Environment as a Weapon: Geographies, Histories and Literature (Historical Geography and Geosciences) 3031508556, 9783031508554

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Historical Geography and Geosciences

Charles Travis

Environment as a Weapon Geographies, Histories and Literature

Historical Geography and Geosciences Advisory Editors Jacobo García-Álvarez , Department of Humanities: History, Geography and Art, Carlos III University of Madrid, Getafe, Madrid, Spain Stefan Grab, School of Geography, Archaeology & Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Ferenc Gyuris, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary André Reyes Novaes, Department of Human Geography, Rio de Janeiro State University, Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Helen Rozwadowski, Department of History, University of Connecticut Avery Point, Groton, CT, USA Dorothy Sack, Department of Geography, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA Charles Travis , School of Histories and Humanities, The University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

This book series serves as a broad platform for contributions in the field of Historical Geography and related Geoscience areas. The series welcomes proposals on the history and dynamics of place and space and their influence on past, present and future geographies including historical GIS, cartography and mapping, climatology, climate history, meteorology and atmospheric sciences, environmental geography, hydrology, geology, oceanography, water management, instrumentation, geographical traditions, historical geography of urban areas, settlements and landscapes, historical regional studies, history of geography and historic geographers and geoscientists among other topically related areas and other interdisciplinary approaches. Contributions on past (extreme) weather events or natural disasters including regional and global reanalysis studies also fit into the series. Publishing a broad portfolio of peer-reviewed scientific books Historical Geography and Geosciences contains research monographs, edited volumes, advanced and undergraduate level textbooks, as well as conference proceedings. This series appeals to scientists, practitioners and students in the fields of geography and history as well as related disciplines, with exceptional titles that are attractive to a popular science audience. If you are interested in contributing to this book series, please contact the Publisher.

Charles Travis

Environment as a Weapon Geographies, Histories and Literature

123

Charles Travis University of Texas-Arlington Arlington, TX, USA

ISSN 2520-1379 ISSN 2520-1387 (electronic) Historical Geography and Geosciences ISBN 978-3-031-50855-4 ISBN 978-3-031-50856-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1 Prologue: Environment as a Weapon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Chapter Overviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 3

2 Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Early Impressions of Environment and War . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Avestan Geographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Mesopotamian Flood: Genesis and Gilgamesh . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 The Torah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.1 Parting the Sea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.2 Biogeographic Warfare, Salt, and Summits . . . . . . . . 2.5 Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles, and the Plagues of War . . . . 2.6 Roman Literary Geographies, Environment, War . . . . . . . . . 2.6.1 Bellum Gallicum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.2 Pax Romana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.3 The Teutoburg Forest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.4 The Spatial Histories of Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7 7 7 8 10 12 13 14 17 18 19 19 21

3 Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Poetry, Nature, and War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Beowulf: Wetlands Warfare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Fens, Bogs, Meres, Slopes, and Marshes . . . . . . 3.3 Placenames, Landscape, and War in Gaelic Ireland . . . 3.3.1 Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) . . . . 3.4 The Steppe Land Emperors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.1 Horses, Hawks, and the Mongol Yām . . . . . . . . 3.4.2 Mongol Invasions of Eastern Europe . . . . . . . . . 3.4.3 The Mongols, Marco Polo, and the Silk Road . 3.4.4 Pax Mongolica and the Decline of Empire . . . . 3.5 West Africa Griot Geographies: Abu Bakr II’s Farfina Fleets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.1 Swallowed by the Blades of the Ocean . . . . . . . 3.5.2 Gold and the Canary, North and South Equatorial Gyres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

4 Seachange: Early Modern Oceanic Wars, 1588–1762 . . . . . . . . 4.1 Neptune, the New God of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 The Wreck of the Spanish Armada, 1588 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Failed Invasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 The Great Irish Gale of 1588 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 The Winds of God: Edmund Spencer’s Literary Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 The Hollandaic Waterline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 North Atlantic Fishery Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 The Tempest: William Shakespeare’s Literary Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.2 The Oceanic Plantation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.3 London and Imperial Cod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.4 Environmental Theatres of Drama, Cartography, and War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45 45 46 47 48

