, a cheese-loving business executive who named her daughter Brie, became friends over a shared a love for travel, taking joint family vacations around Asia. Eventually, they became frustrated with the dairy situation in Laos. As a landlocked country run by a Communist government for years, Laos is behind on infrastructure development and international trade. It only opened up in the 1990s, and the country has no dairy farms: A 200-gram pot of sour cream can cost $12.
They’d noticed buffalo meat for sale at the morning market, though, and eventually asked about buffalo curd. Everyone’s reaction: “You can milk buffalo?” From there, they hatched the idea for Laos Buffalo Dairy. It was a win-win: Farmers would gain extra income by renting out their buffalo during milking season, and O’Shea and Martin would satiate their craving for cheese. “Since they used the buffalo less and less in the rice paddies, it was an under-utilized resource,” Martin explains. "The rental idea came about when we realized farmers weren’t ready to milk their own buffalo, so we had to."
The only thing to do now was find a farmer who would agree. By word-of-mouth, their idea reached Somlith, the chief of Thinkeo Village, who O’Shea describes as “an outside-the-box, well-rounded man.” She adds: "He sees things other people can’t. We come to him with all our crazy ideas.” They showed him YouTube videos and translated step-by-step instructions. Somlith agreed to a trial run, in which he would rent them three buffalo for six weeks. It took a few attempts, but the herd eventually gave milk, which they brought to the guest house daily.
But turning milk into mozzarella proved to be a trying endeavor. Once, O’Shea found herself crying in the kitchen over a failed batch. “You can’t Google a buffalo mozzarella recipe,” she says. “It’s a small industry and nobody shares it. I emailed 15 cheesemongers and explained how we were a tiny business in a tiny country helping the local community.” Nobody replied, save for a woman from Shaw River Buffalo Cheese in Australia. “She said it probably wasn’t going to work because the fat levels are different, but shared her recipe anyway,” O’Shea adds. That’s because buffalo milk is sweeter than cow’s milk and has twice the fat, which changes the ratio of rennet, citric acid, and salt.
But that lone response proved to be a breakthrough. The pair produced a mess of crumbled mozzarella, which was enough to give local chefs samples. Somsack Sengta, the chef and owner of Blue Lagoon Restaurant, was an early tester. Sengta is a Luang Prabang native who grew up under Communism—back then, “there was nothing in the country, [and] fresh milk only arrived in 1990,” he says. Later, he won a scholarship to culinary school in Switzerland.
These days, he uses the dairy’s mozzarella for his menu, which melds traditional Lao dishes, Swiss classics, and insects. It’s a far cry from those first samples. “The first time, their cheese did not have a good consistency,” he says. “I was using mozzarella from Italy and expected the same quality. And because of the grass the buffalo eats, their cheese had a strong aroma. I grew up with buffalo, so I know the smell. Europeans have a strong nose for cheese, so this would not work."
Still, restaurants in the area, like his, needed local sources. It was a better option than having brokers from Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore hand-carry mozzarella into Laos (to avoid sub-optimal shipping conditions). So he kept giving the two feedback. "With locals, you have to say things in a roundabout way, but with Rachel I can be direct,” he says. “And now the quality is there."
A year after that first tasting, Sengta placed an order. At that point, the dairy needed a steady milk supply. Working with one open-minded farmer was one thing. Convincing entire villages was another matter. “It took us 18 months before the farmers trusted we weren’t going to barbecue or sterilize their buffalo,” O’Shea explains. That’s because for Lao farmers, a buffalo is essentially their bank account: One buffalo is worth 12 million kip, roughly the average annual salary. When a child gets married or someone is in hospital, they sell the buffalo to pay for it. Working with the Laos Buffalo Dairy was tantamount to trusting foreigners—who weren’t farmers—with their life savings.
