The Whaling Ship that Sank as a Slaver

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In late January 1862, a strange fleet of ships sank en masse off Charleston Harbor. One of these, a barque named Margaret Scott, was completing an ironic circle of fate. A former whaler seized as a slave ship, the barque was part of an effort to stop Confederate blockade runners — like the convicted pirate Appleton Oaksmith, the very man who first set Scott on its fateful course to the bottom of the Charleston ship channel.   

The ships that sank 160 years ago were dubbed the “Great Stone Fleet.” A collection of former whaling ships purchased by the U.S. government, they were assembled by the navy for a peculiar duty: to be filled with a cargo of stone, sailed south and then sunk at the entrance of South Carolina’s major port. The plan was to make two of Charleston’s three main channels unnavigable, funneling blockade runners toward the U.S. naval squadron on blockade duty.

The 46 ships were sunk in two groups — one in December 1861 in the main channel and a second group in January 1862 in Mafitt’s channel to the northeast, off Sullivan’s island. Each vessel, depending on its capacity, it had been loaded with between 190 and 550 tons of stone. Holes had been bored in each hull and then stoppered with large plugs. Once the ships were anchored in position, men were sent aboard with axes and sledgehammers. These wrecking crews first chopped away the ship’s rigging. An account from the January 11, 1862 Harpers Weekly details the destruction: “The braces and shrouds on the weather side were cut by the sharp axes of the whalemen, and the tall masts, swaying for an instant, fell together with a loud crash, the sticks snapping like brittle pipe-stems close to the deck, and striking the water like an avalanche, beating it into a foam and throwing the spray high into the air.” 

After the masts fell, a select group clambered belowdecks with the heavy hammers to knock the plugs free and allow the waters of the Atlantic to firehose through the bore holes.

Margaret Scott was one of 20 vessels sunk off Sullivan’s Island. Like most of the stone fleet, Margaret Scott was once a whaler. The vessel was named after one of the innocent women executed in Salem, Massachusetts, during the 1692 witch trial hysteria. For the owners of Margaret Scott, the whaling business had fallen on hard times, with many small whaling enterprises closing down and idling ships in whaling ports like New Bedford.

To a small group of maritime criminals, these vessels, which could be purchased at depressed prices, were an opportunity. These former whalers were snatched up for a vile game of bait and switch. Still outfitted with whaling gear, although mostly played out from long use, these ships maintained the pretense of whaling, but in fact their new masters used them as slave ships.

Though the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States and Britain by laws in 1807 and 1820, and by 1831 in the Spanish colonies and Brazil, illegal shipments of enslaved Africans continued.

In New York City and in small harbors on Long Island like Oyster Bay and Greenport, slave ships were outfitted in the late 1850s and up to the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861. The buyer of Margaret Scott was a shady operator named Appleton Oaksmith. The proprietor of a small ship brokerage firm, Oaksmith had purchased other vessels for the slave trade. As in his previous dealings, Oaksmith was careful to use former whaling captains Ambrose Landre and Samuel P. Skinner as intermediaries to obscure his involvement in purchasing Margaret Scott. Oaksmith paid $2,400 for the vessel, a good deal less than the going rate.

With the assistance of Landre and Skinner — the latter named as the titular owner of the barque to maintain the ruse — Oaksmith outfitted Margaret Smith for the ship’s horrifying new role. In these former whalers, bulkheads in the hold were rebuilt to better contain the loading of humans rather than barrels of whale oil. Extra water tanks were also added. Whale ships with tryworks for boiling down whale blubber for oil were repurposed to cook food for the hundreds of slaves.