5 Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Weather and Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Early Winters of Rebellion and Resilience . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 The Siege of Boston, Winter 1775–1776 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 A Weapon They Are Using Against Us . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 Surrounded by a Circle of Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.3 The Ink Freezes in the Pen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.4 A Rabble in Arms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.5 Enwrapp’d in Tempest and a Night of Storms . . . . . 5.4 “Key to the Continent”: New York and Long Island, April–August 1776 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.1 In Almost Every Street There Is a Horrid Smell . . . . 5.4.2 Battle of Long Island (1776)—“The Whole Empyrean Was Ablaze with Lightning” . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.3 That Heavenly Messenger, the Fog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.4 Flying Before the British . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Trenton and Princeton: December 1776 and January 1777 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.1 The Storm Is Changing to Sleet and Cuts like a Knife . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.2 Artillery as Environmental Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5.3 An “Old Fox” Bags the Weather . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65 65 65 66 66 68 69 70 71

6 The Decay of Nature and Birth of Total War, 1798–1815 . . . . 6.1 The Terrestrial Armadas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Panoramas and Cartographies of Total War: Tolstoy, Shelley, and Minard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Napoleon’s Invasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 Dysentery and Scorched Earth Warfare . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 The Nursery of Total War: Battle of Borodino . . . . . 6.3.3 Battle Panorama: The Raevsky Redoubt . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.4 The Burning of Moscow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

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6.4 Napoleon’s Retreat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.1 Bérézina and the Jaws of Total War . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 The Battlefield Flâneur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Industrial War of Organic Beings, the American Caesura 1860–1865. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 The First Anthropocene War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1.1 The Industrial Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Emily Dickinson and the Industrial-Organic Assemblages of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 The Anaconda Blockade: Coal and Steam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 War of Ecological Annihilation, 1864–1865 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.1 The Overland Campaign: “Forests of the Dead” . . . . 7.4.2 Siege of Petersburg and the Battle of the Crater . . . . 7.5 The Ecological Memory of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

94 96 97 105 105 106 107 109 110 111 112 116

8 Global Wars, Environmental Strategy, and the MilitaryEcological Complex, 1914–1975 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 The Bloody Jigsaw of Political Cartography . . . . . . . . . 8.1.1 Sea Power, Geopolitik, and the Heartland . . . . . 8.1.2 Geostrategies: Floods and Firestorms . . . . . . . . 8.2 North Vietnam’s Military-Ecological Complex, 1959–1975 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.1 Tropical Cartesian Illusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.2 Agent Orange, Rolling Thunder and Arclight . . 8.2.3 Uncle Ho’s Trails and Tunnels . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.4 Sex, Drugs, and R&R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.5 The ITZC Military-Ecological Complex . . . . . .

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131 132 135 136 137 138

9 Epilogue: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 The Earth Is Bleeding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Trinity’s New Species . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Towards Digital War, The Battle of 73 Eastings . 9.4 Gaia at War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5 Cloud Atlas (2004) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.6 A Very Brief Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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143 143 144 148 149 150 152

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4

Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6

Aurochs, Horses, and Deer, Lascaux Cave, France . . . Moses parting the Red Sea as the Pharoah’s army drowns. After Raphael’s Stanza di Eliodoro (1650–70). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bird’s Eye and Southern Views of Masada . . . . . . . . . Siege of Plataea Frieze, Temple of Athena, Athens (425 BCE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Romans Legions retreating from Germania and the the Suevi, by burning their military bridge across the River Rhine in 56 BCE. Speculative Artifical Intelligence Image generated by Charles Travis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roman Empire 117–300 CE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Furor Teutonicus at Kalkrieser Berg, Teutoburg Forest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beowulf’s Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cattle Raid of Cooley. Black line: Invasion and Retreat. Yellow dotted line: The Bull of Cooley’s Death Throes. Concentric white lines: Intensity of Conflict & Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fourteenth-century mounted Mongol warriors pursue enemies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Abu Bakr II (left) and Marco Polo (right) in Catalan Atlas, 1375 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irish Wreck Sites of the Spanish Armada, September 1588 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Great Gale of 20–21, September 1588 . . . . . . . . . Edmund Spencer’s Literary Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . Bird’s Eye View of The Hague, Leiden, and Delft. Siege of Leiden, 3 October 1574 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Newfoundland and Grand Banks Fisheries indicated by English, Dutch, and French nautical charts drafted between 1613 and 1693 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shakespearean London and Cod Bones . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Fig. 4.7