But many farmers can’t afford the expenses of pens, feed, and vaccines. So, buffalo often fend for themselves and are susceptible to disease. Worse, due to inbreeding, the Lao swamp buffalo population has shrunk over the last 30 years, and they now produce a fraction of milk compared to more robust breeds. The dairy discovered the inbreeding problem when they set up their starter farm, milking up to ten buffalo a day. “Swamp buffalo should give 2.5 litres of milk, but that wasn’t happening,” says Martin. “We were excited if we were getting six to eight liters from the whole herd.”
Martin decided to get help from the Buffalo Research Institute in Guangxi, China. Government agencies in China want Laos to breed buffalo so they can import two million to meet domestic demand. At that point, Laos could barely deliver: The country has 27,000 buffalo, of which 10,000 died during an unprecedented snowfall in January 2016. To help, the institute gave Laos a small herd of murrah bulls, a breed that can provide two to three times more milk. The problem was that they didn’t include cash to support the breeding. Which is where Martin and O’Shea came in. “We've got a whole lot of buffalo,” Martin said. “Bring your genetics here.”
With the government now on their side, the fledgling farm picked up the pace. While the breeding program ramped up (buffalo are pregnant for ten months), Dr. Som, a veterinarian who had experience running a dairy, helped with farmer education. Construction soon started on the barns and a cafe.
Finally, O’Shea moved her production from the cramped guest house to the farm kitchen. There, commercial-grade refrigerators line two walls, the staff can prep and pack at a large central workspace, and the room is tiled up to the ceiling. It is unique enough in Luang Prabang that O’Shea sometimes gives tours. Sunlight streams through the large picture windows, where visitors can see a fresh batch of cheese as it drains or watch the staff make ice cream. Once, she says, “the hospital people came out and asked, ‘Can we come and operate in here?’”
Today, 30 locals are on the farm’s staff. Many of them are young graduates with degrees in agriculture and animal sciences, all attracted to the unusual business. None of them had tasted dairy before. Chit Sisanom, who leads the farm tours, remembers the day he tried blue cheese well. “I cannot explain the flavor,” he says. “The smell is very strong; it’s really salty, a bit sour. After I tried a second and third time, it was better. The mozzarella is good.”
Saisamone Chittaphong, a calf specialist, works long hours at the farm during calving season. She had her first taste of dairy when she joined. “Yoghurt is strange, a very pale flavor, just fat,” she says. “Lao people like salty or sweet.” Ice cream, on the other hand, is her favorite, and she especially loves the smell of caramel. She frequently walks down to the ice cream hut, a perk of the job.
Typically, O’Shea plans production based on the day’s orders. Ricotta, feta, and yoghurt can be made and delivered the same day, while mozzarella requires a two-day lead time so it can brine properly. If there is milk left over, O’Shea takes the opportunity to test new products. Which is why there are batches of three-month and six-month blue cheese ripening in the refrigerators. She's also testing Camembert, but it was an unfortunate casualty when a circuit blew. Luckily, more Camembert starters are being hand-carried by a friend from the United States.
After a full day on the farm, O’Shea typically packs orders into a blue icebox and loads it onto the company tuk tuk. She’ll use it to deliver mozzarella and other treats directly to the kitchen door of several luxury hotels in the area. These include The Pullman, the newest and largest hotel in town. Executive Chef Marc Comparot heard about the dairy when he arrived three months ago. “At first I didn’t believe my staff that there was cheese 20 minutes up the road,” he says. “I grabbed the car and told our driver, let’s go. I love mozzarella.”
Working with the dairy also fits with local restaurants’ sustainability programs. “If we order from Italy, that product will be cheaper,” Marc adds. “But Rachel and Susie have a fresh product; you have to pay more for that. They are artisans.” The flip side is that the cost can be prohibitive to smaller businesses, although they may be able to decrease prices once they grow.
It looks like the dairy is right on the cusp of that growth. Martin recently returned from LaoFood, a trade fair in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. "Hotels and restaurants have heard about us and are waiting to order,” she says. The Laos-China Railway, which will open in 2020, will also change Laos from landlocked to land-linked. And just last month, a Japanese trader flew in to meet them and wants a ton of product. “A literal ton, 200 kilo of this, 200 kilo of that,” O’Shea says with a nervous laugh. The dairy is now applying for an export license.
