History Notes this week of Oct 15

202 B.C.: At the Battle of Zama, deep within the (now)Tunisian territory of Carthage, Roman General Scipio Africanus engages with and decisively defeats the great Carthaginian General Hannibal Barca, who, for the last 16 years, had occupied and systematically raided Roman colonies in the Iberian Peninsula and, after his dramatic crossing of the Alps, Italy itself. Hannibal’s domination of the battlefield (cf: Cannae turned not only the colonies, but many of Rome’s Italian city-states into Carthage’s vassals, a fact that drove the Senate to distraction and led to both periodic armistices and more aggressive military resistance to the hated North Africans. By 202 B.C., Hannibal was recalled to Carthage to shore up the ruling party’s position. Almost simultaneously, the Senate dispatched Scipio Africanus to effect a landing in North Africa and bring Carthage to heel once and for all. The battle this day broke the back of the existing Carthaginian state. The brutal Roman terms against Carthage ushered in a period of peace lasting over 50 years. In the case of the Roman Senate, the fact of Carthage’s continued existence, however weakened, was unacceptable. It lead to continued agitation to solve the problem once and for all, and motivated the great orator Cato the Elder to end every one of his speeches with the phrase, “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST” which you’ve already translated as “Carthage must be destroyed!”

1356: An earthquake estimated as strong as magnitude 7.1 flattens the Swiss city of Basel, with the structural damage exacerbated by massive fires caused by falling candles and torches. It remains the strongest seismological event in Central European history.

1097: Opening moves of the First Crusade’s Siege of Antioch, the ancient Greek and Roman metropolis that dominated the trade routes of the upper Levant, and which was distinguished in the New Testament as being the city where the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians.” Although the city was in commercial decline during the Crusader period, it remained a singular strategic prize during the centuries of warfare between the Latin Crusaders, the Byzantine and Seljuk Turks, the Saracens of Syria and the Mongols of the Asian Steppes. 

1512: Augustinian monk Martin Luther is ordained Doctor of Theology, two days later to be received into the faculty of the University of Wittenburg.

1540: At a location thought to be only a couple miles southwest of present day Selma, Alabama, a 600 man Spanish army of conquistadores, led by Hernando de Soto, is led by Mississippian chief Tuscaloosa to a suspiciously open field directly abutting a suspiciously stout enclosure of stucco-covered log palisade, filled with a suspiciously homogeneous collection of around 3,000 young men, all daubed with war paint and armed with longbows. Tuscaloosa lured the Spanish to his “town” of Mabila so the Spanish could trade for food and supplies in order to continue their long march through what we now know as the southeast of region of the United States. It did not take long for the trade negotiations to reach an impasse, at which point one of the Spaniards pulled an Indian’s loincloth off over his head, triggering the first of several volleys of arrows to avenge the insult. After several abortive attempts to fight back and breach the walls of Mabila, the Spanish finally organized themselves as a functional army and waded into the Indian fighters, protected by their armor, laying waste to the Braves with furious swordplay.  They set fire to the “village,” took what loot they could, and moved on leaving over 2,000 dead and dying Braves, including Tuscaloosa himself, to be burned in the ruins of the fort.

1632: Birth of the great English architect, Christopher Wren (d.1723). Sir Christopher Wren is most famous for being the architect who led the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, designing the iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral and 51 other city churches. He was a true polymath, also known for his work in science and as a founder and president of The Royal Society. He was also a reknowned astronomer, mathematician and physicist.

1707: The Royal Navy suffers after four ships run aground off the Isles of Scilly in foul weather, with the loss of nearly 2,000 sailors in addition to the ships themselves. Ongoing investigations confirm that one of the crucial factors in the disaster was the inability for navigators to accurately plot their longitude. Parliament eventually passes the Longitude Act in 1714, offering an increasing level of prize money to anyone who could devise a practical way of determining longitude at sea. Perhaps we’ll read more about this in July.

1720: The notorious actual pirate of the Caribbean, John “Calico Jack” Rackham, is captured by a Royal Navy pirate hunter after terrorizing multiple small craft and fishermen along Jamaica’s north coast. He was brought to Spanish Town, Jamaica, where he received a fair trial and was found guilty, then hanged by the neck until dead, his corpse thence suspended in a gibbet for several months at the entrance to the bay.

