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Meet Hercules, One of America’s Early Celebrity Chefs

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After a long day in president George Washington’s executive kitchen, chef Hercules hit the streets of Philadelphia with sartorial flair and a keen eye for late-18th century fashion. Atop his head, the enslaved cook wore a voguish tricorn hat. Bright metal buttons held together his blue velvet-collared coat, a pair of shiny buckles dominated his fastidiously polished shoes, and a long watch-chain dangled from the side of his black silken pants.

“Thus arrayed, the chief cook invariably passed out the front door,” as Washington’s adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis wrote several decades after his father’s death. A gold-headed cane firmly in hand, Hercules would then proceed up Market Street, which was, in the 1790s, where fashionable people “did most congregate.” There, he drew considerable attention. While strangers gawked, those who knew him bowed, hoping, as he writes, “to receive in return a salute of one of the most polished gentlemen and the veriest dandy of nearly sixty years ago.”

It’s a testament to both Hercules’s charisma and culinary skills that historians remain as enchanted with him today as his peers in the 18th century were. In recent years, a renewed focus on early African-American cuisine has revived interest in the story of a man who, while enslaved by the Washington family between 1770 and 1797, bested cruel, capricious treatment to become one of the most famous chefs in the early American republic.

According to historian Kelley Fanto Deetz, author of Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine, Hercules might have been America’s first celebrity chef. “Chef Hercules was a very proud and confident man, whose culinary skills and status were recognized throughout the nation,” she says. “He demanded perfection from his staff in the presidential kitchen, and he commanded attention and respect from the public as well—something unheard of for enslaved laborers of his period.”

Early details of Hercules’s life are limited to brief appearances on tax documents. He first showed up on Washington’s “List of Tithables” in 1771, and subsequent records suggest Washington kept him as a house slave for his first ten years at Mount Vernon. It’s unclear when exactly he moved to the kitchen—though Washington first mentioned him as a cook in a 1786 diary entry. Within three years, Washington promoted Hercules to head chef.

According to Adrian Miller, the James Beard Award-winning author of The President’s Kitchen Cabinet, Hercules likely earned this promotion after mastering contemporary cooking techniques, which required equal amounts of precision and discipline. “The biggest skill that Hercules would have learned is hearth cooking, also known as cooking in a fireplace,” he says. “He would have learned how to tend a cooking fire, what cooking utensils to use, how to change the elevation of cooking vessels hanging in the fire to get the desired cooking effect, and how to cook in warm ashes.”

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By the end of Washington’s first year as president, Congress enacted the Residence Act of 1790—a law that not only cemented plans to build a permanent capital along the Potomac, but also temporarily relocated the federal government from New York to Philadelphia. When it came time for Washington to move into his executive mansion on Market Street, he resolved to bring nine enslaved laborers with him, including Hercules.

Though Hercules had little choice in the matter, he had enough sway over the president to lay out one major stipulation: He insisted upon bringing along his son, Richmond. On November 22, 1790, Washington admitted to his secretary, Tobias Lear, that he had allowed this not on the strength of Richmond’s merits in the kitchen, but simply because Hercules desired “to have him as an assistant.”

Initially, Washington planned for Hercules to cook alongside the professional chef John Vicar, though the president quickly replaced Vicar with Samuel Fraunces in May 1791—a development that evidenced Washington’s preference for Hercules’s food. The president intended Fraunces to serve as his chief steward, a role that involved maintaining and outfitting the executive manor. Though this job also involved overseeing “the Cookery,” Custis’s memoir suggests Fraunces mostly concerned himself with plating and serving food. The kitchen, he wrote, was the realm for “the labors of Hercules.”

Hercules seems to have run an orderly, sanitary kitchen. Though mild-mannered outside the workplace, he quickly rebuked anyone in the executive mansion who failed to meet his exacting standards. “Under his iron discipline,” Custis wrote, “wo[e] to his underlings if speck or spot could be discovered on the tables or dressers, or if the utensils did not shine like polished silver.”

According to Custis, Hercules especially shone during the dinners Washington hosted for members of Congress. These events were crowded and often hectic, but under Hercules, “it was surprising the order and discipline that was observed in such bustling a scene,” he wrote. “[Hercules’s] underlings flew in all directions to execute his orders, while he, the great master-spirit, seemed to possess the power of ubiquity, and to be everywhere at the same moment.”

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Hercules’s specialties unfortunately remain lost to history. Deetz believes he likely focused on “typical colonial fare, kicked up a notch”—foods such as braised fish, oyster stew, custards, puddings, and fresh breads. But whatever was on these menus made him famous. At the height of Hercules’s popularity in Philadelphia, even his leftovers were hot commodities. “His perquisites from the slops of the kitchen were from one to two hundred dollars a year,” Custis noted—roughly $5,000 by today’s standards.

Hercules put this money to good use, spending most of it on fashionable clothes, which helped him to confidently enter prominent social circles that converged on Market Street. “He was able to navigate the streets of Philadelphia, and he got respect there that he could not get back in Virginia,” Deetz says. “He was able to behave not only like a freeman, but a popular man and a famous one.” What’s more, his success during these outings eventually paved the way for his escape.

Throughout Hercules’s stay in Philadelphia, Washington had insisted the cook take periodic trips back to Virginia to avoid breaking the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery—a state law that freed any slave who lived within Pennsylvania’s borders for six continuous months. Despite being aware of Washington’s ulterior motive for these trips, Hercules obliged, which seems to have lulled the president into a state of false security. “Washington allowed Hercules certain liberties as a combination of trust and arrogance,” Miller says. “He probably thought that Hercules should be so honored to be his cook that he would never run away.”

For reasons that remain mysterious, Hercules moved back to Mount Vernon in 1796. On Washington’s 65th birthday (February 22, 1797), Hercules fled. It’s unclear where he took refuge, though Deetz believes he initially headed to Philadelphia. Back then, Pennsylvania was a hotbed of abolitionism, she says, and he had spent years there accruing “sympathetic and capable allies.” Hercules’s flight was not without tragedy, though: In addition to Richmond, he still had two daughters who remained enslaved at Mount Vernon.

Meanwhile, an enraged Washington offered a reward for Hercules’s capture and instructed his associates across the country to keep an eye out for the runaway. By November 1797, the fruitlessness of these measures caused him to write a frustrated letter to his nephew, George Lewis. This document, as much as any other in Washington’s late correspondence, demonstrates how the president’s reliance on slave labor far outweighed any late-in-life epiphanies regarding its immorality. “The running off of my Cook has been a most inconvenient thing to this family,” he wrote, “and what renders it more disagreeable, is, that I had resolved never to become the master of another Slave by purchase; but this resolution I fear I must break.”

Though the Washington family remained frustrated by Hercules’s flight even after the president’s death in 1799, the cook’s friends and family immediately celebrated his bravery. In April 1797—two months after Hercules’s escape—Washington hosted Louis-Phillipe, the future king of France, for a brief tour of his plantation. During his stay, the Frenchman recorded a short, poignant anecdote in his diary about a conversation he’d had with his valet, Beaudoin.

While walking the grounds of Mount Vernon, Beaudoin talked with Washington’s enslaved workforce. After learning of Hercules’s flight, the valet had approached the man’s youngest daughter. “You must be deeply upset that you will never see your father again,” he told her. To the contrary, she responded, “I am very glad, because he is free now.”


Remembering When London's Pubs Were Full at 7 a.m.

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It’s 7 a.m. at The Market Porter in South London, and I’m eyeing the choices behind the bar. “You alright there?” the barman asks. This is the first time I’ve stopped by the pub on my way to work in the morning, and I have no idea what to get. Honestly, what I want is another coffee. But eventually I settle on a cider: the “Traditional Scrumpy,” which is a feisty six percent alcohol. As the morning sun pokes through the patterned glass windows, it goes down a lot better than I expect.

The Market Porter by Borough Market is one of London’s last traditional pubs that is open at this early morning hour. The others—The Hope and the Fox and Anchor—are a little north of the river, by Smithfield Market. These three holdouts are the only historic London pubs left where the almost-gone tradition of having a beer with breakfast is alive and well. They are the legacy of a time when Europe had a very different relationship with alcohol, and when a stiff morning drink was as normal as tea and coffee is today.

“In the past, everyone drank all day—men, women, and children,” says Paul Jennings, pub historian and author of A History of Drink and the English. As recently as 100 years ago, all London pubs opened in the morning, and they’d fill with people having an early drink.

Nowadays, most people in earlyhouses such as The Market Porter have just come off a night shift and want an after-work drink. But some patrons are fresh out of bed. Three men and two women are gathered in the corner drinking half pints; they’re colleagues who work nearby. “We’ve walked past this place so many times, wondering who drinks at this hour,” says one of the women. “We thought that one day, we should go in.” They ask to remain anonymous, as they have to go into work shortly.

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It’s no wonder—drinking before work is fairly taboo in Britain, and most people wait until at least lunchtime. Back in the day, though, workmen would easily drink six to eight pints of beer every day, says Jennings. For what else could they drink? The water often came from sewage-ridden sources such as the River Thames, and there were no soft drinks. Tea and coffee eventually arrived, but they were expensive, foreign imports and, even once they became more common, subject to heavy taxation. “So people drank beer with their meals during the day. That lasted well into the 19th century for many people,” says Jennings.

This doesn’t necessarily mean people were lolling around drunk all day. There were two kinds of beer, says Jennings: “strong beer” at about 10 percent alcohol, which was primarily for men, and “small beer” at two to three percent alcohol, which was primarily for women and children (although these were not hard and fast rules). “Monastery records show monks would have an allowance of eight pints a day. But they're drinking that steadily through the day with food. If you're used to drinking, you can absorb that without getting falling-down drunk,” says Jennings. “And the small beer wasn't getting anyone drunk.”

This occurred during a time when alcohol was viewed very differently in society. Often, beer was the only available beverage. A toast was key to sealing business deals, and to turn down a friendly drink would mark you as an eccentric at best or antisocial at worst. Workers commonly received their wages in pubs, which the first factory owners used as pay offices. In the 1700s, when the Gin Craze hit London and caused so much addiction and violence that the liquor was nicknamed “mother’s ruin,” the government response was to make beer more widely available as the lesser evil.

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Absolutely everyone drank beer. “Farm workers would drink seven to eight pints of quite weak beer a day during harvest time. Drinking all day was to refresh and rehydrate, and to give you some calories,” says Martyn Cornell, beer writer and author of Strange Tales of Ale. “Porter beer was so called because it was drunk by porters—the men who would fetch and carry around the streets of London. They would sit down outside a pub, put their load down, and order a quart to keep them going.”

Beer wasn’t just some kind of energy drink, though—people drank to excess back then too. Newspapers from the era are full of stories of people falling off horses, crashing buggies, or having work accidents because they were drunk. But the idea of alcoholism as an illness or addiction didn’t really enter the culture until the 19th or 20th century. “Heavy drinking was considered immoral. It was seen as a sin, a subset of gluttony,” says Jennings. “Drinking was an even bigger problem [back then than it is now], in the sense of accidents, drunken behaviour, and violence.”

The ill-effects of excessive drinking contributed to the temperance movement in the mid-1800s, but the first major effort to restrict pubs' opening hours only came during World War I, when pubs had to close in the mornings and afternoons. Keeping workers off the sauce was better for the war effort, the government determined, plus it saved grain. An exception was made for market pubs, which were seen as key to market trading: Buyers and sellers would negotiate deals in the pub, and then drink to seal it. This is why the remaining earlyhouses in London have been able to keep their doors open from dawn all these years: They are all historic market pubs.

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Morning drinking permanently fell out of favour after the war, in large part because licensing laws made it illegal for most pubs to be open. People became more aware of the health risks, drinking by children became frowned upon, and “proper” ladies soon came to prefer a nice cuppa over a rowdy pub. There are still places (such as the Czech Republic) that keep up the morning drinking tradition, but those days are long gone in Britain. Nowadays it’s rare to find anyone popping into The Market Porter, The Hope, or the Fox and Anchor before work. Still, these pubs are remnants of a time that’s not as long ago as it may seem. Until World War I, pre-work drinks were as common as Happy Hour.