Customs officers and port officials noted the changes made to these former whale ships and suspected that they were being outfitted as slave ships. In the 1850s, however, during the administration of President Buchanan, enforcement was lax. There were few Federal funds for going after these suspected criminals and the fake whalers often sailed without any hindrance. Sometimes these ships would maintain the charade of whaling by going to whaling grounds off West Africa and even taking a whale. The crews were hired as whalers and were generally well paid. Margaret Scott crewman were promised $500 for the voyage by Oaksmith, Landre and Skinner. These sailors were regularly not told the truth of the voyage before departure. When they were informed, often in African waters, they usually acquiesced. Hard-pressed sailors were unlikely to forfeit the wages offered. According to “Slavers in Disguise: American Whaling and the African Slave Trade 1845-1862” by Kevin S. Reilly, published in The American Neptunemagazine, Oaksmith reportedly told Landre, “…it would not do for anyone, officers or men, to know the ship was going to the coast of Africa. Mr. Oaksmith said everything would be made right when we came there to the coast. They [the crew] would all come into it, they always did.”  

Things changed after the 1860 election and the arrival of the Lincoln administration. After the southern states seceded and their members of Congress were no longer on hand to block antislavery legislation, funds were appropriated to suppress these slave ships. Some port officials were ready for the change. And they had Oaksmith in their sights. As quoted by Reilly, one port inspector wrote to his superior: “I know Appley, Oaksmith, Israel Peck, and Captain Isaac M. Cas[e] very well. I know their views with regard to secession and slavery, especially the African slave trade…. [T]hey are a damnable set, the whole of them.”

Before Margaret Scott could sail, though, the federal marshall in New Bedford swooped in and seized the vessel. He also arrested Oaksmith, Landre and Skinner as pirates under the 1820 law that made participation in the slave trade an act of piracy. Tried in Massachusetts District court in 1862, Skinner was prosecuted by antislavery district attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (who as a young man had written Two Years Before the Mast, a famous account of his time as a seaman aboard the merchant brig Pilgrim). Skinner was convicted, receiving a five-year prison sentence and a $1,000 fine. It was the first time an American ship captain had been convicted as pirate for planning and preparing a slaving voyage.

 Similarly tried and found guilty, Oaksmith pulled off an escape from the Suffolk County jail before he was sentenced for his eight-count conviction. It’s not hard to imagine the shady criminal’s escape was augmented by some well-placed bribes. He fled to the south and used his maritime knowledge to become a blockade runner for the Confederacy.

After Margaret Scott’s seizure in New Bedford, the whaler turned slave ship was added to the other whalers of the great stone fleet and sent to the bottom off Charleston. A poetic end to the story of the whaling barque would have blockade runner Appleton Oaksmith fleeing Union ships before getting snagged by the very ship that earned his conviction as a pirate. History doesn’t give us this satisfaction, however. Oaksmith ceased his blockade running and bought a plantation in New Bern, North Carolina. Ever the criminal operator, after the war he obtained an audience with President Grant at the White House and finagled a presidential pardon for his slaving conviction.

Margaret Scott’s final voyage to make a bar to blockade runners wasn’t ultimately a success. Within a year the tides and currents broke up and scattered the stone fleet wrecks, and the bottom sands shifted to create new channels. By 1863, however, the Union Navy was well into its wartime expansion and many new ships were available for the blockading squadrons off southern ports.                         

Sources:

Magune, Frank; “The Great Stone Fleet,” pgs. 106 – 113; Yankees Under Sail, Yankee Inc. 1968

Harper’s Weekly, pg 31, January 11, 1862.  

Reilly, Kevin S.; “Slavers in Disguise: American Whaling and the African Slave Trade 1845-1862,” pgs. 177 – 189; The American Neptune, 1993

Marques, Leonardo; “The Contraband Slave Trade to Brazil and the Dynamics of US Participation 1831 – 1856,” pgs. 659 – 684; Journal of Latin American Studies vol. 47, 2015

 

Germany says, “Global Warming is Good!”

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Garzweiler surface lignite mine. Photo by Martin Falbisoner.

 

 

In the 1987 film Wall Street the odious financier Gordon Gekko baldly proclaims, “Greed is good.” This New Years 2022, the German government has updated Gekko’s missive to “Global Warming is Good.”

