Cattle Crossing

 More Flotsam

   The news is generally bad here and one can't avoid it even in the antipodes. I am referring to the recent story about a large ship sailing from New Zealand to China which capsized in the East China Sea off the coast of Japan. I mention it only because of the magnitude of the disaster and because I happened to have read about a similar one that happened over 100 years ago. If you are an animal lover or vegetarian, you might want to wait for my next post. 

The Recent Maritime Disaster

   A container ship experienced an engine failure during a typhoon and sank. It was an Exxon Valdez-type disaster, but almost 6,000 live cattle were lost, rather than millions of gallons of crude oil. Of course, one assumes there was also a fair amount of manure on board. I have generally assumed that when we eat meat from far away, it was shipped as steaks and chops, not as live cows or lambs. Apparently, however, the shipment of live cattle is quite common so that they can be fattened upon arrival and butchered appropriately in observance of religious rules.

The Older One

   The ship involved in this incident left the port of Baltimore bound for England in the early 1900s. One of those employed on the ship was W.H.Davies, the author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, where the following description is found. I will spare you the details involved when loading seven hundred and fifty cattle and begin with a brief sample of what it was like once on board and what happened to the 2000 other 'passengers':

What soon breaks the spirit of these wild animals is the continual motion of the vessel. There is always plenty of trouble at first, when they slip forward and backward, but in a few days they get their sea-legs, and sway their bodies easily to the ship's motion. The wild terror leaves their eyes, and, when they can no more smell their native land, they cease bellowing, and settle calmly down. This restlessness breaks out afresh when nearing shore on the other side, and again they bellow loud and often, long before the mariner on the look-out has sighted land.

We also had on this trip two thousand head of sheep, quartered on the hurricane deck. When we were six days out there came a heavy storm, and the starboard side was made clean, as far as pens and sheep were concerned, one wave bearing them all away. This happened at night, and on the following morning the sheep men were elated at having less work to do during the remainder of the voyage. 

   It is difficult to avoid bad news even when one leaves behind current events and retreats to the past.

The Bonus Material

   Although I have not searched through this blog, I am sure the content may not be as 'diverse' as it should now be. For that reason, I will mention some additional material found in The Autobiography... which will be of interest to some of my readers who identify with the LGBTQ segment of the population. If I had any readers at all, I assume this would be a sizeable segment. 

   The description I provided above is found in Chapter X: "The Cattleman's Office". What follows is from the following chapter, "A Strange Cattleman" which begins this way:

Some days before this, a man came to the office, whose peculiar behaviour often drew my attention to him. He asked to be allowed to work his passage to England, and the skipper promised him the first opportunity, and a sum of ten shillings on landing there. This was the reason why some of us had to wait so long, because, having made trips before, more or less, we required payment for our experience. The man referred to above, had a white clean complexion, and his face seemed never to have had use for a razor. Although small of body, and not seeming capable of much manual labour, his vitality of spirits seemed overflowing every minute of the day. He swaggered more than any man present, and was continually smoking cigarettes—which he deftly rolled with his own delicate fingers. In the intervals between smoking he chewed, squirting the juice in defiance of all laws of cleanliness. It was not unusual for him to sing a song, and his voice was of surprising sweetness; not of great power, but the softest voice I have ever heard from a man, although his aim seemed to make it appear rough and loud, as though ashamed of its sweetness. It often occurred to me that this man was playing a part, and that all this cigarette smoking, chewing tobacco and swaggering, was a mere sham; an affectation for a purpose. I could not, after much watching, comprehend. He was free of speech, was always ridiculing others, and swore like a trooper, yet no man seemed inclined to take advantage of him.

   If you are interested and want to learn more about the "Strange Cattleman" you can read The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, for free on Project Gutenberg. 