While my morning cider at The Market Porter seemed invigorating at first, I have to admit that I took a lunchtime nap that day. Maybe the workmen of the 18th century were made of sturdier stuff, or maybe they just developed a tolerance. I wouldn’t suggest a morning tipple if you have to work in an office, but if you have the day off, a pint alongside a proper English Breakfast is really not a bad way to start the day.

How American Curling Clubs Ride Out Olympic Fever

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It doesn't happen with freestyle skiing, speed skating, or skeleton. But if you've been watching Olympic curling, odds are good that one particular thought has slid smoothly through your mind: "Hey, I bet I could do that."

Every four years, as curling teams from around the world pick up their rocks and brooms and hit the ice, some American viewers go a step further, get off the couch, gather some friends together, and pick up the phone. On the other end await the true enthusiasts who bear the brunt of this phenomenon: the country's local curling clubs. They spring into action, welcoming these neophytes into the fold, and trying hard to keep them there.

According to Dean Roth of Curl NYC, true curling mania first hit the United States back in 2010, during the Vancouver Winter Olympics. "That was the first time curling was [regularly] on TV in the U.S.," he says, "so as far as most Americans are concerned, that's when curling began." Roth, who has been involved with the sport for about 13 years, saw the effect firsthand, while helping to run an open house at his local club in South Plainfield, New Jersey that winter. Normally, "we'd be happy if we got 30 or 40 people," he says. That day, "we opened the door, and there were 700 people lined up outside."

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Others say the trend started even earlier, pointing to the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, or to Torino 2006, after which there was a countrywide curling stone shortage. Details notwithstanding, one thing is for sure: "Every year that's an Olympic year, we get a peak. And then four years later, another peak, and then another peak," says Barry McLaughlin, who, as the head of the website Florida Curling Club, coordinates curling efforts across the Sunshine State.

McLaughlin credits the television coverage as well, but for a slightly different reason. With helmet-less sports like curling and figure skating, he says, viewers get to see the players' faces, inspiring an emotional investment. "Figure skating, people have seen that before or even done that," he adds. "But curling, they haven't, and they're fascinated by it. Then they call me up, and they say, 'Can we try it?'"

During Olympic years, curling clubs all over the country work hard to make sure the answer to this question is "yes." This is often easier said than done. The Curling Club of Virginia, for example, estimates that phone inquiries and website visits have jumped about twentyfold since the Olympics began.

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"For a small club like ours, that's great," says club member Kaitie Kovach, who has been curling since she was nine years old, and is part of a kind of impromptu communications team the club has set up to deal with the rush. "It can also be a challenge." The club's volunteers have been hosting viewing parties at local bars. Over the next couple of months, they will also run 12 different "Learn2Curl" sessions, over half of which are already sold out. (Clubs across the country, from Silicon Valley to Cincinnati, are hosting similar events, and many are filling up similarly quickly.)

The clubs also court the press while they can. "The media goes berserk for curling once every four years and then it's crickets," says Roth, who spoke to Atlas Obscura while en route to a taping of Inside Edition. Some publicity opportunities are stranger than others: In 2014, Curl NYC donated props to an Olympic-themed party hosted by champagne company Veuve Clicquot. "We had people out there curling in high heels," he says. "It was hilarious."

Attracting and hosting this swarm of neophytes is just the beginning, though. After they've given them that first big push, the curling clubs must fight attrition, smoothing the way so that at least some of these newcomers continue on. "There are some people who—as some of my classmates in grad school say—do it for the 'gram," says Kovach. In other words, they try it out once, post some sweet curling pics on Instagram or other social media, and never return.

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"We love it when people come out and have fun," Kovach says, "but for the sport to grow, we need some of them to stick around." Some clubs, including Virginia's, have beginner curling leagues, so that those who surfed in on the trend wave don't have to play with experts and get scared away. Others, like Florida, are focusing on opening more clubs in new locales, and on creating youth and wheelchair leagues. "You want to keep as many as you can until the next Olympic season, when you get another spike," says McLaughlin.

In general, these efforts have paid off. Even with the "post-Olympic slump"—an official United States Curling Association term—the country is getting more and more curlers. "At the start of the Vancouver Olympics, there were only 12,000 curlers in the U.S.," says Roth. "After, there were 20,000. Now there's about 22,000, and we don't even know what there will be next week." There are more and more new clubs, too, often popping up in places that Roth calls "non-traditional curling locations," like the West Coast and the Southeast.

At some point, once they've gotten everyone they can on the ice, curling club members have to step back and let their sport speak for itself. They have faith in it: "Anyone can have a good time curling," says Roth. "It's a lifetime sport." Unless, of course, it's a once-every-four-years sport—and even that is better than nothing at all.

America's Secret Ice Base Won't Stay Frozen Forever

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The creation of Camp Century, from the outset, was an audacious scheme. Under the thick ice of Greenland, a scant 800 miles from the North Pole, the U.S. military built a hidden base of ice tunnels, imagined as an extensive network of railway tracks, stretching over 2,500 miles, that would keep 600 nuclear missiles buried under the ice. Construction began in 1959, under cover of a scientific research project, and soon a small installation, powered by a nuclear reactor, nested in the ice sheet.

In the midst of the Cold War, Greenland seemed like a strategic point for the U.S. to stage weapons, ready to attack the U.S.S.R. The thick ice sheet, military planners imagined, would provide permanent protection for the base. But after the first tunnels were built, the military discovered that the ice sheet was not as stable as it needed to be: It moved and shifted, destabilizing the tunnels. Within a decade, Camp Century was abandoned.

When siting the secret ice base, the military chose a spot where dry snow kept the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet from melting, and when the base was abandoned its creators expected the remains to stay encased in ice forever. But decades later, conditions have changed, and as a team of researchers reported in a 2016 paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, the now-melting ice sheet threatens to mobilize the dangerous pollutants left behind.

This hazard-in-waiting is a new kind of environmental threat: In the past, there was little reason to worry about water-borne pollution on an ice sheet 100,000 years old. As Jeff D. Colgan, a professor of political science at Brown University, writes in an article released last week in the journal Global Environmental Politics, Camp Century represents both a second-order environmental threat from climate change and a new path to political conflict.

“We’re starting to get better about dealing with the anticipated problems associated with climate change,” says Colgan. “There are going to be a whole host of unanticipated problems that we never saw coming.”

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By the time the base was abandoned in 1967, it had its own library and theater, an infirmary, kitchen and mess hall, a chapel, and two power plants (one nuclear, one run on diesel). When the base closed, key parts of the nuclear power plant were removed, but most of the base’s infrastructure was left behind—the buildings, the railways, the sewage, the diesel fuel, and the low-level radioactive waste. In the 2016 paper, which Colgan worked on as well, the researchers suggested that the radiological waste was less worrisome than the more extensive chemical waste, from diesel fuel and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) used to insulate fluids and paints.

Overall, the researchers estimated that 20,000 liters of chemical waste remain at the Camp Century site, along with 24 million liters of “biological waste associated with untreated sewage." That’s just at Camp Century; the military closed down bases at three other sites in Greenland, too, and it’s unclear how much waste is left there. Over the next few decades, the researchers found, melt water from the ice sheets could mobilize these pollutants, exposing both the wildlife and humans living in Greenland.

Creating these ice-bound military bases required a delicate political negotiation to begin with. The U.S. established its bases in Greenland under agreement with Denmark, which governed the island at the time. (Greenland now has self-rule but is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark.) There were some principles outlined about the two governments' responsibilities for the bases, but, as Colgan writes in the new paper, the status of American nuclear weapons on Greenland fell into a diplomatic gray area.

The Danish government had taken a stand against nuclear weapons and would never condone a nuclear base on Greenland. But in 1957, an American ambassador, Val Peterson, made an official overture to the Danish prime minister, H.C. Hansen. If—just say—the U.S. had nuclear weapons in Greenland, would the Danish government want to know? Five days later, the prime minister had a response: “I do not think that your remarks give rise to any comments from my side,” he wrote, in a “informal, personal, top secret” paper. The U.S. went ahead with the plan.

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There was similar ambiguity around the responsibility for the physical assets of the base. While they remained the property of the United States, the agreement said they could be “disposed of” in Greenland, after input from the Danish government. But it’s not at all clear who’s responsible for dealing with a long-term environmental hazard posed by the waste abandoned there.

This problem—who will pay to clean up environmental waste—is a common one; in the U.S., the Superfund program assigns responsibility for a polluted site, often across multiple parties associated with it over the years. But in this sort of international agreement between two governments, there’s no parallel process for divvying up blame or costs.

“These agreements are rarely fully specified in what’s written down on paper. There’s no real procedure for addressing disputes,” says Colgan. “If Denmark says, U.S., you’re responsible, and the U.S. says, no, you’re responsible—we don’t have a good resolution process for that. Climate change is likely to make that kind of problem a lot more common.”

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Already, a Greenland politician, who was serving as foreign minister, has lost his job over this issue. After the 2016 paper came out, he started pushing for the U.S. and Denmark to take responsibility for these military hazards; his boss thought he took too aggressive a stance.

But the problem isn’t going to go away, and Colgan emphasizes that these second-order environmental consequences of climate change—which he calls “knock-on effects”—are only going to become more common, creating knotty political disputes. Think, for instance, of the chemical and oil refineries that, damaged by Hurricane Harvey, started dumping waste.

Many of these environmental hazards, though, can be linked to multiple causes; in Greenland, it’s easier to pinpoint the precipitating issue.

“What’s helpful about Camp Century is that, because it’s so isolated, we can be really clear that what’s causing the problem is climate change,” says Colgan. In the 1960s, there was little reason for the U.S. military to imagine that their secret ice-base would cause environmental problems decades in the future. After all, it was encased in ice and should only have been buried deeper into the frozen surface over time.

The Forest That Blooms Brilliantly for Just a Few Days a Year

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For one week a year, the desert-like forests surrounding Mangahurco are filled with bright yellow flowers. This remote town in the Ecuadorian province of Loja, sitting a stone’s throw from the southern border with Peru, was completely off the tourist map until only a few years ago. Now nearly 10,000 visitors per year visit Mangahurco, where the year-round population lingers at around 600, to witness the flowering of the guayacán trees.

Part of the beauty comes from the strange mix of colors, the vibrancy of the yellow flowers against the dry red soil. But it’s also the sheer scale of the event: There are 40,000 hectares (nearly 100,000 acres) of guayacán forest surrounding the towns of Mangahurco, Bolaspambas, and Cazaderos, and, given weather certain conditions, they can all blossom with near synchronicity, painting the landscape with solid stretches of yellow that extend across the entire valley.

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Guayacán is the common name for a number of species of hardwood trees that belong to the Bignoniaceae family. They can grow to heights of up to 20 meters (66 feet) and are best adapted to the hot climate and well-drained soils of the tropical dry forest of Ecuador as well as in parts of Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Peru. The tabebuia chrysantha is found in the north of Peru and in the southwest corner of Loja.

The tabebuia chrysantha’s short flowering season is part of how it adapts to the dry conditions that it experiences during most of the year. To conserve water, they shed their leaves and stay bare during the dry season. After the first rains, the trees flower and then sprout leaves to replace them until the end of the rainy season.

The extent of the blossoming changes from year to year. If the rains are weak, or if they start and stop, the trees will blossom only a few at a time, some earlier and some later in the season. But if it rains hard, for several days in a row, the entire forest will blossom within the span of three or four days.

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Even though you can find guayacán trees throughout the tropical dry forest, the florecimiento in Mangahurco is exceptionally beautiful because the guayacán is the predominant species in this area: Almost all of the trees growing in this part of the forest are tabebuia chrysantha.

After a few days, the trees reach their maximum flowering point and the blossoms begin to fall to the ground shortly after. The fallen flowers form a yellow carpet around the base of each tree—but many are quickly eaten by the hungry goats that wander around the area grazing.