The first murrah-swamp cross-breed was born last December, fittingly enough, to Somlith, the first farmer to believe in them. Sophia, seven months old, has long legs and is already as tall as a local female buffalo. Somlith often visits Sophia on the farm. He wants her there, to show other farmers what’s possible. With his extra income, Somlith can send his children to school, pay for electricity, and buy more food for the family. The dairy now works with 150 farmers in 17 villages. Sisanom, the farm’s tour guide, who grew up with buffalo, says: “That’s why the crossbreed is so important. It is impressive for farmers. They see her and realize they can make money.”
As for introducing cheese into Lao daily life, Martin says, “We never intended the locals to be our main customers. But I’m surprised at how quickly they’ve taken to it.” Farm staff who bring milk home often report back the next day with a thumbs-up. On weekends, local families often visit the farm to see the animals and buy milk, too.
It's dusk on this June day. The two dozen tourists who came today—visiting from all over Asia, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia—have gone. The cheese is packed. It’s a tranquil moment on the farm. This is O’Shea’s favorite time, looking out at the mountains that surround Northern Laos. “Eventually I’d like to be able to put my cheese on a world stage,” she says. “Even if I don’t win, I’d like to know that it was good enough. That was our whole concept: If we were going to make cheese, it wasn’t cheese that’s only good for Laos. It needs to be cheese that is good anywhere.”
How Hōkūleʻa and its amazing voyage across the Pacific helped kickstart a Hawaiian cultural renaissance.
For its crewmembers, Hōkūleʻa is more than just a canoe: it changes how they live their life, and how they plan to care for the world. "Hōkūleʻa," which means “star of gladness,” has for many in Hawai‘i become a shining example of how to inspire new generations of Hawaiians to keep their culture alive and share it with the world.
Hōkūleʻais a waʻa kaulua, or a traditional, Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe. When the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS) built the vessel in 1973, it was the first of its kind that had been created on the islands in 600 years.
The PVS was founded with a mission: to prove that ancient Polynesians could have settled the islands using traditional wayfinding methods. At the time, voyaging canoes were extinct, there wasn’t a single person in Hawai‘i who knew how to navigate them, and some doubted that the canoes and techniques were any good to begin with. There was a common misconception that the Polynesians had merely found the Hawaiian islands by accident.
It wasn’t just the nautical know-how that had disappeared. Bruce Blankenfeld, a captain and master navigator who grew up in Hawaiʻi, says that Hawaiian children learned almost nothing about their own culture. “Everything we learned in school was American history, the Civil War, the 15th and 16th president of the United States.”
Hawaiian history wasn’t taught in schools and hardly anyone spoke the Hawaiian language. If Hawaiian culture was brought up at all, it was framed in a way that “led one to believe that there are no Hawaiians anymore; that they’re gone,” Blankenfeld says.
Hōkūle‘a’s inaugural journey in 1975 helped turn the tide. Using only stars, swells, and other signs of nature, the crew successfully navigated the Polynesian Triangle under the direction of the esteemed Micronesian wayfinder Mau Piailug. The celebrated voyage forced scholars to reconsider previous truths and helped fuel a Hawaiian cultural renaissance in areas from from hula to language. Blankenfeld says of the journey: “It helped to redefine who we are as Hawaiians.”
Almost 40 years after the canoe’s maiden voyage, Hōkūle‘a circumnavigated the entire world. The Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage began in 2014, covered 40,300 nautical miles, and stopped in more than 150 ports in 23 countries and territories– a journey less about defining Hawaiian culture than sharing it with others.
As Jenna Ishii, one of the apprentice navigators who helped guide Hōkūle‘a’s journey around the globe, puts it: “It took us going around the world to discover that everyone’s pretty similar. Everyone wants healthy, safe communities for their children. They want family and connection.”
Hōkūle‘a’s Mālama Honua worldwide voyage is over, but the need to mālama honua (translated simply as “to care for our Island Earth”) is more urgent than ever.