Sources: 

   The recent disaster happened in early September, 2020 and many articles can be found. See, for example: "Cattle ship Capsize: Role of Live Export Trade Under Intense Scrutiny," Natalie Akoorie, New Zealand Herald,  Sept. 5, 2020:

A Government review into the live export trade will not be released before the election despite calls for it after the capsizing of a ship carrying thousands of cows and two New Zealanders, during a typhoon.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she would not pre-empt the outcome of that review or be drawn on whether the trade should be banned.

It comes three days after the Gulf Livestock 1, a container ship carrying 5867 New Zealand cows and 43 crew, is believed to have sank in the East China Sea near Japan after its engine failed during a typhoon.

   I learned, unfortunately, that there have been other recent examples. See:

"4,400 Dead Cows Are Decomposing in a Sunken Ship in a Brazilian River," Thiago Medaglia, Mother Jones, Oct. 28, 2015:
Shipping live cattle is a relatively common practice in Brazil—last year, according to the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, it exported 646,700 live cattle with a total value of $675 million. 

The Gibbet

   A while back I wrote about a lynching. It was the last lynching that occurred in the state of Maryland and it happened in 1933. It is an example of what is now described as a "racial terror lynching" and I will say no more about it. All the information you need for this subject is found at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. 

   Around the time I wrote about "The Last Lynching", I happened to run across a description of one in a book I was reading. It was written by a white man, but he was a Welshman not a white southerner. His reaction to what he saw is curious, to say the least. The event happened around 1900 in Tennessee. Here it is:

Some days after leaving Memphis, I arrived at a small town, where I was surprised to see an unusual amount of bustle, the surrounding country for miles having sent in all its able bodied men. Every man was armed with a gun, and they stood in small groups talking outside the various stores. It seemed as though there had been rumours of an invasion, and that these men were organising to defend their homes and country, but I had not the least idea of what had really happened. The small groups now began to join together into larger ones, and the larger groups joined until they became one large body of men. This one body then shouldered guns and moved quickly along the main street, the men's faces being drawn and pale. I followed on, perhaps the one unarmed man among them, curious to know the meaning of it all. They came at last to a halt, and, to see the reason for this, I stepped across the way, and saw that they had halted before a large building, which, by its barred windows, I had no difficulty in recognising as the jail. One man had curled around his shoulders a long rope, and this man with two others knocked loudly with the butt ends of their guns on the prison door. Almost in an instant the door was flung wide open, and the sheriff stood in the open way to know their wants. The men must have demanded the prison keys, for I saw the sheriff at once produce them, which he handed to these men without the least show of resistance. This man with the rope and several others then entered the jail, and the silent crowd without cast their eyes in that direction. Up to the present time I had not heard a distinct voice, nothing but the buzz of low whispering. But suddenly from the jail's interior there came a loud shriek and a voice crying for mercy. Men now appeared in the open doorway, dragging after them a negro at the end of a rope. This unfortunate wretch was possessed of a terror that is seldom seen in a human being. He fell on his knees to pray, but was jerked to his feet ere he could murmur the first words, O Lord. He staggered to and fro and sideways, at the same time howling and jabbering, foaming at the mouth, and showing the horrible white of his eyes. I can well understand a man screaming, trembling and crying for mercy, when actually enduring bodily pain, but that one should show such a terror at the thought of it, filled me more with disgust than pity. That this prisoner should have been so brutal and unfeeling in inflicting pain on another, and should now show so much cowardice in anticipation of receiving punishment inadequate to his offence, dried in me the milk of human kindness, and banished my first thoughts, which had been to escape this horrible scene without witnessing its end. For it was now I remembered reading of this man's offence, and it was of the most brutal kind, being much like the work of a wild beast. They now marched him from the jail, their strong arms supporting his terror stricken limbs, but no man reviled him with his tongue, and I saw no cowardly hand strike him. Soon they came to a group of trees on the outskirts of the town, and, choosing the largest of these, they threw the rope's end over its strongest branch, the prisoner at the same time crying for mercy, and trying to throw his body full on the ground. When this was done a dozen hands caught the rope's end, made one quick jerk, and the prisoner's body was struggling in the air. Then all these men shouldered their guns, fired one volley, and in a second the body was hanging lifeless with a hundred shots. In five minutes after this, nothing but the corpse remained to tell of what had occurred, the men having quietly scattered towards their homes.