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To outside visitors, the blossoming of the guayacán forest in Mangahurco is a stunning event, but the people who live there thought nothing of it until campaigns by Ecuador’s Ministry of Tourism started attracting tourists over the past 10 years. Most families who live in the area make their living by tending herds of goats and cows that they harvest for meat, and planting crops of corn and sweet potatoes. “The goats would eat the flowers,” explains Horley Ruíz, who lives just outside the town’s entrance, “and that was that.”

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Fabián Altamirano, the Zonal Coordinator for Ecuador’s Ministry of Tourism in Loja and the surrounding areas, is the person responsible for the thousands of tourists who have flocked to the area in the last five years. In 2009, Altamirano assembled a small team, including a photographer and videographer, to put together a pilot project to promote the area as a tourist destination. Once the images of flowering guayacán trees began to circulate, people from Quito and Guayaquil started to come see for themselves.

Since the town only receives visits from tourists for a few days a year, it’s up to the community to adapt and accommodate the needs of their temporary expansion. A municipal organization has built a few community-owned cabins. Some families offer their porches for tourists to set up their tents. Others open up their homes as make-shift restaurants or lend their showers and bathrooms to people who camp in designated areas of the forest.

Planning a trip to see the guayacán forest can be difficult to coordinate, because it blossoms with just a few days’ notice. The best way to see it is to be in Ecuador during January, and leave enough flexibility in your plans to set out for Mangahurco—a six-hour drive from Loja, the closest major city—at the last minute.

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Watch a Trail Guide Take an Eerie Walk Through a Flooded Nature Preserve

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Click play on the video above, and it takes a fraction of a second to realize something isn't right. You're walking on a rainforest trail, with a clear path and vegetation, but the light is tinged with green. Everything, from the camera's forward movement to the swaying of the leaves, happens just a bit more slowly than it should. Eventually, the camera tilts up to reveal that the sky has a strange ceiling. But it isn't the sky after all: The trail is underwater!

The footage was taken on February 2, 2018, at Recanto Ecológico Rio da Prata, a nature reserve in Jardim, Brazil. People go to the park to hike, horseback ride, birdwatch, and scuba dive—but not, generally, all on the same path. When a park guide went to monitor the site and found that this hiking trail suddenly required a snorkel, he decided to take out his camera.

So how did this happen? The park is located at the junction of two rivers, da Prata and Olho D'Agua. According to the video description, the heavy rains in early February caused the Rio da Prata to dam up, raising the level of the Olho D'Agua in turn. The water's clarity likely results from a combination of factors, including its source—springs that wind through a limestone karst—and the fact that visitors are encouraged not to kick up sediment.

The resulting video is dreamlike. Land plants stoically bear the weight of the water, and a bridge, conquered by the river it once crossed, now seems to go nowhere at all. Occasionally, a couple of fish drift by, perhaps confused by their new surroundings.

By the next day, the waters had receded again. And—in case you were worried—the reserve assures that despite the flooding, "all the tourists left satisfied."

Finding the Unexpected Wonder in More Than 22,000 International Standards

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It’s 7:30 a.m., UTC, and you need to brush your teeth. You switch on the bathroom light. The ceramic tiles are cool on your bare feet. You squeeze a little toothpaste onto the brush, then slide it between your lips and against your teeth. Brush. Brush, brush. Brush. (This bit takes a while.) Brush. Spit. Swill some water around in your mouth. Rinse. You splash a little tap water into the sink. Toothbrush down. You leave the room, switching the lights off as you go. It’s 7:33 a.m., UTC.

In Geneva, Switzerland, at the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, teams of engineers have spent months and months thinking about every single of one of these actions. For each, there’s a standard—for the glazed tiles beneath your toes; the precise chemical properties of your chosen paste, cream, or gel; the filaments that make up your brush. There’s an international standard behind the time on your watch and the water that flows through the pipes. As you go through your day, you will come into contact with countless others, without even realizing it. Each one is the product of a minimum of 18 months’ to-and-fro, and sometimes as much as three to five years. Then, within five years of being settled, they’ll be revised all over again.

It can be hard to find the joy in the minutiae of ISO—pages upon pages of acronyms, meeting notes, nuts-and-bolts bureaucracy about actual nuts and bolts. But without it, and the standardization it provides, the world would be a significantly more chaotic place. Understanding how the organization came to be requires a journey back through the history of modern standardization, a peek at some of the stranger—and most instrumental—standards, and a look at its political philosophy, one that stands in stark contrast to how most internationally significant decisions are made elsewhere in the world.


Standardization becomes critical in a connected world. If you never come into contact with your faraway neighbors, it doesn’t especially matter whether you use the same measurements, operate by the same clock, or have the same size windows in your workplace. The Industrial Revolution, however, had the effect of shrinking the world—journeys which would once have been unthinkably long could now take place in the space of weeks, or even days. And for that, there needed to be cooperation along the line.

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In mid-19th-century United States, this became especially clear as railroads began to stripe across the country for the first time. Each place used its own measure to determine the space between the rails on the track. Some track gauge measurements were narrow—in parts of Maine, just two feet wide. Other places, like New York State, favored a gauge of up to six feet. If everybody remained in their “area,” this didn’t represent an especial problem. But increasingly, people, and goods, needed to be moved great distances, from one place to the next. Usually, railways resorted to a break of gauge, where everything and everyone would trundle off one train operating on one gauge, and onto the next train which operated on a different gauge. But this was an expensive, time-consuming solution and, as trade between the Midwest and the East mushroomed after the Civil War, it became a nuisance for trading companies.

By 1880, most North American railways had agreed to convert to a standard gauge—4 ft 8 1⁄2 in, or 1435 mm. At the end of May 1886, the southern railways capitulated, and changed their own lines to approximately the same gauge. This seemingly arbitrary measure is now the standard across much of the world, and used in around 55 percent of railways. It was transitions such as these that began to impress upon people how important it was, from an engineering perspective, to use the same systems across states, countries, and the world.

Gradually, nations began to have their own organizations for standardization—first Britain, in 1901, with the Engineering Standards Committee. (They are now the BSI Group, with the charming tagline: “Making excellence a habit.”) Germany and the United States followed suit, in 1918: The American Engineering Standards Committee, founded by five engineering societies and three government agencies, became the American National Standards Institute in 1969.

The earliest example of international standardization, however, did not include Britain or the United States. Despite being founded in New York, the International Federation of the National Standardizing Association (known as ISA and established in 1926) was a mostly continental Europe body. (America and Britain’s reliance on imperial measurements did not make membership a particularly sensible option for either.) ISA began to lay the groundwork for standards across mechanical engineering out of its Swiss headquarters, but was brought to a crashing halt by the Second World War. In 1942, it was mothballed.

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In 1946, when the war was over, delegates from 25 countries met at London’s Institute of Civil Engineers. The city was still reeling from bombing and rationing, and Willy Kuert, who had traveled from Switzerland for the meeting, recalled a city that was “still partly destroyed.” In the wake of this international conflict, the delegates sought an organization that prioritized international cooperation. “We went to London, we Swiss, hoping to create a new organization which would do the work of standardization in a democratic way, and not cost too much money,” Kuert wrote in the ISO’s self-published history, Friendship Among Equals. “At the end of the London conference, we had the feeling that new statutes and new rules would permit us to do such work. Real, effective work.”

There were certain sensitive issues that delegates made a point of not discussing at that initial meeting—tension between the metric and imperial blocs, for instance. But others did have to be addressed, including the name of the body. Eventually, the group decided on ISO as a standard acronym, independent of any language. The organization’s website now claims that the founders derived this moniker from the Greek work isos, or equal. Kuert, for his part, remembered no such thing: “There was no mention of that in London!” In the 70 years since, the ISO has expanded to some 161 member states and more than 22,000 standards.

Some of these standards are decidedly quirky. Standard 3103, “Tea—Preparation of liquor for use in sensory tests,” which lays down a correct way to brew tea, has particularly enthralled the public, even earning an Ig Nobel prize in 1999. A few highlights: The pot’s inside edge should be partly serrated. “Large pots” should not hold more than 310 milliliters (plus or minus 8 ml), with two grams of tea per 100 ml of boiling water. Timing is critical—20 seconds for that boiling water to cool; six minutes of brewing time.

It may seem ludicrous that such a standard should even exist—but ponder this: In scientific experiments where participants must drink tea, how else can you be sure that tea made and consumed in one country is the same as in another? Americans mostly drink their tea without milk; Indians opt for a beverage that is heavily sugared and spiced, steeping the leaves in warm milk. In Britain alone, people stew over whether the milk goes in first or second. A standard may seem unromantic, but without it, anarchy reigns—even if, from the outside, it might seem a storm in a teacup.

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Other times, standards exist not for international cooperation or scientific accuracy, but because it’s really, really important for things to work. Craig Murphy is a political scientist and the co-author of The International Organization for Standardization (ISO): Global Governance Through Voluntary Consensus, with JoAnne Yates. He gives the example of condoms, which require fastidious and complex standardization. “There are multiple condom standards, because there are multiple sized people, and condoms are used slightly differently in different parts of the world,” Murphy says. Since 1975, somewhere in a room near Geneva airport, teams of engineers have sat around in technical committees, talking about condoms—“smooth, textured, parallel-sided, non-parallel-sided, plain-ended, reservoir-ended, dry, lubricated, transparent, translucent, opaque, colored, pre-shaped, welded or non-welded,” according to the standard.

Testing condoms isn’t sexy work, but it’s deeply, deeply important. On an individual level, the consequences of an unreliable condom may be life-changing—on a global one, they’re the difference between managing, and not managing, an epidemic. Because of that, committees will usually include representatives of as many stakeholders as possible. In the case of condoms, that might include the World Health Organization, charitable and educational agencies that focus on family planning, HIV prevention organizations, and groups representing consumers (who do, after all, pay the price if the standard isn’t up to scratch.) ISO has relationships with over 700 international, regional and national organizations, of which the World Trade Organization and the United Nations are just two.


Global standards can do more than just solve global problems—some have had a radical impact on economies. The most famous of these is likely ISO 6346: the standards for the humble shipping container. Before 1956, as noted in The Economist, goods were piled high on ships’ holds and crammed into empty nooks and crannies in wooden crates. Things regularly went missing, and companies’ losses due to theft were high. The introduction of uniform metal containers that year sent the price of shipping plummeting, as companies wasted far less time loading and unloading—picking up a box, even a really, really big one, is much quicker than trying to unpack hundreds of miscellaneous wooden crates of every which size. In the late 1960s, the ISO published an initial shipping container standard that made things even more straightforward.

Ships and ports got bigger—containers made it easier to move things inland, as well. People sent things around the world more cheaply, and with greater abandon, than they had before, with boxes shunted easily from ship to truck and from truck back to ship.

“Containerism,” as it’s technically known, is associated with a 320 percent increase in bilateral trade in the first five years alone. Over 20 years, it’s close to 800 percent—more than any free trade agreement in the last five decades. At any given moment, millions of shipping containers are making their way across the globe, whether laden with inexpensive merchandise, from China to the United States, or with 50,000 bananas per 20-foot box, from Colombia to the United Kingdom. Today, writes Rose George in Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate, we live in an “era of extreme interdependence.” A lot of that is due to these special standardized boxes.

In a sense, nations being interdependent, and collaborating accordingly, is precisely the aim of ISO, whose slogan, is, after all, “When the world agrees.” It’s a wholly different kind of international wrangling, says Murphy. “ISO finds a way to create cooperative agreements that are widely used.”

“Knowing that it is possible to not have the kind of political battles that we have in the UN system or in the regular politics of Parliament or the American Congress,” he says, trailing off. “It’s fascinating to think that human beings can actually do this other thing as well.” There is little showboating or power play at work in the ISO, he says. ”[It’s] a world where, instead of having the kind of politics that we actually have, politics is done quietly, behind the scenes, by people trying to find the best possible solution, or at least the solution that is the most agreeable to lots of interest groups.”

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International cooperation isn’t free, however. To be a member of ISO, each country pays a subscription fee that helps cover the organization’s operating costs—a figure that is worked out for each country according its Gross National Income and trade figures. Other revenue comes from the sale of standards, starting at around $40 apiece. Internet commentators often bemoan the high price of individual standards. In a world of open source technology, this can seem baffling, or even hostile, to engineers and developers. But these costs play an important role in the ISO’s day-to-day running activities, Murphy points out, as they help subsidize the costs of having engineers or organizations from developing countries on its committees.