1721: Tsar Peter I (The Great), after defeating the Kingdom of Sweden over four Baltic provinces, declares a Russian Empire with the new city of St Petersburg as its capital. The empire eventually became the Russian Republic at the start of the 1917 revolution.

1746: The College of New Jersey receives its founding charter. Better known now as Princeton University in 1896.

1776: Just weeks after his victory at the Battle of Brooklyn, British General Sir William Howe opens the next phase of  his campaign to capture New York by crossing to the mainland to trap General George Washington’s army on Manhattan Island. After being thwarted from an initial attempt his first landing attempt at Throg’s Neck, Howe re-grouped and on this day lands a force of 4,000 Redcoats on the mainland side of Long Island Sound at Pell’s Point, at what today is Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. An American force of about 750 under the command of Colonel John Glover established themselves in defensive positions behind a series of stone walls. Using a tactic that would be echoed later at the Battle of Cowpens, Glover exploited the American expertise at sharpshooting to attack the advancing British with continuous fire until their position was very nearly overrun. They would then make an orderly retreat to the next stone wall and re-attack the same way. After repeated repulses, the British finally halted their advance, which gave Washington time to evacuate the bulk of his Manhattan force to White Plains, where the final tactical loss sealed the fate of New York, but allowed Washington to withdraw the intact Continental Army across to New Jersey. 

1781: Two days after asking for surrender terms, at 2:00 this afternoon the British army at Yorktown marches out of their bivouacs with their muskets shouldered and flags furled. The British band plays the tune “The World Turned Upside Down” as the men stack arms and colors and went into custody as prisoners of war.

1797: In Boston, the Joshua Humphrey designed 44 gun frigate USS Constitution is launched. 

1803: After a relatively short debate, and fully aware of what some argued was the tenuous Constitutionality of the purchase, the U.S. Senate on this day ratifies the Louisiana Purchase as a treaty, essentially doubling the land mass of the United States without firing a shot.

1805: Just off the SW coast of Spain, the 27-ship strong Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy, under the command of the Viscount Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, engages the larger 33-ship Allied combined French & Spanish fleets under the command of French Vice Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve in the pivotal naval battle of the Napoleonic Wars. The Battle of Trafalgar was the culmination of months of British blockades, French breakouts, a trans-Atlantic sea chase to the Caribbean and back, and an ultimately futile attempt by the Allied fleet to break free from their blockaded anchorage at Cadiz in order to make a run back into the Mediterranean for re-arming and replenishment. Having finally weighed anchor and cleared his fleet for sea, Villeneuve realized almost immediately that Nelson’s fleet lay in wait below the horizon. He formed up his ships into the conventional and powerful line of battle, significantly outnumbering and out-gunning his British foes. Nelson, for his part, correctly anticipated Villeneuve’s move, and at dinner with his captains the night before, laid out an audacious plan to split his fleet into two lines of battle set up to run perpendicular to the Allied line in order to crash through it and break the powerful battle line into a general melee of individual ship actions, of which Nelson was confident that the morale, discipline, seamanship, and marksmanship of the British would carry the day. He was explicit with his captains that night: “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.” The next morning Nelson, aboard his flagship HMS Victory, ordered a flag hoist message to all ships: “England expects that every man will do his duty,” and led his line straight into the middle of the Allied line just ahead of Villeneuve’s flagship. Nelson’s second commander, Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, crashed his line about halfway back between Villenueve’s ship and the rear of the line, thus separating the Allied fleet into three parts and creating havoc as the British gunners pummeled the French and Spanish ships into charnel houses while the vanguard of the Allied line worked vainly for over 90 minutes in the light winds to bring their lumbering ships back into the fray. Allied losses: 21 ships captured, one sunk; 4,393 sailors dead, 3,800 sailors wounded, over 8,000 sailors captured. British losses: no ships lost; 488 sailors killed, 1,208 wounded. Prominent among the dead was Lord Nelson himself, felled by sniper fire from a French fighting top.

1812: Five weeks after entering the flaming remains of Moscow (DLH 9/14), with his army already depleted by the Battle of Borodino and there being virtually no remaining supplies to plunder, Napoleon Bonaparte orders the Grande Armee to turn around and begin the long retreat back to France. The losses suffered by this once omnipotent force are staggering, and remain a central focus for students at American war colleges to this day.

