Was U.S. Civil War Major General Daniel Sickles a Scoundrel or Hero?

Major General Daniel Sickles was one of the most colorful and controversial figures of the Civil War era, known as much for his flamboyant personality and scandals as for his political and military actions. He can be viewed as either an American war hero or an infamous murderer and insubordinate military commander, and it's not easy to decide which categorization is more accurate.  Sickles was an unscrupulous swindler who led a life that no writer of fiction could have invented. A brief synopsis: Lawyer, Tammany Hall politician, US Congressman from New York, he married a 15 year old woman and became a serial adulterer, brought an infamous prostitute to London to meet the Queen, murdered his wife’s lover (Francis Scott Key’s son Philip, the US District Attorney for the District of Columbia) in broad daylight across the street from the White House, pleaded temporary insanity (invented for him by Edwin Stanton) and won acquittal by smearing her in the press. And that was just before the war!

Then, he recruited the Excelsior Brigade, lost his leg at Gettysburg, testified against Meade at Congressional hearings, was appointed to evaluate the impact of occupation on the south, appointed diplomat to Colombia, had an affair with the Queen of Spain, received the Medal of Honor, and championed saving the battlefield at Gettysburg as a park.  

In short, he was a diplomat, playboy, lousy husband, beloved general, congressman, murderer, and good old boy. This was a man who looked out for himself and got other people killed with no qualms. He had zero training as a soldier. He was self-aggrandizing, selfish, corrupt, and unprincipled, but he was also brave, patriotic, and extremely enterprising. He got away with all of it because he was colorful, resourceful, and charming.  Thomas Keneally, the author of Schindler’s List, wrote an outstanding biography of General Sickles, entitled American Scoundrel, and that sobriquet fits perfectly.

Lloyd W Klein explains.

Major General Daniel Sickles.

Early Life

Sickles was born to a wealthy New York family and trained as a lawyer. He soon became involved in Democratic Party politics. He was closely aligned with the Tammany Hall political machine, which helped his rise despite his checkered personal life. He served in the New York State Senate and was then elected to the U.S. Congress as a Democrat from New York in 1856.

The Murder in Lafayette Square (1859)

Sickles discovered that his wife, Teresa, was having an affair with Philip Barton Key, the handsome U.S. Attorney and son of Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner. Sickles shot and killed Key in broad daylight in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. This led to his greatest notoriety before the war. Key had been signaling Teresa with a white handkerchief outside her window to arrange secret meetings. When Sickles found out, he confronted Key in public, shouted, “You must die!”—and shot him multiple times with witnesses present.

The trial was sensational. Sickles’ defense team—including Edwin Stanton, future Lincoln war secretary—argued that Sickles was driven temporarily insane by betrayal. The public mostly sided with Sickles, seeing him as a wronged husband defending his honor, even though he himself had a long track record of infidelity. Verdict: Not guilty. Sickles was acquitted after arguing he was temporarily insane. Sickles' claim to Infamy is that he was the first person in U.S. history to use the temporary insanity defense—and it worked.

Despite his notoriety, Sickles was politically well-connected and knew his way around the intricacies of Congress and New York State politics. He was not a natural Lincoln ally. Lincoln, a Republican, ran against the very sort of people Sickles called friends. However, once the Civil War began, Sickles became a vocal pro-Union Democrat, which made him useful to Lincoln, who desperately needed Democratic support to prevent border states and northern cities from turning against the war.

Lincoln rewarded Sickles with a commission as a brigadier general, despite his scandalous past. He had no military experience, just political clout, becoming one of the few political generals. But Lincoln understood that having a Democrat representing New York and Tammany on his side was good politics..

Army Experience Before Chancellorsville

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Sickles used his connections to raise troops despite having no formal military training. Sickles organized the Excelsior Brigade (composed mostly of New York volunteers) and was appointed a brigadier general of volunteers in September 1861. He commanded with flair, although he had no prior military experience.

In early 1862, Sickles temporarily lost his commission due to political wrangling and issues with his official confirmation. He spent several months lobbying in Washington and was reinstated later in 1862, thanks to his political influence. Sickles commanded the Excelsior Brigade, a New York volunteer unit he had personally recruited and organized. The brigade was part of Major General Joseph Hooker’s division in  III Corps under the command of Major General Samuel P. Heintzelman.

Seven Days

At the outset of the Peninsula Campaign in spring 1862, Sickles was not present with his brigade. He had returned to Washington, D.C., to lobby for confirmation of his military commission, which was being held up in the Senate due to concerns over his checkered past and political appointment. Sickles’ commission was finally confirmed in May 1862, and he rejoined the Army of the Potomac shortly before the Seven Days Battles. By the time of the actual fighting, his Excelsior Brigade had already seen action without him at battles such as Williamsburg and Fair Oaks/Seven Pines.

During the Seven Days Battles, Sickles’ brigade participated in some of the fighting, particularly in the Battle of Oak Grove (June 25) and Glendale (June 30), though the records are somewhat unclear on the exact extent of Sickles’ personal involvement.

By the end of 1862, Sickles was commanding a division in the III Corps, Army of the Potomac. He served under General Joseph Hooker and participated in the Battle of Fredericksburg (December 1862), although his division was held in reserve and saw limited action.

Chancellorsville (May 3-4, 1863)

By the time of the Battle of Chancellorsville, Sickles was a major general in command of the III Corps. He was a political general with limited battlefield experience but significant ambition and personal charisma.

On May 2, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson launched the famous flanking attack that shattered the Union XI Corps on the Union right. Jackson devised a daring plan that divided the numerically inferior southern army and then marched his Corps far around the Union army to strike unsuspecting northern troops on their extreme right flank. Meanwhile, Sickles, with the III Corps in the center-left, was ordered to make a probing advance and moved forward to Hazel Grove, a clearing with commanding artillery potential. We know today that numerous Union forces had detected Jackson’s movement, and Colonel Sharpe of the Military Intelligence Unit had warned Hooker. But Hooker believed that Jackson was in retreat, not advancing on his flank. Scouts on Hazel Grove from Sickles’ Corps informed Hooker that they saw and heard Jackson’s men to their west. Sharpe had even deployed aerial balloons and spotted the movement.

As the morning progressed though, Hooker grew to believe that Lee was withdrawing. He ordered III Corps to harass the tail end of Lee's "retreating" army. General Sickles advanced from Hazel Grove towards Catharine Furnace and attacked Jackson’s men in the rear guard. Jackson’s main force continued onto Brock Road, where it meets the Orange Plank Road, directly into the Union right flank. Sickles informed Hooker, to no avail, that Jackson wasn’t retreating but was on the move.

By the morning of May 3, Howard's XI Corps had been defeated, but the Army of the Potomac remained a potent force, and Reynolds's I Corps had arrived overnight, which replaced Howard's losses. About 76,000 Union men faced 43,000 Confederates at the Chancellorsville front. The two halves of Lee's army at Chancellorsville were separated by Sickles' III Corps, which occupied a strong position on high ground at Hazel Grove. Sickles’ troops at Hazel Grove were right in between. Hooker could have attacked either part and destroyed it. JEB Stuart was completely aware of this predicament. He was not in a position for a defensive battle. Instead, he prepared an attack at dawn on Hazel Grove rather than await what seemed to be the obvious move.

But Hooker ordered Sickles to withdraw from Hazel Grove and fall back closer to the main Union line—a serious tactical error. Hooker ordered Sickles off the high ground and instead to another area much lower called Fairview. Hooker felt he was losing and he couldn’t see the advantage of his position so he retreated to what he erroneously thought was a safe fallback position. JEB Stuart had been ready to fight for that ground, and now it had been given to him. Hazel Grove was then occupied by the Confederates, who used it to devastating effect. He took control of the high ground and blasted Sickles at Fairview, where he was a sitting duck for Stuart’s artillery.

Sickles would remember this moment 5 weeks later at the Peach Orchard. He wouldn’t make the mistake again of following orders he knew to be wrong, and especially he would not again let the high ground in his front be captured by the enemy without a fight.

Daniel Sickles, estimated to be 1861.

Gettysburg & the “Peach Orchard Gamble” (July 2, 1863)

Sickels’ most controversial moment came at the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), where he disobeyed orders and advanced his corps into a dangerously exposed position.

The move led to severe casualties but arguably disrupted the Confederate attack. On the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Sickles did something extraordinary—and reckless. His orders were to hold the left flank of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. But Sickles disobeyed, moving his III Corps forward nearly a mile to a rise near the Peach Orchard, creating a salient (a bulge) in the line. The decision to abandon the line General Meade assigned him to defend between Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge, but rather to advance to the Peach Orchard, must count as one of the most fateful decisions of the entire war. General Sickles decided entirely on his own to defend the Sherfy Peach Orchard, adjacent to the Emmittsburg Pike, not the position assigned to him. This not only created a huge, undefendable salient, but it also left his flanks uncovered. The left flank, of course, was Little Round Top, Devil’s Den, and the Wheatfield. All of these killing fields had to be covered on the fly as troops entering the battle were immediately sent to desperate locations to save Sickles’ III Corps and the entire front. Day 2 of Gettysburg therefore depended on the heroism and courage of many men and their regiments now honored as heroes, including William Colville, Joshua Chamberlain, Patrick O’Rorke, and many others.

Sickles and his III Corps were assigned on the early morning of July 2 to be in line south of Cemetery Ridge and cover the low area and the Round Tops. Sickles perceived, correctly, that the ground his position was about 10 to 15 feet higher than the ground he was supposed to defend. He believed this ground would be perfect for artillery to destroy him. A very similar situation had happened at Chancellorsville when he was ordered by General Hooker to give up Hazel Crest, which then became the key to confederate artillery destroying the army on day 2 of that battle. Sickles hadn’t forgotten that experience, so he asked Meade for permission to move up at least twice. Meade thought that area was not a good position for artillery but was rather a no-man’s land, and on Day 3, he was proven to be correct. But Sickles made the decision to move up to the Sherfy Peach Orchard anyway. He showed his position to General Warren and to Captain Meade, the general’s son, neither of whom thought this was a good idea. Famously, when General Meade saw this right before the battle opened, he told Sickles that he was out of position and knew a disaster was in store.

III Corps was hammered by Confederate attacks. He was blasted in the leg by a cannonball (said to have kept smoking as he lay on the ground). His line collapsed, but his move arguably disrupted Longstreet’s attack and may have helped buy time for Union reinforcements. He lost his right leg, which had to be amputated, and sent the limb to the Army Medical Museum, where it’s still on display. Sickles visited it regularly in later years. He’d bring guests along, saying, “Let’s go see my leg.”

As Sickles recuperated, Lincoln visited him in the hospital. Sickles spun his wild maneuver as a kind of accidental genius: “Yes, I moved without orders, but look how it saved the Union line!” Lincoln, who knew politics as well as war, didn’t publicly criticize Sickles, even though most generals thought he’d nearly ruined the battle. Lincoln needed popular heroes, and Sickles was selling himself as one. There’s no record of Lincoln outright endorsing Sickles’ version of events—but he never denounced him, either. Lincoln tolerated Sickles because he was politically useful, loyal to the Union, and wildly effective at self-promotion. Sickles respected Lincoln, perhaps because Lincoln didn’t judge him for the things others never forgot—like adultery, murder, or insubordination. It was a pragmatic, oddly warm relationship—the honorable statesman and the rogue with a cannonball scar and a murder rap.

One of the great debates of the Sickles’ movement is whether it was a smart move or a dumb move. There is no doubt that not following orders isn’t a sign of working well with others, but Sickles wasn’t the kind of man to let that bother him. Given the fact that III Corps was crushed in this maneuver, one could say, rightfully, that it was a dumb move from that perspective. This decision led to the destruction of his III Corps; it threatened the entire left flank of the Union defense. By uncovering both of his flanks, including Little Round Top, and not telling anyone what he was up to, he put Meade at a serious disadvantage. The prosaic truth, though, is that it might have saved the battle. Longstreet arrived with the intent of attacking north but found III Corps waiting; this forced the attack eastward. Longstreet’s attack was supposed to go north, up the Emmitsburg Turnpike, landing on Cemetery Ridge. Instead, the attack direction was east, across the turnpike, landing further south than Lee had intended. The original idea was for an attack on the Union center, not its left flank. When Longstreet and Hood saw the position Sickles had taken, they knew that Lee’s plan was no longer viable; they couldn’t attack northwards while the Peach Orchard was in Union lines.

The argument that it was a really smart move that saved the battle does not deny that Sickles had no idea what he was doing, that he was insubordinate, that he threatened the whole union line, and that many soldiers died that day because of his decision.

Congressional Investigation

After the war, Sickles spent years smearing General George Meade, the commander at Gettysburg. Sickles claimed he had saved the day, not Meade. After Gettysburg, while other generals returned to quiet retirement or relative obscurity, Daniel Sickles launched a political campaign to rewrite the history of the battle—and to bury General George Meade/ Sickles hated Meade because Meade didn’t praise him for his “bold” (unauthorized) move into the Peach Orchard and blamed him for nearly unraveling the Union line. So Sickles went to Congress and began whispering, testifying, and maneuvering.

He gave testimony to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, a highly politicized Congressional body led by radical Republicans who distrusted West Point generals like Meade. Sickles portrayed Meade as timid, indecisive, and nearly incompetent, suggesting that the Union could’ve destroyed Lee’s army if only Meade had pursued him more aggressively. Sickles took advantage of Meade’s lack of popularity and quiet demeanor to shape the narrative to his own benefit.

Sickles claimed that his unauthorized advance drew the Confederates into a trap. His sacrifice (losing his corps and his leg) helped the Union win the battle. Meade was ready to retreat from Gettysburg, and Sickles and others persuaded him to stay. Much of this was self-serving or false, but it stuck.

And Meade—an actual West Point general who won the most important battle of the war—found that his reputation never fully recovered from Sickles’ campaign. Meade was reserved, disliked political games, and didn’t defend himself well in public. Sickles, by contrast, was a master of spin. He leaked to newspapers, charmed Congressmen, and turned Gettysburg into his victory. Even decades later, monuments popped up at the Peach Orchard and the line Sickles had created—many due to his efforts and fundraising.

Sickles used his role as a former congressman and war hero to full effect. He testified multiple times, always angling to elevate his role. He stayed close with key members of Congress, many of whom distrusted Meade and the Army’s high command. He helped shape early public memory of Gettysburg—not by rank or fact, but by force of personality. Sickles weaponized testimony to smear Meade and polish his legacy. He turned a near-disaster into a story of heroism and sacrifice. He influenced how the war and Gettysburg would be remembered. In short, Sickles lost a leg, nearly lost a battle, and then won the credit for the victory in Congress. Sickles received the Medal of Honor in 1897 (largely due to his own lobbying) for the winning the battle at Gettysburg.

Post-War Life

Lincoln’s assassination hit Sickles hard. Though politically and personally different, the two shared a strange kinship: both were outsiders, both survived enormous personal loss, and both were men who navigated immense scandal and contradiction. After the war, Sickles helped memorialize Lincoln, attending events and praising him as the savior of the Union—even as he continued pushing his own battlefield legend. Sickles knew a political stalking horse when he saw one, and he tied himself closely to Lincoln.

Daniel Sickles’ postwar life was as colorful, scandalous, and self-serving as his wartime career—maybe more so. Once the fighting stopped, he turned his full energy toward politics, diplomacy, monument-building, and intrigue, always placing himself at the center of the action (or at least the story).

U.S. Minister to Spain – A Scandal in Madrid

In 1869, President Grant appointed Sickles as Minister to Spain, a plum diplomatic post. And, true to form, Sickles created headlines: he reportedly had an affair with Queen Isabella II (already deposed but still influential).

He tried to negotiate the annexation of Cuba—a long-held American dream—but was far too erratic to be effective. He made diplomatic waves by openly supporting Cuban rebels against Spain, which caused confusion and tension. His time in Spain was glamorous, chaotic, and utterly Sickles. After a few years, Grant recalled him—he had outlived his usefulness and outworn his welcome.

Political Operator & Congressional Drama

Sickles returned to the U.S. and ran for Congress again in the 1880s. He won—because he still had political clout. His legend (and storytelling) still played well with veterans and the press. He positioned himself as the defender of Union veterans, advocating for pensions and memorials. He used his seat to promote Gettysburg preservation, always to highlight his own role. He remained a master of the behind-the-scenes political game, buttering up allies and undermining rivals.

Founding the Gettysburg National Military Park

Sickles played a central role in the creation of what would become the Gettysburg National Military Park. He was a founding member of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association (GBMA), created in 1864 to preserve the battlefield.

He used his political connections to secure funding, land purchases, and publicity, all while making sure his old positions were commemorated. He lobbied for national control of the battlefield, which Congress approved in 1895. The War Department took over the site, making it one of the earliest national military parks.

In the 1890s, Sickles was appointed chairman of the New York Monuments Commission, responsible for erecting state monuments at Gettysburg. Sickles had monuments built along the line he occupied on Day 2 of the battle—including the Peach Orchard, Wheatfield, and Devil’s Den area—even though that line had been a disaster militarily. He ensured his III Corps got prominent recognition. He blocked or delayed monuments to commanders and units that had criticized him. He boosted his image as a martyr who had saved the Union line—his missing leg became part of the mythos.

Sickles never got a monument of his own at Gettysburg—at least not an official one.. The monument on the field at Gettysburg to his brigade was supposed to include a bust of him. What happened to it? He allegedly stole the money given by charitable donations and kept it for himself. His later years were dogged by embezzlement accusations related to the New York Monuments Commission. In 1912, a bombshell dropped: $27,000 in funds had mysteriously disappeared. That’s nearly a million dollars in today’s money. Sickles was accused of misappropriating the funds, but he claimed he didn’t know where the money went. He never admitted guilt. He was removed from the commission, but never prosecuted—likely due to his fame, age, and connections. The scandal derailed efforts to give him an equestrian statue at Gettysburg. To this day, he’s the only corps commander at Gettysburg without a monument.

His reputation was so tainted by that point that even his allies backed away from a monument. But Sickles didn’t care—he had already built his legend into the park’s landscape. He argued that the entire battlefield was a monument to him. This isn’t surprising given the size of his ego. He may have lost a leg and almost a battle, but he won the memory war. He influenced how the battlefield was memorialized, ensuring his Peach Orchard line was heavily commemorated. Some say he preserved Gettysburg not for history’s sake, but to rewrite his role in it. He played a major role in the preservation of the Gettysburg battlefield, helping turn it into a national park.

American Scoundrel is truly the right description for this man, who demonstrated no evidence of a moral compass. He helped create the battlefield park. He influenced which sites were preserved and emphasized. He used monuments to reshape public understanding of his role. He made sure Gettysburg was about legacy, not just tactics, and very much his legacy.

Daniel Sickles in 1911.

Legacy

Daniel Sickles remains a deeply divisive figure: Some see him as a self-promoting rogue and reckless commander. Others credit him with playing a pivotal role at Gettysburg. Historians often present both sides: bold, flawed, fascinating. If you like historical drama with real-life consequences, Sickles is your guy.