It’s much easier for wealthy countries, and their organizations, to send representatives to Geneva to work with ISO. For developing countries, however, these costs can be prohibitively high. In the past, this has been a problem—a 2004 study points out that Western Europe represented almost half the voting base in ISO’s standards development work, despite comprising approximately six percent of the world’s population. In the past few years, however, ISO seems to have committed to funneling money into improving representation from the developing world in its boardrooms and meeting committees. It’s good for the developing world but it’s good for ISO, too: Without participation from developing countries, ISO standards wind up applying to only a minority of the globe—to the detriment of world markets, technical progress, and sustainable development.

That said, politically, 2018 doesn’t seem like a golden period of international standardization. Political leaders trumpeting promises of deregulation have proven of late to have serious sway with voters, especially in the Anglo-American world. Furthermore, calls for America to “go metric” have been ignored for hundreds of years. In 1906, purported telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell urged Congress to adopt the metric system: “Few people have any adequate conception of the amount of unnecessary labor involved in the use of our present weights and measures.” Congress demurred, and does to this day. It remains to be seen how long this will continue to be the case, despite the huge costs having a different system represents.

In the meantime, however, ISO’s technocrats are hidden in plain sight, keeping their heads down and trying to making the world function a little more smoothly. “It’s about the power to get things done, which is actually all about consensus and listening to people,” Murphy says. “It might seem very boring, but it’s a different form of power—and it’s a better form of power.”

These Marine Bacteria Can Change Their Colors in Different Types of Light

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As painters such as J.M.W. Turner or Claude Monet knew well, the ocean can come in myriad different colors, from royal blue to dark grey and emerald green. That's because of the different ways in which water absorbs sunlight. On a sunny day, the ocean looks blue because water absorbs colors in the red part of the light spectrum, so all that we see is what's left behind in the blue light spectrum.

Much of this light absorption is carried out by microscopic marine algae called phytoplankton that, much like plants do on land, use chlorophyll to carry out photosynthesis, turning light energy into chemical energy that can be used to sustain life in the ocean.

Now, new research, published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has discovered that Synechococcus cyanobacteria, a kind of phytoplankton that is abundant in ocean waters, are able to swiftly adapt their pigment content to absorb different types of light.

A team of researchers led by David Scanlan, a professor in Marine Microbiology at the University of Warwick, looked at data on seawater gathered by the Tara Oceans expedition, an international research effort to document global plankton ecosystems, in order to study the genetic composition of Synechococcus found in different parts of the ocean. The team identified a particular "chromatic adaptor" gene that enables these bacteria to adapt their pigment content according to different light. This allows them to survive and carry out photosynthesis in all kinds of water.

Finding Synechococcus cells capable of dynamically changing their pigment content in accordance with the ambient light color—abundant in ocean ecosystems, making them planktonic ‘chameleons’—gives us a much deeper understanding of those processes essential to keep the ocean ‘engine’ running," Professor Scanlan said in a press release.

As phytoplanktons account for most of the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean, it is hoped that learning more about them can shed light on how ocean environments adapt to climate change. “This will help improve how we look after our waters," Professor Scanlan said, "and will allow us to better predict how oceans will react in the future to a changing climate with increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”


Documenting the Beauty of Italy's Abandoned Villas

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Four years ago, Eleonora Costi, an Italian photographer based in Florence, was skimming through a local paper when she came across an article about an abandoned 14th-century villa located just few miles north of Milan. “It sounded like a good location to take photos, so I decided to go and check it out,” she says. “The first thing I remember is a vivid scent of wet wood and a haunting silence.”

Originally built by the Pusterla family, the 10-acre estate was later acquired by the Cirivelli and Arconati families. During the 19th century it became known as “Villa Napoleone” after Napoleon Bonaparte used it as his headquarters during the Italian chapter of the French Revolutionary Wars. By 1879, the government had converted the estate into one of the largest psychiatric facilities in the country. It wasn’t until after 1978, when a new law called for the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, that the nearly 700 year-old estate was abandoned. No effort has been made to restore it since.

“It was dark, damp, and really quiet,” Costi says. “It’s a kind of surreal silence I have been feeling only in abandoned places. As if anyone could come out from behind a corner at any time.”

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Since that first trip, Costi has visited more than 50 abandoned villas across northern and central Italy. “Once you start researching, you realize that there is a whole world of abandoned places out there.”

Over the years, she’s developed a varied methodology to find such hidden gems. Sometimes it’s about entering the right string of keywords into Google. Other times, she searches local papers to see if anyone is mentioning a villa that is crumbling or a family from the area that used to own one. Google Earth also helps. “If you pay attention to the right kind of signs, you can spot them from above,” she says. “For example, if a roof seems like it has some crumbling parts, that is usually a promising clue.”

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Less often she gets advice from fellow photographers. But as you can imagine, explorers interested in abandoned spots can be pretty secretive about the locations of their discoveries.

“It’s not unusual to run into people during a shoot,” she says. Typical encounters include photographers, writers, petty thieves looking for copper wires or marble blocks, and sometimes, owners. “I once met an elderly lady who owned one of the villas. After I complimented her house, she told me: If you like it, it’s yours!”

For many Italians who inherit hundreds-year-old properties, the windfall can end up more a curse than a blessing. “Very often people can’t keep up with high taxes and maintenance costs,” Costi explains, “let alone financing restoration works.”

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Part of what drives Costi’s work is the desire to create awareness about Italy’s abandoned villas, with the hope that someone might step in to preserve them.

“I know that many people find the decadence attractive, but for me what’s striking about these places is the persistence of beauty,” she says. “It’s striking to see a fresco from 300 years ago still standing despite the neglect.”

Decades of rainfall and the damage caused by earthquakes, which are not uncommon in central Italy, do eventually take their toll. “When you come into a place and see water infiltrations in its foundations, you know that there is very little one can do.” In other cases, however, restoration efforts can make a difference.

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“My favorite villa so far is one I photographed two years ago, just outside Milan,” says Costi. When the photographer first visited it, this particular mansion was in pretty bad shape. Walls were cracked and parts of the ceilings had collapsed on the floor. But thanks to intensive renovations it has since been restored and a family now lives there. Costi’s photos were used in the online ad seeking a buyer. “Sometimes a good photo can help," she says.

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That was the case with Sammazzano castle. For decades, most people had no idea that a few miles outside of Florence lay a semi-abandoned Moorish-style castle built by an eccentric prince in the mid 19th century. But in recent years, partly thanks to social media campaigns that circulated stunning photos of its interiors, more than 50,000 citizens signed public petitions to demand its restoration. Last June, the castle was sold to a Dubai-based company for €15.4 million. “The government did not do much,” Costi says. “But at least now everyone knows about it.”

Finding the best spots to capture sumptuous interiors or decadent facades is clearly an important part of Costi’s work. But so is the ability to imagine how these places used to look, sound, and feel when they were still inhabited. “Sometimes I try to capture a detail that can suggest something about the people who used to live there,” Costi says. A couple of years ago she entered a villa that was probably owned by an artist, as she found a room filled with just an easel and paints. “Everything in there, from bed sheets to newspapers to kitchenware, looked like it was left exactly as it was.”

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The feeling, she says, is almost like traveling back to a moment frozen in time. “I can barely scratch the surface of these long-lost private worlds, but can’t help but feel a sense of nostalgia for a time that’s gone and will never come back.”

Why Bees Prefer the Countryside

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How many different sorts of bees can you name? Most people trail off at about two—honeybees and bumble bees—though there are nearly 20,000 different species across the world. Just a tiny fraction of them, however, can cope with urban living, even in city gardens that are bursting with bloom. If it's not the flowers that are holding back urban bee communities, why do so many of them flourish in the countryside and other natural areas?

The answer, according to scientists from North Carolina State University, seems to relate to higher temperatures in cities and towns. Bees like it to be cool—with yards that are just 3.6°F warmer having a third as many bees as their cooler neighbors. Hot temperatures can be fatal for some species of bees, putting them at greater risk from pathogens or making it harder for them to forage.

For two years, scientists sampled bees in 18 parks and yards across Raleigh, North Carolina, publishing their results in a recent study in the journal Urban Ecosystems. Some yards were warmer, and some were more temperate. Some had an abundance of many different kinds of flowers, and others did not. Bees definitely seem to prefer more flowery yards—but only the largest really appeared to benefit from high floral density. While some species of bees don't seem to mind a warmer yard, others can't handle the heat. For those, even the floweriest warm yards are out of the question—no matter how many nectar-heavy blossoms there are.

Still, if you're trying to get bees into your garden, there are things you can do to help cool it down. Trees help, and so do other kinds of shade. And the more flowers there are, the better. But on a sizzling day, when the asphalt seems on the brink of melting and the sidewalk is almost steaming, well—can you blame the bees for wanting a rural getaway?

The Centuries-Old Mystery of How Florida Got Its Flamingos

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It was late afternoon, and John J. Audubon still hadn’t found a flamingo. The sun was slinking toward the horizon, the sky scuffed by wispy clouds, and the boat was able to slice through the water with barely a ripple. Not a bad voyage, but Audubon had engineered this expedition to the islands off of Florida’s southeast coast for the express purpose of finding a flock of the long-necked crimson beauties. Where were they?

Audubon had seen an American Flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) in Florida before—in Key West, soaring toward a hammock of mangroves. (Naturally, he tried to nab it as a specimen, but it dodged the shot he fired.) He knew that flamingos were thick in Cuba, and had heard that the birds often congregated near Pensacola, and sometimes Alabama or South Carolina. Now, in May of 1832, he was desperate to shoot one, or even lay eyes on one—but so far, no luck.

Then, off in the distance, he spotted a flock careening with outstretched wings, elongated necks, and legs tucked back behind them. “Ah! reader, could you but know the emotions that then agitated my breast!” he later wrote. The birds changed direction before he could aim his gun, but Audubon watched them as if entranced, and didn’t tear his gaze away until dusk settled.

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The flamingo isn’t the state bird of Florida—that honor goes to the much-less-leggy Northern mockingbird—but the rosy-hued waders with Modigliani necks are deeply associated with the Sunshine State. When Audubon set out to a find a Florida flock, he described his desire to study “these lovely birds in their own beautiful islands.” In 1909, a rail line linking the southern state with New York adopted the moniker, christening itself after “the bird which is so typical of Florida.” Across the peninsula, a brood of contemporary waterparks, motels, and inns all borrow from the bird.

"Living in Florida, you see flamingos everywhere—in advertising, in place names, even on the logo for the state lottery—but as an actual organism, as a species, there was essentially no information available on the biology of flamingos," said Steven Whitfield, a conservation ecologist at Zoo Miami. The birds are iconic, Whitfield says, but there’s been little information about their past and present in the state. When and how did they get to the region? What happened to them once they arrived?

The murky history spans centuries. While some 19th-century naturalists recounted dense clusters of flamingos around Florida, others were less certain about the birds' primary strutting grounds. In the 1881 edition of his encyclopedic book, The Birds of Eastern North America, Charles Johnson Maynard notes that flamingos were rare in the Florida Keys. In fact, he wasn’t sure how plentiful they’d ever been there. Word had it that they clustered in the Keys in the summer months, while they molted—but he’d never seen one there himself.

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At the turn of the 20th century, naturalists who wanted to get a close-up look at flamingos often traveled to the Bahamas to do so. In the 1896 revision to his book, Maynard describes an often-unpleasant excursion in a flat-bottomed bateau. The sun blazed off of the water and the light-colored mud just a few inches beneath it. To get a closer look at a flock, Maynard waded through three creeks, in muck that reached up to his armpits. “But what did that matter!” he concluded later. It all seemed worth it when he saw the birds arranged in an “immense flock” that “honk[ed] hoarsely.”