As of January 2022 the Germans are completing their plan to shut down six low-carbon nuclear power plants. Facilities that are superbly run, indeed, are acknowledged as among the best in the world. Each of them could operate for decades more. They provide 8.4 gigawatts of power to the German grid and produce virtually no CO2. But they are being shut down for purely ideological reasons. “Nuclear power is bad, we don’t care about global warming” is the depth of the policy from the German Green Party and the German government.

And what will replace the power from these plants? High carbon emissions from German coal plants. These are particularly bad because many of them burn lignite or brown coal, which is a worse polluter than standard hard coal. And the Germans strip mine this lignite so voraciously that whole towns have been wiped off the map to get at it. 

Maybe the coal plants should be turned off too. According to the German government they will be, but not for another ten years or so!

So the plan is to shut down the non-carbon producing plants now but let the carbon monsters keep spewing their emissions for another decade. 

It’s Germany’s tip of the hat to Mr. Gekko. 

The Great Pyramid: This may be how they did it

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While everyone these days makes a “making of” video, the ancient Egyptians decided to let their work speak for itself. They never tossed a video on YouTube explaining how they built the pyramids. So while there are a variety of theories about how they piled up all those stone blocks, even the most obsessed of Egyptologists don’t really know the answer. 

Was it massive ramps, lifting cranes, elevators (yes, that has been suggested)? Ramps are a problem because to build a ramp or ramps to reach the top of the Great Pyramid would require as much or more work as it took to build the pyramids themselves. Lifting cranes are a possibility, but they require some heavy-duty wood to lift the multi-ton stone blocks (the Egyptians didn’t have wood of this quality and would need to import from a place like Lebanon). And the idea of wooden elevators inside the pyramid seems a little far fetched.  

But there’s a German fellow named Franz Lohner who has a different theory on how the Great Pyramid was constructed. A former worker in a quarry, Lohner’s idea is that the builders made use of the sloped sides of the pyramid as their “ramp.”

Click to enlarge — illustration R. Zuberbühler/courtesy Franz Lohner

According to Lohner, the Egyptians built a wooden track that was secured to the side of the pyramid. This track was used to lift the stones, which were lashed to wooden sledges. The tracks were lubricated with an oil and water mixture. 

The true genius of Lohner’s idea, however, rests with the use of a primitive type of turning block that could change the direction of a lifting rope 180°. He calls these turning blocks “rope rolls.” The rope is led up through two rope rolls, one on either side of the track, and then back down the track to where two teams of workers make use of their own weight to head down the track, pulling the stone up. A clever idea that is far less expensive and time consuming than building massive ramps. 

Even though the Egyptians didn’t have the wheel or pulleys, Lohner contends that inside one of the major pyramids there is an example of a log used to change the direction of ropes in this way. So the concept was likely not foreign to the clever engineers who built these massive structures. 

Check out his site, which contains drawings and detailed explanations of his ideas. For pyramid fans, its well worth the visit. Who knows, maybe Lohner has cracked the case.


   

  

Dry Pod

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On a late summer stalk

A forgotten growth in papery husk

Onetime ear of sustenance

Now dried and colored

No hint of midsummer sugar

A tattered orange brown 

The alien heart of coiling growth

Desiccated on rattling stalk

To be trampled

And lie under winter’s flake

Knowing without knowing

Ripe pods will rise anew

Someday to spread the cracks and reign

Sir Thomas More: American revolutionary

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Robert Shaw, left, as Henry VIII and Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons (1966)

It’s a bit silly, of course, to base historical observations on a movie, but I’m going to do it anyway. Playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt was not alive in 1530s when Sir Thomas More mouldered in the Tower of London, obstinate in his refusal to sanction Henry VIII’s break with his first wife Catherine of Aragon and the Church of Rome. But his screenplay for the film A Man for All Seasons, while not historically accurate in all details, provides enough of the reality of the times to make the case that More (and probably his brilliant and learned daughter Margaret who kept many of her father’s writings alive) would have been largely copacetic with the ideals of the American Revolution 240 years later.