Historians, Civil War buffs, and battlefield guides have spent over a century arguing about how to rank, remember, and judge this uniquely outrageous figure. In the decades right after his death (1914, age 94), Sickles was remembered mostly as a scandalous but lovable rogue. Veterans who served under him remembered his charisma and bravery. He was still widely considered a hero of Gettysburg, thanks to his relentless mythmaking and the monuments his friends placed on the battlefield. He was seen as flawed—but entertaining, and above all, American in his contradictions.

But in the mid-20th Century, there was a backlash. As historical analysis became more rigorous, especially post-WWII, historians began to sharply reassess Sickles. He was criticized as a glory-hound, incompetent field commander, and blatant self-promoter. His decision to move his corps forward at Gettysburg was labeled insubordinate and disastrous, weakening the Union left and costing thousands of lives. He was accused of poisoning Meade’s legacy and distorting the historical record to elevate himself. By the 1950s and 60s, serious Civil War scholars often treated Sickles as a cautionary tale of political generals run amok.

Today, modern historians fall into two main camps: Villain or Disruptor. His decision at Gettysburg was irresponsible and disrespectful to the chain of command.

sleazy in politics and postwar behavior. No question, too, that he was self-serving—a saboteur of Meade’s legacy and battlefield truth, but his advance to the Peach Orchard disrupted Lee’s plan, despite disobeying orders. Historians like Garry Adelman and James Hessler have produced recent work that’s more nuanced, arguing that while Sickles was reckless, his maneuver may have inadvertently helped, and that his impact on battlefield preservation was immense.

Sickles was flamboyant, scandal-prone, and unrepentant. He can be remembered as: a heroic general, an ostentatious rogue; a man who lived a dozen lives (in one body, minus one leg). And perhaps most fittingly, a man who never stopped campaigning—even when the war was long over. He was:

·       A murderer turned war hero

·       A wounded general with a public skeleton (literally)

·       A womanizer and political operator

·       A man who could charm, offend, or politically outmaneuver almost anyone

He lived to age 94, never expressed regret, got away with all of it, and managed to ensure that we are still talking about him more than a century later. And there is no doubt that that is exactly the legacy that he wanted.

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Conquering the Channel: Louis Blériot and the First Powered Flight Across the English Channel

On a hazy summer morning in 1909, a lone monoplane soared over the white cliffs of Dover, trailing a roar that startled grazing sheep and sent onlookers scrambling toward the coastline. At the controls was a mustachioed French engineer named Louis Blériot, whose daring flight across the English Channel etched his name into aviation history. Blériot's achievement, flying 35.4 kilometers, (22 miles) from Calais to Dover in 37 minutes, marked not only a personal triumph but a milestone in humankind's conquest of the skies.

Terry Bailey explains.

Starting the engine prior to the crossing.

A boyhood shaped by invention

Louis Blériot was born on the 1st of July, 1872, in Cambrai, a town nestled in northern France. His father, Clémence Blériot, was a prosperous manufacturer, and young Louis was given an excellent education. He demonstrated a keen interest in engineering from an early age, constructing toy boats and tinkering with mechanical devices. After completing his studies at the prestigious École Centrale Paris, Blériot worked in the electric lighting business and became a successful inventor, patenting the first practical headlamp for automobiles, an innovation that earned him considerable wealth.

However, electricity and automobiles, while fascinating, couldn't match the allure of flight. Like many others captivated by the exploits of pioneers like Otto Lilienthal and the powered flights of the Wright brothers, Blériot became obsessed with the dream of powered aviation. He began investing his time and fortune in designing and building flying machines, many of which ended in crashes, disappointment, and lessons learned the hard way.

The long road to the channel

Blériot's early attempts at flight were fraught with failure. Between 1900 and 1908, he constructed a variety of gliders, ornithopters, and powered aircraft with names like the Blériot I through Blériot VIII. Most were unstable, underpowered, or mechanically unreliable. Still, his persistence was unwavering. Working with the brilliant engineer Raymond Saulnier, Blériot refined his designs until he produced a breakthrough: the Blériot XI.

The Blériot XI was a revolutionary aircraft for its time. A monoplane with a tractor configuration (the propeller at the front), it had a wooden frame covered in fabric, a 25-horsepower Anzani engine, and bicycle wheels for landing gear. Its simplicity, light weight, and maneuverability made it superior to many of the Wright brothers' inspired aeroplanes. On the 25th of July, 1909, Blériot would stake everything on this machine.

Channel challenge

The English Channel had long symbolized natural and political division, a waterway that had thwarted would-be conquerors from Napoleon to Hitler. However, to early aviators, it represented something more: a daring challenge and a test of the aircraft's reliability, pilot skill, and human courage.

Newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, publisher of the Daily Mail, offered a £1,000 prize (about £120,000 in today's money) to the first aviator who could fly across the Channel from France to England. Several tried, but one, Hubert Latham, was even poised to win until an engine failure plunged him into the sea.

Blériot seized the opportunity, at dawn on the 25th of July, 1909, with a bandaged foot from a previous crash, he took off from Les Barraques near Calais. He had no compass, and the weather was overcast. Guided only by instinct and glimpses of the English coastline, he flew at altitudes varying between 250 and 1,000 feet, enduring winds, vibration, and the ever-present risk of mechanical failure. As he neared the English shore, he spotted the chalk cliffs of Dover and descended toward the designated landing site near Dover Castle.

A flight that changed everything

Blériot's landing was less than graceful, he broke a propeller blade and damaged a landing gear strut, but he had succeeded. The flight took 37 minutes, and the world took notice. Crowds rushed to greet him, cheering him as a hero. King Edward VII sent congratulations, and the feat was celebrated in newspapers across the globe. The military implications were not lost on observers, particularly in Britain, where some newspapers warned, "England is no longer an island."

Blériot's Channel crossing was more than a publicity stunt. It was a clear signal that powered flight had arrived, not just as a novelty, but as a practical and transformative mode of transportation. It spurred interest in aviation across Europe and North America, inspired new generations of aircraft builders, and helped lay the foundation for modern aerospace engineering.

After the crossing.

A legacy in the skies

After his Channel triumph, Louis Blériot became a household name. He capitalized on his fame by founding the Blériot Aéronautique company, producing aircraft for civilian and military customers. His factory became one of the largest and most respected in pre-war France. During World War I, Blériot's designs played a key role in training pilots and conducting reconnaissance missions.

Blériot continued to promote aviation throughout his life, but he never undertook another flight as iconic as his journey across the Channel. He died in Paris on the 1st of August, 1936 at the age of 64, but his legacy endures. The Blériot XI that he flew that day now rests in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, a silent witness to the courage and innovation that helped usher in the age of flight.

In today's world of supersonic jets and space travel, it's easy to overlook the audacity of that moment in 1909. Yet, Louis Blériot's journey across the English Channel remains one of aviation's most compelling tales, a testament to human ingenuity and the timeless urge to conquer the impossible.

Louis Blériot's flight across the English Channel in 1909 stands as one of the great inflection points in the history of aviation, a moment when dreams gave way to possibility, and possibility transformed into reality. His journey was not just a triumph of machinery and engineering, but of resilience, vision, and the indomitable human spirit. From the workshops of northern France to the windswept cliffs of Dover, Blériot's life traced the arc of invention against a backdrop of skepticism, risk, and relentless trial.

Blériot's achievement symbolized far more than the successful crossing of a geographical barrier. It shattered the illusion of natural frontiers and awakened the world to a new age, one in which flight was no longer bound to the pages of fantasy or the cautious experiments of isolated inventors. His monoplane, fragile by today's standards, became the vessel through which the modern world first glimpsed the potential of powered flight to connect nations, reshape warfare, and redefine what it meant to explore.

The legacy of that 37-minute flight reverberated through the 20th century and beyond. It inspired the early aviation industry, influenced military strategy, and encouraged a generation of pioneers who would take flight higher, faster, and farther. Blériot's crossing was a catalyst, one that propelled aviation from curiosity to cornerstone, from daring to indispensable.

When looking back on that hazy morning over a century ago, it is done so with the understanding that Louis Blériot's courage helped lift humanity off the ground, literally and figuratively. The flight was the first wingbeat in a world that would soon stretch skyward and, eventually, toward the stars.

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Notes:

Ornithopter

An ornithopter is a type of flying machine that achieves flight by mimicking the flapping wing motion of birds, bats, or insects. The term comes from the Greek words ornithos, (ὄρνιθος), (bird) and pteron, (πτερόν), (wing). Unlike conventional aircraft, which use fixed wings and thrust-producing engines or propellers, ornithopters rely on oscillating or flapping wings to generate both lift and propulsion. This method of flight is inspired by nature and is known as biomimetic engineering, where the designs are modelled after living organisms.

The concept of the ornithopter dates back centuries. One of the earliest known designs appears in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched several flying machines based on the idea of human-powered flapping wings. However, due to the limitations of human muscle strength and materials available at the time, none of these early concepts were able to achieve practical flight. It wasn't until the development of lightweight materials and miniature motors in the 20th and 21st centuries that small, functioning ornithopters became feasible.

Modern ornithopters range from small remote-controlled models used in research or hobby flying to experimental drones to surveillance devices. Some are powered by tiny electric motors and are capable of highly agile flight, similar to birds or insects. Engineers and scientists continue to study ornithopters to better understand natural flight and to develop innovative solutions for aircraft in environments where traditional fixed-wing or rotary systems are less effective, such as in confined or turbulent spaces. Though they are not yet widely used for commercial applications, ornithopters hold promise in the fields of robotics, aeronautics, and even space exploration.

Fake News: The Legends of Al Capone and the ‘Conference’ that Wasn’t

Al Capone was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1899. As a young man he moved to Chicago and became involved in prostitution, gambling and, in the 1920s, bootlegging rackets. He became rich enough to buy a mansion in Florida and a bullet-proof car but was convicted of tax evasion in 1931. He served time in federal prisons, notably Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay before being released in 1939 after it had become clear he was losing his mind as a result of a case of untreated syphilis. He died of a heart attack at the age of 48, a relatively young man. Besides these basic facts, most other claims about the world’s most famous gangster are fictional. Among the false or unsubstantiated claims frequently made about Capone include the following: He was ‘the boss’ of Chicago; he founded the ‘Outfit’ – an organized crime organization based in Chicago; he orchestrated the St Valentine’s Day Massacre; and finally, he was a participant in a ‘conference’ held in Atlantic City in 1929 that established a nationwide crime syndicate.

Michael Woodiwiss looks at these claims.

Al Capone in 1930.

Capone was never the boss of Chicago rackets, let alone the boss of Chicago. The historian Mark Haller has done the most thorough analysis of Capone’s business activities.   The group known to history as the Capone gang,’ he wrote, ‘is best understood not as a hierarchy directed by Al Capone but as a complex set of partnerships.’ Capone, his brother Ralph, Frank Nitti, and Jack Guzik formed partnerships with others to launch numerous bootlegging, gambling, and vice activities in the Chicago Loop, South Side, and several suburbs, including their base of operations, Cicero. These various enterprises, Haller continued, ‘were not controlled bureaucratically. Each, instead, was a separate enterprise of small or relatively small scale. Most had managers who were also partners. Coordination was possible because the senior partners, with an interest in each of the enterprises, exerted influence across a range of activities.’ Like other criminal entrepreneurs, Capone did not have the skills or the personality for the detailed bureaucratic oversight of a large organization. Criminal entrepreneurs are ‘instead, hustlers and dealers, for whom partnership arrangements are ideally suited. They enjoy the give and take of personal negotiations, risk-taking, and moving from deal to deal.’  Haller’s analysis helps to explain why Capone’s removal as a criminal force in Chicago made no difference to the extent of organized crime in the city. There was no ‘Outfit’, although Chicago gangster businessmen after the Second World War might have used the word to describe their loose associations. The Belgian comic strip artist, Herge, basing his research on the hyperbolic claims in Chicago newspapers, referred to Capone as the ‘Boss of Chicago’ in Tintin in America (1931) and many thousands more in True Crime books, documentaries, movies and TV shows simply repeated similar assertions without substantiation.

Capone’s notoriety reached a peak on February 14, 1929, St Valetine’s Day. At a garage at 2122 North Clark Street, seven of the associates of North Side gangster George ‘Bugs’ Moran were waiting for a shipment of illegal liquor. A Cadillac drew up and five men, two in police uniforms, got out and entered the garage. They disarmed the Moran men, who assumed it was the inconvenience of a routine raid and did not object. They were lined up against a wall, as if for a search, and then suddenly sprayed with machine-gun bullets. No one survived.  Capone was in Florida at the time but was soon thought to be responsible. The murders remained unsolved.

Atlantic City and the ‘Conference’ that Wasn’t

The Atlantic City gangster “conference” story began life as a credible account by Al Capone of a trip he made to the New Jersey resort in May 1929. The newspaper and magazine reports of this visit at the time were based almost entirely on Al Capone himself as a source. There have been countless reconstructions since, in books, articles, television documentaries and Martin Scorsese’s TV series Boardwalk Empire, yet Capone remains the only credible source for the story.

Capone was arrested for carrying a gun in Philadelphia on May 16, 1929, a day after he had been in Atlantic City, and told police investigators the following: 

I have tried hard to stop all this killing and gang rivalry. That was my purpose in going to Atlantic City. It was a peace conference. I engineered it. Some of the biggest men in the business in Chicago were there. ... “Bug” Moran, leader of the north side gang, ... and three or four other Chicago gang leaders were there [emphasis added]. We talked over our trouble and at the end agreed to sign on the dotted line, bury the past and forget warfare for the general good of all concerned. 

This was reported on 18 May in the Atlantic City Daily Press, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. So, that was the word on the Atlantic City “conference” from the only known witness consulted. Capone and three or four other Chicagoans talking about peace.

The exaggeration of Capone’s account began with the publication of a book by Walter Nobel Burns, The One-Way Ride: The Red Trail of Chicago Gangland from Prohibition to Jake Lingle, in 1931. Burns upped the number of conference attendees to “about 30 veterans” of Chicago gang wars from the “North, South and West Sides” of the city. Other journalists would by then have taken note that Burns’ inflation of the numbers was not challenged.

The fictionalization of Capone’s account had already begun in November 1929 with the publication of a short story by Damon Runyon in Cosmopolitan magazine. Runyon was by then one of the most popular American authors, turning out mainly tales of low-life for the publication group owned by William Randolph Hearst. In the story “Dark Dolores,” his narrator relates how he was “persuaded” by “Dave the Dude” to catch a train to Atlantic City to attend a “big peace conference” to settle a gang war going on in St. Louis between three rival mobs. It would have been clear to readers that St. Louis stood for Chicago and that one of the mob leaders, “Black Mike” – “an Italian with a big scar on his face” – stood for Capone. The popularity of Runyon’s stories would have assured that the ‘conference’ entered popular consciousness.

After Runyon’s story the fictionalization process took a big step forward with the printing of a photograph in the New York Evening Tribune on January 17, 1930. It showed Capone walking next to the political boss of Atlantic City, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. The picture looks fake – Capone’s wearing heavy winter clothes, Johnson’s in light summer clothes. However, the alliance between corrupt politics and gangdom implied by the juxtaposition of the nation’s most notorious gangster with a machine politician chimed with the dominant perspective on organized crime at this time. 

There was little more published about the Atlantic City “conference” until Hickman Powell’s Ninety Times Guilty in 1939. Powell was the first author to claim that Runyon’s imaginary “interstate” conference was actually true. He wrote: “In May 1929, Al Capone went to a peace conference in Atlantic City,” and elaborated that “The last year had been bloody. There had been the killing of Frank Yale in Brooklyn, the Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago, and various minor killings.” “Frankie Costello, the slot machine man,” he continued, “who has never been one to encourage violence, arranged the meeting and spent twenty-five thousand dollars of his own money on it. Various gang chieftains were entertained for several days at the Hotel President.” Powell does not mention a credible source for these claims. He did not have to – True Crime books and articles weren’t required to reference their sources.

Powell went further than merely paraphrasing a fictional account. He sowed the seeds of what became the mainstream interpretation of organized crime history, supported by most writers, film directors and – most damagingly – by the US government. “The aim of the Atlantic City conference,” he claimed, “was to establish peaceful co-operation in the underworld instead of warfare.”

Consolidating the “Conference” Legend

On December 10, 1940, the Hearst newspaperman Jack Lait made a reference to the mythical Atlantic City meeting, as he praised the efforts of the IRS against “syndicate” criminal and corrupt politicians. “There’s a convention in New York ... Its [sic] a gathering of top gangsters and racketeers of the nation. Such get-togethers are not uncommon. They have been held in Chicago, Miami, Atlantic City, Phoenix, Providence and other points.”

It must have been a lengthy New York convention since he repeated the column almost verbatim on July 22, 1949 – nine years later. The only difference was a subeditor’s correction to Lait’s omission of an inverted comma in the first version: “It’s a gathering of gangsters and racketeers ...” The federal policing agencies were singled out for praise as the only answer to such evidence of nationwide organization and super-government among hoods: 

And a shudder of fear has the mob geniuses shaky. They haven’t forgotten what happened to Al Capone, “Lucky” Luciano and “Nucky” Johnson ... They know that whenever the Feds really try, they can get these malefactors of great stealth, for they are all venal and vulnerable, they have influence beyond calculation, but when the G-boys are ordered from up above to close in, nothing can help them. 

This was the first time the politician Johnson was mentioned in connection with the Atlantic City “conference,” albeit indirectly, and it was not as the host in the way later writers embellished the story.

In 1950, the year after the second of Lait’s reports on the alleged conference, Senator Kefauver read and later endorsed a book that Lait co-wrote with another journalist, Lee Mortimer: Chicago Confidential. Kefauver was preparing for an influential investigation of organized crime. The federal policing agencies were singled out for praise by politicians and journalists alike as the only answer to such evidence of nationwide organization and super-government among hoods.

Lee Mortimer was another newspaper columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain who specialized in scurrilous stories about celebrities. The Confidential books feature the two main preoccupations of post-war America—communism and organized crime—in an amalgam of racial and political bigotry. The only evidence they provide about the American Mafia indicates that the concept originated in the paranoid imagination of reactionaries. The Mafia, according to Mortimer and Lait, was

The super-government which now has tentacles reaching into the Cabinet and the White House itself, almost every state capital, huge Wall Street interests, and connections in Canada, Greece, China and Outer Mongolia, and even through the Iron Curtain into Soviet Russia.

The organization is ‘run from above, with reigning headquarters in Italy and American headquarters in New York’. It ‘controls all sin’ and ‘practically all crime in the United States’, and is

an international conspiracy, as potent as that other international conspiracy, Communism, and as dirty and dangerous, with its great wealth and the same policy—to conquer everything and take over everything, with no scruples as to how.

Kefauver’s senate investigation into organized crime encouraged rather than discouraged such hyperbole.

Mafia? 