It was love at first sight. “Minor affairs were forgotten in the magnificent spectacle before us,” Maynard wrote. He left with a live specimen, which he named Aurora. She became a pet, dining on boiled rice and water-soaked bread, and trailing Maynard around the house. She hung around while he worked, and appeared to get along with Spottie, his dog—though she occasionally nipped the canine’s ear to nudge him out of the way when she wanted to pass.

In 1920, spurred by fears that American Flamingos were tiptoeing toward extinction, a gaggle of researchers from the National Geographic Society, Miami Aquarium Association, and other institutions headed to the salt swamps of Andros Island, in the Bahamas, to “hunt with a camera” and capture photographs of the birds. With the help of a local guide—Peter Bannister, who had also accompanied a similar outing in 1901—they traveled by yacht, canoe, and foot. They slogged through waist-deep water and sucking mud, juggling camera equipment in one hand and swatting at “blinding swarms” of mosquitoes with the other.

The trip was front-page news back in Florida. The Miami Daily Metropolis breathlessly chronicled the team's escapades, quoting one member of the party who described the flock as “a flaming mass of brilliant scarlet bodies, jet black beneath the huge wings, with their long, slender necks gracefully lowering and raising their Roman-nosed heads.” The group spent 10 days hunkered down in blinds, shooting thousands of feet of film. Some members of the crew embarked on another outing a few months later, with the goal of capturing a live specimen to bring back to Miami and house near the beach in a spectacularly sun-drenched iron-and-wire cage larger than any other. That trek didn't go to plan. They paddled 250 miles in canoes, but didn't find the feathered treasure. The aquarium director, apparently dejected, explained it thusly: "This time, we didn't find the fledglings we were after, nor did we locate the adult flamingo. They had disappeared." The birds that had once been said to flock to Florida's shores were getting harder and harder to find.

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Whitfield, the ecologist, and a gaggle of collaborators try to pin down some specifics about Florida’s flamingos in a new report, published this week in The Condor: Ornithological Applications. To track the birds’ historic numbers and locations, the researchers surveyed the records of early naturalists, including Maynard and Audubon. They also excavated evidence from museum records, as well as more recent data from citizen scientists.

In the 19th- and early-20th centuries, the authors report, naturalists documented flamingo sightings in a number of Florida locations, including the Anclote Keys, Indian Key, Key Largo, and areas close to Cape Sable, Marco Island, and Miami. Eggs held by four museums, including the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, suggest that flamingos were nesting in the state in the late 1800s. The eggs at Yale are paired with a card stating they were collected in the Florida Keys in June 1884, and are scribbled with the inscription “585,” the number for American Flamingos on an 1880 checklist of American birds.

Museum records aren’t always reliable, the authors caution: None of these are accompanied by detailed field notes, and labeling can be inconsistent or even fraudulent. On the other hand, it’s not surprising that more eggs didn’t end up in museum collections, the authors add, because expeditions to nests were wildly inconvenient—eggs were incubated in salt flats that were far from roads and frustratingly shallow for boats. The collection dates on the labels do line up with known nesting seasons for flamingos in the Bahamas and Cuba.

On the whole, the authors conclude, “there is overwhelming evidence both from narrative accounts and from museum records that American Flamingos occurred naturally in large flocks in Florida.” These flocks were regularly 500 to 1,000 birds strong, and sometimes topped 2,500 members. Flamingos were hunted in large numbers for their plumes, skin, and meat, and the historical population was nearly wiped out by 1900.

Sightings were sparse for decades. Then, drawing on citizen science data, the authors mark an increase of wild flamingos spotted in the state between 1950 and 2017, particularly in the Florida Keys. Still, the picture isn’t entirely rosy: The population has never quite returned to a healthy state.

“We do, sort of, have flamingos, but we don’t have the resident breeding population that we used to,” Whitfield says. “Individuals fly in from the Bahamas or Cuba, forage a little while, and leave.” While there were once clusters of thousands of birds, Whitfield says, “we’re nowhere near that now.” The largest recent sighting was 150 individuals, and they didn’t hang around very long.

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The research helps resolve a debate about whether the birds people spot today are wild or escaped from zoos or captive populations at tourist attractions. “Until just a few years ago, everyone thought that they were all escaped,” Whitfield says. It’s unclear how many trek back and forth between Florida and the Caribbean, and a better picture could emerge with the help of satellite images, banding, or population genetics.

This isn’t perfect data, the researchers admit: Some birds were likely counted more than once, and the figures would benefit from a mark-recapture technique. Still, Felicity Arengo, associate director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, thinks the work holds water. “The authors are cautious and recognize the limitations of the data in their study, but they provide ample evidence that Florida was the northernmost extent of the American Flamingo prior to the early 1900s and that populations have been recovering," said Arengo in a statement.

Getting a grasp on the American Flamingo’s history and present is an important part of devising a strategy for protecting them, the authors write. Some agencies have classified the birds as nonnative species, rendering them ineligible for protection under wildlife laws. In Florida, where roughly half of the species are introduced and the other half are threatened, Whitfield says, “it’s a bit of an ecological mess.” He doubts any of the legions of introduced species—from Burmese pythons to primates and a handful of parrots—are a direct threat to flamingos, but the birds already face other challenges. Coastal construction can encroach on habitats, for instance, and hurricanes and storm surges can imperil low-lying nests.

The authors leave the business of policy recommendations to state and federal officials, but Whitfield points to a trend across the Caribbean, where flamingos are settling down again in areas where they had historically nested. “If protected, they may recover naturally,” Whitfield says. That could be key to a bright future for the strangely statuesque bird, the authors write—a “lost Florida icon” found and safeguarded.

How Killer Rice Crippled Tokyo and the Japanese Navy

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In 1877, Japan’s Meiji Emperor watched his aunt, the princess Kazu, die of a common malady: kakke. If her condition was typical, her legs would have swollen, and her speech slowed. Numbness and paralysis might have come next, along with twitching and vomiting. Death often resulted from heart failure.

The emperor had suffered from this same ailment, on-and-off, his whole life. In response, he poured money into research on the illness. It was a matter of survival: for the emperor, his family, and Japan’s ruling class. While most diseases ravage the poor and vulnerable, kakke afflicted the wealthy and powerful, especially city dwellers. This curious fact gave kakke its other name: Edo wazurai, the affliction of Edo (Edo being the old name for Tokyo). But for centuries, the culprit of kakke went unnoticed: fine, polished, white rice.

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Gleaming white rice was a status symbol—it was expensive and laborious to husk, hull, polish, and wash. In Japan, the poor ate brown rice, or other carbohydrates such as sweet potatoes or barley. The rich ate polished white rice, often to the exclusion of other foods.

This was a problem. Removing the outer layers of a grain of rice also removes one vital nutrient: thiamine, or vitamin B-1. Without thiamine, animals and humans develop kakke, now known in English as beriberi. But for too long, the cause of the condition remained unknown.

In his book Beriberi in Modern Japan: The Making of a National Disease, Alexander R. Bay describes the efforts of Edo-era doctors to figure out the disease. A common suspect was dampness and damp ground. One doctor administered herbal medicines and a fasting regimen to a samurai, who died within months. Other doctors burned dried mugwort on patients’ bodies to stimulate qi and blood flow.

Some remedies did work—even if they didn’t come from a true understanding of the disease. Katsuki Gyuzan, an early, 18th-century doctor, believed Edo itself was the issue. Samurai, he wrote, would come to Edo and get kakke from the water and soil. Only samurai who went back to their provincial homes—going over the Hakone Pass—would be cured. Those who were seriously ill had to move quickly, “for the worst cases always result in death,” Katsuki cautioned. Since heavily processed white rice was less available outside Edo and in the countryside, this likely was a cure. Similarly, a number of physicians prescribed barley and red beans, which both contain thiamine.

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By 1877, Japan’s beriberi problem was getting really serious. When the princess Kazu died of kakke at 31, it was only a decade after her former husband, Japan’s shogun, had died, almost certainly from the mysterious disease. Machine-milling made polished rice available to the masses, and as the government invested in an army and navy, it fed soldiers with white rice. (White rice, as it happened, was less bulky and lasted longer than brown rice, which could go rancid in warm weather.) Inevitably, soldiers and sailors got beriberi.

No longer was this just a problem for the upper class, or even Japan. In his article British India and the “Beriberi Problem,” 1798–1942, David Arnold writes that by the time the emperor was funding research, beriberi was ravaging South and East Asia, especially “soldiers, sailors, plantation labourers, prisoners, and asylum inmates.”

Into this mess stepped a precocious doctor: Takaki Kanehiro. Almost immediately after joining the navy in 1872, he noticed the high numbers of sailors suffering from beriberi. But it wasn’t until he returned from medical school in London and took up the role of director of the Tokyo Naval Hospital that he could do anything about it. After surveying suffering sailors, he found that“the rate [of disease] was highest among prisoners, lower among sailors and petty officers, and lowest among officers.”

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Since they differed mainly by diet, Takaki believed a lack of protein among lower-status sailors caused the disease. (This contradicted the most common theory at the time: that beriberi was an infectious disease caused by bacteria.) Takaki even wrangled a meeting with the emperor to discuss his theory. “If the cause of this condition is discovered by someone outside of Japan, it would be dishonorable,” he told the emperor. Change couldn’t come soon enough. In 1883, 120 Japanese sailors out of 1,000 had the disease.

Takaki also noticed that Western navies didn’t suffer from beriberi. But instituting a Western-style diet was expensive, and sailors were resistant to eating bread. An unfortunate incident, though, allowed Takaki to make his point emphatically. In late 1883, a training ship full of cadets returned from a journey to New Zealand, South America, and Hawaii. Out of the 370 cadets and crewmen, 169 had gotten beriberi, and 25 had died.

Takaki proposed an experiment. Another training ship, the Tsukuba, would set out on the exact same route. Takaki leveraged every connection he had to arrange for the Tsukuba to carry bread and meat instead of just white rice. So while the Tsukuba made its way around the world, the doctor spent sleepless nights fretting about the result: If crew members died from beriberi, he would look like a fool. Later, he told a student that he would have killed himself if his experiment failed.

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Instead, the Tsukuba returned to Japan in triumph. Only 14 crew members had gotten beriberi, and those men had not eaten the ordered diet. Takaki wasn’t exactly right: He believed the issue was protein rather than thiamine. But since meat was expensive, Takaki proposed giving sailors protein-filled barley, which is actually rich in thiamine. In the face of this evidence, the navy began mixing rations with barley. Within a few years, beriberi was almost totally eradicated in the navy.

But only in the navy. Takaki became navy surgeon general in 1885, yet other doctors attacked his theories and questioned his results. The sad result was that while the navy ate barley, the army ate only rice. According to Bay, the use of barley smacked of discredited traditional Japanese medicine to many Western-trained doctors. Plus, recruits were enticed into the army by promises of as much white rice as they could eat.

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The result was deadly. During the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, beriberi killed 27,000 soldiers, compared to 47,000 men killed by actual war wounds. Finally, barley became a vital battlefield ration. The source of a disease that had ravaged Japan’s leadership and kneecapped the military was identified. It was the country’s staple crop, everyday meal, and cultural touchstone: simple white rice.

Vitamins had yet to be discovered, and the debate over the true cause of beriberi lingered for decades. But few could deny that Takaki had uncovered white rice’s deadly secret. Takaki, for his efforts, was made a member of the nobility in 1905. Charmingly, he was given the nickname “the Barley Baron.”

The Mystery of the Fog Holes That Form Over Cities

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In the winter months, thick fog forms over the plains that stretch south of the Himalayas, through Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Visibility can be so limited that it’s impossible to see more than 10 or 20 feet ahead, which means planes stay on the ground and even rail travel slows to a crawl.

Ritesh Gautam, a climate scientist who works for the Environmental Defense Fund, first started studying the formation of fog in order to understand the ways in which air pollution was making it worse. But during his research, he noticed another strange phenomenon: Holes, dramatic enough that they show up in satellite imagery, would form in the thick fog directly over cities.

The cause of these fog holes was a mystery, but Gautam and other scientists suspected that they could be caused by the heat trapped in urban landscapes, which makes city temperatures hotter than those in the surrounding area. In a new paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Gautam and a team of colleagues outline the relationship between cities and these mysterious fog holes. By looking at 17 years of satellite data, capturing fog holes in California, Europe, South Asia, and China, they found a clear connection between the size of cities and the size of these gaps in the fog.