In Hawaiian, the concept means tending to our world as if it were an island. With resources dwindling across the globe, we must work together as islanders do to keep our planet thriving. Hōkūle‘a has already proven that it’s possible to reverse a path to extinction.
“The Hōkūle‘a is an ambassador for change,” says Blankenfeld. “If we believe that we can make a difference— to impact and to arrest and then reverse our environmental degradation across the globe— then that’s the big first step to doing it.”
The Mahalo Hawai‘i Sail is currently underway in the Hawaiian islands through March 2019, bringing attention to community conservation efforts such as the Limu Festival in Hana, Maui and the Hawai‘i Island’s Hawaiian Legacy Reforestation Initiative.
Speaking on the goal of the current sail, Blankenfeld says: “We want to meet others and have really productive conversations about things [like climate change] that we’re all confronted with.” In the future, PVS also hopes for a Pacific Rim voyage.
“We want to get some engagement going with these countries that we share the Pacific Ocean with,” Blankenfeld explains. “What is the perception about this ocean? Is it foreign to you, is it a dumping ground, what is it? The common thing we have with all these countries and regions is this ocean.”
Voyaging canoes, past and present, were built as vessels of exploration. They traveled to bring back knowledge, whether in the form of sweet potatoes from South America or lauhala for weaving and building houses from Australia. “Part of the process of discovery is finding something that has tremendous benefit to people, from feeding the masses to healing,” Blankenfeld says of Hōkūle‘a, its voyages, and its community. “That’s no different from today. We just trained a new generation of navigators. It’s a living culture.”
The famed Royal Observatory in Greenwich, United Kingdom, is reopening more than 60 years after London’s smog forced its closure in 1957.
The Royal Observatory was founded in 1675 by King Charles II of England, with the goal of improving navigation at sea and reducing shipwrecks by mapping the locations of stars. The observatory at Greenwich is the site of the Prime Meridian, the line that divides the world’s eastern and western hemispheres (in the same way the Equator divides the northern and southern hemispheres). It is also home of the historic Greenwich Mean Time, which is the basis for the world’s time zone system.
By the 1940s and 1950s, London’s industrialization—which expanded the city’s railways and resulted in extreme light pollution—had begun to interfere with the urbanized Royal Observatory’s operations. Louise Devoy, the curator of Royal Observatory at Greenwich, said in a recent interview with the Telegraph, “The observatory really started to wind down in 1948 because … [the] Greenwich Power Station was belching out smoke so the telescopes were becoming useless.” She added that the vibrations from nearby trains and signals from iron-framed buildings made it challenging for the observatory’s sensitive equipment to take accurate readings.
Moreover, the city’s air pollution got so bad that astronomers could no longer do their work. During the mid-20th century, London was periodically plagued by thick blankets of yellow smog, which were so severe that they halted traffic and even closed theaters because audiences could not see performers on stage through the haze. (The phenomenon showed up in a Season 1 episode of The Crown.) Seeing faraway stars through telescopes was nearly impossible in such conditions.
Because of the challenges and limitations of running an observatory in an urban environment, in 1948 the Royal Observatory began to transfer its instruments and functions to Sussex, which had darker, clearer skies than London. In 1957, the Royal Greenwich Observatory reopened at the Herstmonceux Castle, and the defunct observatory in London became a museum and outreach center to educate the public about astronomy.
In 2017, the Royal Museums Greenwich launched a successful campaign to raise funds to restore the observatory at Greenwich and upgrade the building in which it was housed.
The revamped Royal Observatory has been outfitted with a new telescope named after Annie Maunder, who was one of the first female scientists to work at the observatory in Greenwich. Maunder was hired in 1891 to process data as a “lady computer.” Her later research mapping sunspots and observing solar eclipses helped shed light on the link between the sun’s activity and Earth’s climate.
The Royal Observatory’s Annie Maunder Astrographic Telescope consists of four different telescopes that perform different functions. The largest can produce magnified views of the moon and planets in our solar system. Another telescope will track and record changes to the sun. The observatory will also be able to look at nebulae and galaxies with a specialized digital camera.