1818: The United States and Great Britain, in a remarkable display of common sense and reciprocal respect, sign The Convention of 1818, setting the southern Canadian and northern U.S. boundary starting at the northwest shoreline of Minnesota’s Lake of the Woods, due south to 49 degrees latitude, and thence all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Two little warts distract from this otherwise elegant line: a) The Northwest Angle, created by that southward excursion at the east end of the line, a holdover from the 1783 Treaty of Paris, and; 2) Point Roberts, Washington, a tiny peninsula of British Columbia that pokes into Puget sound for a mile or so south of the 49th. It makes for a convenient place for Canadians to buy staple supplies at American prices, not to mention providing a nominal U.S. address for U.S. relatives to mail packages without all the annoyances of clearing Canadian customs. (Shhhhh. Don’t tell). Both the U.S. and UK had to cede prior claims on both sides of the line, and both sides agreed to joint governance of the Oregon Territory (present day OR, WA, ID and part of western MT).

1824: Briton Joseph Aspdin obtains a patent for Portland cement. It derives its name not from the city in Oregon, but from its similarity to stone quarried in the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England.

1833: Birth of Albert Nobel (d.1896), Swedish chemist and physicist, inventor of dynamite, whose bequest funds the ongoing Nobel Prize competitions.

1836: Six months after his dramatic victory over the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto, Virginia native Sam Houston is inaugurated as the first president of the Republic of Texas. 

1873: Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Rutgers Universities agreed to set up a set of consistent rules for intercollegiate football play.

1882: Birth of Bela Ferenc Dezso Blasco a.k.a. Bela Lugosi (d.1956), Hungarian-American actor best known for his defining characterization of Count Dracula in the 1931 movie. 

1884: The International Meridian Conference formally designates the Prime Meridian as running through the Naval Observatory in Greenwich, just outside of London. 

1901: Birth of Arleigh “31 Knot” Burke (d.1996), American naval officer renowned during WWII for the aggressiveness of his destroyer squadron in combat.

1917: Birth of American trumpeter and Big Band leader Dizzy Gillespie (d.1993).

1926: Birth of American guitarist Chuck Berry (d.2017).

1931: Birth of the great NY Yankees slugger, Mickey Mantle (d.1995).

1937: Birth of the SF Giants’ right-hander (pitcher), Juan Marichal. 

1947: Opening gavel for the House Un-American Activities Committee, a multi-administration exercise in detecting and black-listing Communists in the entertainment industry (there were lots of them), the State Department (ibid.), and other influential public and quasi-public organizations.

1956: British colonial forces capture rebel Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi, effectively collapsing the brutal Mau Mau Rebellion that terrorized Kenya from 1952 until this day. The insurgency was completely crushed by the end of the year. Kimathi was tried and executed for war crimes in February, 1957.

1962: One week after obtaining conclusive proof of Soviet nuclear missile deployments to Cuba, President John F. Kennedy gives a speech to the nation, publicly revealing the Soviet deployments, and declaring a naval quarantine around the island to prevent further Soviet military supplies from landing there. It’s worth pointing out that the term “quarantine” was carefully developed to avoid its more accurate description as a blockade, which is an explicit act of war under international law. This public announcement upped the ante for the high stakes diplomacy between Washington and Moscow, buying time for both the diplomatic dance and military planning for a potential invasion and occupation of the island. The Cuban Missile Crisis is well worth the time to study the nexus of diplomacy and “diplomacy by other means” between mortal adversaries. In case the stakes of this confrontation weren’t clear, JFK made the point explicitly this night: “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

1994: The United States signs the “Agreed Framework” with the regime of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) in which the DPRK agrees to shut down its nuclear program in consideration of the US delivering annually 500,000 tons of heavy petroleum, making arrangements for construction of two light water reactors, providing a formal “no first use” of nuclear weapons statement, and moving toward full diplomatic and economic recognition of the DPRK. The NORKS, for their part will “freeze” their graphite modulated reactors, remain within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, “take steps” to implement the de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula, and dismantle the graphite reactors after the LW reactors are completed.
The executive agreement collapsed by January, 2003.

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Wayne Creed

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