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There are a few different types of fog, but the thick layers that form over these plains occur when the air in the lower atmosphere cools and becomes saturated with moisture. Air pollution can hasten and intensify fog formation, as moisture condenses around the particles hanging out in the air.

Cities tend to create more pollution, so it’s surprising to see holes in the fog there. But cities also trap heat more effectively than the areas around them, which are usually greener. They get hotter during the day and cool down more slowly at night. This well-documented “urban heat island effect,” Gautam and his colleagues write, can also speed the dissipation of fog. Fog forms overnight, but by the late morning holes appear over cities, while the fog still lingers in the surrounding area.

“It’s almost like a Faustian bargain,” says Gautam. “You have pollution increasing the fog, but the urbanization is increasing and making the fog less frequent.”

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In the paper, he and his colleagues looked at the size of 13 different cities along with the area of the fog holes, and found a remarkable correlation. “The shape of the fog hole almost coincides one-to-one with the city boundaries and the size of the city,” he says.

It’s rare to get a result this clear in science. But the relationship here is strong: The larger the city, the larger the fog hole. Of the cities examined in the study, the largest fog holes appeared over New Delhi, with surprising frequency. Compared to the surrounding area, Delhi has 50 percent fewer foggy days. Sometimes the fog wouldn’t show up in the city at all. “We’re not just finding the fog is dissipating faster, but that it’s not even forming,” Gautam says.

While clear days might be preferable to foggy days, these fog holes are one more example of how human beings are changing the patterns of the planet in unprecedented ways. In the densely populated plains of South Asia, with quickly growing cities, that seasonal blanket of fog will only become more pockmarked over time.

A 30-Year Career Writing and Directing for Medieval Times

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In 1983, the first Medieval Times location opened in Kissimmee, Florida. Leigh Cordner, the dinner theater franchise's director of show, joined the company 30 years ago at that original location, and has since risen to be the creative brains for all nine Medieval Times shows across the U.S. and Canada.

Working with horse trainers, stunt coordinators, musicians, and fictional knights and royals, Cordner has guided the show’s narrative across multiple iterations of the performance. It hasn’t always been easy.

Cordner has had to work to keep a live show featuring sword-fighting, jousting, and feudal intrigue both kid-friendly and consistent across multiple locations. Every change to a scene sends ripples through the entire production. In late 2017, Cordner and company introduced one of the biggest changes in the show’s history, replacing their long-standing king character with a queen.

While the new queen is still in the process of taking her throne, and in advance of a Reddit AMA we're hosting with Cordner on Monday Feb. 26 at 12 p.m. EST, Atlas Obscura spoke with him about the challenges of installing a female monarch, how he tries to tell a story through action, and why we won’t see dragons at Medieval Times any time soon.

What do you want the feel of a Medieval Times show to be?

It has to be family-friendly, in so much as we’re killing off four or five guys every night. It’s a family destination. The idea is to weave the story through the action. It would be difficult to have an hour and forty-five minutes of non-stop action. You try to make the characters a little multidimensional along the way.

How do you bring these characters to life?

The audience is divided up into six sections each night, so that relationship [with the knights] has already established itself. Whether we had the king before, or the queen, we make sure the audience understands that all the knights that they’re cheering for are in service to the monarch.

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What are some of the previous changes you’ve introduced to the story?

We came out of the gate with the first show I wrote. We had an after-the-battle scene all in torchlight, and the guys all in distressed costumes, as a prequel to the show. Then in the next show, we had a flashback scene that we had never done before that took place in the arena, but it was a scene previous to the action in the show. We also started micing some of the knights, which we had never done before, and assigning them speaking roles. That turned into, in the last three shows, the knight wearing the mic, who was subsequently in one of the final combats, was probably going to be carrying one quarter of the dialogue.

After something like 20 years of writing the show on my own, or close to it, I felt like we had probably run all the possibilities. It started seeming repetitive. The king this, the princess that, the king this, the princess that…We were really looking for a way to change the model. And we have to be careful, because people come to see the horses, they come to see the falcon, they come to see the games, they come to see the jousting, so when you look at it, you’re really only talking about 30 percent of the show you can play with.

What kinds of things do people often request to be added to the show?

We have people asking us why we don’t have a dragon, why we don’t use archers. I mean, it’s a 360-degree theater, which way would you like us to shoot the arrows? We had pyro for years, but we took it out. Indoor pyro is expensive and unsafe. A lot of people want us to use fake blood. But we’ve got kids there, and they’re eating dinner. You don’t want to spatter blood all over the front row.

We do take pride that there’s nothing fake about the show. Everybody you see talking is talking. The weapons are real, the combat is real. The stunts on the horses are real. We don’t use anyone in a mask, we don’t use pre-recorded stuff. No video, no lasers. What you see is all real. It’s live.

What are some things that, in a perfect world, you’d like to see added to the show?

We’ve danced around with acrobatics and aerial [performances] over the years. But with the limitations of the ceilings [it’s tough]. Like in California, where they did 81 shows in July, I don’t know how many specialist people I would need to staff that. That was something we experimented with once or twice and then realized it probably wasn’t going to happen.

Then recently we were looking at the floor mapping [projections] that you see the NHL and the NBA doing. The problem is that arenas have a 60-80 foot ceiling height to throw the projection, but ours is only like 25 feet, so it would require a ton of projectors. And then the surface of the arena is only gonna be pristine when the show starts. Once the horses start running around out there, you have this mottled surface that’s not going to be good for projection mapping.

We are upgrading the lights across the country. We’re going all LED.

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How did the introduction of the queen occur? How do you think it will change the show?

We wanted to change it up, which is how we came upon the idea of the queen.

It’s really difficult. You’ve got this [show] model that’s 33 years old last year, and you start messing with main characters. Once or twice we’d discussed a plot where the king dies in the first scene, or the show opens with a funeral for the king, but my argument was, ‘it wouldn’t be Medieval Times without The King.’ You go to a castle, you expect to see a king.

That was probably me with blinders on, because why wouldn’t you see a queen?

It was a big thing for us to approach it. We were trying to answer the comments from people who said they’d like to see more females with a higher role in the show, which I felt [the princess had fulfilled]. A fully realized character, a third of the dialogue, the plot revolved around her in several shows. I’d started writing a show with two princesses and we were going to give them the majority of the dialogue, and there was going to be conflict between them. Somewhere along the way it just became unmanageable as far as staffing and training went. It was the president of the company that said to me in a meeting, ‘what about a queen?’ And I said, ‘we can do that.’

Does it surprise you that you hadn’t seized on the idea of installing a queen previously?

I don’t know if the word queen ever came up. I think I was a little resistant to losing the king. It seemed to me that the whole thing would be headless.

It just seemed like so much. Like if McDonald’s stopped offering the Big Mac, y’know? It just seemed like so much change, it was hard to get my head around until I actually sat down to start writing dialogue. When I started to give her a voice, I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be fun because after all these years of writing this one character’s voice, I’m going to get to write a different character from a whole different perspective and a whole different approach.'

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In terms of the writing, what are the differences between the king and the queen?

It was a tightrope at first. My first few attempts were probably overkill with her justifying herself as queen. Luckily a few women who read the script pointed it out to me. They said, ‘she’s spending too much time talking about why she’s the queen. She’s just the queen. The king never spent any time in the show justifying why he was the king.’ I didn’t realize I was doing that, but I see it now.

It was easier to just let conflict develop around her and let her position and her strength solve the conflict. So you see the strength in her without her being involved in the squabbling all the time.

Have you looked at any other bigger female roles in the acts? Female knights?

We’re not there yet. That’s a logistics, staffing, training thing. We have female horse trainers, we have female falconers. The transition to queen means that this woman on stage answers to no one. She’s all-powerful. In the previous two incarnations of the show, [the princess] was fully one-third of the cast, but she was always subservient to the father figure. So the real change here is that we’re putting the queen on our throne for the first time.

Where would you like to see the queen’s story go?

We’re in the middle of the rollout now. We’re only going to be installing the fourth one next month in California. So for the next six-to-ten months, our attention is fully on getting these things rolled out and then polishing it up and maintaining it for the next three-to-four years.

What keeps you there? What is the spirit of Medieval Times that keeps it going?

It’s a family-run company. When I started with this company, it was much smaller. There was just one location in Florida, and one location in California. But as big as it’s gotten, it still feels a little bit like a family company. A lot of the employees have been there 20-25 years, a few of us have been there for over 30 years. I think you get invested in the company’s success. You want the product to be better.

We do change the product every four or five years, so you don’t feel like you’re falling into a rut. I probably would have walked away at some point without that constant change. When I’m not writing a show, it’s my job to fly to all nine cities and watch shows, and give them notes. It’s a live thing. It never stops moving. You’ll never write the last note on a show.

I think that’s why our customers come back too. They enjoy the basic product, but I think they enjoy seeing what we can do with the basic product too.

How do you sum up what Medieval Times offers?

We have the standard line, “Heartstopping Action!” But I think there seems to be an ongoing and sometimes even growing interest in this period. There’s shows about the monarchy in England, the Knights Templar, The Da Vinci Code, Game of Thrones, A Knight’s Tale. Every few years it gets reinvented, and it never quite goes away. If you’re looking for a 21st-century touchstone to any of that, our show’s really the only place you can go. There isn’t anywhere else you can go to see sword-fighting.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

If you'd like to ask Leigh Cordner some questions of your own, join Atlas Obscura for a Reddit AMA with Cordner on Monday Feb. 26 at 12 p.m. EST!

The Earliest European Cave Art Was Made by Neanderthals

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For decades, Neanderthals have been burdened with a bad rap. Maligned as thick-skulled and dim, having brute force to Homo sapiens's sharp wit, their extinction around 40,000 years ago has often been seen as "survival of the fittest" in action. In short, we won. But more recent archaeological research tells a different story. Like humans, Neanderthals buried their dead. They may have grieved. They likely had a language all of their own—certainly, they had the physical capacity. They hunted, made pigments, used toothpicks. They were enough like us that, in some cases, we had children with them. And around 64,000 years ago, in what is now Spain, they made abstract art on the walls of caves.

The whorls and slashes of this art, found at three sites up to 430 miles apart at La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales, had previously been attributed to early humans. But a new study, led by researchers from the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, used a technique called uranium-thorium dating to date the works. At a minimum age of 64,000 years old, the art—stenciled hands, dots, pictures of animals and geometric signs—predates modern humans' arrival in Europe by 20,000 years. At that point, the land was inhabited only by Neanderthals.

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The results of the study were published earlier this week in the journal Science. The greatest takeaway, researchers said, is that the artwork suggests that Neanderthals, like modern humans, had the capacity for symbolic behavior. In turn, it raises new questions about how we should think about our ancient neighbors.

"The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind," joint lead author Dirk Hoffmann said in a statement. "It is one of the main pillars of what makes us human." That these works appear in three separate places is equally significant, and suggests that it was a long-lived tradition, co-author Paul Pettitt added. "Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places. The art is not a one-off accident." Whether other early cave art was also misattributed to modern humans is yet to be seen, he said.


Don't Just Wipe Your Face—Write a Poem!

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If you've got too much soup in your bowl, you'll likely end up reaching for a napkin. But if you have too many ideas in your head, you probably will, too. That's what napkins are there for: to mop up excess thoughts, scribbles, ideas, and emotions, along with more physical drips and dribbles. A Twitter-only publication, TheNapkin, celebrates the wipe's rich creative potential, publishing poetry, diagrams, short stories, sketches, and other ephemera, all done solely on napkins.

Jordan Davis—who first started The Napkin back in 2014, and resuscitated it a few weeks ago—has a special appreciation for the way a napkin, as he puts it, "makes you put things down in a small square quickly without fussing too much over it." While some people have madecareers out of bringing true beauty and care to napkin art, successful submissions to The Napkin are generally quick and dirty. "The small space, the haste—all of that appeals directly to my aesthetic," Davis says.