I will also say nothing more about this episode.

   I gather that Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature, that the world is gradually becoming a better place and we are growing less violent. Maybe so. I ran across another execution in Maryland, but this one was earlier and happened in 1781.  The sentence of the men found guilty:
That they be carried to the Jail, of Frederick County, that they be drawn from thence, to the Gallows of Frederick Town, and be hanged thereon, that they be cut down on the Earth alive, that their Entrails be taken out, and burnt, while they are yet alive, that their heads be cut off, that their bodies be divided into four Parts, and that their Quarters be placed where his Excellency the Governor shall direct and appoint.

Sources:

    The lynching account is from: The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, by W.H. Davies. I also wrote about the book in my post about "Jails as Hostels."

    The image chosen for this post is a fairly benign one, I think you will agree. If you would like something more graphic you can find lots of photos of black men hanging above a crowd of people, containing some children and many who are smiling see: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, by James Allen.

    My abruptness above is in reaction to the current issue of 'cultural appropriation'. Apparently it is easy to be seen as insensitive if one writes about such things and is white. 

    See for example:

"Emmett Till’s Coffin, a Hangman’s Scaffold and a Debate Over Cultural Appropriation,” Hillary M. Sheets, NYT May 31, 2017

"Protests over Sam Durant’s sculpture “Scaffold,” installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden of the Walker Art Center, have drawn immediate parallels to the controversy this year over Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket” in the Whitney Biennial.

Both works, made by artists who are white, recall historical acts of racial violence and have been viewed by many as painful and insensitive to communities that have suffered directly from those injustices.

Central to both cases are issues of cultural appropriation and artistic freedom. Should white artists, no matter how well intentioned, represent harrowing stories that are not their own to tell? Conversely, should any subject matter be off-limits to artists because of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or other life experiences?"

  And:

"Thank God for Cultural Appropriation," Richard Cohen, Washington Post, June 5, 2017.

"The great jazz singer Billie Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit” on April 20, 1939. It is a song about lynchings, inspired by the 1930 murder of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who were photographed, like in the words of the song, “hanging from the poplar trees.” Holiday sang the song so often and it meant so much to her that she apparently came to believe she co-wrote it. She didn’t. Abel Meeropol wrote it. He was a Bronx high school teacher — white, Jewish and, not uncommon at the time, a communist. Now, maybe, he would be called a “cultural appropriator.”

Bonus Material

   There is a huge and hugely interesting book by John Sutherland which contains short essays on 287 novelists. 287 of them! If you are interested in the subject of  hangings in literature, Sutherland is your man. For example, he discusses Thackeray's On Going to See a Man Hanged, and the many hangings that are found in the works of Dickens and Hardy. The book is: Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 287 Lives. 

   For hanging histories in our very own London see: "Hanging Days" by the late Christopher Doty. 

Jails as Hostels

     I read recently that on any given night, there are over 20,000 people spending it in the slammer in neighbouring New York state. That is a small fraction of the 2.1 million imprisoned in the United States, which is ranked at the top of the incarceration category, ahead of El Salvador and Turkmenistan. Apparently jails here are full as well and the local detention centre has had a problem with overcrowding.
     There was a time when jailers were looking for customers and offered cells to weary travellers. I have been re-reading A Time of Gifts which is an account of a walk across Europe in the early 1930s by the 18 year old Patrick Fermor. Not long into his journey on a winter night in Holland he found refuge in such an accommodation. Here is his account:

“I must have made a late start from Dordrecht: Sliedrecht, my next halting place, is only a few miles on, and Gorinchem, the next after that, is not much more. Some old walls stick in my memory, cobbled streets and a barbican and barges moored along the river, but clearest of all, the town lock-up. Somebody had told me that humble travellers in Holland could doss down in police stations, and it was true. A constable showed me to a cell without a word, and I slept, rugged up to the ears, on a wooden plank hinged to the wall and secured on two chains under a forest of raffish murals and graffiti. They even gave me a bowl of coffee and quarter of a loaf before I set off. Thank God I had put ‘student’ in my passport: it was an amulet and an Open Sesame. In European tradition, the word suggested a youthful, needy, and earnest figure, spurred along the highways of the West by a thirst for learning--thus, notwithstanding high spirits and a proneness to dog-Latin drinking songs, a fit candidate for succor.” A Time of Gifts, p. 25.


 That reminded me of another account of jails described as hostels for travellers, which provides an example found closer to home, if further back in time. In the late 1890s, a tramp and his companions jumped from a train in a small town in Michigan and one of them said they needed to locate the marshal.

“We had been here some fifteen minutes, when we saw the marshal coming down  the road leading to the station, the bright star of his authority being seen distinctly on his breast. “Now,” said Brum, “let me be the spokesman, and I will arrange for a month’s comfort.” By this time the marshall stood before us. “Boys,” he began, “cold weather for traveling, eh?”....You would certainly be better off in jail. Sixty days in our jail, which is considered one of the best, if not the best, in Michigan, would do you know harm, I assure you.” “As for that,” said Brum, “we might take thirty days each, providing of course, that you make it worth while. What about tobacco and a drink or two of whisky?” “That’ll be all right,” said the marshal, “here’s half a dollar for a drink, and the sheriff will supply your tobacco.” “No, no,” objected Brun, “give us a dollar and three cakes of tobacco, and we will take thirty days, and remember, not a day over.” The marshall produced the three cakes of tobacco, seeming well prepared for these demands, and giving us a paper dollar, requested us to go to Donovan’s saloon, which we would find in the main street, where he would see us later in the day, “when of course,” he added winking you will be supposed to be just a bit merry?
“What is the meaning of this?” I asked Brum, as we went our way to Mr. Donovan’s saloon. “It simply means this,” he said, “that the marshall gets a dollar for each arrest he makes - in our case three dollars [another bum had joined them]; the judge receives three or four dollars for every conviction, and the sheriff of the day is paid a dollar a day for boarding each prisoner under his charge; we benefit by a good rest, warmth, good food and plenty of sleep, and the innocent citizens have to pay for it all.” 

They showed up appearing to be suitably drunk and were arrested by the sheriff and, the next day, were sentenced to thirty days. The chapter in which this is found is suitably titled: "Chapter 8: A Prisoner His Own Judge." p.50

    They travelled from Michigan into Ontario and apparently jailers here were welcoming as well. They did experience some difficulty on one occasion. “One night we arrived at a small town where a double hanging was to take place in the yard of the jail early in the next morning. A woman, it seems, had called on her lover to assist in the murder of her husband, which had been brutally done with an axe, for which crime both had been pronounced guilty and condemned to die. Thousands of people had flocked in from the neighbouring country, which in this province of Ontario was thickly settled, and a large number of plain clothes detectives had been dispatched from the cities, there being supposed that some attempt might be made at rescue, owing to one of the condemned being a woman.” p.135.
      After some negotiating, they were given a cell. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.

 
   If you think you would find such accommodations appealing, here is a list of jails in which you can stay. Be warned that most are swanky and pricey. You can begin in our nation’s capital and reserve a spot at the HI Ottawa Jail where you can “Hunker down among stone walls and iron doors, or even sleep in your own solitary confinement cell. You're free to leave when you want, and the Parliament Buildings, Byward Market and National Gallery of Canada are all within walking distance.” That is the entrance above.
 For you more adventurous travellers here are 9 more:

1. Langholmen Hotell, Stockholm, Sweden

Located in Stockholm's Sodermalm neighbourhood, Långholmen Hotell is near a metro station and near the beach. Royal Swedish Opera and Vasa Museum are cultural highlights, and travellers looking to shop may want to visit Mall of Scandinavia and Sollentuna Centrum.