In 1959, Frederic Sondern, a journalist who relied on agents from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) for his sources, made the claim that not only were Atlantic City “conference” gangster delegates from across the whole of the United States, but that they were all members of the Mafia. The ‘Mafia’ at this time was thought to be a single centralized organization of Italian-Americans that allegedly controlled organized crime in America.  In Brotherhood of Evil: The Mafia, he claimed: 

… Capone issued invitations to the senior capi Mafiosi of Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and several other big centers to meet in Atlantic City in May 1929. ... It was the Atlantic City gathering that made underworld and Mafia history ... The Sicilians listened as Capone explained a project on which he had been working for some three years – a nationwide syndicate and organization, not only for bootlegging but gambling, prostitution, labor racketeering and various kinds of extortion as well ... At Atlantic City a series of peace treaties for the Chicago, New York and other areas was hammered out and ratified – without documents and signatures but with a validity that lasted a long time. It was the fundamental design and unwritten constitution of the modern American Mafia.

Sondern had taken Hickman Powell’s imaginative reconstruction of the Atlantic City “conference” and made all the significant participants Italian American in line with the FBN’s propaganda contention that organized crime in the US was controlled by a single Italian entity.

In 1965, one of America’s best-known journalists, Walter Winchell, added his prestige to the Atlantic City “conference” mythology. Winchell was in a sense the voice of the “gangbuster” since he was the narrator of the popular Untouchables television series. In his syndicated column, he wrote:

It was Capone who organized the nation-wide crime syndicate ... In May 1929 the mob chiefs gathered in Atlantic City at Capone’s invitation ... There they organized their operations on a more business-like level ... They operated like any big business ... Recognized leaders, standard rules of procedure and periodic meetings. ... If the black flag of the underworld were to unfurl atop one of the tallest skyscrapers in New York it would be a fit symbol of how the Mafia has gained control of that building and many other real estate holdings.  

By this time most of the American law enforcement community, as well as the rest of the America media, shared the kind of interpretation articulated by Winchell, and given official sanction by President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice in 1967. “Today,” according to the Commission’s report, “the core of organized crime in the United States consists of 24 groups operating as criminal cartels in large cities across the Nation. Their membership is exclusively Italian, they are in frequent communication with each other, and their smooth functioning is insured by a national body of overseers.”

The report offered very little historical substantiation for its claims besides the following short paragraph:

The present confederation of organized crime groups arose after Prohibition, during which Italian, German, Irish and Jewish groups had competed with one another in racket operations. The Italian groups were successful in switching their enterprises from prostitution and bootlegging to gambling, extortion, and other illegal activities. They consolidated their power through murder and violence.  

The only known source for a “history” that implied that only immigrants participated in organized crime was Sergeant Ralph Salerno of the New York Police Department. Dwight Smith, a colleague of Salerno, has detailed the ways in which Salerno provided as much historical and analytical substance as the commission required in its efforts to justify a large increase in policing resources and powers to combat what it saw as a security threat to the United States. Accuracy was not the commission’s concern.

The commission’s work culminated with the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 that was significant nationally and internationally in establishing a widely accepted template for organized crime control.  In a book published in 1969, Salerno and his co-writer, John S. Tompkins, confirmed an acceptance of Atlantic City “conference” mythology. After detailing Capone’s conviction and imprisonment on tax evasion charges in 1931 and the shootings of John Dillinger and other bank robbers, they asserted that, “Unnoticed during all of the hoopla about sending Capone to prison and the FBI’s war on crime, major crime itself was organized at a meeting in Atlantic City in 1931, and the details worked out over the next few years.” By moving the mythical meeting from 1929 to 1931, the authors had managed to prevent the only known source for the alleged convention or conference – Al Capone – from attending it altogether.

By the 1970s there was no limit to the imagination and deceit of True Crime writers when it came to descriptions of the Atlantic City “conference.” In 1971, Hank Messick devoted six pages to the event in Lansky, a biography of the Jewish American gangster businessman who founded something Messick called the National Crime Syndicate. Lansky, Messick claimed, was the real inspiration for the gathering of mobsters – not Capone, Luciano or Costello. Messick embellished the story in three ways. First, by adding claims and details on Enoch Johnson. Instead of being just being the subject of the probably doctored photograph walking along the city’s Boardwalk beside Capone, Johnson now “ruled a criminal-political empire” in the resort who could be depended upon to “entertain the boys in style.” Second by making up conversations between Lansky, Luciano and others that happened four decades earlier and could have no other source than Messick’s imagination. Finally, giving the names of long-dead ‘gang chieftains from all over the U.S.A.’

The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano

Messick’s imaginative reconstruction of the conference was soon outdone by Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer in The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano (1975). The book project was initiated by Gosch, Hammer was a crime journalist brought in later. Gosch was usually described as a film producer, although confidence trickster is a better description.

According to Gosch’s account, Lucky Luciano himself had told him that he was the central player in the Atlantic City “conference.” Luciano had asked him to be his “Mr. Boswell” in 1961, a year before he died. The heart attack happened, appropriately and, in terms of publicity, profitably, when Luciano was meeting Gosch at Naples airport on January 26, 1962. The 1961 deal, according for Gosch, was for Luciano to record his life story to Gosch on tape and for it to be written up and published ten years after his death. According to Gosch, Luciano said he wouldn’t “hold back nothin’” and that the money gained would be “an annuity” for Gosch and his wife, Lucille.

The paperback rights of Last Testament were auctioned for $500,000, a serialization appeared in Penthouse magazine the year before publication and the book was chosen as main selection by both the Book-of-the-Month club and the Playboy Book Club. Its success was based largely on the publisher’s claim that it was the life story of Lucky Luciano as dictated by the Mafia boss himself before his death in 1962. Last Testament, however, was a fake, based mainly on hearsay accounts written by Hickman Powell and others. It quotes Luciano as saying that he was at meetings and events during the time that he was in prison – it even quotes him talking about an event that happened two years after he died. Faking True Crime books was made easier at the time since, as noted earlier, they were not required to have notes indicating the sources of their frequently outlandish claims.  Gosch himself did not benefit from the hoax since he died just before the book was published. There was, however, clearly “an annuity” for his wife.

Gosch and Hammer added several more gangsters to Messick’s list: “Purple Gang” leader, Abe Bernstein, Willie Moretti from New Jersey, John Torrio, and Dutch Schultz, Albert Anastasia, Vince Mangano and Frank Scalise. Gosch and Hammer, like Messick, invented dialogue and put Nucky Johnson at the center of events that followed the alleged refusal of one hotel to let the imaginary group of lowlifes in, “So Nucky picks Al up under one arm and throws him into his car and yells out, ‘All you fuckers follow me!’” Johnson then, according to Gosch and Hammer, laid on “a constant round of parties, with plenty of liquor, food and girls.” This is quite a leap given the only evidence of Johnson’s presence was a photograph showing him in summer clothes walking besides Al Capone in winter clothes on the Atlantic City boardwalk. The Atlantic City “conference” was a good base for a story, however, as the author of Boardwalk Empire (2010), “The true story that inspired the HBO series,” must have realized. He uncritically used The Last Testament as one of his main sources. Biographies of Capone written after The Last Testament reference the book as if it were a legitimate source. Even scholarly criminologists have used the made-up dialogue as if it were real.   

Calling Capone’s meeting with fellow Chicago gangsters in Atlantic City a ‘Conference’ was itself an exaggeration, calling it a conference with gangsters from across the United States setting out to control organized crime throughout the whole country was pure invention. There is no doubt that Italian-American gangsters such as Capone and Luciano in America have been among the most prominent gangsters since the Prohibition years. The dispute is over the identification of organized crime almost exclusively with Italian Americans and the suggestion that organized crime is some sort of alien transplant onto an otherwise pure political and economic system. Thanks to fanciful accounts of the Atlantic City ‘Conference’ and other variations of Mafia mythology, many people, in every part of the world, not just in America, believed that something called the Mafia ran organized crime in the U.S. for decades. By constantly highlighting a centralized super-criminal conspiracy, set up after a series of conferences following Atlantic City, U.S. opinion makers  ensured that people’s perception of organized crime was as limited as their own. The constant speculation, hyperbole, preaching, and mythmaking served to confuse and distract attention away from failed policies, institutional corruption and much systematic criminal activity that was more damaging and destructive than the undeniable criminal activity of the likes of Capone.

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References

Michael Woodiwiss, Double Crossed: The Failure of Organized Crime Control (London: Pluto, 2017)

William Moore, The Kefauver Committee and the Politics of Crime (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974).

Frederic Sondern, Brotherhood of Evil: The Mafia (London: Panther, 1961).

President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967).

Ralph Salerno and John S. Tompkins, The Crime Confederation, (New York: Popular Library, 1969), p. 275.

Hank Messick, Lansky (London: Robert Hale, 1971).

Tony Scaduto, Lucky Luciano (London, Sphere Books, 1976).

Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), p. viii.

Nelson Johnson, Boardwalk Empire (London: Embury Press, 2010).

David Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931 (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1997).

Marc Mappen, Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation (London: Rutgers University Press, 2013).

Hickman Powell, Ninety Times Guilty (London: Robert Hale, 1940).

Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, Chicago Confidential (New York: Crown, 1950)

Whan NATO Fought Itself: The Turbot War

As inconceivable as it may sound, there was an occasion when two NATO allies were considered in a state of war, albeit limited. It was the only time that that two NATO allies were in a heated exchange and exchanged fire. The incident was called the Turbot War (named after a type of fish which was the cause of this strange altercation). This minor escalation was between Canada and Spain between March 9 and April 16, 1995 and fought over a dispute involving their respective international fishing rights in what Canada saw as their territorial waters. To call it a war may be an exaggeration, but that was the term adopted by the media to create sensationalism. The incident brought no formal declarations of war, but shots were fired in anger by the Canadian Navy upon Spanish vessels and at one point even involved the deployment of the Spanish Navy in retaliation.

Steve Prout explains.

El Vigía, a vessel sent by Spain to protect its fishing fleet. Source: Manuel Luís Soto Sáenz, Cádiz, 11 de Octubre de 2008, available here.

Fishing Rights and Canadian Waters

This article does not intend to delve into the legal complexities of international fishing rights but give an outline of the causes. The Canadians complained that their fishing rights were being violated by various foreign trawlers citing the regulations set by the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO). On this occasion Canada accused Spain and Portugal of trespassing and of overfishing in Canadian territorial waters. It was a claim both Spain and Portugal disputed.

The Canadians had an established shipping perimeter two hundred nautical miles from their shores. This perimeter had been agreed in 1982 by the Third United Nations Convention on the law of the sea. It took until November 1994 for an exclusive economic zone finally to be recognized. It would not be enough to resolve the ongoing issues and was either ignored or misunderstood. The EU meanwhile issued a ruling which gave European vessels an increased quota in a disputed zone close to what Canada claimed was within her territorial waters.

The matter of overfishing had been a concern for Canada since the 1970s, but little had been done to address their issues. These concerns were made more urgent by the Grand Banks Fishery collapse, which occurred due to over overfishing of cod over the years. Fishing communities had been devastated and any further damage or a repeat of this over the turbot stocks would not be allowed or tolerated.

The war was named after the type of fish known as Turbot (also known as Greenland Turbot and Greenland Halibut) that was being decimated by the presence of these trawlers. Brian Tobin, a Canadian politician and Director of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans championed the Canadian side of the dispute. Canada claimed that there were over fifty violations of their international waters and their attempts to reach out to the Spanish and Portuguese governments met no response and so the Canadians felt that more assertive action should be taken.

The beginning of hostilities

On March 9, 1995, a Canadian air patrol plane spotted the Spanish trawler Estai fishing in Canadian waters. The Canadian Coast Guard and Navy vessels, led by Sir Wilfred Grenfell, were launched and headed towards the Spanish trawler. On spotting the approaching Canadian vessels the skipper of the Estai, Captain Enrique Davila Gonzalez, ordered the crew to cut their nets in a desperate attempt to remove evidence of their fishing activities and attempted an escape.

The chase then developed, escalated, and “shots fired in anger”. The Estai only stopped when the Canadian Coast Guard vessel Cape Roger fired a burst of machine gun fire across its bows and warned that the next shots would be aimed at the Spanish trawler itself. The event was not just isolated to the Estai because other Spanish fishing boats had come to assist the Estai but were repelled by high-pressure water cannons. The Estai was then boarded by DFO officers who discovered numerous infringements of Canada’s fishing laws. A Canadian trawler was used to recover the Estai’s net from the seabed. A number of other infractions by the Spanish crew were found by the Canadians. It was soon found that the net had a much smaller mesh size than Canadian law allowed. The crew of the Estai were subsequently arrested with the trawler being towed back to Canada (the city of St. John’s) where it was displayed. The incident then was widely publicized to the world with the blame being put onto Spain by Canada. The Spanish trawlers attempt to hide the incriminating evidence failed and an international furor followed when Canada seized the vessel which in turn caused the European Union to accuse Canadas of acts of piracy.

The Canadians used the publicity to their maximum advantage. A crowd of over five thousand Canadians gathered to witness the Estai being impounded in St. John’s harbor, with Brian Tobin swiftly arranging a press conference in New York City outside of the United Nations headquarters. Tobin ordered the Estai’s net suspended from a crane while he addressed the world’s media, explaining in detail how the small mesh size meant that the Spanish vessel had been fishing illegally. Tobin was steadfast in his view that Canadian law applied in the waters where the Estai was fishing and furthermore Canada had the legal authority to act against the Spanish vessel and arrest the crew.

Spain escalates and the EU is divided

A small drama back in 1995 looked and felt quite different at the time as this affair escalated and caused diplomatic divisions amongst EU states and fellow NATO allies. Britain, for example, backed Canada and other EU states supported Spain, at least from a respectable distance. Meanwhile, in retaliation to the seizure, Spain dispatched a Serviola-class gunboat, armed with machine guns and cannons, to protect the Spanish trawlers operating in the area from the Canadian navy and coastguard. The diplomatic exchanges intensified and became heated. Spain demanded the immediate release of the trawler and the crew claiming Canada had no right to impound the boat or its crew who were Spanish nationals. They did however concede that the net used by the trawler was illegal under Canadian law, but they still maintained that they were fishing outside of Canada’s EEZ in international waters. Canada cited the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, which stated that they had the legal right to protect fish stocks that straddle their EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) and international waters. They asserted that Canadian law applied to all vessels fishing in these waters. The technicalities continued for and against continued.

Canada was further vindicated by an immediate inspection of the fishing catch. The Canadian claims were further strengthened when an independent inspection of the Estai reported that seventy to eighty percent of the turbot catch within the Spanish vessel were undersized or protected species. More damningly the trawler also possessed false bulkhead that revealed secret storage tanks that contained twenty-five tons of the heavily protected American plaice - which had been under a protective moratorium since 1992 due to declining stocks.

For Spain there was more damning evidence of illegal activity that was discovered aboard the trawler. The captain of the Spanish trawler had maintained two differing sets of logbooks recording his catch which was a favorite trick of corrupt skippers who needed to hide from the authorities the fact that they had caught over their quotas. This explains the desperate attempt by the Estai to cut its nets and outrun the Canadian Navy.

Europe is temporarily divided

The matter soon involved some of the wider international community. In fact, European countries were split over who they supported in the dispute. Britain and Ireland took Canada’s side. The rest of the European Union supported the Spanish. Meanwhile, the dispute had degenerated into churlish name-calling, with the Spanish claiming the Canadians had behaved like “pirates,” while Canada accused Spain of being “conservation criminals” and “cheats.” British Prime Minister John Major (1990-1997) risked turning the EU community against Britain by reiterating staunch support for the Canadians. When the issue of the EU bringing trade sanctions against Canada was proposed, Major made it clear that Britain would use its veto to block any such sanctions from going ahead.

Many British and Irish trawlers began flying the Canadian flag to show which side they supported in the dispute, which antagonized a European ally and member of NATO. A Cornish trawler, called Newlyn, was challenged by a French patrol boat whom the latter mistook as being a Canadian ship because it was flying the Canadian flag. The French backed down when they realized the ship was British and no further action was taken. What if that had been a Canadian trawler? Now France would have been at military odds with their NATO ally. Thankfully, the incident of the “Turbot War” took on a more proportionate response later, but the incident had a little more milage left in terms of rhetoric and naval mobilization before that resolution was found.

Canada later released Captain Gonzalez and the crew of the Estai, and, once the owners of the Spanish vessel had paid a fine of $500,000, the Canadians released the ship and the crew who then sailed back home. The concluded the matter of the Estai but the dispute continued.

Canada still refused to enter any negotiations until all foreign fishing vessels left the disputed area on the edge of their EEZ. Spain steadfastly ignored this and sent trawlers back to the disputed Canadian waters, this time accompanied by a Spanish navy patrol boat to protect them. Spain also began to prepare a more serious task force consisting of frigates and tankers to head to the area. It was no surprise that in late March talks between the two nations broke down. The naval detachments escalated as Canada began to increase the numbers of its naval and coast guard vessels across the edge of their EEZ, along with a higher number of surveillance air patrols. Brian Tobin also declared that he was prepared to use net cutters to sever the trawl nets of Spanish vessels (in the same way as the Icelandic Coast Guard did to British trawlers in the Cod Wars of the 1970s). It was also reported that Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had authorized his navy to fire at any armed Spanish Navy ships that sailed in or around Canada’s EEZ.

The pressure built up in Europe as they baulked at the very real possibility of actual conflict breaking out. The EU eventually put pressure on Spain to back down and agree to a deal. Despite Spanish objections they acquiesced, and a deal was reached on April 5. The result was a win for Canada. Spain was forced to leave the disputed zone and Canada’s right to eject foreign fishing vessels from the area, using military force, if necessary, was accepted. Under the deal, Canada refunded the $500,000 fine to the owners of the Estai. And with that, the Turbot War ended.

Conclusion

The incident has now been forgotten although it is certain to remain in the memories of the fishing community and the crew of the Estia. Canada understandably needed to protect her fisheries and her industry and showed the level of force that she was prepared to take - and indeed did so to the extent that the international community was also taken by surprise by her uncharacteristically aggressive response. This was understandable given the Grand Banks fisheries collapse just three years before. Canada still felt the severe economic backlash from hardship due to fish stocks collapsing and was not going to allow their turbot stocks to be decimated by foreign vessels in the same way as cod stocks previously. She deserved the favorable outcome.

While the dispute on the surface focused more on fishing rights, beneath the surface the tension from this affair tested for a brief time the relationships between NATO allies. Countries belonging to NATO and the larger European Economic Block were at odds with each other but despite this applying the actual word “war” to describe this affair does appear disproportionate. The level of military engagement was limited. Interestingly we are left with a question: how would NATO have dealt with a quarrel within its own internal structure? The matter has never been tested and hopefully never will be. Of course, the worst-case scenarios would have been highly unlikely as sensible heads would have prevailed over any impasse.