He's not the only one. In certain circles, napkin-related origin stories are basically a badge of honor. As Davis points out, "dozens and dozens of startups have claimed to have been founded on the back of a napkin." The first four Pixar movies, the Super Bowl trophy design, the Laffer Curve, and Southwest Airlines all allege a similar provenance.

The Napkin originally leaned into this egalitarian spirit. Back in 2015, when there was also a newsletter, they published napkins containing everything from illustrated translations to advice for reading the news. In this more recent incarnation, Davis—a poet himself—has decided to focus more on verse (although "we are open to everybody," he says). Authors range from newcomers to big names: Last week, they published a meditation on thrift-store shopping, written in ballpoint on a creased paper napkin by Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout.

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Davis himself has had a rollercoaster relationship with napkin-writing. Back when he first started the publication, "I bought a big bag of Vanity Fair fancy dinner napkins, and tore them to shreds with pens that were wrong," he says. (He now recommends the Pilot Razor Point II.) But even with the right pen, he found himself ripped up by the pressure of expectation. "I started to get napkin block," he says. "I was writing things that felt like I had rehearsed them. I defeated the purpose of it."

In his current, more curatorial role, Davis has his eye out for trends. Although he stresses that thus far, his sample size is too small for anything but back-of-the-napkin analysis, "I would guess that the crummier the napkin paper quality, the more urgent the message will be," he says. "That's probably a romantic idea. But I am romantic about crummy napkins."

This romance only goes so far: At this point, "we would prefer not to receive napkins in the mail," Davis says. Instead, mealtime scrawlers can submit their works via email, as laid out below:

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Found: A Rich Collection of Triassic Fossils at Bears Ears

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A team of paleontologists led by Robert Gay, of the University of Western Colorado, has recently discovered what may be the largest concentration of Triassic fossils in the world. The newly found site is located in part of the Chinle Formation of Utah, which was part of the more than 1.3 million acres that the Obama administration proclaimed part of Bears Ears National Monument in December 2016. But after the Trump administration's decision to reduce the size of the monument area by 85 percent, the site where the fossils were found can no longer count on its old legal protections.

“Based on our small, initial excavation, we believe that this 69-yard site may be the densest area of Triassic period fossils in the nation, maybe the world," Gay said in a statement. "If this site can be fully excavated, it is likely that we will find many other intact specimens, and quite possibly even new vertebrate species.”

It is unusual to find such a large number of well-preserved fossils in a single location, Gay says. Some of the most notable finds unearthed so far include several intact pieces of ancient, crocodile-like reptiles known as phytosaurs, which are currently being studied at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm, a local paleontology museum.

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The discovery is even more remarkable because one of the fossils was missing a portion of its skull, which had apparently been looted. Gay and his team were able to find the missing part after learning from local authorities that a fossil matching the one they found had recently been found in the possession of an illegal collector. “This may be one of the only times a recovered fossil has been traced all the way back to the location where it was looted,” Gay says. Vandalism and looting are among the reasons that Native American groups got together to push for the National Monument designation.

“There is an incredible amount of work yet to be done," said Tracy J. Thompson, a coordinator of the Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontology, in the release, "and we hope that paleontological sites like this one will get the protection they need before more of our prehistoric past is forever lost to looting or irreplaceably damaged by mining in the region.”

How to Spot the Fossils Hiding in Plain Sight

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Some of the most arresting evidence of prehistoric life is enshrined in museums: fossils, hoisted onto pedestals, interpreted with placards, illuminated by spotlights. But fossils can be anywhere—you likely pass some every day. Countless fragments of shells, corals, and other traces of long-extinct life are embedded in outcrops and the building materials that we stack to make everything from skyscrapers to town halls. Just last month, researchers in Australia determined that chunks of oolitic limestone in the Pentagon and the Empire State Building are full of mineralized microbes that lived 340 million years ago.

There’s no shame in missing these bits of the distant past—the ooids, which give oolitic limestone its characteristically goose-pimpled texture, are scarcely a millimeter in size. Even the larger examples are difficult to detect—and if you do spot, say, an ammonite, how do you know what you’re looking at?

Atlas Obscura asked Ruth Siddall, a geologist at University College London who specializes in the urban environment, for tips on how to maximize your chances of noticing the fossils all around you. Happy hunting!

Figure out where to look.

Many experts have written region-specific guides, which may help you target your search. Siddall’s observations are the backbone of London Pavement Geology, an app and website, and she has guides on her blog. Paleourbana maps finds in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Salt Lake City, Doha, Bogotá, Moscow, and more, and David Williams’s book Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology reads like a prehistoric road trip across America. Search for a resource specific to your area. A local university’s geology department might be a good place to begin, too. If you’re in America, you could also try your state geologist.

Practice.

Before you make a go of it by yourself, Siddall suggests seeking out a guided tour. A printed guide would be the next-best thing. Retrace the steps, and try to spot the features it describes on your own. This helps train your eyes.

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Gear up.

“A magnifying glass can be useful, but not essential,” Siddall says. It may also be helpful to use your smartphone’s GPS to record longitude and latitude, or other location information. But at the end of the day, your eyes and brain are the ultimate tools.

Find the limestone.

Your best bet for finding urban fossils is to identify limestone. “Many limestones, but not all, are fossiliferous,” Siddall says. Unfortunately, identifying limestone isn’t always simple. Some limestones are left rough, others are polished smooth. They’re often pale gray or creamy, but can come in other hues, too. “Limestones are softer than most other rocks,” Siddall adds, “but I guess one shouldn’t go around scratching buildings!”

A local historical society might be a useful tool for zeroing in on historic building materials. Or, to focus your quest, Siddall recommends googling your town plus “building stones.” Doing so for New York City, for example, leads to a database where Wayne Powell, an earth and environmental scientist at Brooklyn College, highlights the materials of some of the city’s most prominent buildings.

Powell has documented oodles of fossils in local building materials, including fragments of aquatic bryozoans and crinoids in Tennessee marble, a type of limestone despite its confusing name. The historic J.P. Morgan & Co. building on Wall Street and the USS Maine National Monument in Central Park are both made of this material, and ripe for the fossil-spotting. Powell’s site also spotlights the features of Indiana limestone, Tuckahoe marble, and the reddish sandstone characteristic of some residential blocks.

Adjust your expectations.

While there’s a romance to finding some magnificently preserved specimen that everyone else missed, the odds are against you. You’re much more likely to spot shells and corals than bones or leaves—“and certainly not an articulated skeleton,” Siddall says. Limestones frequently form in marine environments, where shells and and reefs are the most abundant fossil candidates. “Just by the laws of averages, it is much rarer to get bone preserved than it is shell,” Siddall says. “I do find people overinterpret what they see—I was asked to come and look at a fossil bird in a building and it turned out to just be an oyster shell.”

Try not to get so hung up on scouting for vertebrates that you lose sight of the wondrous qualities of more workaday fossils—and don’t trick yourself into assuming that a humble (but no less fascinating) find is something superlatively rare.

Train yourself to think in two-dimensions.

A fossil in a building slab is likely to lay flush against the stone—it probably won’t protrude out into three dimensions, like many of the ones in museums. To find one, you’ll want to scan a building’s slabs and seams. Let your eyes roam, because fossils could be in any surface—floors, ceilings, walls. They’ll likely be easiest to see in slabs that are polished, instead of those left rough.

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Look for patterns and irregularities.

Keep an eye out for shapes that bear distinct patterns that you might already be familiar with—the curve of a seashell, maybe, or the winding branches of coral. Fossils may be a different color than the surrounding stone, so take note of changes in hue: white in a slab of black limestone, or gray against a red or yellow background.

Black veins snaking through a rock may be a sign of other interesting geological features, such as the fracturing and melting that can result from a meteorite impact. Siddall’s research on London’s Irongate House is full of information on visual signatures of meteorite activity.

Crowdsource it.

Not sure what you’ve found? Or if you’ve found anything at all? You can reach out to a local geology group, or tap into the knowledge of the online mob. Siddall is glad to field identification questions on Twitter (@pavementgeology).

Your Climate Change Monsters, Revealed

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Climate change is scary. Climate change monsters, it turns out, are too. For decades, people have been inspired by dramatic environmental changes when coming up with creatures and horrorscapes. One of the most famous is Frankenstein's monster, who emerged from the mind of Mary Shelley during what was known as The Year Without a Summer.

Recently, we asked you to help us design a climate change monster—what beasts will emerge from a world ravaged by rising temperatures and sea levels? Almost 100 Atlas Obscura readers reached out with creatures scaly and slimy, humanoid and extraterrestrial. Some come from the top of the planet, while others thrive at the bottom of the ocean. All of them were inventive, and helped give a face or a name to a phenomenon many people are still struggling to wrap their heads around.

We couldn’t feature them all, but here are some of our favorites, organized thematically and shortened, where necessary, for clarity.

An ecosystem out of control


I can't shake the image of polar bears moving into southern territories and adapting in terrible ways. Shedding every bit of their white fur due to rising temperatures, the pitch-black skin beneath is exposed, causing them to appear unnatural, as if they're living shadows. Though losing their fur has allowed them to survive in the scorching heat, other animals are less fortunate, and the bears grow lean and bony, ever more wraith-like. Slowly but surely, the burrowing rodents of the baked forests and runty fish of the polluted rivers can no longer sustain them. The shadow bears move into small towns and settlements, setting their ebony gaze on the one thing to survive this calamity intact—us.—Dave Froom

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It started out as a small group of plastics, washed out into the ocean from the countries of the world. And then it started to grow. Bacteria from all over the globe converged into one spot on an island of plastic floating in the ocean. As sea temperatures continued to rise, the bacteria flourished, growing and adapting to their environment. Sea creatures became tangled in the mass, allowing for the change to begin. Slowly at first, but as the bacteria latched on to the newly acquired organic material, the island of plastic began actively gathering organic material. Schools of fish were trapped in plastic webbing, birds that landed on the creature were pulled under the water and drowned.

It began to finally take a shape. A Frankenstein Leviathan of plastic and sinews. Long tentacles stretched out behind it, webbing between the limbs ready to pounce on prey. Inside the cavernous exoskeleton was a network of enzyme pools and bile ducts that worked in rapid fashion to reduce organic material to its usable parts in a matter of minutes.—Falcon Storm

Primordial ooze


It takes over cities flooded by massive hurricanes. Any animal it touches become feverish and sluggish as their body is converted into the bacteria that make up the sludge … As long as it stays connected to the central mass, these flood zombies and the cloud of sludge they generate retreat to the ocean, as waters drain and drift through the currents, until another hurricane brings them inland. If it disconnects and dries out, rescuers will only find a partially digested corpse lying in a slick, oily puddle.—Marshall Bradshaw


A tiny bacteria or virus that has been frozen in the permafrost since it wiped out all of its prehistoric primate victims. Of course we will have no resistance to it, and it will doubtless happily mutate in a huge planet full of new hosts. We are already seeing some pretty scary stuff thawing out right now. Not as exciting as a giant deep-sea radioactive kraken, but a LOT scarier to those of us paying attention.—Stephanie Harper

Plants to be reckoned with


The red weed proliferated in the declining days of women and men. The only things it required in decadent abundance were heat and carbon dioxide to fuel its accelerated rate of photosynthesis, and these humanity had been happy to provide. The red weed began in the forests withered down to bare sticks, in the parched waste places, in the empty lots and suppurations in the roads. The roots of the red weed, like rust given life, even bit into steel. The red weed grew even in lightless places; some said it ate darkness the way normal plants ate light.