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

6.4 6.5 6.6 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6

Fig. 8.7 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3

Visualization of Augustine Fitzhugh’s 1693 A chart of the coasts of Newfoundland (upper left) with Grand Banks bathymetry and British-French cod landing amounts, 1700–1900, geo-statistically graphed in red and yellow. Blue dots: English offshore boats. Red dots: French fishery ships. Lower right: 1762 French attack on Newfoundland near St. John’s . . . . . . . . . . . Left: British Army Map. A plan of Boston, and its environs: shewing the true situation of His Majesty’s army, and also those of the rebels (1775) Right: Sketch of British and American Lines and Fortifications in the Boston Area by John Trumbull . . . . . . . . . . . . . Battle of Long Island, and Washington’s East River Crossing, August 1776 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Casting artillery as art. The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, December 26, 1776. John Trumbull (1756–1843) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minard’s Carte Figurative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grande Armée Invasion, 1812 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . War and Peace’s Literary Cartography. Views from the Bagration Flèches and Raevsky Redoubt . . . . . . . . Grande Armée Retreat, 1812 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Battle of the Nile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Battle of Borodino Museum Panorama . . . . . . . . . . . . Steam Pump (Atmospheric Engine), 1734 . . . . . . . . . . Civil War Industrial-Organic Assemblages . . . . . . . . . . Eastern Theatre Civil War Battles, 1862–1864 . . . . . . . Battle of the Crater, 1864 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andersonville Prison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . American Dreadnought Battleship, 1909 . . . . . . . . . . . Halford J. Mackinder’s Heartland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Huang He (Yellow River) Flooding, June 1938 . . . . . . U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, German– Japanese Village, South of Stark Road, 1943 incendiary test area, Dugway, Utah, U.S.A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saint-Lô, Normandy, France 1944 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clockwise from left: Agent Orange poster, U.S. Army UH-1H Huey Helicopters (1970), Boeing B-52D Stratofortress, 1st Battalion Bulldozer, south of Da Nang, Vietnam (1967) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . NVA / Viet Cong Tunnel Complex Map 1960–1970 . . Kuwaiti Oilfields on Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trinity Test Base Camp, edge of Jornada del Muerto Desert, New Mexico, May 1945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nagasaki 1945. Before and After “Fat Man” . . . . . . . .

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1

Prologue: Environment as a Weapon

… the obstacles that made me fail did not come from men; they all came from the elements. In the south, the sea has been my undoing; in the north, the burning of Moscow and the cold of winter. Thus water, air, and fire, all of Nature, nothing but Nature-these have been the enemies of a universal regeneration which Nature herself demanded!1 Napoleon Bonaparte, in exile on St. Helena, 1816.

1.1

Introduction

Arguably, from the time homo-sapiens first harnessed fire, the environment has served as an arsenal. It has provided the means to ward off the climatic and predatory elements of nature (cold and carnivores) and utilized as a tool of internecine combat and subsistence. J. Donald Hughes notes that “hunting was often regarded as a form of warfare, and art often portrayed humans in battle with animals. The idea that hunting and warfare are similar […] is much older than the classical period,” and illustrated by the preliterate paintings adorning the walls of a warren of caves at Lascaux, France.2 Created by the Magdalenian (c.a. 17,000–12,000 BCE) cultures of the present-day French region of Dordogne, these firelit, prehistoric “art galleries” were given names after their discovery in 1958, such as the Hall of the Bulls, the Chamber of Felines, and the Passageway (Fig. 1.1). Indeed, evidence of pre-historic mapping from the Magdalenian period has been discovered at the mouth of the cave of the Abauntz in the Pyrenees Mountains of Navarre, Spain. Stone tablets carved to depict a topography of

mountains, ponds, rivers, and a herd of ibex perched on a hillside, date to “13,660 [BCE], 9000 years before the invention of writing.”3 As probable aids for navigation, the Magdalenian topographic tablets depict a “plan for a coming hunt or perhaps a narrative story” of a hunt that had taken place.4 The images inscribed on the stones provide evidence for “early modern human capacities of spatial awareness, planning, and organized hunting,”5 illustrating the “significant development of abstract thinking and symbolic representation” in the pre-historic era.6 It can be argued from the Magdalenian Period to our present day that, The metaphor that links war and land is that of the map. In disciplines such as geography, geology, anthropology, and the agricultural sciences, we expect to find language associated with maps, but now in ethics and rhetoric, mapping and other spatial metaphors appear more frequently as scholars take up issues related to environment.7