Many of the world’s observatories are located in remote areas with little light pollution, such as the Very Large Telescope (yes, that’s really its name) in the heart of Chile’s Atacama Desert. However, advances in technology have made urban astronomy more feasible. The astronomer Brendan Owens explained to the Telegraph, “We now have filters which completely block out the wavelengths of light from things like street lamps and instead just focus on the hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur dioxide that are coming from stars and planets.”
The astronomers at the reopened Royal Observatory are hoping to witness the “blood moon” lunar eclipse July 27, 2018, during which the Moon will turn a reddish color as it passes through Earth’s shadow.
“It should be quite spectacular,” Owens said of the upcoming eclipse. “We can also use the red tinge to tell us about pollution in the air, as that changes the [Moon’s color] during an eclipse.” Luckily, although the London’s air is still quite polluted, the air quality has visibly improved since the days of the Great Smog.
The function of these ancient rings is not yet known.
When Norman Witherow, a farmer from Ireland's County Donegal, came across some unfamiliar objects on a recent Saturday while digging a drain, they were so covered in clay he couldn't even make out what metal they were made from. He pulled them from the earth, then dumped them first in the trunk of his car, and next in his kitchen. They remained there for four whole days, until a jeweler friend nudged him to report the discovery.
Since handing them over to the Donegal County Museum, however, Witherow is beginning to have some appreciation for the scale of his discovery. "This is a once in a lifetime find for our county," the curator Caroline Carr told the BBC, "and we are absolutely delighted."
The artifacts, which resemble coiled metal rings, are made out of gold and believed to be thousands of years old. Each is approximately four inches in diameter: too large to be worn on one's finger, and likely too small to fit around a person's arm. Carr believes they may have been used as a kind of Bronze Age currency. They are now with the keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum, who traveled from Dublin to collect them in person, but Carr noted that she'd like to see them return to her institution in the near future.
Witherow, for his part, is still reeling from the magnitude of his discovery. "We had no idea of the value," he told the BBC, "and we definitely didn't appreciate their worth when we first discovered them." Now, he says, he plans to make the trip to the Irish capital to see them on display, finally glinting gold again after centuries and centuries deep in the Irish muck.
In 1966, California newspapers began reporting a startling story. A B-movie actor and several California businessmen were making plans to build their own island. The chosen locale was 100 miles off the California coast, on a massive, submerged island known as Cortes Bank. Ostensibly, the goal would be to mine a rich vein of seafood, especially abalone. Only an accident kept them from building their island nation. It was going to be called “Lemuria,” the name of a lost continent. But the media coined another, more compelling name: “Abalonia.”
Cortes Bank has long been considered a valuable yet perilous spot. Ships need to dodge Bishop Rock, which lurks a few feet below the surface, marked by a warning buoy. The site fosters a rich environment of sea life, making it a diving destination today. It’s also a legendary surfing site, because Cortes Bank produces some of the tallest surfable waves in the world. For Joe Kirkwood, Jr., Richard Taggart, and Bruce McMahan, the attraction was the sea life: They hoped to build an island outpost where they could harvest and ship seafood plentifully and cheaply. However, they didn’t know about the waves.
The group was an eclectic bunch. Kirkwood was most famous for appearing in film versions of the comic strip Joe Palooka. He was also a talented pro golfer, and owned a bowling alley. Taggart and McMahan were California abalone canners. Also involved, among others, were savings and loan group president Robert Lynell and aquatic expert James Houtz.
Their plan was to drag a decommissioned World War II freighter, the SS Jalisco, to Cortes Bank and scuttle it in a shallow area. Afterwards, they would haul rocks and even garbage out to the Bank, to create a terra firma from which sweet, fleshy abalone could be harvested. And they would rule their new nation of Abalonia. In October 1966, Taggart gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug to the Los Angeles Times. “I know it sounds fantastic,” he said, “But we’ve consulted experts in international law and they say there’s nothing to prevent us from starting our own country if we want to.”