It does go to show that underneath the solidarity of an alliance like NATO there does exist on occasions underlying tensions and altercations but rarely have shots been fired in anger. In 1972 the Cod Wars again concerning fishing rights saw the UK and Iceland also disagree, but no shots were fired in anger and no forces were mobilized. However, the threat of Iceland withdrawing from NATO expedited a climb down by the UK. On both occasions it was not the Warsaw Pact that was the only cause of disquiet for this organization. It was a not so simple matter of troublesome fishing rights. Currently the NATO alliance is experiencing more stresses and strains as the US continues to press some of its European allies to increase spending levels and prove their commitment to the NATO alliance. Nothing has ever erupted and dissipated like the long-forgotten Turbot incident.

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Wings of Genius: The Wright Brothers and the Birth of an Aeroplane

On a blustery winter morning in December 1903, amid the dunes and salt-laden winds of North Carolina's Outer Banks, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, changed the course of human history. Orville and Wilbur Wright, driven by ingenuity, science, and relentless perseverance, achieved what millennia of dreamers and engineers had only imagined, the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft.

This is the story of the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk aeroplane, its meticulous development, groundbreaking construction, and those first exhilarating flights that transformed the world.

Terry Bailey explains.

The first flight of the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903.

Orville and Wilbur Wright, the sons of Milton Wright, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and Susan Catherine Koerner Wright, grew up in a household that encouraged curiosity, intellect, and mechanical tinkering. Born in Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur in 1867 and Orville in 1871, the brothers were raised in an environment that valued learning but offered few formal advantages. Their father's wide-ranging library and frequent travels exposed the boys to new ideas, while their mother, who had a mechanical aptitude and built small appliances, served as an early influence on their technical abilities.

Neither brother graduated from college. Wilbur, a bright student, had plans to attend Yale but abandoned them after a family move and a severe injury caused by an ice-skating accident. Orville, more mischievous and inventive as a child, dropped out of high school to start a printing business. Their first entrepreneurial venture involved publishing local newspapers and magazines using a homemade printing press. However, it was their fascination with bicycles, a booming technology of the 1890s that truly set them on the path to aviation.

In 1892, the brothers opened the Wright Cycle Company in Dayton, repairing and eventually building bicycles of their design. The shop funded their aviation experiments and provided them with vital mechanical experience, particularly in precision manufacturing, lightweight design, and balance skills that would later prove essential in building their aircraft. The act of designing bicycles taught the Wrights the importance of stability and control in motion, a concept they would carry into their pursuit of flight.

The success of their bicycle business allowed them to devote more time and money to the growing challenge of human flight. By combining practical mechanical skills with methodical scientific investigation, Orville and Wilbur Wright laid the foundation not just for their own success, but for the birth of modern aviation itself.

The dream takes flight

The dream of human flight was ancient, stretching back to the mythological story of Icarus offering metaphorical concepts of humankind's wish to fly, through to Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and designs to the eventual early balloonists. However, no one had yet solved the riddle of powered, controllable flight in a heavier-than-air machine. Inspired by German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal, the Wright brothers began experimenting in the late 1890s. Their approach was revolutionary: they believed that true flight could only be achieved through the mastery of three axes of control, pitch, roll, and yaw, rather than simply building a large wing and hoping for lift.

By 1900, the brothers had chosen the remote sandhills near the small fishing village of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as their testing ground. With steady winds, open terrain, and few obstacles, the site offered ideal conditions. The brothers would make annual trips to test their gliders and refine their designs.

Building the flyer

The Wright Flyer of 1903, the machine that would make history was the culmination of years of experimentation and data collection. The brothers were not just inventors but engineers and scientists in their own right. Dissatisfied with published aerodynamic data, they built their wind tunnel in 1901 to test over 200 wing shapes, collecting accurate data to refine lift and drag coefficients. This careful study set them apart from their contemporaries.

The 1903 Flyer, completed in the fall, was a biplane with a 12.3-metre (40-foot) wingspan and weighed about 274 kilograms (605 pounds) with the engine. Its skeletal frame was constructed of spruce wood and muslin fabric. Power came from a custom-built, 12-horsepower gasoline engine designed by their bicycle shop mechanic, Charlie Taylor. The brothers also designed and produced their propellers after discovering that not one of the existing designs was efficient enough; their twisted, airfoil-shaped blades were themselves miniature wings, providing thrust as they spun.

Control was achieved through a forward elevator for pitch, a rear rudder for yaw, and a unique wing-warping system for roll, achieved by twisting the wings using cables connected to a hip cradle in which the pilot lay prone.

The 17th December 1903 - A new epoch begins

After several setbacks, including a damaged propeller shaft and unfavorable weather the winds finally cooperated on the 17th of December. At around 10:35 a.m., Orville took the controls for the maiden flight while Wilbur steadied the Flyer's wing. In a dramatic moment captured in one of the most iconic photographs in history, the Flyer lifted off the ground and remained airborne for 12 seconds, covering 36.576 meters, (120 feet).

Though brief, it was an unprecedented triumph: the first powered, controlled, and sustained flight by a manned, heavier-than-air machine. The brothers would make three more flights that day, taking turns as pilots. The fourth and final flight, with Wilbur at the controls, lasted 59 seconds and covered 259.69 meters, (852 feet), demonstrating both control and increased stability. Just after the final flight, a gust of wind flipped and damaged the Flyer beyond repair. It never flew again, but its legacy had already taken wing.

Refinements and subsequent flights

The 1903 Flyer was a prototype, a successful proof of concept. Over the next two years, the Wright brothers returned to Dayton and focused on improving their design. In 1904 and 1905, they developed the Flyer II and Flyer III, which offered better stability and longer flight durations. These new versions were tested at Huffman Prairie, near Dayton. By 1905, the brothers had built a truly practical flying machine. The Flyer III, significantly improved in structure and control, could stay airborne for over half an hour.

On the 5th of October, 1905, Wilbur flew it for 39 minutes, covering 24 miles in 30 laps of the field, undeniably proving the potential of powered flight.

However, the world was slow to recognize their achievement. The Wrights, cautious about intellectual property and wary of competitors, kept many of their details under wraps. It wasn't until 1908, when they demonstrated their aircraft publicly in France and at Fort Myer, Virginia, that their genius received international acclaim.

A lasting legacy

The Wright brothers' accomplishment at Kitty Hawk was not an isolated marvel, it was the birth of modern aviation. Their scientific approach to flight laid the groundwork for aerospace engineering, and their fundamental understanding of control systems remains central to aircraft design even today. Their humble wooden flyer now hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, revered as a relic of one of humanity's greatest breakthroughs. What began with a 12-second flight in the dunes of Kitty Hawk sparked a century of innovation, shrinking the world, transforming economies, and carrying humankind into the sky and eventually beyond Earth's atmosphere.

"If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance."

Orville Wright

The dunes of Kitty Hawk have long since returned to quiet, but the echo of that December morning in 1903 still resonates across time, reminding us that innovation is born not only of daring but of persistence, intellect, and vision.

The story of the Wright brothers is not merely the tale of two inventors who built a flying machine, it is a testament to the boundless potential of human curiosity and determination. From a modest bicycle shop in Dayton to the windswept shores of Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur Wright transformed flight from myth into reality through a rare combination of mechanical intuition, scientific rigor, and sheer perseverance. Their success was not a matter of chance but the result of disciplined experimentation, bold innovation, and an unwavering belief in the power of their ideas.

In mastering the elusive elements of lift, propulsion, and control, the Wrights solved problems that had stymied humankind for centuries. Their Flyer did more than lift off the sand; it lifted the veil on a new era of possibility. The subsequent revolution in transportation, communication, and exploration owes its origins to that fragile machine and the minds that conceived it.

Today, as jetliners traverse the globe and spacecraft leave Earth's atmosphere, the seeds planted by the Wright brothers continue to bear fruit.

Their legacy lives on in every pilot's ascent, every satellite launch, and every child who dares to dream of flying. Their journey proves that with clarity of vision, courage to defy convention, and the patience to solve one problem at a time, humanity can rise to the challenge of the impossible.

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Notes:

Otto Lilienthal: The Glider King who inspired the age of flight

Otto Lilienthal, often called the "Glider King," was a German aviation pioneer whose groundbreaking work in the late 19th century laid the essential foundation for modern aeronautics. Born in 1848 in Anklam, Prussia, Lilienthal was a trained mechanical engineer with a passion for understanding the mechanics of bird flight. He spent years carefully observing storks in flight and conducting scientific measurements, believing that successful human flight could only come through the mastery of natural aerodynamic principles.

Between 1891 and 1896, Lilienthal constructed and tested more than a dozen different glider designs, becoming the first person in history to make repeated, well-documented flights in a heavier-than-air aircraft. His gliders typically featured monoplane or biplane wings made from fabric stretched over a lightweight wooden frame, which he launched by running down hills.

He made over 2,000 successful flights, some reaching distances of more than 250 meters. His experiments proved that controlled gliding was possible and that wing shape and stability were crucial to successful flight.

Lilienthal's most enduring legacy was not just his flights, but his meticulous scientific approach. He published extensive data on lift, drag, and wing camber that was invaluable to later aviation pioneers.

His 1889 book, Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst (Bird flight as the Basis of Aviation), became a seminal text in the field. Tragically, Lilienthal died in August 1896 after a crash caused by a stall during one of his flights. His final words—"Sacrifices must be made"—echo his belief in the inevitability of risk in pursuit of progress.

Among those who were deeply influenced by Lilienthal's work were Wilbur and Orville Wright, who considered him a guiding light in their quest for powered flight. The Wright brothers once said, "Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important." His courage, innovation, and scientific rigor earned him a permanent place in the history of aviation as the man who truly gave wings to human aspiration

Earlier attempts at powered flight

There are several recorded attempts at powered flight before the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk flight in December 1903, but not one fully met the criteria of a controlled, sustained, powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine with a pilot onboard, which is why the Wrights are still recognized as the first to achieve it.

Notable pre-Wright flight attempts

Clément Ader (France, 1890 & 1897)

Aircraft: Éole (1890) and Avion III (1897)

Claim: Ader reportedly flew about 50 meters (165 feet) in 1890 using a bat-like steam-powered aircraft.

Problems: The flight was uncontrolled, unverified, and not sustained.

His later government-funded attempt in 1897 failed publicly, and no successful, documented flights were made.

Conclusion: Ader's craft may have hopped off the ground, but lacked control and documentation.

Hiram Maxim (United Kingdom, 1894)

Aircraft: Large steam-powered test rig on rails

Claim: His enormous contraption briefly lifted off its tracks due to high power output.

Problems: The machine was tethered to rails and not free-flying.

It had no meaningful control system or sustained flight.

Conclusion: Important for development, but not a powered, free, controlled flight.

Gustave Whitehead (Germany / USA, 1901–1902)

Aircraft: No. 21 and No. 22

Claim: Whitehead allegedly flew over 800 meters (half a mile) in Connecticut in August 1901.

Evidence: Supporters cite newspaper articles and witness accounts.

No photographic proof exists of the flights.

Mainstream aviation historians (including the Smithsonian Institution) remain highly skeptical.

Conclusion: If true, it would predate the Wright brothers, but the lack of verifiable documentation or technical continuity makes it speculative.

Karl Jatho (Germany, August–November 1903)

Claim: Jatho conducted short powered hops near Hanover in mid-to-late 1903.

Problems: His aircraft reportedly lifted off for flights of just a few feet high and 60 meters long.

No effective control, and little documentation until decades later.

Conclusion: A promising effort, but not sustained or well-documented enough to challenge the Wrights.

Why the Wright Brothers are still first

The Wright brothers' flight on the 17th of December, 1903, at Kitty Hawk is still considered the first successful powered sustained flight of a heavier-than-air piloted machine.

Achievements

Controlled, yes

Sustained, yes

Powered, yes

Manned, yes

A heavier-than-air flight

It was carefully documented, photographed, witnessed, and followed by repeatable success. Most importantly, the Wright brothers also understood and developed control systems for pitch, yaw, and roll, which no earlier experimenter had solved completely.

Final Verdict

It is well known that others attempted powered flight before the Wright brothers. However, as indicated, not one of the other known attempts met all the technical and historical criteria of their first flight. The Wrights' breakthrough was not just a machine that flew but one that could be controlled, steered, and improved repeatedly over a number of ever-increasing time and distance flights, thus ushering in the true age of aviation.

Battle of Cowpens: A Turning Point in the Revolutionary War

The Battle of Cowpens has been called by many as "The perfect tactical battle.” It is also known as the battle that saved the South for the colonial army and the turning point of the United States' War for Independence. And perhaps it's fair to use all of these monikers to describe it.

However you want to describe it, it was a victory that the colonists needed in the worst way. After their army was almost completely destroyed at the Battle of Camden, the victory at Cowpens saw the defeat of a feared British commander and started the dominoes that led to George Washington's victory at Yorktown.

Greg Simbeck explains.

The Battle of Cowpens. By William Ranney, 1845.

War Shifts to the South

By the time of the Battle of Cowpens, the Patriots' southern forces were in disarray. British General Lord Charles Cornwallis brought the war to the South to take advantage of the large Loyalist population. These were individuals in the colonies who were still loyal to King George of England. 

And with loyalist assistance, the British had already captured Charleston, South Carolina, massacred colonial troops at the Battle of the Waxhaws, and dealt a crushing defeat to the Southern American army under General Horatio Gates at the Battle of Camden.

The only things that were holding the Patriot cause together in the South were the Overmountain Men's defeat of British Major Patrick Ferguson's forces at the Battle of Kings Mountain, and the harassment of partisans like Elijah Clark, Thomas Sumter, and the "Swamp Fox," Francis Marion. It was in this environment that General Nathanael Greene was appointed by General. George Washington on October 14, 1780, to take command of the Patriot effort in the South.

Greene Takes Command

The group that greeted Greene when he assumed command of the Southern Continental army at present-day Charlotte, North Carolina, on December 3, 1780, was low on morale, and a "ghost of an army" with little equipment, clothing, supplies, or the will to fight. The group consisted of 2.300 men, but only 1,500 were present that day, and far fewer were equipped to do battle. Provisions were low, and clothing was almost non-existent.

On his way down to North Carolina, Greene attempted to procure additional funds from the leaders of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, but they were all low on money and credit. In addition, moving an army from point to point in the South was hampered by a lack of roads and swamps that were hard to navigate. Next, Greene did the unthinkable.

He decided to split his army in two to play a war of harassment with the British until he could recruit more soldiers to fight a pitched battle.

Greene was fortunate that "The Old Waggoner," Brigadier General Daniel Morgan, had come out of retirement to aid the cause. Morgan earned his nickname when he drove wagons for the British during the French and Indian War. After striking an officer, he received 500 lashes, which would kill most men. From then on, he had a deep hatred for the British army. 

Green sent Morgan and 600 men to the Western part of South Carolina to threaten the British forts in the area. Cornwallis countered this move by dispatching Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton and his British Legion to destroy Morgan and his army. Tarleton was hated by the Colonials due to his ruthlessness and apparent massacre of forces at the Battle of Waxhaws.

Prelude to the Battle

Tarleton's scouts located Morgan's army five days before the Battle of Cowpens. His dragoons closed the gap on the colonial troops, and a skirmish between Morgan's cavalry under the command of Lt. Col. William Washington and a large group of Tories resulted in Washington's capture of 40 British sympathizers. On January 15, Morgan sent a message to Greene saying he didn't think he could defeat Tarleton with the number of troops he had.

But Tarleton's close proximity to his force changed his decision. As Tarleton closed in on Morgan and his troops at  "Hannah's" Cowpens, a frontier pasturing ground, with the Broad River at his back, Morgan decided that he and his troops would stand and fight at this location. Morgan spread word to the militia in the area to rendezvous at the Cowpens. Col. Andrew Pickens' militia began to arrive in camp on the eve of the battle.

The field at Cowpens was a half mile wide and one mile long. There were first-growth pines and hardwood, but no undergrowth. The field had a sloped ridge, which led to a shallow swale, then rose to another slightly higher ridge. Behind the highest point of this ridge was a deep gully that could obscure the location of Morgan's cavalry.

Battleplan and Disposition of Troops

Morgan used the topography of the field and his knowledge of Tarleton to create his battle plan. His troops would form three lines of battle. The first line would consist of skirmishers from the Virginia Militia, under the command of Majors. John McDowell and John Cunningham. Their orders were to fire two volleys and retreat to the second line, some 150 yards behind them.

Manning the second line was the militia of North Carolina, South Carolina & Georgia, commanded by Colonel Pickens. They were also ordered to fire two volleys and then repair back to the third line, 150 yards up the hill. Both of these lines would include some army veterans to help stabilize these militiamen.

The third line had 450 Continental troops, commanded by Lt. Col. John Howard. They would be flanked on both sides by 200 Virginia independent riflemen. Washington's cavalry would be hidden in the deep gully out of sight in reserve.

Morgan knew that the militia was prone to retreating when the fighting started. Still, with the Continentals behind them and the swollen, unpassable Broad River behind all of the troops, they would be forced to stand and fight. Morgan, knowing Tarleton's aggressive nature, would see this as a full retreat of the militia. He would send his dragoons in, thereby exposing them to the full force of the third line of Continentals.

There is still great debate about how many forces Morgan commanded at Cowpens. Morgan, in his official report, placed the number at 800. Tarleton would report back to Cornwallis that he faced opposition from 1,900 men. Consensus puts the number at around 1,000. Rough breakdown of his troops is as follows:

• Militiamen: 533

• Continentals: 237

• Cavalry: 80

• Independent Riflemen: 200

Tarleton's battle plan was simple and uncomplicated. The majority of his infantry would line up in a linear formation and head straight to Morgan. The flanks of this line would be protected by cavalry. The 250-man battalion of Scottish Highlanders commanded by Major Arthur MacArthur was the reserve corps. And Tarleton kept the 200-man cavalry contingent of his Legion ready to attack the Americans when they broke and ran.

Tarleton had the following contingent of 1,000 troops:

• British Regulars: 500

• Cavalry: 300

• Loyalists: 276

• Artillerymen: 24

Battle

Tarleton roused his troops at 2 am on January 17, 1981, and marched toward the Cowpens. He rode his troops hard, and forty-eight hours before the battle, the British ran out of food and water, and were operating on under four hours' sleep. His men arrived at the site of the battle hungry and tired. Morgan's men, having arrived at the Cowpens on January 13, were rested and well-fed.

So the battle would begin at 7 am as Tarleton and his army arrived at the Cowpens. His first battle line was from right to left: the Light Infantry Battalion, the British Legion, and the 7th Fusiliers, along with two small cannons. Protecting the flanks were 50 dragoons on each side. Their presence there would also threaten the colonists' flanks. Tarleton's reserves consisted of MacArthur's Highlanders and 200 horsemen from the British Legion.

Tarleton, in his desire to destroy Morgan and his troops, signaled for the attack to begin before all of his army was in formation. He then directed some of his dragoons to break up the skirmish line. The skirmishers followed their orders and fired their two volleys, and one group retired to the second line while the other fell into the third line alongside the Continentals.

Tarleton recalled the dragoons who had suffered some losses while simultaneously, his right wing started their charge, accompanied by cover from the two cannons, as they thought the Americans were in full retreat. The British were able to reform their line somewhat. When they came within 150 yards of Pickens and his militia, the militia fired a deadly volley into Tarleton's oncoming troops, injuring and killing several infantrymen and mounted legionnaires.