Although difficult to determine its true origin, the invention of the first human writing systems (in distinction to symbolic hieroglyphic and petroglyphic representation) emerged around 3500–3000 BCE in Mesopotamia with Sumerian Cuneiform inscription. Perception of our planet

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Travis, Environment as a Weapon, Historical Geography and Geosciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_1

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1 Prologue: Environment as a Weapon

Fig. 1.1 Aurochs, Horses, and Deer, Lascaux Cave, France. Source Wikimedia Commons

has evolved significantly since the introduction of textual inscription. As a medium for recording and transmitting knowledge, and creating works considered literature (epic poems, ecclesiastical, mythological, and historical chronicles) writing evolved from oral-lore, record-keeping, and accounting practices that were established during agricultural revolutions in Mesopotamia, the Nile Delta, the Hindus Valley, China’s Yellow River valley, and North and Meso America. Relations between environment and warfare possess an ancient lineage, as well, illustrated in the urban designs of early Mesopotamian metropolises: “At the center of the city were two large sanctuary complexes, one for Inanna, the goddess of love and war, and one for An, the sky god.”8 This volume engages approaches in literary and historical geography and is informed by the observation that: … war and the environment are intertwined in a complex, diverse, and often capricious fashion, the result being an ever-varying military cacophony incorporating repetition, counterpoint, juxtaposition, inversion, and reversal, all within the evolving framework of space and time.9

In the fifth century BCE, literary works on the relationship between environment and war appeared in Sun Tzu’s (554–496 BCE) treatise The Art of War (孫子兵法) and in the Histories

(Ἱrsoqίai), Herodotus’ (484–425 BCE) semimythical account of the Greco-Persian Wars (499–479 BCE). In East Asia, Tzu mused: “We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country -its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps. We shall be unable to turn natural advantage to account unless we make use of local guides.”10 In the Histories, Herodotus recounts a story “told by the Libyans” of the Psylli, a North African tribe who “perished utterly” and were buried in a “sandy desert” after marching out to battle against “the force of a south wind,” (the Simoom) that had “dried up their water tanks.”11 Such works blur the boundaries between lore, legend, and history, but also coincide with the establishment of Western geographical thought. From geography’s inception, arguably traced to the writing of Hecataeus of Miletus (550–476 BCE), literature played a prominent role in defining the nature of the discipline: “For ancient Greeks, and to a lesser degree for Romans as well, geographia represents a literary genre more than a branch of physical science. It belonged far more to the cultural mainstream than to the specialized backwaters to which we, today, have assigned it.”12 Constructing their geographical narratives, Herodotus and Strabo (4 BCE–24 CE)

1.2 Chapter Overviews

blended the deductive reasoning of science, with the imaginative and intuitive nature of poetry: “they sifted through a vast storehouse of traveller’s tales in order to separate fact from fiction, then retold those which they thought credible enough to claim a reader’s attention.”13 Initially, “the geographer’s science and storyteller’s art … could not be fully detached from each other.”14 At times the blurry boundary between geography’s subjective poesis and its Euclidian claims of objectivity became a point of contention between ancient geographers: An academic controversy was waged over the reliability of geographical data in Homer’s Odyssey. Strabo, who believed the Odyssey to be authentic and reliable, in a long and controversial passage leveled criticism against Eratosthenes for holding that Homer should be read as a poet and not a scientific authority.15

