On May 13, 1787, eleven ships left England with a cargo of 730 convicts, including over 100 women, bound for the sunny shores of Australia. The Mother Country had formerly unloaded their surplus prisoners on the American colonies, but that ended with the Revolution.  Nine months later, the ships landed in New South Wales and founded the settlement that would become Sydney.

It was hardly a hardy bunch of pioneers. Some were hardened criminals, but many were simply poor folk who had taken to stealing food or clothing. They found life even harder in the new land.  Many were turned into slaves. In the aptly named Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, the worst criminals were put to work in chain gangs and in quarries. Life was so brutal that suicide pacts were common.

In 1822, convict named Alexander Pearce escaped with some other prisoners. When he was apprehended after several months, he was asked what had happened to his companions. He confessed that he’d eaten them.

The book to read on the subject of the settling of Australia by convicts is The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes.   

Rossetti, stoned again

Italian painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born on this day in 1828. He wrote:

The hour when you learn that all is vain
And that Hope sows what Love shall never reap.

Just this one line makes us slightly ill

American writer Stanley Elkin was born on this day in 1930. He wrote:

"If you can't make people miserable by writing, what's the point?"

   He’d set out to be a writer, once and for all. Thirty-six years old, turning over a new leaf. He’d sworn off drinking for a while. Sober, industrious as a squirrel, he didn’t answer the door. He ate soup and crackers, potpies, Spam. Holed up in his garret, he wrote and wrote. Short stories, poems, a novel, and then another. The memoirs of a rat, the one who’d started the Great Plague. Essays. Epistles, letters of defamation, of denunciation. Diatribes. He was angry. Athletic career over, Cutterback dead, Rae Ann done for. His marriage a smoldering ruin. Like Achilles’, his anger encompassed the cosmos, he imagined.  --  Chapter 11, The Misforgotten.

Which is how long it takes, approximately, to read The Story of Civilization

Historian Ariel Durant was born on this day in 1898. She and her husband, Will, wrote The Story of Civilization, the tenth volume of which, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968.

Ariel Durant wrote:

"It is good that a historian should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity."

A Bloody bold theft

On May 9, 1671, Col. Thomas Blood stole the British Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. Blood had posed as a preacher in order to win the confidence of Talbot Edwards, the 77-year-old keeper of the Crown Jewels. On the morning of the heist, Blood showed up at the Tower with three friends and somehow talked Talbot into letting them see the Crown Jewels. Once he did, they bound and gagged the old man, and stuck an iron hook in his nose for good measure. As he kept struggling, they conked him on the head with a mallet and stabbed him in the stomach.

Blood used the mallet to flatten out St. Edward’s Crown, and stuck it inside his preacher’s cloak. He and his pals stuck as many jewels in their pockets as they could and fled. Somehow, Talbot got ungagged and cried out. Blood shot one pursuer, and the frightened drawbridge guard let the crooks go out. Blood was chased and caught by a Captain Beckman, after a “robustious struggle.” He and the other thieves, also nabbed, were held prisoners in the Tower. Blood refused to talk to anyone but the king himself, and during an audience granted by that august personage, the silver-tongued Blood wangled not only a royal pardon, but a pension of 500 pounds a year.   

Also, persuading people that nonsense is sense

Harry S Truman was born on this day in 1884.

"I sit here all day," Truman said, "trying to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the President amount to."

Sounds modest enough, but to read another take on the matter, see Gore Vidal on Truman

We'd like to see more blood, though

The first Academy Awards presentation to be shown on TV was on this day in 1953.

"We are drawn to our television sets each April the way we are drawn to the scene of an accident." -- Vincent Canby.

Happy day after St. Patty's Day!

"Saint, n.: A dead sinner revised and edited." -- Ambrose Bierce.

Today's Perverse Verse:

It's a sad fact but one that we secretly relish
That those whose wholesomest words and deeds we most embellish
And whom we venerate as a saint,
Ain't.
Everyone, it seems, has one skeleton in his or her closet or another,
Including that most saintly of all figures you can think of--
Your mother.
Even Mother Teresa, we now know, had her moments of doubt and misgiving,
Times when she exclaimed to herself: "This is a hell of a way to make a living!"

Relatively speaking, that is

This is the birthday of Albert Einstein, born 1879.

"I have never met a man yet who understands in the least what Einstein is driving at...I very seriously doubt that Einstein himself knows what he is driving at." -- William Henry Cardinal O'Connor.

Today's Perverse Verse:

Apparently, E=MC squared
-- Has anyone ever cared?
It may be a gas
That energy is mass
To some;
But what's Einstein to us,
Who can't tell minus from plus?
-- A bum.

Beat from all that typing

American beat writer Jack Kerouac was born on this day in 1922.

"That's not writing, that's typing." -- Truman Capote, on Kerouac's famous novel, On The Road.

And the price of stamps went up on the 21st

The U. S. Post Office was established on this day in 1792.

“I have received no more than one or two letters that were worth the postage.” 

          -- Henry David Thoreau.

Giving Edison the needle

You talkin' to me?

Thomas A. Edison was granted a patent on the phonograph on this day in 1878.

"Dear Mr. Edison: I am astonished and terrified at the results of this evening's experiment. Astonished at the wonderful form you have developed and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music will be put on records forever." -- Sir Arthur Sullivan.

...The band was to start at eleven, for some reason. Maybe he’d hang around, listen to some music for a change. Although he had to say, most of what passed for music today left him cold. No lyrics or melodies. Say what you would about some of the shit he’d grown up listening to, at least you could find a tune in there somewhere, usually. But now…what had happened?

   What had happened to him, maybe that was it. Was he that old, that the music had totally changed, as if it were from some other world, far in the future? Or rather, that he was from some other world, far in the past?   --  The Misforgotten, Chapter 31.

We'll drink to that

Prohibition was repealed on this date in 1933.

"Alcohol is the anaesthesia by which we endure the operation of life." -- George Bernard Shaw.

Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever. -- The Misforgotten, Chapter 22.

Be kind to yourself - don't get married

Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) was born on this day in 1850.

"In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish," Stevenson wrote, "and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being."

Did you know that today is World Kindness Day? Let's be nice to one another. Keep in mind Stevenson's words: "Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity."

And we're making history right now

The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was born on this day in 1828. He wrote:

"History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names."