The militia fired another volley and dropped back to reform on the left side of Howard's line. The veteran British soldiers reformed their ranks and continued their advance. Tarleton, seeing another group of retreating Americans, released 50 dragoons to pick off the retreating colonists. In panic, some militiamen did not reform and instead kept running.

Morgan understood the gravity of the situation and sent Col. Washington's cavalry to disperse the dragoons, which they did. Meanwhile, Morgan and Pickens rallied most of the militia and they reformed directly behind Howard's line. Tarleton, believing that victory was at hand, called for the Highlanders to attack on the left while his cavalry would assault the American right.

A ferocious battle ensued with neither side giving ground. Morgan noticed that the Highlanders were starting to overlap Howard's right flank and called on Col. Washington to attack the Highlanders before they could overwhelm the Americans. At this point, someone in Morgan's command mistakenly called for a retreat.. Somehow, Morgan and Howard were able to reform the lineup on the rising slope. This was the turning point of the battle.

Once again, seeing the Americans retreat, Tarleton and his men could smell blood. They ran up the slope in a disorganized fashion, where they ran into a deadly volley from Howard's Continentals. This stopped the British in their tracks, and sensing their confusion, Col. Howard called for an all-out charge with bayonets. Before this, Tarleton had sent the rest of his cavalry into the fray.

But to their surprise, they received a volley from an unknown source. They tried to rally, but Pickens' men, who had fired the volley, charged Tarleton's cavalry, led by Morgan. With Washington sweeping down on the British from the right and Morgan and Pickens assaulting on the left, Tarleton and his men were caught in a double envelopment. This sent most of his force into a panic, and they retreated in haste, with many dropping their arms when they fled.

No matter what Tarleton and his officers said or did, they could not prevent the rout. Washington's cavalry swept down, capturing most of the fleeing soldiers and their two cannons. The Highlanders tried to hold back the forces of Morgan and Pickens, but with the loss of their cavalry support, they were soon overtaken by Col. Howard's men on the other side, and they broke in panic. Shortly thereafter, Maj. McArthur would surrender his sword to Pickens.

Tarleton, attempting to rescue the Highlanders, approached with 55 dragoons but were immediately intercepted by Col. Washington and his cavalry and the British were forced to leave the field. The Americans gave chase, and Washington and his force caught up to Tarleton and some of his men. Tarleton parried with Washington, but after seeing the futility of the situation, he shot Col. Washington's horse out from under him and rode off.

Aftermath

British casualties at the Battle of Cowpens were 110 killed, 229 wounded, and 800 captured or missing. American totals were 25 killed and 124 wounded. Daniel Morgan and his troops won a game-changing battle for the fledgling colonials. Military instructors and historians still study Morgan's tactical brilliance in the battle.

After that battle, Morgan would reunite with Greene in North Carolina to continue to fight the ongoing war in the Southern Theatre. Unfortunately for Morgan, back and other ailments forced him to leave the army and return to his Virginia home.

As for Tarleton and the British army in the South, he would continue to serve under Cornwallis, but his defeat at the Cowpens soiled his reputation and depleted the British army of valuable troops. The battle forced Cornwallis to chase Greene and Morgan into North Carolina, where he would engage in several small, inconclusive, but costly battles with the American forces. Tired and lacking supplies, he left for Yorktown, Virginia, to rest his troops and resupply.

As we all know, while at Yorktown, he was surrounded by George Washington's army, the French navy, and a French army contingent under the command of Lt. Gen. Comte de Rochambeau and was forced to surrender on October 19, 1781. This would be the last major conflict of the American Revolution. Two years later, both parties signed the Treaty of Paris, allowing the United States to finally gain its independence.

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New York’s Greatest Love Story

Here, we look at the story of Captain William Kidd, His Lovely and Accomplished Wife Sarah, and Pirate Mythology. Samuel Marquis explains.

Captain Kidd in New York Harbor. By Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

By a simple twist of fate that might more appropriately be called unbelievably bad luck, Captain William Kidd, my roguish ninth-great-grandfather, stands today as perhaps the most famous “pirate” of all time. A larger-than-life figure in his own lifetime and the original source of many of the enduring myths of cutlass-wielding sea robbers we now hold dear, the New York seafarer who helped build the original Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan has captivated the imaginations of children and adults alike for 325 years now. Indeed, without my salty ancestor there might never have been fictionalized swashbucklers of the likes of Long John Silver, Captain Hook, Captain Blood, or Captain Jack Sparrow, for Captain Kidd, more than any other sea rover during the Golden Age of Piracy (1650-1730), has done the most to immortalize the association of treasure maps, buried chests of gold, silver, and jewels, and macabre ghost stories—with pirates.

For four centuries and counting, he has been an American cultural icon and the international brand name for Piracy, Inc., with countless books, short stories, articles, ballads, and songs written about him, as well as rock bands, pubs, restaurants, streets, and hotels named after him. Because of his villainous reputation and pivotal role in the creation of buried-treasure mythology, he was a favorite of such literary titans as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as pirate artist Howard Pyle and prominent New Yorker and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Today, there are hundreds of websites on Captain Kidd, including more than a few with helpful tips on where plucky treasure hunters can find his long-lost fortune. In the U.S. alone, legend still places buried chests of Captain Kidd’s treasure in a multitude of locations not only in New York but Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine. Because of our enduring fascination with both the man and myth, he has secured his place in the pantheon of American folk heroes as our maritime Kit Carson and Jesse James.

However, while many people have heard of the swashbuckling “Captain Kidd the arch-Pyrate,” few know that he was not only a towering war hero as a lawful private naval commander, or privateer, in King William’s War between England and France (1689-1697), but one of early colonial New York’s most esteemed citizens, who hobnobbed with colonial governors and the merchant elite. But even less well known is that he was married to one of the city’s most dazzling socialites on Manhattan Island, Sarah Bradley Kidd, a larger-than-life figure in her own right. In fact, the romance between William and Sarah Kidd is one of the greatest New York love stories of all time.

ΨΨΨ

Born in 1654, William Kidd was an educated man who could read and write and trace his roots to a humble, upstanding, and loving Protestant Christian family hailing from Soham Parish, Cambridgeshire, England. However, he was also a restless and adventurous soul, who went away at an early age to sea as a cabin boy from the port town of Dundee, Scotland, and knew only the life of a mariner. Considering himself as much a Scotsman and colonial American as an Englishman despite his ultimate English lineage, he served as an English privateer against the Spanish, or “buccaneer” as they were called by the English in the West Indies, and occasional merchant seaman throughout the 1670s and 1680s. Trained in mathematics and navigation, he sailed extensively to and from the Caribbean, the American colonies, the metropole of London, and quite possibly the South Sea, which we know today as the Pacific Ocean.

Though free-spirited and bacchanalian, the buccaneers were licensed, government-sanctioned privateers not outlaw pirates plundering the ships of all nations indiscriminately. Privateering as a respectable seafaring profession for both patriotism and profit has existed at least as far back as the Roman Republic, and privateering ships and the privateersmen who manned them (both are referred to as “privateers”) served the function of an auxiliary, cost-free navy that were recruited, commissioned, and unleashed upon the enemy under government-issued letters of marque and reprisal when the resources of combatant European nations were overextended. During Kidd’s early career as a duly licensed Caribbean buccaneer, he plundered the Spanish on land and by sea along the coast of Central and South America and in the Gulf of Mexico and West Indies —not only to earn a decent living wage but to patriotically weaken Spain’s grip in the New World. But he was no outlaw pirate.

The buccaneers’ lifestyle was built upon a modern-like, egalitarian political framework. Their homegrown system of direct democracy resulted in a unique brotherhood defined by honor, trust, integrity, and lending a helping hand to those in need. It played a huge role in nurturing Kidd’s core democratic value system and well-known generosity. During his later seafaring career in the 1690s as a privateer commander, he employed African Americans, Native Americans, East Indians, and Jews as share-earning stakeholders aboard his ships-of-force, and he went out of his way to help seamen’s wives, parentless children, and his family relations and was heavily involved in community service.

By 1688, Kidd had made New York City his home and purchased several prime real-estate properties overlooking the pristine East River. He could afford properties that today are some of the most valuable real-estate holdings in the entire world because he had made a bundle of gold dust and silver coinage from his respectable privateering activities throughout the 1680s. As a private commerce raider taking richly laden enemy ships as prizes, he had earned far more than the average overworked and downtrodden Royal Navy or merchant deck hand, who typically netted a paltry £16 to £25 ($5,600 to $8,750 today) per annum.

In his own day, Kidd was described as a “hearty,” “lusty,” and “mighty” warrior of “unquestioned courage and conduct in sea affairs,” as well as a man of exceptional physical strength and skill in swordsmanship. Taking part in an occupation where violent hand-to-hand combat was the norm rather than the exception, the tall, robustly built, and pugnacious colonial English-American felt no qualms about killing a sworn enemy in close quarters with sharpened steel and snarling lead pistol shot. He was, in essence, a seventeenth-century U.S. Navy Seal.

History has not revealed to us the exact date or circumstances that the rough-and-tumble buccaneer William Kidd and the charming, comely, and very-much-married Sarah Bradley Cox first laid eyes upon one another—but circumstantial evidence points to the year 1688 as the likely starting point. In this historic year that marked the joint ascension of the Dutch Prince William of Orange and his English wife Princess Mary Stuart to the English throne in the Glorious Revolution, thereby securing a Protestant succession, Kidd was thirty-three years of age and had recently made New York his home port. Meanwhile, at this time, the woman who would soon be the love of his life was an eighteen-year-old English mistress, who had attained elevated social station through her marriage to an elderly, wealthy flour merchant and city alderman of Dutch descent named William Cox. By hook and by crook, William Kidd and the “lovely and accomplished” Sarah would find a way to be together as far more than just friends—while she was married to William Cox.

Historians have long been intrigued with Sarah Bradley, the woman who stood resolutely by Captain Kidd when he was fighting for his life as an accused pirate, and yet little is known about her. Born in England in 1670, she was brought to New York in 1684 at the tender age of fourteen by her father Captain Samuel Bradley Sr., along with her two younger brothers, Samuel, Jr. and Henry. Sarah’s family was by no means rich, but the recently widowed Captain Bradley was wealthy enough to pay for the passage for himself and his three children, and Sarah brought with her a substantial 114-ounce silverware collection, a sign of modest wealth and substance at the time.

To secure his daughter’s future and a position in New York polite society for the Bradley family, within a year of their arrival to the New World the captain partnered with the wealthy merchant William Cox and arranged a marriage between his daughter and the anglicized Dutchman. Sarah and Cox, a man two and a half times her age, were married on April 17, 1685, but he died a mere four years later, on August 1689, in a bizarre drowning accident off Staten Island. At the time of Cox’s death, Kidd was in the West Indies fighting the French in King William’s War as a privateer and making a name of himself as a combat hero. Within a year after Sarah had met Kidd in 1688, the two had begun a clandestine romantic relationship that resulted in a son born out of wedlock several months after Cox’s death. Due to the moral and religious constraints of the age, the future Mr. and Mrs. Captain Kidd gave their infant son William up for adoption to Kidd’s aunt Margaret Ann Kidd Wilson living in Calvert, Maryland.

Unfortunately for Sarah, following Cox’s drowning, his estate was swiftly tied up in bureaucratic red tape by Jacob Leisler, the acting lieutenant governor of New York province, and his political cronies at City Hall, who desperately needed money to finance William III’s expensive war against France. The German-born, militant Calvinist Protestant was a New York merchant, former militia officer, and the leader of Leisler’s Rebellion. After seizing power in June 1689 in the name of William and Mary and the Glorious Revolution, Leisler held office as acting lieutenant governor until March 1691, when Kidd returned to New York to play a pivotal role in his removal from power and to take Sarah as his lawfully wedded wife.

Due to her difficult circumstances and with Kidd away fighting the French in the Caribbean, Sarah briefly took a second husband, a Dutch merchant named John Oort, in 1690. Sarah and Oort were married less than a year when he died suddenly and unexpectedly on May 14, 1691, of unknown causes—and two days later she married Captain Kidd. As a two-time widow, Sarah would have been left alone again at age twenty and heavily in debt, but before Oort’s body had even gone cold she and Kidd tied the knot and thus began one of the New York’s greatest, most romantic, and swashbuckling marriages of all time.

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The wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Captain Kidd was celebrated on May 16, 1691, the same day that Jacob Leisler was hung and beheaded for treason. The ceremony took place inside the Dutch-built Fort William church at the southern tip of Manhattan Island near present-day Battery Park, where Anglican services were held at the time. Following his return to New York in early March, Captain Kidd’s star had risen quickly as a lawful privateer and community leader. He had swiftly secured a position in the inner circle of the city’s economic and political elite by playing a key role in taking down Leisler, who had proven to be a corrupt, incompetent, and despotic colonial administrator. In fact, the war hero Captain Kidd was so highly regarded as a member of New York polite society that the municipal clerk listed the sea captain’s occupation as “Gent” for gentleman instead of “mariner” on the marriage license. That must have brought a grin to the rough-and-tumble buccaneer who had pillaged and plundered all across the Caribbean and Spanish Main.

Although their affection for one another was the driving force behind their marriage, their love match proved to be beneficial to both parties and Kidd brought Sarah immediate financial security. Not only did he possess several valuable real-estate properties from his privateering cruises over the past two decades, he owned his own formidable 16-gun privateering and merchant ship, the Antigua, given to him by Christopher Codrington, the English governor of the Leeward Islands, as a reward for his bold military service on behalf of the Crown in the Caribbean. He had also been rewarded by New York’s royal governor, Richard Sloughter, and the governor’s council with a substantial amount of money for his privateering efforts in forcing Leisler’s surrender and for a libel case involving the merchant ship Pierre, which had been unlawfully condemned by Leisler in Vice-Admiralty court.

That summer, Captain Kidd headed out to sea once again with a commission signed by Governor Sloughter to battle French privateers sneaking down from Canada to wreak havoc in Long Island Sound and along the New England coast. When he returned to New York in August with an enemy warship as a prize along with her valuable cargo, his reunion with Sarah was a joyous one. Hundreds of New Yorkers turned out with her, her father Captain Bradley, and her brothers Samuel and Henry from the docks, rocky coastline, and oyster-shell-strewn beaches to greet the heroic seafaring commander guarding their coasts from French attack and capturing enemy prizes.

Soon after his return, Kidd made the transition from serving “His Majesty’s forces and good subjects” as a licensed privateer to full-time merchant sea captain. The former buccaneer, now closing in on his thirty-seventh birthday, agreed to “settle down” at the request of his wife, who wanted him to spend more time at home. In a chauvinistic age when a husband could legally beat his spouse with no consequences, Kidd was passionately in love with Sarah and not only listened to her but dutifully obeyed her. As a self-made gentleman hobnobbing with the wealthiest New Yorkers along with his young socialite wife, he now turned away from dangerous privateering missions and towards lucrative commerce on short, reasonably safe trading voyages to the English and Dutch West Indies he knew so well.

For the next five years, the Kidds lived the most placid and domestically fulfilling part of their lives. During this halcyon time, William and Sarah enjoyed the birth of their two daughters, Elizabeth in 1692 and little Sarah in 1694, and they were finally together much more than they were apart. It was during these years that they became Manhattan’s most dazzling married couple.

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Though William and Sarah had been born mere “commoners” in England, by the fall of 1694 they were not only living the American Dream but wining and dining with the Philipses, Nicolls, Van Cortlandts, Emotts, Bayards, Livingstons, Grahams, and others from Manhattan’s most well-respected families. Enjoying his ongoing success as a Caribbean trader and having recovered Sarah’s rightful inheritance with the settling of John Oort’s estate, the widely known, well-liked, and reputable Captain Kidd stood as one of the wealthiest citizens in the city, with his and Sarah’s individual net worth at last combined and under his control as head of household. As a New York man of affairs, he had even recently served as a jury foreman on a high-profile legal trial, and he and Sarah continued to be part of the “English” inner circle in the anglicizing city in the aftermath of Leisler’s Rebellion.

New York at this time was as progressive and cosmopolitan a metropole as existed in the New World, just as it is today. Although the original Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam remained predominantly Dutch in culture and had undergone significant anglicization since the English conquest of 1664, it was the most ethnically and religiously diverse English colony in North America. English language, churches, and settlers made up only a portion of a society that was more than half Protestant Dutch and included French Huguenots, Walloons (French-speaking Protestants from southern Netherlands), Scots, Irish, Swedes, Finns, Germans, Norwegians, Jews, and a large population of Africans, some of whom were free. The mixture of orthodox and moderate Calvinists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, dissident Baptists, and Lutherans to go along with a smattering of Dunkers, Quakers, Jews, Catholics, and African conjurors brought with it a religious freedom unmatched anywhere else in the American colonies. This ethnic and religious diversity encouraged a plethora of viewpoints and made New York America’s first grand experiment in multicultural democratic republicanism.

In the colonial era, the waterfront along the East River separating New York City from Long Island was Manhattan Island’s most coveted real estate and the political and merchant elite lived in the South Ward, Dock Ward, and East Ward. William and Sarah lived with their two daughters in a sprawling waterfront home at 119-121 Pearl Street in the multicultural, polyglot, and eclectic neighborhood of the East Ward. The Kidds’ combined properties included what are today some of the most expensive real estate holdings on the planet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars: 90-92 and 119-121 Pearl Street; 52-56 Water Street; 25, 27, and 29 Pine Street; and the Saw Kill farm in Niew Haarlem at today’s 73rd Street and the East River.

Their luxurious Dutch-style, brick mansion at 119-121 Pearl Street was not only located in one of the most desirable waterfront locations in the city but was one of the largest and finest homes in the entire province. Built two generations earlier by the wealthy Dutch merchant Govert Lockermans, the three-story house overlooking the East River had a high peaked gable roof, scrolled dormers, fluted chimneys, and was filled with handsome and abundant furnishings, including a Turkeywork carpet and chairs, four feather beds, an abundance of silver plate, and Sarah’s homemade English coat of arms. To top it all off, the entrepreneurial sea captain had a special rooftop crane to load and unload trade goods and supplies into a storage room on the third floor.

The Kidd family’s view of colonial New York City, the Great Dock, and Harbor must have been a stupendous sight to behold. Across the East River, in Brooklyn and the verdant green farmland of Long Island stretching beyond, they looked out onto more than a dozen Dutch windmills spinning in the ocean breezes. A stone’s throw from their front door, they listened to playfully barking seals and the soothing melody of seawater lapping gently against the pebble beach stretching north of the Great Dock. Looking toward the sky, they gazed up daily at immense flocks of seagulls and bluebills soaring above fisherman waist-deep in the water unloading nets filled with oysters.