During the European enlightenment, “geography and literature were far more inclusive and more permeable categories in the eighteenth century, […] so individuals often considered as eighteenth-century geographers frequently had wider interests and careers in writing comparable to individuals we now consider ‘literary.’”16 The revival of geography’s interest in literature in the 1970s and 1980s was prompted by a humanistic project aiming to restore meaning and values in the discipline as the relevance and feasibility of the Quantitative Revolution’s methodologies that dominated Anglophone geography in the 1950s and 1960s began to wane.17 Geographers engaging with humanistic approaches argued that “literature is the product of perception, or, more simply is perception,” and supplied the means to provide a “basis for a new awareness, a new consciousness,” they argued was needed in the discipline.18 Historical geographers and geoscientists are now beginning to show increasing interest in the temporal and environmental perceptions, contingencies and agencies of landscape phenomenon with the aid of historical works and pieces of literature.19 By developing critical hermeneutical skills and applying commensurate geographical, historical and literary framings, mappings and visualizations, (as illustrated by the chapters in this book), new

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avenues to perceive, interpret and parse physical landscapes, climate and weather, and their effects on the longue durée of human history are emerging to facilitate deeper understandings and engagements between disciplines in the arts, humanities, and Earth-systems sciences.20

1.2

Chapter Overviews

The chapters in Environment as a Weapon chronologically engage the lenses of literary and historical geography to explore perceptions concerning the relations between environment and war over the past several millennia. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, (1600–1155 BCE) an ancient saga first inscribed on clay tablets, the legend’s eponymous hero and his companion Enkidu hunt and kill the animal-god Humbaba, tasked with guarding the cedar forests of Lebanon. It has been speculated that their aim was to harvest and bring timber to build a city on the treeless plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.21 Perspectives in “environmental history posit that nature - an amorphous and hotly debated category that includes weather, rivers, bears, grasses, lice, and the malariacausing parasite Plasmodium falciparum,” has “shaped human history, just as humans transformed their natural environment.”22 Strongly underlying such a view is the premise: … that nature has historical agency. Agency does not equal intention; rather, ascribing agency to nature acknowledges the processes of evolution and adaptation, in both the long and short term, by both human and nonhuman communities.23

Chapter 2, Ancient Warfare 1500 BCE–128 CE and Chap. 3 Post Classical and Medieval Age Poetic Perceptions, 975–1493 CE, apply geomythological lenses to bridge perspectives shared by literary and historical geographers and geoscientists to discuss readings drawn from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Torah, Greco-Roman literature and the respective Anglo-Saxon/ Nordic, Gaelic and West African epics Beowulf, Táin Bó Cúailnge, Sundiata, in addition to shamanistic Mongolian myths, and the chronicles of Marco Polo.

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History records that the Little Ice Age’s (1300–1850 CE) climate and weather played roles in the wreck of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and General George Washington’s early campaigns in the American Revolutionary War between 1775 and 1777. Chapter 4, Seachange: Early Modern Oceanic Wars, 1588–1762, explores the inauguration of early modern oceanic warfare during a period in which temperatures in the North Atlantic region experienced a pronounced decline due to orbital forcing, shifts in oceanic circulation, low solar radiation cycles and increases in volcanic activity.24 The advent of early modern sea power intersects with the agencies of the Little Ice Age in the destruction of the Spanish Armada on the west coast of Ireland, the construction of the Hollandic Waterline, and the bathymetry and confluence of Gulf Stream and Labrador currents in creating Newfoundland’s biblical Grand Banks codfishery, a natural resource that contributed to capitalizing the British empire. This era of global cooling spanned the Early Modern and Enlightenment Ages, and within its time frame, the Protestant and Counter Reformations transformed and redefined the concepts of capital, commerce, property, and the role of the nationstate. Revelations from new scientific perspectives introduced by Copernicus were translated into tropes of scientific rationalism by Descartes, Newton, and others. In 1608, the invention of the telescope revealed the “secrets of the universe,” symbolizing the new Galilean ontology on relations between nature, environment, and technology which recalibrated and refocused “the earth from the viewpoint of the universe.”25 In the eighteenth century, the concept of the “Clockwork Universe” emerged in which a Cartesian globe orbiting in “absolute” sequential time, was navigated with the new language emerging from Copernicus’ cosmology, Newton’s physics, and the grid of coordinates conjured by Descartes’ seventeenth-century marriage of Euclidian geometry and algebra. Chapter 5, Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777, illustrates how environment, geographical knowledge and weather intersected as weapons in a quarrel that began between King George III and English colonials to ensure their