What’s striking about Bolt’s script, ably helmed by Hollywood regular Fred Zinnemann (who knew about dictatorship as an Austrian Jewish refugee from the Nazis who lost his parents in the Holocaust), is not so much Bolt’s erudite dialog, as good as it is, but the emotional reaction it provokes in the viewer that under the political system of monarchy, especially a powerful and paranoid killer like Henry VIII, you are only a whim away from losing your head.

There’s a scene in the film that brilliantly underscores this. We see a wedding party held for the Henry after he has broken with the Catholic Church, rid himself of Spanish Catherine and married Anne Boleyn. He’s immensely pleased with himself and needs only one thing to make the day perfect: the acquiescence of More to the situation. Henry, played as a volcanic egomaniac by a young Robert Shaw, thinks he spies More across the room during the revels. He’s excited by the prospect that More, Henry’s chancellor, has given in.  So he pushes — he’s an asshole and a king so he really pushes — his way through the crowd to greet the man he thinks is More, loudly exclaiming “Thomas!” When the partygoer turns around we see that he is not More, however, the reaction of Henry is first surprise, then anger and finally a murderous gaze that heralds all that is to come for More. Shaw handles this beautifully, giving his initial reaction at the mistaken identity, then a short head turn away and then the final sulfurous look. You expect Henry to order the poor lookalike to be killed on the spot.

And that’s the true emotional kick of Bolt’s script, not the tearful reaction of More’s wife and daughter to his long imprisonment prior to his beheading. When your life hangs in the balance of a tyrant’s ever-shifting whims, you could be toast at any time. More attempts to buck this system by using the protections of law and due process. But a powerful autocrat can subvert those protections and get at you anyway, as Henry did with More. Regardless of the reasons that More won’t pledge allegiance to Henry’s marital whims, the point is that he shouldn’t have to just to keep his head. 

This pushback against royal power is one of the reasons for the American Revolution. The reality of the rebellion is much more complex than that, of course. And the British themselves had already largely joined More in the realization of the need to reign in their kings and queens via both the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the 1688 Glorious Revolution — when Parliament required William and Mary to sign a document that restricted their power before allowing them to be crowned the new king and queen.     

So while More would likely have been appalled in many ways by America in 1776, part of him may have been on board with the concept that a nation of laws is the way to go — not the tides of a monarch’s, or a dictator’s, fevered psyche.   

        

Mockingbird – an underrated sci-fi classic

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Published in 1980, four years before his death at age 56 of lung cancer, Walter Tevis’s novel Mockingbird is a powerful vision of future mankind on the decline. The novel does incorporate some major threads of previously-explored dystopian Sc-Fi thought, but Tevis still manages to make them his own. Mockingbird is an underrated book that should be considered a classic of Sci-Fi, alongside Brave New World, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Fahrenheit 451, The Children of Men, I am Legend, etc.  

This past winter the success of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, based on a Tevis novel, revived the author’s profile. During the course of his career, the talented Tevis had three of his books turned into feature films: The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Color of Money. Since I binge-watched Gambit and enjoyed it, I was intrigued by Tevis. I decided to dive into Mockingbird and was delighted by the plunge.

The novel has three main characters, one of whom is a world-weary robot. The story occurs in a world that’s running down, as humans are no longer reproducing and thus inexorably dying out. Almost as bad, however, they’ve already died intellectually. The majority of humans have forgotten how to read. Their lives are coddled by pills, cannabis and legions of robots. In constructing his future world, Tevis invents clever terminology that is similar to, though not as lush as, the verbal inventiveness of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. 

It’s a elegiac story of human decline that is nearly perfectly balanced between the sadness of a vanished human past and its terminal future. While that sounds like an unpleasant journey,  Tevis is a gifted writer who understands the power of simple truths, chiefly the beguiling pull of love. Mockingbird is sad, but it’s also beautiful, inventive, strangely heartfelt and emotionally true and carries a seed of hope to the end.   