In the afternoons when their daughters were napping, William and Sarah would take pleasant strolls along the East River, down oyster-shell-littered Pearl and Dock Streets, and also along Broad Way, Wall Street, and Beaver Street, past the affluent three-story houses of red, yellow, and brown Holland brick with fancy glass windows and high peaked gabled roofs. The couple would also take Elizabeth and little Sarah to the marketplace the original Dutch inhabitants called Het Markvelt. The commercial district a stone’s throw from their house was always bustling with people buying, selling, and unloading goods. To seaward, the Great Dock hummed with industry and the Kidds looked out every day at hardy White and Black men loading and unloading pipes of Madeira wine, stacks of animal skins, barrels of flour, piles of lumber, crates of munitions, kegs of gunpowder, and casks of dry goods amidst a forest of furled masts.

When the summer heat became oppressive, they would take their daughters up the East River to the cool shade of the family’s 19¼-acre Saw Kill farm located north of the city in New Harlem, where Sarah’s father lived. With their young girls in tow, they took pleasant strolls and picnicked on the spacious rural property amidst green pastures, freshwater ponds, and woodlands of majestic copper beech, oak, cherry, and birch in what is today northern Central Park.

At this time, in the sixth year of King William’s War, there was an explosion of piracy in the Indian Ocean, and New York overnight became the foremost pirate enclave in the New World. The Red Sea Men, as they were known, were some of the most audacious freebooters of all time, preying on the shipping of the Great Mughal of India, Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir I. The Great Mughal’s richly-laden ships sailed annually in late summer from Surat, India, to Mocha and Jeddah on the Arabian Peninsula, where the devout travelers rested before continuing to the holy city of Mecca by foot to pray and trade before Allah in the sacred pilgrimage known as the hajj. On both the outgoing and return voyage to India, the fleet was the richest prize in the East and a magnet for the Red Sea Men sailing out of primarily New York and Newport, Rhode Island, in the American colonies.

Although Captain Kidd would not even entertain the possibility of becoming a Red Sea Man and going a-pirating, it couldn’t have been easy for him to turn his back on so much wealth and temptation. Along with Sarah, he saw the signs of the astronomical riches reaped from the Indo-Atlantic “sweet trade” every day along the wharves, in the shops, taverns, and warehouses, and in the colonial mansions of his wealthy merchant friends and the governor himself. Most importantly, when he looked within his own elevated social circle, he must have wondered what his and Sarah’s life might be like if he did cross the line into piracy.

When he was in port, he and Sarah attended sumptuous parties hosted by Governor Benjamin Fletcher (1692-1698) and the Philipses, Bayards, Nicolls, van Cortlandts, DeLanceys, Emotts, Grahams, and other high-society movers and shakers. At these fashionable New York galas, the men typically dressed in silk waistcoats with jeweled buttons, full wigs, and lace cuffs, while the women wore the latest fashions from London: narrow-waisted, floor-length, bright-colored dresses of silk or satin, with a slight décolletage in the front and padded bustles, which plumped out the backside. They talked about the French and Indian attacks up north in King William’s War and how New Yorkers were secretly providing a safe haven for New Englanders accused of witchcraft; but what dominated the conversations were the stories of treasure chests full of gold, silver, and precious jewels and bales of rich silks pouring into the colonies from the Red Sea trade. In the Roaring 1690s, New York was one of the wealthiest colonies in the Atlantic world through a combination of legal shipping and the pillaging of the Mughal Empire. Plundering the rich Muslim heathens of the East was widely accepted by colonial Americans since it brought desperately needed gold and silver specie into the colonies, thereby helping overcome England’s draconian Navigation Acts that stifled American commerce and the lack of a New World banking system.

By the spring of 1695, Kidd’s ears had been filled for two years with tales of the fantastic riches there for the taking in the East Indies, relayed to him by both returning Red Sea Men and mega-merchants who traded with the pirates of Madagascar, like Frederick Philipse, with whom he and popular Sarah regularly socialized. Hearing these almost mythical stories, at some point he decided he wanted to be more than just a merchant captain making runs for sugar, spices, and rum to the West Indies and part-time privateer pestering the French in local waters.

There was just one catch: he absolutely refused to become an outlaw pirate. So, he made the decision to sail to London on a trading voyage and while there procure a privateer commission directly from the Crown. It was a combination of the feverish excitement generated by the Red Sea trade, his advancing age, his undying patriotism, and his lust for adventure that drove him to pursue his dream at this late stage of his maritime career. He loved Sarah and his daughters and was very happy in his marriage. He enjoyed his new house, his wealth, his wide circle of friends and colleagues, and his stature as a New York society gentleman. But he wanted to take one last shot at a grand adventure, perhaps to recapture the freedom and excitement of his buccaneering days in the Caribbean. More importantly, he wanted to be something more, to accomplish something grandiose and magnificent, and he wanted to do it in the service of king and country. Given the inherent dangers, Sarah tried to talk him out of the enterprise. Although Kidd was passionately in love with his wife, listened to her, and heeded her wise counsel, this time he overruled her.

With Sarah’s eventual blessing, he procured a letter of recommendation from his high-powered friend James Graham, attorney general of New York and protégé of Sir William Blathwayt, the secretary of war and a wheeler-dealer in imperial patronage in London. Graham laid out the case to Blathwayt for Kidd to be awarded a royal privateering commission based upon his extensive skill as a mariner, his bravery, and his devotion to duty as a patriot in King William’s War. “He is a gentleman that has done his Majesty signal service [and] has served long in the fleet & been in many engagements & of unquestioned courage & conduct in sea affairs,” wrote Graham. “He has been very prudent and successful in his conduct here and doubt not but his fame has reached your parts and whatever favor or countenance your Honor shows him I do assure your Honor he will be very grateful.”

In early June 1695, with his letter from Attorney General Graham in his pocket that he hoped would open doors to imperial sponsorship, Kidd bid a teary-eyed farewell to Sarah, their two daughters, and his father-in-law Captain Samuel Bradley Sr., and set off for London in the Antigua with a cargo full of goods to sell and to make a name for himself as a Crown privateer. It proved to be a huge mistake and he should have listened to his sensible and loving wife.

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Upon reaching London, Kidd was recruited by a group of wealthy Whig financial backers to carry out a dangerous privateering mission that would make King William III and themselves a bundle of money but was of questionable legality. Based on his sterling reputation, the investors issued him a government commission to fight the French and another to capture Red Sea pirates in the Indian Ocean and they constructed a 34-gun warship, the Adventure Galley, to his specifications. Kidd’s government sponsors included not only the king as a silent partner but Lord Bellomont, a powerful Whig House of Commons member and soon-to-be royal governor of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire; Lord John Somers, Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Great Seal; Charles Talbot, the Duke of Shrewsbury, Secretary of State; Admiral Edward Russell, First Lord of the Admiralty and Treasurer of the Royal Navy; and Henry Sidney, the Earl of Romney, Master General of Ordnance. Some of the most powerful men in all of England, the five lords of London who served as his business partners were members of the Whig Junto that administered the English government, and they had all been early and steadfast supporters of William and Mary in the royal couple’s 1688 ascent to the English throne in the Glorious Revolution.

Kidd initially said no to the command of the risky venture. But Lord Bellomont threatened to have him arrested, to seize the Antiguafrom him so he could not sail back to New York, and to have his seamen press-ganged away from him by the Royal Navy if he didn’t agree to command the voyage. Not only that, but Bellomont warned that he would “oppress” him in New York when he took office as governor of the province. Kidd backed down. Confidant in his abilities and knowing firsthand from the streets of New York the untold riches awaiting him in the East, he decided to carry out the difficult mission rather than make enemies of Bellomont and the other unspeakably powerful English noblemen, who offered him further assurances “of their support and his impunity from criminal prosecution.”

Kidd’s reluctance to command the expedition was well-founded, for his 1696-1699 voyage to the Indian Ocean turned out to be an epic disaster and turned him overnight into one of the most notorious criminals of all time. By the fall of 1697, a year into the expedition, he and his crew had still not encountered a single enemy French or pirate ship that could be seized as a legitimate prize and they had suffered one disaster after another, including raging storms, a tropical disease outbreak, severe thirst and starvation, and repeated attacks by the East India Company, Portuguese, and Moors (Muslim East Indians). Increasingly desperate to earn some money under their standard “no prey, no pay” privateering contract, a large number of his New York and New England seamen wanted to become full-fledged pirates themselves and plunder the ships of all nations to garner a big score. However, the law-abiding Captain Kidd would not allow any violations of his two legal Crown commissions.

While quelling a mutiny, Kidd accidentally killed his unruly gunner, William Moore, a man with two prison sentences to his name, by smacking him in the head with a wooden bucket. Though he felt badly about the incident, many of his men never forgave him and the simmering discontent aboard the Adventure Galley grew. Following the mutiny, Kidd seized two Moorish ships, the Rouparelleand Quedagh Merchant, that presented authentic French passports and together provided a valuable haul of gold, silver, silks, opium, and other riches of the East. However, while these wartime seizures were 100% legal and he himself never once committed piracy in India, he soon thereafter looked the other way during the capture of a Portuguese merchant galliot that presented official papers of a nation friendly to England (at least marginally).

His seamen sailing separately from his 34-gun galley in the captured Rouparelle seized from the Portuguese vessel two small chests of opium, four small bales of silk, 60 to 70 bags of rice, and some butter, wax, and iron. It was a paltry haul, and if Kidd hadn’t later become such an infamous figure, few would have cared that he had turned a blind eye to his unruly sailors from a separate ship plundering a few foodstuffs from a Catholic merchant vessel crewed by Moors. However, it was technically piracy even though Kidd wasn’t directly involved in the capture. He only allowed the seizure to placate his mutinous crew, which had by this time divided into “pirate” and “non-pirate” factions aboard his three separate privateering ships; and in reprisal for the damage inflicted upon the Adventure Galley and serious injuries sustained by a dozen of his crewmen from two Portuguese men-of-war that had attacked him without provocation months earlier.

The reason that Captain Kidd became such a notorious figure overnight was because of the anti-piracy propaganda campaign of the English Crown and East India Company. Because England had failed to arrest and capture the most dastardly and successful pirate, the Englishman Henry Every, following his 1696 rampage of the Great Mughal’s treasure fleet, the authorities made the colonial American privateer Kidd out to be a Public Enemy #1, even though King William III and his greedy Whig leaders in England had commissioned him as their personal pirate-hunter to earn gargantuan profits for themselves. Because Kidd followed in the wake of Henry Every and the fiercely territorial East India Company considered him an “interloper” in their waters, the English authorities created Treasure Island-like yarns of a roguish, treacherous, and mean-spirited Kidd who never existed because they were unable to capture the real pirate Every and needed a scapegoat.

Despite the numerous challenges he faced during his perilous voyage and a full-scale mutiny because he refused to go all-in on piracy, Kidd miraculously made it back to the American colonies from Madagascar with around £40,000 ($14,000,000 today) of treasure in his hold and the French passports that proved he had taken the Rouparelle and Quedagh Merchant legally in accordance with his commission. However, when he and his small band of loyalists who hadn’t mutinied reached Antigua on April 2, 1699, they received heartbreaking news. The Crown, at the urging of the East India Company, had sent an alarm to the colonies in late November 1698 declaring them pirates and ordering an all-out manhunt to capture and bring them to justice. Kidd decided to try to present his case for his innocence and obtain a pardon from his lead sponsor in the voyage, Lord Bellomont, who had by this time had taken office as the royal governor of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

But his first priority before sailing to Boston was to make arrangements with his lawyer, James Emott, to reunite with his beloved wife Sarah and their two young daughters in Long Island Sound.

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On June 25, 1699, Sarah took in the sight of her husband standing at the railing of his recently acquired ship, the St. Antonio, anchored off the eastern end of craggy Block Island, Rhode Island. He looked strikingly dashing in his waistcoat with nine diamond buttons and chestnut-colored wig parted in the middle and hanging to his shoulders. A moment later, she and her daughters were helped aboard the sloop by Captain Kidd and his seamen. Reunited for the first time in two years and nine months, Sarah gave her husband a welcome-home embrace befitting a man who had risked everything to return home to her and their daughters and clear his good name. The girls joined them in the hugging as the crew hauled up the belongings. Kidd squeezed Elizabeth and little Sarah tight and gave them presents of sugar candy. For the next several hours, the deck of the St. Antonio was the scene of fiddle music and a bountiful feast of roasted lamb and pig, fresh oysters, cabbage, salt, sweetbreads, and much hard cider.

Six days later, Captain Kidd and his reunited family sailed into the Puritan stronghold of Boston, the husband-and-wife team deciding to roll the dice with Bellomont, who by this time had promised his business partner an official pardon in writing. Though much of Kidd’s lawfully captured silver and gold, jewels, and bale goods remained with him aboard the St. Antonio, he had safeguarded a significant portion of his booty with his good friend Captain Thomas “Whisking” Clark, a New York political leader and church vestryman who had picked up Sarah, Elizabeth, and little Sarah and sailed them to Block Island; his old Rhode Island privateer friend, the war hero Captain Thomas Paine; and John Gardiner, the proprietor of Gardiner’s Island in Long Island Sound. He had told Sarah about these critical reserves before they sailed for Boston in case things went badly with Bellomont, whom they both did not fully trust.

It is these unusual precautions that have contributed mightily to the longstanding myth of Captain-Kidd-the-Treasure-Chest-Burying-Scoundrel—with treasure hunters still flocking today to the U.S. East Coast, Caribbean, Madagascar, and even the South China Sea in search of Captain Kidd’s long-lost treasure. The irony is that in 1699 these treasure-burying antics that “would forever affect popular culture’s view of piracy” were performed solely because the captain and his astute wife didn’t trust Kidd’s principal business partner, Lord Bellomont, the titled English earl who had strong-armed him into commanding the fateful voyage and promised to have his back.

They were right not to trust Bellomont, for five days after arriving to Boston and undergoing three separate interrogations by the royal governor, Kidd and his loyal crew members were arrested and thrown in the Boston City Jail. The Crown authorities swiftly seized all of his gold, silver, bale goods, and other assets as well as coins, silverware, and personal items belonging to Sarah and her housekeeper. Sarah was crestfallen, for she now had nothing to live on in unfamiliar Boston or to bail her husband out of jail. She pleaded with Bellomont not to take her and her housekeeper’s rightful possessions that had nothing to do with the captain, but the gouty English earl considered all three of them criminals in their own right. His primary objective was to keep Kidd under wraps and get his hands on all of the money and goods without colonial officials asking too many questions. He hoped to simultaneously secure the treasure for himself and his fellow Whig lords to alleviate his heavy debts and to protect himself and his fellow investors from the newly ascendant Tories, who had targeted the Whig Junto over the Kidd affair, which at this point was the top news story of the day.

For the next eight months, Captain Kidd was incarcerated with heavy 16-pound iron shackles around his ankles in solitary confinement in atrocious Stone Prison. Throughout the fall and winter, Sarah remained in Boston with her daughters, fighting for her and her husband’s rights under the law. With the help of her Boston lawyer and the deputy postmaster, she prepared legal petitions requesting prison conjugal visitation rights, the return of her husband’s clothing seized by Bellomont, and the restoration of her and her housemaid’s belongings illegally taken by the governor. However, Bellomont refused every single one of her petitions and Sarah only obtained visitation rights by appealing to the charity of the sympathetic jailkeeper, without the governor knowing.

With no income to feed herself, her daughters, or housekeeper or to help her husband locked up in Stone Prison, and with Bellomont having reneged on his promise of protection, she had no alternative but to turn to sketchy characters to retrieve her husband’s stashed-away gold. But before the New York she-merchant, socialite, and now fallen woman could take charge of her family situation, she was arrested and thrown in the dank Boston City Jail by order of Bellomont. In seizing her, the English earl had truly sunk to a new low, for he had no reason to toss her into the slammer except to intimidate her. However, she was able to dictate a note from her jail cell for delivery to Kidd’s friend Captain Paine, asking for “twenty-four ounces” of the gold her husband had left with him and instructing him to keep the rest in his custody until she, or her husband, called upon him again. The gold was soon retrieved from Paine, the privateer hero of Rhode Island, by a veteran sea dog named Captain Andrew Knott. Now Sarah had money again for lawyer fees, bribes, and meals for her husband, who for nearly three weeks now had been subsisting on mostly bread and water.

During Kidd’s incarceration in Boston, the husband-and-wife team hatched various escape plots during Sarah’s sporadic conjugal visits under Bellomont’s nose. During one such visit on February 5, 1700, talking in whispers so as not to be overheard by the jailers, they put together a bold jailbreak plan. Two days earlier, the fourth-rate warship HMS Advice, captained by Robert Wynn, dropped anchor in Boston Harbor. The ship destined to convey Captain Kidd to London for trial had completed the Atlantic crossing in five short weeks and, after refitting, would be ready to load him up for the return journey back to England, along with more than thirty other “pirate” prisoners and £14,000 worth of treasure ($4,900,000 today) recovered by Bellomont. When Sarah learned of the arrival of Wynn and the Advice, she went immediately to visit her husband in Stone Prison. She knew their time was running out and they had to make their move.

The critical first part of the escape plan called for Sarah to sweet talk or bribe the jailor to remove Kidd’s irons that had been chaffing his ankles for the past six months. Kidd contributed to the scheme by complaining about the pain in his legs from the heavy irons. It is not certain what combination of pleading, bribery, or sweet talking was utilized, but on Wednesday, February 8, the jailer took off Kidd’s iron shackles to alleviate his discomfort.

Now the escape plan entered a second phase. Sarah’s job was to find a way to enable Kidd to physically sneak out of his solitary confinement cell. The two most promising alternatives were filing through the heavy iron bars or picking the lock, so that he could slip out undetected late at night. There was no time to spare with the HMS Advice having arrived.

They made plans to escape on February 13, five days in the future. This would give Sarah time to make all the arrangements for the jailbreak. At this point, the best option seemed to be smuggling in tools so that he could saw through the iron bars. The captured Red Sea pirate James Gilliam, who had sailed from St. Mary’s to America as a deckhand with Kidd after the pirate-faction had mutinied, had used an iron crowbar and metal files during his attempted escape back in December; however, he had made too much noise and was caught before cutting through the final iron bar at his cell window. Sarah’s second option was to persuade the jailer, whom she knew was a considerate man since he had let her husband out of his irons, to set Kidd free for a price.

Unfortunately for the husband-and-wife team, Bellomont sent an official to check on Captain Kidd at this time and when the gouty earl learned that his fallen protégé was unshackled and moving about his cell, he became irate. He soon thereafter sent the high sheriff and armed deputies to Stone Prison to forcibly collect Kidd and load him onto the Advice. By the time Sarah awoke at the seaside inn she was staying at with Elizabeth and little Sarah, her husband had been dragged out of his solitary confinement cell and shackled aboard the Royal Navy prison ship. It pained her that he had spent nearly eight months in Boston’s two toxic lockups without being charged with a single crime, but she was crestfallen when she learned that he would now be shipped off for a probable show trial and grisly hanging in London without the opportunity to bid a proper farewell to her and their daughters.