1 Prologue: Environment as a Weapon

full rights as British citizens, but quickly flared into a revolutionary struggle for liberty and the self-determination of an independent nation. The early battles of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1777) were fought in New England “nor easters,” the torrid humidity of a New York City summer, and the freezing hail, sleet, and snow of a Christmas Day in New Jersey. Environment, climate, and the weather of the Little Ice Age, not only served as weapons of war for George Washington and his Continental Army, but also as metaphors in the war-time poetry and pamphlets of both rebel and redcoat propaganda. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, political, scientific, cartographic, and industrial revolutions inaugurated the practice of Total War, creating battle environments that possessed the agencies of geo-hazards, and consumed the bodies of a nation’s populace as if they were enormous herds of cattle being sent to the abattoir, or buried in volcanic pumice like the citizens of ancient Pompeii. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Charles Minard’s Carte Figurative contextualize Napoleon’s disastrous Grande Armeé invasion and retreat from Russia in 1812 in Chap. 6 The Decay of Nature and Birth of Total War, 1798–1812. Reflecting the new scientific sensibilities of this period, Prussian military officer and theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who fought in Russia against Napoleon, argued in On War (1832) that though warfare strategies may be drafted on paper, they are executed within the physical geographies of battlefields where environmental contingencies must be recognized. Clausewitz argued that factors such as soil, flora, fauna, topography, and the obstacles of lakes, rivers, valleys, mountains, and the dynamics of precipitation, climate, and weather must be considered, if the outcome of a military campaign was to be successful. Observing a battle through an environmental lens, Clausewitz pointed out the geographical exigencies that could influence its course: … here the fog prevents the enemy from being discovered in time, a battery from firing at the right moment, a report from reaching the general; there, the rain prevents a battalion from arriving […] the cavalry from charging effectively because it is stuck fast in heavy ground.26

1.2 Chapter Overviews

Although Clausewitz’s work was not included in West Point’s curricula before the U.S. Civil War (in which 1,117 graduates—810 for the Union, and 307 for the Confederacy fought), the theatres of battle in the North and South were impacted by industrial-organic assemblages that played strategic roles in how combat occurred between the warring sides.27 Chapter 7 Industrial War of Organic Beings: American Caesura 1860–1865 interrogates the course of history’s first Anthropocene War, through the clarifying lenses of Emily Dickinson’s Civil War poetry and in case studies discussing the Union’s Anaconda Blockade, General Robert E. Lee’s Invasion of the North, General Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea, and General Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign. By the time the war erupted in 1860, steel and iron works, steamboats, and railways were spreading liked mechanical vines and spores across the landscape of America, buttressing an industrial North against a Southern agrarian plantation system powered by enslaved labour. Gazing back on the war in 1885, John Fiske commented in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine: “Never did any war so thoroughly illustrate how military power may be wielded by people that has passed entirely from the military into industrial stage of civilization.”28 Chapter 8, Global Wars, Environmental Strategies and the Military-Ecological Complex, 1914–1975 sketches early twentieth-century geopolitical perceptions before discussing the use of geo-hazards as catastrophic battle weapons, and how the power of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex was countered by North Vietnam’s Military-Ecological Complex. Last, but not least, Chap. 9 Epilogue: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail briefly reviews twentieth-century petroleum wars, explores the deployment sub-atomic and digital environments, and addresses the existential and “wicked problem” of global warming. In this regard, James Lovelock, father of the EarthSystem Science model Gaia, employed a mythical metaphor when he observed, … we are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago, and if it does most of us, and our descendants, will die. It is as if we were committed

5 to live through the mythical tale of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and see our Valhalla melt in torrid heat.29