Don’t be the bag man

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High level folks skate, low level soldiers get it in the neck. Okay, not a glitteringly original observation — what American paying attention doesn’t know that? A fascinating documentary now on Netflix, Made You Look, clearly underscores this point. Instead of greedy Wall Street criminals, corrupt defense contractors or real estate sharks, however, this doc dishes on the art world in NYC in the late 90s early 00s. A more genteel venue than those more hard-elbowed grifters’ haunts, yet apparently still well-equipped with conmen, fraudsters and shady operators willing to ride the train for as long as possible. 

It’s an engaging, well told story by director Barry Avrich, the prolific producer/director who also made the profound Prosecuting Evil (2018), a look at Ben Ferencz, the last surviving Nuremberg Trial prosecutor. Made You Look has a famous art gallery, a well-connected art dealer, a genius painter churning out the fakes and then there’s the low-level type who’s working the scam. So what happens? [SPOILERS BELOW]

When the fraud is uncovered the gallery owner claims to know nothing and closes the gallery, the art dealer professes innocence and the genius painter escapes to China. And the low level operator gets arrested and goes to jail.

Everybody skates but her. So the lesson is clear: Don’t be the low level operative. Everyone above you? They’re all gonna get away with it. But you, you’re called the bag man for a reason. Cause you’re the one left holding it.     

A correspondent’s chronicle of the Eastern Front

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This book is an excellent sampling from the wartime reporting of the Soviet writer Vassily Grossman. “A Writer at War” not only has Grossman’s often grim, sometimes lyrical but always superb descriptions of the Eastern Front in WWII, it also has excellent wrap-around explanatory text and footnotes by the British military historian Antony Beevor. Grossman covered the Red Army throughout WWII on the Eastern Front for the Red Army newspaper. He never shrank from danger and was often on the front lines, especially in the summer and fall of 1941 during the months of retreat from the German onslaught, and was nearly captured several times. There is tremendous, sharply-observed detail in his writing about the soldiers and the suffering of civilians. And his piece on the Treblinka death camp is chilling in its almost novelistic approach to explaining the monstrous way the Nazis fooled people into thinking they were heading east to farm before being brought to the camp and gassed. Grossman was Jewish and tried to write about the deaths of Jews in the war and the Holocaust, but Stalin and Soviets authorities wanted only to describe the suffering of Soviet citizens, “no special commemoration of Jews.” After the war Stalin purged many Jews during the times of “the little terror” and “the doctor’s plot” and Grossman would likely have been killed as well, but luckily for him, Stalin died in 1953 just as the terror apparatus was gearing up purge him. Grossman also wrote novels about the war, the most famous being “Life and Fate,” which revolves around the Battle of Stalingrad.

Lost in the Rush

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The Safdie Bros. film, Uncut Gems is a impressive piece of work. Crazy energy and the insanity of gambling are seen here in stark terms. The rush of hitting a big score hooks some people and they can’t get over it. The sense of addiction is palpable. Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a character who scrambles to get the money to pay off to the mobsters (a nice touch having one of them be his brother in law), but he can’t resist the rush and the addiction of one more big throw. The film shows he’s got talent at sports betting but he ultimately pays dearly for his addiction. It’s a Shakespearian level tragedy set in a nasty, lowlife world. As the film begins the camera enters the fabulously iridescent black opal of the title and travels through on of the embedded gems before coming out the other side to show a monitor screen depicting Howard getting a colonoscopy. It’s a self-deprecating joke by the Safdie’s telling us that Howard has just entered a world of shit!

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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The novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is a strange and immersive ride. Murakami’s writing is subtle and almost artlessly naturalistic. There are few huge twists or outsized dramatic moments, but he draws you in with steady, ingratiating details about the characters that make it impossible not to read on. The dreamlike, otherworldly nature of his prose is masterful. Even though I didn’t think the various threads of the story came together in a standard storytelling way, they did all work to present a sense of completion. The parts about the Japanese soldiers in Manchuria in WWII and later in the Soviet prison camp are gripping. The struggles of Toru and Kumiko and her family are elliptical and strange, yet also engaging and ultimately moving.