Much of the history of the “Abalonians” has been compiled by a journalist, who also coined the term “Abalonians.” In 2011, Christopher Dixon published Ghost Wave, a history of Cortes Bank and the explorers, treasure hunters, and surfers obsessed with it. One chapter was devoted to the Abalonia tale. “The idea of someone trying to resurrect a sunken island is such an American idea to me,” he says.
By the time Dixon was writing his book, many of the Abalonians had died or gone to ground. Trying to find Kirkwood or someone associated with him was a bust. Until one day, someone anonymously sent him a package. Inside was a scribbled-over manuscript and fistfuls of photos of the Jalisco. The manuscript, says Dixon, was Kirkwood’s account of the dramatic sinking of the freighter and his own near-death, which he had apparently written up for Sports Illustrated but never published. “I suspect that one of the family members that I reached out to might have found me,” Dixon says. Even better, he soon got a call from James Houtz, who was on the Jalisco that fateful November day.
“You’re really taxing my brain, kiddo,” Houtz says when I reach him at his home in Dana Point, California. Now 79 years old and retired, he took a break from wrangling grandchildren to tell me how he joined the Abalonia venture. A diving and underwater demolitions expert, Houtz had served in the Navy. A self-professed thrill-seeker, he gained fame diving Death Valley National Monument’s Devil’s Hole, a geothermal pool that’s home to the world’s rarest fish. His experience turned somber when, in 1965, two young divers disappeared into its watery depths. Houtz was flown in to find them, but only found a mask. The publicity around the tragedy led to Houtz receiving a call from Kirkwood.
“It was nuts,” Houtz says of Kirkwood’s plan. But he was young and daring, only in his late 20’s. Soon, he was in, intrigued by the challenge. “In my opinion, the impossible takes just a little bit longer. A little bit more thinking.” And, of course, he wanted “a cut of the pie.” Serving as both an aquatic expert and financial backer (he took out a second mortgage on his house), Houtz says he was the one who came up with the idea of scuttling a freighter to build the base of Abalonia. The team found the Jalisco in a “mothball fleet” up in Berkeley. After stripping the ship of everything that could be sold for salvage, it was outfitted as a seafood processing enterprise. By planting the ship near Bishop Rock, the shallowest part of the Bank, fisherman could start harvesting seafood right away.
The dream of Abalonia was expansive. The spot would also be a hive for commercial fishermen, Kirkwood believed, and they could build a runway for planes. Ships could stop to refuel, and there could even be gambling. (Kirkwood denied the allegations that he wanted to build a casino, though Houtz, decades later, confided that he was considering it.) Even building the island would be subsidized, since Kirkwood claimed he was teaming up with City of Los Angeles to build Abalonia out of the city’s trash. It seemed like an impossible dream, but Kirkwood had a way of making it seem possible. Houtz remembers Kirkwood as boisterous and extremely charismatic: He had movie-star looks and “hair most guys would die for,” Houtz says. But Houtz also says that Kirkwood had an irresponsible streak, something that may have sunk Abalonia.
In Ghost Wave, Dixon conjectures that Kirkwood kickstarted the Abalonia venture in a rush, fearing the federal government would bring it to a halt. At the time, Houtz noted that there was a storm on the coast of Japan, but thought it wouldn’t have too much of an effect. On November 13, the SS Jalisco was tugged out of the Balboa Bay Club late in the evening. Along with it went boats with the Abalonians and their crew. Barges full of rocks, provided by McMahan, were scheduled to follow soon after.
Houtz had already been to the Bank, scouting for the ideal way to lay the ship down. He had set down a runway of buoys, and with two anchors and long chains, he planned to put the Jalisco into a precise spot before scuttling it. While he had seen some of Cortes Bank’s large swells, putting down the planned “Volkswagen-sized” rocks would likely have protected the Jalisco, he says. Ironically, when the Jalisco arrived near Bishop Rock, they floated on a calm sea. “The kind you kind of dream about. It was just so flat and so smooth,” Houtz remembers. But soon, slight swells started rocking the freighter. The effects of the far-off storm, in the form of a massive North Pacific swell, was arriving.