The manifestations of extreme weather and climate over the past quarter century illustrate that Gaia is beginning to “participate in history,” and is “fighting back,” with the Earth engaged in a “power struggle” to draw homo-sapiens back into biogeographical balance with its planetary systems.30 Notes 1. Cited by Lasky, M. J. 1976. Utopia and Revolution. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Ref. 481. 2. Hughes, J. D. 2013. Warfare and Environment in the Ancient World. (Eds.) Brian Campbell and Lawrence A. Trittle, The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ref. 129. 3. Clarke, K. C. What is the World’s Oldest Map?, The Cartographic Journal, 50:2, 136– 143, Ref. 140. 4. Utrilla, P., Mazo, C., Sopena, M. C., Martínez-Bea, M. and Domingo, R. 2009. A palaeolithic map from 13,660 calBP: engraved stone blocks from the Late Magdalenian in Abauntz Cave (Navarra, Spain). Journal of Human Evolution, 57(2), pp. 99– 111. Ref. 99. 5. Ibid. 6. Clarke. What is the World’s Oldest Map?, 140. 7. Killingsworth, M. J. 2005. Mapping Babel: A Response to Max Oelschalager, in (Eds.) Sidney I. Dobrin and Christopher J. Keller, Writing Environments, SUNY Press. Ref. 167. 8. Bowen, William M., and Robert E. Gleeson. 2018. The evolution of human settlements: from pleistocene origins to anthropocene prospects. Springer. Ref. 129. 9. Winters, Harold A. 1998. Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ref. 1.

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10. Tzu, S. 2020. The Art of War: The Oldest Military Treatise in the World, Trans., Lionel Giles, Strelbytskyy Multimedia, Ref. 56. 11. Herodotus, Histories, 1920. English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. Ref. 4.173. Retrieved from http://www.perseus.tufts.edu; Also, see, Harrison, Thomas. 1998. Herodotus and “The English Patient”, Classics Ireland, Vol. 5: 48–63. “Almásy tells Katharine, as they shelter from a sandstorm, of the Simoom, a wind which ‘a nation thought was so evil they declared war on it and marched out against it in full battle dress.’ Herodotus completes the story: the Psylli, the people in question, marched out, and the wind blew and buried them in sand (4.173).” Ref. 56–57. 12. Romm, J. S. 1992. The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ref. 3–4. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Wright, J. K. 1996. Human Nature in Geography. Cambridge: Harvard. Ref. 11. 16. Mayhew, R. J. 1997. Geography and literature in Historical Context: Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century English Conceptions of Geography. Oxford: School of Geography. Ref. 43. 17. Brousseau, M. 1994. Geography’s Literature, Progress in Human Geography, 18(3), Ref. 333. 18. Pocock, D. C. 1981. Humanistic Geography and Literature: Essays on the Experience of Place. New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books. Ref. 15. 19. Phillips, J. D. 2018. Place formation and axioms for reading the natural landscape. Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and

1 Prologue: Environment as a Weapon

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

Environment, 42(6): 697–720; Barnes, Trevor J., and Duncan, J. S. Eds. 2013. Writing worlds: discourse, text, and metaphor in the representation of landscape. London: Routledge. Phillips, Place formation and axioms for reading the natural landscape, 697–698. Ibid. Brady, L. M. 2012. From Battlefield to Fertile Ground: The Development of Civil War Environmental History. Civil War History, 58(3): 305–321. Ref. 308. Ibid. Koch, A., Brierley, C., Maslin, M. M., Lewis, S. L. 2019. Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. Quaternary Science Reviews. 207: 13–36. Arendt, H. 1988. The human condition. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press Ref. 248–261. Clausewitz, C. V. 1873. On War, Trans. J. J. Graham, London: N Trübner & Co. Ref. 40. National Park Service. 2023. Teaching Military strategy at West Point Before the Civil War. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.nps.gov/articles/ 000/teaching-military-strategy-at-west-pointbefore-the-civil-war.htm. Fiske, J. 1885. Manifest Destiny, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March: 578–590. Lovelock, J. 1998. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity, New York: Basic Books. Ref. 1. Latour, B. 2018. Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons. Ref. 41–42; Hamilton, C. 2017. Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ref. 45.