The red weed was like us. It was adaptable. It thrived everywhere. And the red weed was like us, too, in that it was selfish. It gave nothing back—not food, not fuel, not so much as a fragrant flower. The red weed grew over the walls of what had been cities, until they were cities no more, until they were but vague shapes beneath a thick smear of red. The red weed became an eczematous second skin over all the planet.—David Kammerzelt


I imagine that melting ice formations on the poles, caused by climate change, reveal dormant spores of a prehistoric plant species, similar to Equisetum. Once the spores are transported to the world (by a craft of some kind or by some living creatures), the plant spreads rapidly and grows with unparalleled speed. Agricultural area is affected tremendously, which leads to the critical shortage of food in the world. But even cities literally crumble apart, as the invasive plant can take root in every crack or gap or even on a porous surface of asphalt pavement. All attempts to eradicate or suppress the invasive Equisetopsida are futile—the only way to confront it is by physical elimination, day by day.—Alex Pesh

Creatures from the deep


As the earth gets warmer, the polar ice will melt and the oceans will rise. What is left of dry land will become more humid and swampy. Day to day, the weather will always be drizzly and damp, when it's not pouring rain. Human habitation will have to be moved to buildings on tall stilts and artificial islands. In this wet environment, the cephalopods (octopuses, squid, nautiluses, and cuttlefish) will thrive. They can already crawl on land briefly as long as it's moist. In the future they will have almost unlimited access to whole new classes of prey. With a few minor mutations, the giant squid will become an amphibious apex predator, abandoning the ocean depths to hunt on land. Intelligent and wily, these huge creatures will slide into stilt-raised buildings in the middle of the night and quickly consume all the residents, before disappearing into their watery lair. As these creatures evolve, they will become longer-lived and more intelligent, until humanity has to struggle to survive.—Vincent Treewell

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The water level rose and took over some cities. Octopuses got smarter and took over the sunken cities and learned to how to use our technology. The people had to defend the remaining cities from the octopus. Then the octopuses made suits so that they can go on land … the octopuses are trying to invade. So, who is going to win—the humans or the octopuses?—Ben P., age 11


When I saw your call for climate change monsters, the first thing I thought of was a report that climate change is resulting in all-female sea turtle nests. Sex in turtles is determined by temperature; warmer temperatures produce more females and cooler temperatures produce more males, and with temperatures on the rise globally, we're now seeing turtle clutches that are 99 percent female. What if all-female turtle populations instead somehow evolve to reproduce parthenogenetically?

As turtles are famously long-lived and don't undergo senescence, I imagined rapidly breeding turtles populations could reproduce again and again as they invade more and more territory in vast, all-female swarms. Admittedly turtles don't seem all that scary as they're slow, but so are zombies. Also, considering the popular image in mythology of turtles holding up the world on their backs, I thought there was something kind of poetic and karmic about an apocalypse brought on by a turtle swarm abetted by human-driven climate change.—Aimee Lim


The repercussions of nuclear war are felt strongest in the environment. Specifically, in the creatures. Somehow, they didn't all die. Some of them changed. As sea and sky became one again, creatures that struggled to find food in the damaged environment adapted to a poisoned world. The radiation evolved the animals into creatures who could go farther, go deeper, to find food. The fish that was in the water, still, was very deep in the water. And so the birds changed. Perhaps they grew gills and teeth and fins. The new hybrid of pelican and angler fish is able to lure food in different ways and swim deeper than the natural bird. This, the unnatural bird, is the new predator, in the deep sea.—Talia Blumofe


In my mind, the climate change monster looks like a giant, shark-sized catfish, with the visible, crooked teeth of a sand tiger shark, but without a shark's smooth, streamlined and somewhat comforting features. In place of a shark's fin it has long, striped spines, not unlike a lion fish's spines, the sort of thing that brushes against your leg in murky water and you think there might be something there...

It doesn't have any eyes, because eyes give an animal a certain level of personality, or a sense of empathy, and the climate change monster has no empathy. The lack of eyes also makes it seem less dangerous. Even if it has all these fearsome spikes and things, if it doesn't have eyes, it's not going to go after you, right? … This is how it operates—the climate change monster lets you drift ever closer, and by the time you've realized it is not only as dangerous as it appears, but is also very, very real, it's too late.—Jesse Bethea


Devorantis Antipathes (devour against suffering) is a species of deep ocean coral. It does not require light from the sun to penetrate the deep gloom, for it has developed a taste for flesh. It thrives on the flanks of active submarine volcanoes and hydrothermal vents. These vents have always been sanctuaries for life in the deep ocean but with more life fleeing the toxic surface waters they have become organic hives.

With an unprecedented abundance of food, Devorantis Antipathes has grown enormous … with tentacles that can grow to be three to four meters in length, which the coral uses to ensnare prey and feed it to a gaping maw at the centre of the coral’s crown. Unlike its sunlit water cousins, Devorantis does not make glorious and magnificent reefs. It creates eerie forests of skeletal tentacles, dense thickets of metallic thorns and haunting fleshy growths. It may be a horror of the deep but like the Siren’s song, there is an inescapable grace and serenity to this creature.—Alex Clark

Tiny things made terrible


All across the world every environment imaginable is being overrun and utterly dominated by gigantic, mutated variations of the creatures previously known as tardigrades, or more colloquially, “water bears.” Also named “moss piglets” due to their rather docile appearance, clumsy movements, and habit of peacefully grazing on moss beds, these tiny creatures are usually no larger than 0.5 millimeters. That cannot be said for “Tardi-upgrades,” that are nothing short of creatures seemingly inspired right out of a Horror/Sci-fi video game nightmare. They are ten to 12 feet long, 600-800 pound, eight-legged monstrosities that crawl out of saltwater breakers and freshwater lakes everywhere. Gone now are the gentle “moss piglets”, only to be replaced by swift, savage, and merciless hunters that have a distinct fondness for human flesh.—Brannon Hollingsworth

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I see giant African land snails which currently wreak havoc on new habitats they have been transplanted to, growing larger and having seven foot shells. Adapting to semi aquatic they will prefer and thrive in jungles near rivers and supplement a vegetable diet with fish and animals that get within their area. Having a 15-foot reach from their shell they can stealthily hide amid foliage and silently drop down to bite someone's head off.—Andhi Scott


Many scavenger type insects that live on dead and decaying matter will have a big survival advantage. In the face of ever hotter summers, and eventually summer year round, the common brown cockroach will develop huge ruggedized exoskeletons to protect themselves from the heat of the sun. Their inner bodies will require little water, and they will evolve a special organ that can filter its own liquid waste for reuse.

Females will reach 12 feet long, males only six feet long, with heavy shields around their faces, long nose spikes, and long spiked tails that make them look like ancient rhinoceros. They will keep their short thin front legs for manual tasks and will eventually develop an opposed thumb on their front feet. Due to their weight, they will lose their ability to fly, but they will not need to fly with such an abundance of food dead and dying all around them. … When all of the other plant and animal life has died away, they will be the last creatures left alive. They will live a long time dining on each other. Then, somewhere in the far eons of time, they’ll finally die out, and the world will be empty of life and quiet again.—Camilla Herold

The Africans Who Called Tudor England Home

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No monarchy in the history of the Kingdom of England has garnered a cult following quite like the Tudors (1485-1603). The betrayals, wars, and religious reforms of the Tudor dynasty have been depicted in numerous films and in the Showtime series, The Tudors.

One perception that we get from these pop culture portrayals of the lustful King Henry VIII and the tumultuous life of Bloody Mary is that Tudor England lacked ethnic diversity.

At the College of Arms in London on a 60-foot-long vellum manuscript sits an image of a man atop a horse, with a trumpet in hand and a turban around his head. This is John Blanke, a black African trumpeter who lived under the Tudors. The manuscript was originally used to announce the Westminster Tournament in celebration of the 1511 birth of Henry, Duke of Cornwall, Henry VIII’s son. Blanke was hired for the court by Henry VII. The job came with high wages, room and board, clothing, and was considered the highest possible position a musician could obtain in Tudor England.

Blanke was no anomaly, but was one of hundreds of West and Northern Africans living freely and working in England during the Tudor dynasty. Many came via Portuguese trading vessels that had enslaved Africans onboard, others came with merchants or from captured Spanish vessels. However once in England, Africans worked and lived like other English citizens, were able to testify in court, and climbed the social hierarchy of their time. A few of their stories are now captured in the book, Black Tudors by author and historian Miranda Kaufmann.

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Pulling from exchequer papers, parish records, letters, and petitions, Kaufmann pieces together the lives of 10 Africans living in Tudor England. She sets out to change the way we understand Tudor life, Medieval England, and dispel the notion that the first Africans arrived in England as slaves. “Once people learn of the presence of Africans in Tudor England, they often assume their experience was one of enslavement and racial discrimination,” Kaufmann writes in her opening introduction.

The idea that Africans were mistreated by the English well before the Atlantic slave trade comes from a Queen Elizabeth I letter sent to the Privy Council in 1596, a sort of board of directors for England. In the letter Queen Elizabeth I largely blamed the African population for England’s ongoing social issues, writing that the country did not need “divers blackmoores brought into this realme.” This proclamation was sent to the mayors of England’s major cities. She later arranged for a merchant named Casper van Senden to deport Africans from England.

However, this edict wasn’t what it appeared. Kaufmann writes that van Senden originally approached the queen telling her that Africans were taking jobs away from English citizens, a problem that could be readily solved by paying him to deport them. “In the queen's understanding, everyone she cared about would profit: there would be more work for good English folk who would then complain less to the queen, and a grateful merchant would make money from her kind deal. But like several other of Elizabeth's schemes, they solved a problem that nobody really saw or worried about,” says Janice Liedl, Professor of History at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.

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There was one caveat in the proclamation: as Kaufmann notes, deportation was based on the consent of their masters, which in this case was likely in the context of an apprenticeship. In 1569 an English court ruled that “England has too pure an air for slaves to breathe in,” setting the first legal precedent barring slavery from England. This was so well known that according to Kaufmann the idea of England as a free land reached slaves working in Mexican silver mines. Juan Gelofe, a 40-year-old West African slave working in the mines around 1572 told an English sailor by the name of William Collins that England, “must be a good country as there are no slaves there.” The merchants thus refused to comply with the edict, unwilling to lose their African apprentices. This prompted van Senden to plead with the council to expand his authority over the situation. A second letter went out from the queen, but it too was largely unsuccessful and ignored.

While the African population in England would have been relatively small, possibly a little more than 300 individuals according to Kaufmann, they were respected members of Tudor society. In Black Tudors the importance of the church is discussed at great length. Through her research, Kaufmann uncovered evidence that Africans were married and baptized by the Church of England. More than 60 Africans were baptized in England between 1500 and 1640, along with hundreds of burials. “The church was the central social and cultural institution. Your membership in the church helped cement you as a legal person—if you became poor, sick or were injured, your parish had an obligation to take care of you,” says Liedl. The church gained further importance after King Henry VIII’s reformation where you could be tried as a heretic for not attending church, according to Liedl.

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As Black Tudors details, Africans weren’t just members of society but were present during some of the major events of the Tudor era. Jacques Francis, a salvage diver from Guinea in West Africa, worked the wreck of the Mary Rose and Diego the circumnavigator explored the globe with Francis Drake. The aforementioned John Blanke would have certainly enjoyed some celebrity during his time due to his position in the royal court. He even performed at Henry VIII’s coronation and married a London woman. So, what changed? What prompted England to become a key nation in promulgating the Atlantic slave trade?

English expansion and colonization is often seen as the driving factor. In the 1640s the Dutch introduced sugar cane to the island of Barbados, showing Bajan planters how to cultivate the crop and providing them with African slaves as labor. Sugar dominated agriculture on the island, the English relied heavily on convict labor, but it was far scarcer than slaves. Taking their cues from the Dutch and to increase profits, the English began the triangular trade of African slaves to the Caribbean. But there was another factor, the transformation from the concept of slavery holding the generic meaning of another person owning another, to one defined by ethnic identities says Liedl. She explains that defining “white” and “black” in English literature comes from this decision toward the end of the Tudor period. The idea of racial superiority wasn’t a common theme in Tudor England. “As more black people were enslaved, Europeans began to write of black people as naturally slaves or as benefiting from slavery. These benefits included Christianity and civilization, both of which black Africans were assumed to lack,” says Leidl.

Black Tudors adds insight into a portion of English history that’s been overlooked as much as it’s been romanticized. It helps break down the preconceived ideas we have of England under the Tudors as a monolithic society lacking diversity. As Leidl explains: “As long as we think of England as naturally white and Anglo-Saxon, a pure state of people who have a set identity going back to antiquity that really didn't change until the 20th century, we're getting it wrong.”

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