Both man-made and natural disaster struck. In Kirkwood’s account, the Jalisco hit Bishop Rock late Monday night and started to take on water, an accident that he couldn’t be held accountable for. In Houtz’s account (which Dixon confirmed with another living crewman), the action happened the next morning. Houtz says he left much of the preparation of the Jalisco to Kirkwood. When Houtz, Kirkwood, and three others clambered aboard, one of the anchors and much of the vital anchor chain (necessary for situating the freighter) was missing, sold for extra money as salvage. Plus, the diesel engine that powered the chain spool compressor was broken. Putting the freighter in the right place would be nearly impossible. Meanwhile, the swells were getting larger, lifting the Jalisco up 20 feet and dropping it. One swell crushed the freighter against Bishop Rock. “It just thundered. It just crunched. It just hit,” Houtz says. The Jalisco plunged down: The hull had been punctured by Bishop Rock.
The 7,000-ton freighter twisted and turned. A massive wave loomed, then swept over the freighter, snapping the anchor chain. Kirkwood grabbed ahold of a jackstaff, but the others were slammed against the side so hard that Houtz broke a rib. The Whitney Olson, the tugboat that had dragged out the Jalisco, valiantly came close to the side to rescue the trapped men. One man made it over, another jumped into the water. Houtz, Kirkwood, and another man, Will Lesslie, were left on the Jalisco, but not for long.
Kirkwood refused to let go of the jackstaff, insisting that the water couldn’t wash him away. “Joe, you're out of your mind,” Houtz remembers saying. Another massive wave was coming, a wall of green water. “I thought, holy mackerel.” Heavy barrels of diesel were tossed off the deck: looking as light, Houtz says, as after-dinner mints.
Sheltered behind the ship’s superstructure, Houtz was drenched but fine. But Will Lesslie and Kirkwood were taken overboard. A stunned Houtz, wearing a life jacket, leapt into the water and made it over to the Whitney Olson. An almost-drowned Kirkwood was swept beneath the entire length of the Whitney Olson, only to miraculously emerge relatively unharmed. Everyone on the Jalisco escaped with their lives.
The freighter wasn’t so lucky. Smashed by the waves, Dixon writes in Ghost Wave, “the entire superstructure tore completely free of the deck in a colossal mingling of water and steel.” Months passed before it sunk fully beneath the water. Houtz and the others were whisked away, to be interrogated by FBI agents who arrived via helicopter. “The air was let out of the balloon,” Houtz says.
Houtz emerged physically and financially battered. No seafood empire rose from the waves—his investment was shot, and his rib was broken. The Abalonians parted, and Houtz never spoke to Kirkwood again. Kirkwood managed to dodge legal repercussions for the Abalonia affair, though there was a Coast Guard investigation.
The concept of Abalonia may have been mad, but Kirkwood did well for himself, buying a Hawaiian golf course and selling it in 1987 for $50 million dollars. McMahan became a wealthy hedge fund manager whose lifestyle was the subject of tabloids. And maybe Abalonia wasn’t so bad of an idea after all. Another corporation started making noise about building an island at the spot soon after the Jalisco went down. The federal government squashed it by claiming Cortes Bank as U.S. territory.
As for Houtz, he soon recovered and event went back out to Cortes Bank. Occasionally is it clear enough to see San Clemente Island in the distance, he says. But other than the buoy, it’s a vista of empty sea. “It’s beautiful, but it's eerie,” Houtz says.
Now, Cortes Bank is notorious, the rusted wreck of the Jalisco beneath the water making it even more dangerous for surfers (though it is a lush diving site). Houtz says he wasn’t aware of how massive the waves could get at Cortes Bank. He’s also not sure what would have happened if the Jalisco had been outfitted correctly. “The Jalisco was pretty fragile when it comes right down to it,” Houtz says. But he thinks that if it had been a calmer day, it might have survived long enough to be protected by the incoming rocks. Abalonia could have risen after all.