Upon learning that her husband was held captive aboard the Advice, Sarah tried to visit him so she could say goodbye. But Bellomont would not allow any visitors. Saddened but undaunted, she sought out Captain Wynn, hoping that he might be more sympathetic. She was able to introduce herself one frigid afternoon shortly before the ship’s departure, just as he was leaving the governor’s mansion.

She expressed her disappointment and distress to the Royal Navy commander that Bellomont was not allowing her to visit her husband aboard the HMS Advice, and especially that she and her daughters were being deprived the right to bid him a proper farewell. She then made a polite request. Despite Bellomont’s ban, could Wynn find it in himself to grant her and her daughters just five minutes to say goodbye to their husband and father, and to send him off with their affection and a letter to remember them by? He was innocent, she pointed out, and he deserved the right to say farewell to his family, who he might never have the chance to see again.

Since the arrival of the Advice to Boston Harbor, she and her husband had decided that it would be best if she, Elizabeth, and little Sarah return to New York and remain in America if he was put aboard the prison ship to be sent to London for trial. Not only did he want to ensure their safety, he couldn’t bear the thought of his wife and daughters seeing him disgraced in irons in atrocious Marshalsea or Newgate Prison, or to see him on trial for his life before a courtroom of hostile English judges and prosecutors eager for his execution and salivating at the prospect of his gruesome public hanging.

Though Captain Wynn appears to have been a reasonable man, his fear of provoking Bellomont’s rage was too great for him to fulfill her modest request. He regretfully informed her that he had been ordered by the royal governor to hold Captain Kidd as a “close prisoner” with no visitors or letters; and that he could not violate his military orders by allowing her to visit or deliver a message to her husband, despite the fact he was under heavy guard.

Unwilling to allow it to end there when her husband’s life was on the line, Sarah reached into a leather pouch, pulled out a golden ring, and pressed it into the Royal Navy officer’s hand. Wynn maintained that he could not accept gifts and attempted to return the ring to her.

But Sarah refused to take it back and pleaded with the captain to keep it. All she asked in return was that Wynn be kind to her husband during their extended sea voyage to London. However, he once more objected, stating that he was unable to accept any presents from prisoners or their loved ones.

Feeling powerful emotions sweeping through her, she took a step forward and gazed directly into the eyes of the Royal Navy officer. “Captain, I must insist you keep the ring as a token until we meet again,” she said, struggling to hold back the tears. “On the day you bring my husband back to me.”

And with that Sarah Kidd walked away and into the pages of history. Not yet thirty years old, she had stood resolutely by her man for the past nine months, sailing with him and their daughters aboard the St. Antonio and living like Hester Prynne in a repressive Puritan citadel that was utterly alien to her. Like her husband Captain Kidd, she had been abandoned by everyone once she became tainted and expendable, including her Boston lawyer who went over to Lord Bellomont, and she had even done a stint in the atrocious City Jail. Yet never once during the interminably long, bitterly cold, and desperately lonely winter did she waver in her support of her beloved husband, or in her belief in his innocence.

A day or two later, on March 10, 1700, the HMS Advice set sail from Boston Harbor for London and the trial of the century, while Sarah returned with Elizabeth and little Sarah to her home in New York. All she and her young daughters could do now was pray.

ΨΨΨ

On May 23, 1701, Captain William Kidd was hung at the gallows at Execution Dock in Wapping, East London. The New York privateer had been tried two weeks earlier at the Old Bailey on five counts of piracy and one count of premeditated murder. Although the piracy charges against Kidd were weak and the death of Kidd’s gunner William Moore had been an accident while quelling a mutiny, it didn’t matter. The courtroom drama proved to be nothing but a sham trial to make an example of Kidd to protect England’s trade with Great Mughal and the East India Company’s profitable monopoly. He had been swiftly convicted on all counts based on the perjured testimony of his heavy-drinking surgeon, Dr. Robert Bradinham, and deserter-seaman Joseph Palmer, both of whom served as the Crown’s star witnesses and received full pardons for their betrayal of their captain.

In the Golden Age of Piracy (1650-1730), large numbers of Londoners flocked to public pirate executions, but the turnout for Captain Kidd’s public execution was unprecedented due to his notoriety and the frenetic newspaper coverage. To witness death up close, scores of pleasure boats anchored close to the north shore next to the gallows, and a huge crowd of more than 10,000 souls packed the narrow streets, Wapping Stairs, and the wide foreshore. The colonial American sea captain—who only a short time earlier had been heralded as the “trusty and well-beloved Captain Kidd” by King William III himself—died just as a blood-red sun set over London Town and the gently rippled waters of the Thames. Four days after he stopped twitching and three tides had washed over him, his soggy corpse was coated with tar and hoisted in a gibbeted iron cage downriver at Tilbury Point, where it would remain for the next twenty years to serve as the English State’s grisly warning to other would-be pirates of the fate that awaited them if they dared disrupt England’s valuable trade relations with India by pursuing the short but merry life of a plundering freebooter.

At the gallows at Wapping, Captain Kidd’s last spoken words were for his wife Sarah and their daughters:

[Captain Kidd] expressed abundance of sorrow for leaving his wife and children without having the opportunity of taking leave of them, they being inhabitants in New York. So that the thoughts of his wife’s sorrow at the sad tidings of his shameful death was more occasion of grief to him than that of his own sad misfortunes.

On August 4, 1701, nine weeks after his gruesome public hanging, Sarah received a knock at the front door of her house on Pearl Street, and a New York official notified her that her husband had been executed in London on May 23. Since Captain Kidd had been “attainted as a pirate,” the official presented her with a signed warrant for the confiscation of her husband’s estate. Under English law, she owned nothing as the widow of a pirate and was cast out onto the street, along with Elizabeth, little Sarah, and housekeeper Dorothy Lee. She promptly waged a fierce legal battle against the Crown, arguing that the properties and household possessions were acquired from her first and second husbands and from Captain Kidd prior to his alleged piratical acts. The case would drag on through the courts until 1704 when Queen Anne finally granted back to Sarah the title to her properties and possessions.

Since Kidd had sailed from Boston in irons in March 1700, she had struggled to put her life back together while living quietly in the city with Elizabeth and little Sarah, but times were hard as many of her New York friends ostracized her. Her only consolation was that Trinity Church honored the Kidd family’s ownership of Pew Number 4, allowing her and her daughters to regularly attend church services in return for her husband’s generosity to the community back in 1696. To assist with the Anglican house of worship’s construction, Kidd had, prior to departing on his voyage to the Indian Ocean, lent his runner and tackle from the Adventure Galley as a pulley system to help the workers hoist the stones. The Kidd family pew was right up front near the rector and bore the inscription “Captain Kidd—Commanded ‘Adventure Galley.’” Unfortunately, Captain Kidd never had the opportunity to pray with his family at the church he helped build in the New World. As one of New York City’s greatest links to its historic past, the latest incarnation of legendary Trinity Church stands today in the exact same spot where Captain Kidd lent his runner and tackle over 330 years ago.

Sarah eventually remarried and died a moderately wealthy widow on September 12, 1744. By this time, she had moved back to New York from New Jersey and was living in her old home on Pearl Street where she had lived her best years with Captain Kidd. Fittingly, she is buried today in the churchyard of Trinity Church on Wall Street in Manhattan.

Although today we know Captain Kidd as one of the most notorious scoundrels of all time, my ninth-great-grandfather was no more of an “arch-Pyrate” than Horatio Nelson or Jean Paul Jones—both of whom are recognized today as national seafaring treasures.Thus, the great irony of the legendary Captain Kidd is that, as historian Philip Gosse declared over a century ago, he was “no pirate at all.” He was, in fact, a progressive New York gentleman, colonial American coastguardsman and war hero, and beloved husband and father who helped build up America’s greatest city and a democratic New World. Together, he and his fiercely devoted and courageous wife Sarah enjoyed one of New York’s most adventurous and unique romantic partnerships of all time during the Golden Age of Piracy.

The ninth-great-grandson of legendary privateer Captain William Kidd, Samuel Marquis, M.S., P.G., is a professional hydrogeologist, expert witness, and bestselling, award-winning author of 12 American non-fiction-history, historical-fiction, and suspense books, covering primarily the period from colonial America through WWII. His American history and historical fiction books, have been #1 Denver Post bestsellers and received multiple national book awards in both fiction and non-fiction categories (Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews Book of the Year, American Book Fest and USA Best Book, Readers’ Favorite, Beverly Hills, Independent Publisher, and Colorado Book Awards). His in-depth historical titles include Blackbeard: The Birth of America and have garnered glowing reviews from colonial American history and maritime historians, bestselling authors, U.S. military veterans, Kirkus Reviews, and Foreword Reviews (5 Stars).

What's in a Town Name? British Town Names

Every town name tells a story, hidden in plain sight, the suffixes of place names—those last few letters we often overlook are time capsules that reveal the identities of ancient settlers, conquerors, and religious institutions that once shaped the land. Nowhere is this more evident than in Great Britain, where a rich history of invasions, migrations, and cultural shifts has left a linguistic fingerprint on the landscape. However, this phenomenon isn't limited to Britain all across Europe in countries such as France and Germany, place-name endings serve as archaeological markers etched into language.

Exploring the hidden meanings behind place name endings, like '-ton', '-by', '-Chester', and '-minster', allows us to show how these suffixes point directly to the historical people: Saxons, Vikings, Romans, and early Christians, all leaving their mark on the landscape and offering a historical journey.

These names clearly show centuries of layered history embedded in the names spoken daily, often without awareness of their ancient roots.

Terry Bailey explains.

A view of Edinburgh. Braun & Hogenberg, Edenburgum, Scotiae Metropolis circa 1581.

The Saxon '-ton': Fields and foundations

One of the most common endings in English towns is '-ton', a suffix rooted in Anglo-Saxon settlement. It comes from the Old English word tūn, meaning "enclosure," "settlement," or "farmstead." These were the heart of Saxon agricultural communities, often established in the wake of the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century.

Place names like Kingston upon Thames—meaning "king's settlement", likely marked royal Saxon estates. Taunton, originally Tantun, refers to a "farmstead on the River Tone." And Brighton, once Beorhthelmes tūn, translates to "Beorhthelm's farm." These names reveal how Saxon settlers prioritized cultivation and community, leaving behind the seeds of what would grow into medieval England.

The Viking '-by': Norsemen leaving their mark

Heading north or east in England, a different suffix becomes common: '-by'. This Norse-derived ending means "farmstead" or "village" and is a legacy of the Viking Age, particularly the Danelaw, the area of England under Norse control from the late 9th to the mid-11th centuries.

Derby, for instance, translates to "deer farm." Grimsby likely means "Grim's village," named after a Norse chieftain. Whitby, or "white village," became known for its Christian abbey founded during the later medieval period a blending of Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures. The presence of '-by' in place names is a linguistic monument to Viking colonization and settlement in England.

The Roman '-chester': Fortresses of the Empire

Towns ending in '-chester', '-caster', or '-cester' hark back to the era of Roman Britain. These suffixes come from the Latin castra, meaning "camp" or "fort," indicating that the town was once the site of a Roman military base.

Manchester, originally Mamucium, refers to a Roman fort on a breast-shaped hill (mamma in Latin). Chester, the archetypal Roman stronghold was once known as Deva Victrix, a major Roman garrison town. Doncaster, from Danum castra, also owes its name to Roman roots along the River Don. These place names serve as reminders of the time when much of Britain functioned as a frontier province of the Roman Empire.

The Christian '-minster': Monks and manuscripts

With Christianity's arrival came a new kind of naming: the '-minster' towns. Derived from the Latin monasterium, the suffix denoted a monastic foundation, often large and influential that became a religious and cultural center.

Westminster, "western minster", was named to distinguish it from the eastern cathedral of St. Paul's in London. Axminster developed around a monastery near the River Axe, and Leominster grew around a religious community in Herefordshire. These towns were not just places of worship but also hubs of education and manuscript production, echoing Christianity's growing dominance in post-Roman Britain.

The Fortified '-burgh': Castles and Strongholds

Another suffix steeped in history is '-burgh', particularly found in Northern England and Scotland, where it means a fortified place. Derived from Old English burh, related to the Old High German burg, these settlements were often military or political centers during the medieval period.

Edinburgh, for example, means "Edwin's fortified place," named after King Edwin of Northumbria. Its iconic castle atop volcanic rock underscores its strategic value. Fraserburgh, a 16th-century fortified fishing port, and Jedburgh, a border town often fortified during Anglo-Scottish conflicts, reflect similar histories. Even Dunfermline, once Dunfermelinburh, and Petersburgh (now Peterborough) show how the suffix marked religious or royal significance.

In England, spelling variants like '-bury' and '-borough' share the same roots. Examples include Salisbury, Canterbury, and Scarborough, all of which denote fortified or ecclesiastical settlements.

Another example would be Middlesbrough, (Middlesborough). Utilizing Middlesbrough, we can provide a more detailed breakdown of the town's early cultural heritage to its modern-day linguistic name.

The town name Middlesbrough, originally Mydilsburgh, has roots that stretch back to the early medieval period, and its etymology provides a window into how place names in Britain evolved through layers of language and cultural shifts.

The name Middlesbrough is composed of two Old English elements: middel, meaning "middle," and burh (later softened to borough, brough, or burgh), meaning "fortified place," "settlement," or "town." Thus, Middlesbrough likely meant "middle fortified settlement" or "settlement in the middle", perhaps indicating a location between two more prominent places, or situated centrally within a larger area of early landholding or ecclesiastical territory.

The earliest form of the name appears in medieval records as Mydilsburgh, and it is believed to refer to a small monastic cell or church established in the 7th or 8th century. This was during a time when the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, such as Northumbria, were consolidating land and founding religious institutions. A monastery existed in the area in the 7th century, likely linked to St. Cuthbert and Whitby Abbey. The "burgh" suffix in this early context might not have referred to a large settlement or town in the modern sense, but rather to a monastic enclosure or small fortified religious community.

Following Viking incursions and eventual settlement, Old Norse influence influenced many place names in the North East of England, especially in nearby Yorkshire and the Danelaw regions. However, Middlesbrough retained its largely Old English form, suggesting it may have remained a religious or minor rural site not heavily repopulated by Norse settlers. By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the writing of the Domesday Book in 1086, the area was little more than a small agricultural village, and the name, while not prominent, retained its ecclesiastical and geographic connotations.

Middlesbrough remained a minor village until the early 19th century. In 1829, a group of Quaker businessmen led by Joseph Pease purchased land to develop a port to export coal from nearby Durham and Yorkshire. With the arrival of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1830, (both early Saxon, -ton settlements), rapid industrial development occurred, Middlesbrough exploded in size and population, becoming a major center for iron, steel, and shipbuilding.

During this expansion, the spelling of the town's name was standardised as Middlesbrough, reflecting modern English spelling conventions. The "-ough" ending, while difficult to pronounce for non-natives, was a common modernization of the older "-burgh" or "-borough" endings used in earlier centuries.

Thereby, the name evolved across linguistic eras: from Old English Mydilsburgh or Middilburh, meaning "middle fortress or settlement," to Medieval Latin or Anglo-Norman forms like Middlesburg or Middlesburgh, reflecting scribal and pronunciation shifts, and finally to the modern English Middlesborough, which was eventually simplified to Middlesbrough. This linguistic evolution mirrors the transformation of Middlesbrough itself: from a religious outpost in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, to a quiet rural hamlet, and finally to an industrial powerhouse of the Victorian age. Each layer of the name captures a stage of English history embedded in language.

European Cousins: '-burg', '-bourg', and '-berg'

Across the continent, similar suffixes emerge. In Germany, '-burg' and '-berg' appear in towns like Nürnberg (from nouren + berg, meaning hill fort), Heidelberg, and Freiburg. These names often combine natural features with fortification.

In France, especially in Alsace and border regions, the suffix becomes '-bourg'. Strasbourg, once Argentoratum in Roman times, was renamed by the Franks to mean "town of the roads." Luxembourg, meaning "little fortress," and Frankenbourg, a smaller Alsatian commune, also carry this legacy. These endings preserve the story of Roman, Frankish, and Germanic influences overlapping in one of Europe's most contested regions.

Germany: Tribal roots to medieval foundations

Other German examples, with endings such as '-heim' and '-burg' are linguistic indicators of early Germanic tribal settlements and medieval fortifications. The suffix '-heim', meaning "home" or "homestead," points to Frankish or Alemannic origins. Mannheim, "home of men", is located at the junction of the Rhine and Neckar Rivers.

Heidelberg, combining Heidel (possibly a personal name) with berg (hill), reflects both natural topography and fortified strategic value. Meanwhile, '-burg' denotes a fortress or walled town. Hamburg, from Hammaburg, was a fortified site on the River Hamme. Freiburg, or "free fortress," reflects a city granted privileges. Würzburg, originally a Celtic site, evolved into a Roman and later Frankish fortress. These endings show how tribal and feudal power shaped the urban geography of the Holy Roman Empire.

France: Gallic, Roman, and Frankish legacies

France has its own rich linguistic heritage rooted in Gallic, Roman, and Frankish history. One of the most telling suffixes is '-ville', which comes from the Latin villa and refers to a rural estate or settlement.

Deauville, meaning "Dello's estate," is now a renowned resort town. Trouville, derived from Thorulf villa, reveals Viking influence during raids along the Seine. Neuville, or "new town," often marks medieval expansions or resettlements. Other suffixes such as '-sur-Mer' (on the sea) and '-en-Auxois' (in the Auxois region) reflect French place-naming traditions that combine geography with historical ownership and administration.

The Linguistic Map of History

Thereby, paying attention to something as simple as the ending of a town's name, it is possible to read a map of ancient movements and cultural transformations. Each suffix reveals layers of conquest, settlement, religion, and adaptation. '-ton' whispers of Saxon ploughs and fields. '-by' speaks in the voice of Norsemen. '-chester' echoes with the march of Roman soldiers. '-minster' resonates with the chants of early Christian monks. '-burgh' reminds us of stone fortresses and watchful towers.

Whether you're walking through Brighton, Whitby, Chester, or Westminster, you're not just stepping through space, you're walking through time. And when you cross the Channel or travel along French or German, rivers you'll hear similar echoes in Trouville, Mannheim, or Hamburg or any other European country. The next time you pass a signpost, remember: that town's name isn't just a label it's a legacy. In the USA and Commonwealth countries, these Ancient town names were transported across the ocean with settlers as a reminder of their homeland.

In conclusion, what begins as a simple glance at a town sign can swiftly unravel into a journey through centuries of cultural evolution, conquest, and identity. The linguistic endings of town names are not arbitrary, they are echoes, carefully preserved through time, of the peoples who once built farms, raised fortresses, founded monasteries, and governed with sword or scripture. They are the spoken remnants of the Roman legionnaires who constructed outposts of the empire. The Saxons who tilled the land, the Norsemen who sailed into river mouths and carved out new settlements, and the monks who brought with them Latin prayers and sacred learning.