2. Het Arresthuis, the Netherlands

Situated in a former detention centre in the historic centre of Roermond, Het Arresthuis offers luxurious rooms with free WiFi and a flat-screen TV. Facilities include a sauna and a gym.

3. The Liberty, Boston, USA

Each of the 298 rooms and suites at The Liberty, a Luxury Collection Hotel, has been painstakingly renovated to maintain the historic nature of our landmark building. Inspired by the hotel’s location, Boston, Massachusetts’ former Charles Street Jail, our accommodations feature playful nods to the hotel’s infamous past. But don’t worry, these days, the doors lock from the inside only. But with rooms this luxurious, we can’t guarantee that you’ll ever want to leave.

4. Clink78, London

Clink78 is centrally located just 10 minutes' walk from King's Cross Tube Station and St Pancras International Station.

5. Alcatraz Hotel, Kaiserslautern, Gemany

This fascinating new hotel is a converted prison, offering both cell-style and conventional rooms. It is located near the Japanese Garden in the centre of Kaiserslautern, at the edge of the Pfälzer Wald forest.

6. Hotel Katajanokka, Helsinki, Finland

A unique hotel where chic design, uncompromised comfort and personal service meet in a historic former prison setting – a short walk from the city.

8. Malmaison Oxford, UK

Welcome to Malmaison Oxford, a boutique hotel in Oxford city centre with 95 richly appointed rooms and suites that are packed with some of the best creature comforts that come to mind. Housed in a former prison, the rooms in our Oxford hotel are rather more spacious than your average jail cell and come complete with luxurious beds, super-fast Wi-Fi and power showers. 

9. Q Station in Sydney

Tread the path of Haunted Souls..

Sydney's Quarantine Station on North Head is one of Australia's most haunted sites! 

As darkness descends over Q Station’s historic buildings, the burial ground and empty pathways… the time comes to encounter the ghosts of our site.

     I did not put in links to the hotel sites, but they are easily found.

Sources:

    Both A Time of Gifts and The Autobiography are highly recommended.

    There are now many articles about over-incarceration, the one about the New Yorkers is from: "There's A Strong Case for Sticking With Bail Reform," Emily Bazelon and Insha Rahman, NYT, Jan. 24, 2020.
     For prison data see: WPB: World Prison Brief. 

Post Script:

     The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp is old enough to be freely electronically available. I suggest, however, that you get The Neversink Library edition pictured above since it has a good introduction by George Bernard Shaw who suggests: "All I have to say by way of recommendation of the book is that I have read it through from beginning to end, and would have read more of it had there been any more to read."

     Apart from being talented, Davies was a tough old tramp.  On a snowy night when attempting to catch a train to Pembroke, he missed the hand of his companion (probably because it belonged to  "Three Fingered Jack) and fell under the train and lost his leg. He was found in the snow and taken to the station: A number of people were still there; so that when I was placed in the waiting room to bide the arrival of a doctor, I could see no other way of keeping a calm face before such a number of eyes than by taking out my pipe and smoking, an action which, I am told, caused much sensation in the local press."

    Here is what GBS has to say about the event: "Were not the author an approved poet of remarkable sensibility and delicacy I should put down the extraordinary quietness of his narrative to a monstrous callousness. Even as it is, I ask myself with some indignation whether a man should lose a limb with no more to-do than a lobster loses a claw or a lizard his tail, as if he could grow a new one at his next halting place! If such a thing happened to me, I should begin the chapter describing it with "I now come to the event which altered the whole course of my life, and, blighted etc., etc.,"

   The chapter which contains this episode bears the title " A Voice in the Dark", which is referring to the voice of the injured author and the fact that one man heard it and did not come to help. Davies does drop out of the "Gold Rush" and returns to England where he began to write about his experiences.