Yesterday in class, while lecturing on
the War of 1812, I was cataloging the many and varied sins of General
Dearborn. William Dearborn had been a
true hero of the Revolutionary War, but 30-odd years after witnessing the
surrender of Cornwallis, he was no longer fit for military duty. I was describing him as old, decrepit, and
obese...when it suddenly occurred to me that I am exactly the same age as
General Dearborn had been when he failed to adequately defend Detroit.
Well, the years were harder on a man
back then than they are today. Nowadays,
men age like the finest cognac. Two
centuries ago, men aged like milk.
None of my students will remember
General Dearborn. But I am pretty sure
that ten years from now, if you ask any of them about General Pakenham--they
will absolutely remember him. They
probably won't remember that I said most of the story was apocryphal, but at
least they will remember something.
Students, like everyone else, remember only the things that interest
them.
It was 1815, and British General
Pakenham was leading the attack on New Orleans.
The city was being defended by Andy Jackson and one of the strangest
armies in military history: Tennessee backwoodsmen, Choctaw Indians, slaves,
assorted men swept up from the floors of bars, and Jean Lafitte's pirates. Technically, these men were known as
"Irregulars", but in truth, they
probably qualified as "Odds".
When the two armies met, the much
larger British army fired its new Congreave's rockets at Jackson's men. General Pakenham expressed surprise that such
undisciplined and unprofessional troops didn't panic in the face of the
frightening new weapons. What Pakenham
didn't know was that the defenders were a hell of a lot more scared of Andy
Jackson than they were of British fireworks.
When the battle was over, the British
were defeated, Jackson's men still held their lines, the war was over...and
Pakenham was dead.
Pakenham had had a distinguished
military career, so his body couldn't be simply left on foreign soil. His body was disemboweled, and was carefully
packed in a barrel of rum. Actually, to
get his body to fit in the barrel, his head had to be temporarily cut off. (After last week's blog, I'm a little loath
to mention this fact for fear that you might think that beheading is going to
turn into some kind of a trend in this blog.
Honest, I promise not to lop off any more heads for at least another
month.)
Pakenham was shipped home, his head was
reattached, and he was buried on the family estate in Ireland. That is the end of the story...but not the
end of the legend. In one version of the
tale, it was a long and difficult voyage back home. The sailors on the ship soon ran out of their
accustomed daily grog ration and drilled a small hole into the cask in order to
siphon off a little of the rum through a straw.
This practice was called "sucking
the monkey" and seems to have originated from British sailors drilling a
hole in a coconut, draining out the coconut milk and replacing it with
rum. Have you ever noticed that the
three dark spots on the top of a coconut look a little like a monkey's
face? The word coconut even comes from a
16th century Portuguese word for head.
Another version of the Pakenham legend
has the barrel being lost during the shipment home and ultimately being sold to
a plantation in South Carolina. The
barrel was tapped for a large party and enjoyed by all present. ("I do declare! This rum has a fine body and a good
head.") When the barrel was empty
of rum, the owners wondered why it was still so heavy. When they opened the barrel, the discovery
broke up the party.
Nor is Pakenham the only British
military hero attached to such a grotesque tale. At the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the British
navy destroyed or captured most of the combined navies of France and
Spain. The architect of this monumental
victory was Admiral Horatio Nelson, who unfortunately did not survive the
battle.
Preservation of cadavers, was a science
that would not exist until the 1860's, when the sheer number of men killed
during the American Civil War prompted the development of what came to be known
as "embalming science." Until
then...the bodies went into barrels of spirits.
Nelson was placed in a barrel of brandy. The barrel was lashed to a mast and guarded
by the ship's marines until the ship arrived in Gibraltar. There, the barrel was drained of the brandy
and refilled with wine. The barrel was
opened in England and the admiral's body was placed in a lead casket, which was
placed inside a wood casket made from the mast of the French flagship L'Orient,
then buried in St. Paul's inside a sarcophagus originally carved for Cardinal
Wolsey.
But those are just the facts--here is
the legend: during the voyage home,
sailors drained the brandy and consumed it.
When the cask arrived in London, the brandy was found to be considerably
less than full. To this day, brandy is
sometimes referred to as "Nelson's blood" and to the men in the
British Navy, the phrase "tapping the admiral" means to obtain an
alcoholic drink by theft.
Actually, history is full of such
legends. There is an Arab story from the
13th century in which treasure hunters found a sealed jar of honey in a tomb
under the Egyptian pyramids. After enjoying
a leisurely meal from bread dipped into the honey, naturally, at the bottom of
the jar, they discover the preserved body of a child.
I'm not going to tell my students any
of these other stories, I still have hopes they will remember a little of the
real lectures.
Okay, I'm just going to say it..................Ick!
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