This deeper appreciation of place-name suffixes—'-ton', '-by', '-chester', '-minster', '-burgh', and their European kin '-ville', '-burg', '-heim', and more, transforms the overall understanding of geography into something far richer: a palimpsest of human history etched into everyday language. Each name is a code that, once deciphered, brings into sharp relief the lives and legacies of those who walked these lands long before people of the modern World. They reveal the political boundaries of empires, the spiritual priorities of a people, the technological advances in fortification and agriculture, and the quiet transformations of communities throughout a millennium.

Towns like Middlesbrough stand as prime examples of this phenomenon. Its name, evolving from Mydilsburgh to Middlesbrough, encapsulates layers of English history: the Anglo-Saxon monastic beginnings, the Norse interlude, the quiet medieval persistence, and the sudden eruption into industrial modernity. The evolution of its name mirrors the story of England itself, an island repeatedly reshaped by outsiders and insiders alike, within the language absorbed each wave into the very structure of its speech.

However, this phenomenon is not confined to Britain. All across Europe, from the German -burgs and -heims to the French -villas and -bourgs, and in all European countries the same patterns of historical layering exist. Each suffix carries with it a local tale within a greater continental story, a record of how borders, identities, and institutions shifted with each new era. They are reminders that language is not static. It grows, adapts, and carries forward the cultural DNA of civilizations, sometimes long vanished.

Understanding these suffixes is more than an academic exercise. It is a reminder that the past lives on in the most familiar things. Every town name uttered, every address written, every road sign passed is not merely utilitarian, it is a whispered chronicle of migration, survival, conquest, devotion, and transformation. The very fabric of maps and speech is stitched with memory.

So the next time a name like Taunton, Whitby, Doncaster, Westminster, or Strasbourg, is overheard or read, pause, as that name is more than just a location name. It is the footsteps of Romans, the farm settlements of the Saxons, the axe-strokes of Norse settlers, the chants of monks, along with the rich orders of kings, and the ambitions of Victorian industrialists. That town name offers insight into history itself, not just in books or monuments, but in the living, breathing words of the landscape itself.

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Notes:

Danelaw

Danelaw refers to a historical region of England under the control of Danish Vikings from the late 9th to the mid-11th centuries. The term also describes the set of laws and customs imposed by the Danes in these territories, distinct from Anglo-Saxon legal traditions. Danelaw originated as part of a peace agreement in 878 CE between the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great of Wessex and the Danish warlord Guthrum, following the Battle of Edington.

Under this treaty, the Danes agreed to withdraw from Wessex and instead settle and rule in the northeastern portion of England. The resulting area stretched from the River Thames in the south to Northumbria in the north, and from the North Sea in the east to the approximate line of Watling Street in the west.

Within the Danelaw, the Viking settlers established their own social, legal, and political systems, which were influenced by Scandinavian customs. Many of the towns and villages in the region took on Norse names, such as those ending in -by, (meaning "farm" or "village") as indicated in the main text, or - thorpe (meaning "hamlet"), and local governance reflected the structure of Scandinavian rule, with things (assemblies) and jarls (chieftains) replacing some Anglo-Saxon institutions. The legal system of Danelaw was more community-based and emphasized compensation and restitution over corporal punishment, aligning with Norse traditions.

The Danelaw had a lasting impact on the cultural and linguistic development of England. Even after the English reconquest of Danelaw territories by the mid-10th century under kings such as Edward the Elder and Athelstan, Norse influence remained embedded in local dialects, legal customs, and place-names. The legacy of Danelaw illustrates how Viking colonization and Anglo-Saxon resilience shaped medieval English identity, forging a complex cultural synthesis rather than a simple tale of conquest and domination.

The USS Panay: The Ship Before Pearl Harbor

The USS Panay Incident played a crucial role in the timeline of the United States' involvement in international affairs in the late 1930s as the world prepared for the Second World War. Yet today, most Americans have never heard of the incident. It is cited as both the first time American Naval ships had been sunk by enemy aircraft, as well as the first time US ships had been targeted since the conclusion of World War I.

Ryan Reidway explains.

The USS Panay sinking after the Japanese attack.

With three men killed and 48 injured, the incident led, on one hand, to the passage of the March 1938 Naval Act that allowed the expansion of the American Pacific Fleet.[1] On the other hand, it led to increasing anti-war and isolationist sentiment at home. Happening only months after the adoption of the Ludlow Amendment, which restricted the ways Congress could declare war when attacks happened overseas[2]. Although there was initial condemnation and outrage towards the Japanese government in the United States, it seems to have been forgotten in the pages of history.

The USS Panay had been commissioned in 1927 in Shanghai as part of the Asiatic Fleet. It was designed to patrol the Yangtze River to protect American interests in China. It was a shallow draft river boat, with a displacement of between 370 and 500 tons. It could reach speeds of 13 knots and had armor plating on the forward and aft of the ship. It was armed with several.30 Caliber Lewis Machine Guns[3] as well as two 3-inch main guns[4].  Fon Huffman, who is believed to be the last living survivor of the Panay, proclaimed, “It was a good ship. It was a really good ship.”[5]

By the 1930s, the Panay and its crew had become accustomed to fending off pirates who often tried to attack Standard Oil vessels as they moved up and down the river. 1n 1931 According to Lieutenant Commander R. A. Dyer, "Firing on gunboats and merchant ships have [sic] become so routine that any vessel traversing the Yangtze River sails with the expectation of being fired upon. Fortunately," he added, "the Chinese appear to be rather poor marksmen and the ship has, so far, not sustained any casualties in these engagements."[6]

1937

Fast forward to the summer of 1937, when the Japanese army invaded China, Western powers, including the United States, looked on with horror and dismay at the brutality of the conflict. After the fall of Shanghai in November of that same year, Japanese commanders set their sights on Nanjing. Fearing for the lives of their citizen, the United States initially ordered all Americans to enter an International Safe Zone that had been set up in the city. But by early December, Chinese Nationalists had abandoned the city, and the American government wanted its citizens out.   

On December 9th, 1937, the Panay’s commanding officer was Lieutenant Commander James Joseph Hughes, and its Executive Officer was Lieutenant Arthur F. Anders, received orders to evacuate all American Citizens from Nanjing. By that night, 15 American citizens, embassy workers, several foreign nationals, and reporters had boarded and joined the 59 officers and enlisted men already on the ship. The Panay remained anchored at the dock on December 10th, despite the carnage of the Japanese onslaught in the city.

By December 11th, Japanese artillery shells were landing too close for comfort, and the order to pull away from the dock was given. The ship slipped away from the dock with American flags flying visibly and proceeded to head up the Yangtze River. It joined a convoy of three Standard Oil ships, the Meiping, Meian, and Meihsia. Those ships had been helping to evacuate employees of Standard Oil, many of whom were Chinese.[7]

Early on December 12th, the Japanese naval officers boarded the ship for an inspection. Commander Hughes replied to the officers, “The United States is friendly to Japan and China alike. We do not give military information to either side.” [8]The Japanese officers left, and the Panay continued down river, eventually anchoring 28 miles north of Nanjing.[9]

Attack

Later that afternoon, as lunch was being served, three Japanese bombers bombed the Panay. After releasing their bombs, they came back around and strafed the ship with their machine guns. Battle stations were manned, and the crew of the Panay attempted to fight back. It was in vain as the ship had sustained too much damage, and the order to abandon ship was given. By 3:55 pm, the ship had sunk. Many of the wounded were evacuated from the ship via sampans as there were no lifeboats. As the men tried to escape the carnage, the Japanese planes came back and strafed them again.

When it was all over, three people had been killed and 50 had been wounded[10]. Two of the three oil tankers had sunk, and one had run aground. Desperate to avoid capture by the Japanese forces, the survivors of the Panay proceeded to walk towards the friendly Chinese village of Hoshien. They were later rescued by American and British naval vessels in the area.

Probably the most remarkable thing about the whole incident was that it was recorded. There were a few reporters aboard the ship, including Norman Alley of Universal Press. Remarkably, using his camera, he was able to document the entire event. The footage would later go on to be used in legal hearings between the governments of the United States and Japan, as well as be broadcast in movie theaters around the United States.  A copy of the footage can still be found on the Internet Archive site. In it, there is a narration of the events of that day, including the moments before the attack, the call to arms, the heroic stand, and eventually the sinking of the ship. Viewers will also notice the very visible American flag, which would play a crucial role in the doubts historians have about the official narrative.    

Apology

The Japanese government quickly issued a statement apologizing for the incident and claiming it was an unfortunate mistake. While there was an investigation conducted by the American Government, the results showed that the attack was due to “poor field communications and bad visibility”[11]. Ultimately, Japan paid over two million dollars in damages, and while the United States formally accepted the apology in 1938, the American public was outraged. Fear that the American people would demand war forced the United States government to bury the incident and continue diplomatic relations with the Japanese. 

Historians have argued, however, that the pilots of the Japanese bombers would have known what the ship looked like, its position in the river, and would have seen the American Flags flying from the air. In addition, reports later came out that the Japanese military had ordered all ships sailing north on the Yangtze to be destroyed to target Chinese military forces. Documents also show that commanders of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy argued which branch was ultimately responsible. The last piece of evidence to show the Japanese involvement was the pilot's request for confirmation of permission to attack before bombing the Panay.

Regardless of the reason for the attack, it is surprising in the 21st Century that this kind of incident did not lead to conflict between the nations.  Nonetheless, this tragic event has been forgotten by most despite its revealing nature of the state of events during the run-up to the surprise attack on  Pearl Harbor. Speculation dictates that the events of the Second World War could have been very different if the American government had pushed the issue. 

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References

Alley, N. (Director). (n.d.). Norman Alley's Bombing of USS Panay Special Issue, 1937/12/12 [Film]. Universal Studios. https://archive.org/details/1937-12-12_Bombing_of_USS_Panay (Original work published 1937)

Barnett, K. (2016, 06 27). Fon Huffman Remembers the USS Panay Attack 1937. Ken Barnett Design Youtube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1yUbW_WkDM&list=PLtJturmrhWAHvT9Hoi9Z4r_vkvacS0Fx6&t=75s

Frank, L. (2023, 08 08). Hidden History: The USS "Panay" Incident. Daily Kos. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/8/2172658/-Hidden-History-The-USS-Panay-Incident

HISTORY.com Editors. (2009, 11 09). Rape of Nanjing: Massacre, Facts & Aftermath | HISTORY. History.com. https://www.history.com/articles/nanjing-massacre

Lyons, C. (2015). Attack on the USS Panay. Warfare History Network. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/attack-on-the-uss-panay/

Naval History and Heritage Command. (2021, June 14). The Panay Incident. Naval History and Heritage Command. Retrieved June 29, 2025, from https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/world-war-ii/1941/prelude/panay-incident.html

1937 USS Panay Incident | A Pearl Harbor Preview. (2024, 12). Today's History YouTube Channel. https://youtu.be/EKECgwufjg8?si=kqf-dnGCphliy0hv

Roberts Jr, F. N. (2012, 11). Climax of Isolationism, Countdown to World War. U.S. Naval Institute, 26(6). https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2012/november/climax-isolationism-countdown-world-war#:~:text=What%20became%20known%20as%20the%20Panay%20Incident%2C%20in,at%20home%20was%20strong%20and%20tensions%20abroad%20high.

USS Panay (PR-5). (n.d.). Detail Pedia. https://www.detailedpedia.com/wiki-USS_Panay_(PR-5)

[1] (Naval History and Heritage Command, 2021)

[2] (Roberts Jr, 2012,)

[3] (Naval History and Heritage Command, 2021)

[4] (Frank, 2023)

[5] (Barnett, 2016)

[6] (USS Panay (PR-5), n.d.)

[7] (Lyons, 2015)

[8] (Lyons, 2015)

[9] (Lyons, 2015)

[10] (Lyons, 2015)

[11]  (Roberts Jr, 2012)

How Did Polish Jews Resist the Nazis Prior to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they had to determine how the increasing numbers of Jews would be controlled. Their temporary solution was to section the Jews off into ghettos, and Jewish methods of resistance must be seen in the context of that environment.

Heather Voight explains.

Resistance members captured during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

A cursory reading of a Holocaust textbook would lead most readers to conclude that Polish Jews failed to respond to persecution prior to the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. In order to determine whether the Jews resisted their oppressors, however, the term resistance must be defined. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines the word resist as “to oppose actively; fight, argue, or work against; to refuse to cooperate with, submit to, etc.” According to this definition, the Jews could resist their oppressors in other ways besides warfare, though physical fighting was sometimes involved. Patterns of resistance did not remain static but changed just as the situation of Jews changed. Polish Jews in the ghettos altered their response to persecution as the types of persecution they faced changed, but some form of resistance was ever-present.

Smuggling Food as Resistance

The Jews in Polish ghettos had every intention of surviving the war. In order to accomplish this, they needed more food than the meager Nazi provisions. Food supplies to inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto each had a caloric value of 220, 15% of the normal daily requirement. Jews acquired the food they needed through smuggling. Adam Czerniakow, leader of the Warsaw Judenrat, a council of Jews created by the Nazis to carry out their orders, estimated that smuggling accounted for 80% of the food available in the Warsaw ghetto. Many smugglers were women and children who managed to circumvent the Nazi guards. Renia Kukielka went out of the Jedrzejow ghetto with her sisters to trade lace placements for coins that were used to buy food. Other young women served as couriers, smuggling out food and medicine.

Regardless of who did the smuggling, it was a dangerous task. Abraham Lewin, who kept a diary while in the Warsaw ghetto, wrote about children going over to the Aryan side to get potatoes. “There are some Germans who show a little mercy for these unfortunate children and pretend not to see, turning away deliberately, and the children dart with their little overcoats bulging…There are also vicious guards who hit the children with murderous blows…more than one child has fallen victim to their bloodlust.” Yet the Jews continued to engage in smuggling despite the bloodshed. The Nazis hoped the Jews would starve and thus disappear, but children and adults bravely resisted by smuggling food.

Music as Resistance

The people in the ghettos also continued to participate in cultural activities such as concerts. Though the Nazis didn’t allow Aryan music, Jewish musicians in the Warsaw ghetto still played to large audiences, which sometimes included Poles on the Aryan side of the ghetto. Not everyone thought these performances were appropriate, however. In his diary, Adam Czerniakow wrote, “Many people hold a grudge against me for organizing play activity for the children, for arranging festive openings of playgrounds, for the music, etc. I am reminded of a film: a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz piece. I had made up my mind to emulate the captain.” Czerniakow understood that culture should continue regardless of what the Nazis did. Other ghettos also held concerts, including one of Poland’s most isolated ghettos in Lodz. Musical concerts in the ghetto resumed two months after deportations. Despite the loss of family and community members, Jewish creativity went on.

Religious Observance as Resistance

In defiance of the Nazi order which forbade all public religious practices, religious life for Jews in the ghettos simply went underground. Warsaw ghetto diarist Chaim Kaplan wrote, “Public prayer in these dangerous times is a forbidden act..But this does not deter us. Jews come to pray in a group in some inside room facing the courtyard, with drawn blinds on the windows.” Given their followers’ unprecedented circumstances, some tenets of Jewish law were modified. For example, people could not keep the sabbath because the Nazis forced them to work. Rabbis also permitted the consumption of non-kosher food because the preservation of life was more important than dietary laws. Though they had to practice their religion differently, the Jews did not surrender their beliefs.     

Education as Resistance

In addition to religious practices, the Nazis banned education in the Warsaw ghetto and others. Nevertheless, students and teachers found ways to meet. As early as 1939, teachers received bread in exchange for teaching groups of 4-8 children for a few hours. Unfortunately, there is no information on the number of these groups in the Polish ghettos because of the secrecy involved. As Chaim Kaplan explained in his diary: “It is possible that the ban against study also applies to such small groups, and if questions were asked they would have to be stopped. But no one asks questions. The matter is done quietly, underhandedly. There is no other solution.”

Education wasn’t limited to younger students. High school and college age students helped to organize education for themselves in consort with their teachers. A Zionist youth movement organized an illegal high school in the Warsaw ghetto which existed between 1940 and summer 1942. It wasn’t a high school in the traditional sense since teachers travelled to the students’ apartments. Yet by spring of 1942 the school had 120 pupils and 13 teachers. Courses included math, history, biology, philosophy and literature. There were also university level courses in education and medicine. In spite of the Nazi ban on education, teachers and students were determined to provide knowledge that students would need if they survived the conditions of the ghettoes and the eventual deportations.  

Writing as Resistance

Jews in the ghettos also used writing to keep the world and each other informed about the Nazi’s plans to exterminate the Jews. Jews sometimes escaped from concentration camps to the tenuous safety of the Warsaw ghetto. They told the inhabitants of the Nazi’s plans to kill them all. Courier girls who initially smuggled food and medicine began to smuggle underground writings.

In addition to communicating within the Polish ghettos, coded postcards from courier girls were sent to Jews outside Poland. Frumka Plotnicka wrote, “I am waiting for visits from guests: Machanot and Avodah should be coming here.” Machanot and Avodah were Hebrew words for camp and work. “Pruetnitsky and Schitah lived with me.” These are Hebrew words for pogroms and destruction. By using words the Nazis couldn’t decode, Jews in Polish ghettos warned others about their fate.

One of the most lasting ways that Jews defied the Nazis was by documenting their experiences. Secret archives were established to preserve the history of life in the ghettos. The Oneg Shabbat of Warsaw was established by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum. He persuaded people like former teacher Abraham Lewin to contribute their accounts. Part of Lewin’s diary was discovered in a milk pail after the war. The partial diary covers late March 1942 to January 1943. Lewin wrote in June 1942, “We gather every Sabbath, a group of activists in the Jewish community, to discuss our diaries and writings. We want our sufferings, these ‘birth pangs of the Messiah’ to be impressed upon the memories of future generations and on the memory of the whole world.” Lewin’s diary entries got shorter whenever deportations to the death camps were increased. For example, he struggled to describe his heartbreak when his wife was deported in August 1942. “I have no words to describe my desolation. I ought to go after her, to die. But I have no strength to take such a step.” Although Lewin often found it difficult to write about the actions of the Nazis, his diary and others like it testify to the horrors of the Holocaust.   

Violence as Resistance

 Although much of Jewish resistance prior to the Warsaw ghetto uprising was nonviolent, this was not always the case. For example, in fall of 1942 Jews in the town of Lubliniec were ordered to gather in the market and undress. Naked Jewish women began attacking the officers, biting them and throwing stones. The Nazis ran away. The headline in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s report read “Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers.” A bit later in the year, an armed act of violence by Jews in Krakow occurred. On December 22, 1942, 40 Jewish men and women fighters descended upon three coffee houses and bombed a Nazi Christmas party. Others threw grenades into another café. Their efforts killed at least seven Nazis and wounded many more. The Jewish resistance leaders were killed but others still bombed targets outside the city. Most importantly, Jews who used violence to resist inspired those who became part of the larger Warsaw ghetto uprising.

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References

Batalion, Judy. The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust. Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts, 1982.

Dwork, Deborah and Robert Jan van Pelt. Holocaust: A History. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2002.

Lewin, Abraham. A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Edited by Antony Polonsky. New York: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1989.