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Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE

That the Persians set forth from Oasis across the sand, and had reached about halfway between that place and themselves, when … a wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops, and caused them wholly to disappear. Thus according to the Ammonians, did it fare with this army.1 The History of Herodotus

2.1

Early Impressions of Environment and War

In Western history and geography, ancient associations between environment and war can be gleaned from the ancient records, chronicles, artefacts, and religious and mythological manuscripts of Mesopotamia, the Levant, Greece, and Rome. The Zoroastrian Avesta (First millennium BCE) the Epic of Gilgamesh (1600–1155 BCE) and the Hebrew Torah (8–1 BCE) provide perspectives originating in Agricultural Revolution societies of today’s Middle East that budded in 10,000 BCE and flowered in a fertile crescent spanning from western Persia across the TigrisEuphrates watershed to the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. In the Greek Classical world, Homer’s epics, the Iliad and Odyssey (800 BCE) Thucydides’ histories, and Sophocles’ dramatic tragedies speak to perceptions on the environmental degradations of sieges, combat, and conflict. Across the seven volumes of Bellum Gallicum (58–49 BCE), Julius Caesar presents and invents Gaul as an uncivilized territory that needed to be conquered, creating a

rhetorical political weapon with which to maintain the Roman Senate’s support for his military campaigns against the Celtic and Germanic peoples. By defining the physical and human geographies of the “Other” Caesar created a geoimperial template celebrated in Virgil’s Æneid (29–19 BCE) but critiqued by Suetonius’s account of the loss of three Augustan Roman Legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE and later in Tacitus’ Germania (98 CE). Ancient Mesopotamian, Levantine, Greek, and Roman writings discussed in the following sections provide historical and geographical touch-stones to consider how conceptions and perceptions on environment and combat, as will be discussed in subsequent chapters, have evolved, particularly in the West over the past millennia or so.

2.2

Avestan Geographies

For adherents and scholars of Zoroastrianism, the well-spring of the faith resides in a mystical place beyond the confines of time and space.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Travis, Environment as a Weapon, Historical Geography and Geosciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_2

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However, in our historical world, this fount sits within the physical geography of a triangle formed in the west by the Zagros Mountains, Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush Range in the east, and in the south by the lower Indus River Valley. This region’s alluvial and mountainous topography serves as the ancient cradle for one of the earth’s oldest still practising religions.2 In its sacred text —the Avesta—credited to the Persian-speaking spiritual leader Zarathustra, also known as Zoroaster (said to be born between 1500 and 1000 BCE) ecology, eschatology, spiritual and temporal existence and warfare are indivisible. Comprised of Gathas—mysterious ritual poems and Yasna hymns—the Avesta shares an Indo-European language etymology with the sacred Sanskrit Hindu Vedas of northwest India. Possessing monotheistic and polytheistic elements, Zoroastrianism invokes a cosmological battle between the Wise Lord (Ahura Mazda), the embodiment of the benevolent omniscience of the Endless Light, against the destructive forces of the Endless Darkness. Zarathustra teaches that: The original purpose of creation—the sky, the water, the soil, the first plant, the first animal, and the first human—was to help in the fight against the Lie, to help Ahura Mazda to destroy the demonic forces.3

This spiritual and metaphorical weaponization not only of the human soul, but also of the natural environment, its geology, flora and fauna, atmosphere, and hydrosphere reflects a metaphysical battle, which manifests on the earth in a struggle between the “people of the truth” and the “people of the lie.” Such factions in Zarathustra’s teaching were represented respectively by the settled, agricultural, and animal husbandry communities of the Iranian plateau and Caspian Sea basin, and the nomadic horse cultures raiders from the vast Eurasian Steppe.4 In the Avesta, the Wise Lord Ahura Mazda is described as an early, if not militant, horticulturalist: … like the owner of a garden, or a wise gardener, whose garden destructive wild animals and birds seek to ruin.5

In ancient Persian, the etymology of the word “garden” is found in “paradise-pairidaeza-. …

Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE

… formed from pairi for ‘around’ and daeza for ‘wall.’”6 Persian paradise carpets featured blue “water” in the centre surrounded by green foliage rendered in symmetrical patterns “seemingly entwined to infinity.”7 These ground coverings influenced the iconography of Islamic prayer mats, woven to resemble the … entrance to paradise, to the original garden that Christians came to refer to as Eden. This design template—a cognitive response to the environment encoded deeply into culture via religion as well as architectural practice—spread along trade routes east to India and west to Egypt.8

The emergence of Zoroastrianism is important in understanding the weaponization of the environment because its principles, a blend of monotheism and dualism, ecological and eschatological conflict, diffused from the geographical triangle of its birthplace to all four points of the compass, to subtly influence the human, environmental and religious metaphors in the literature of post-exile Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and tenets of Classical Greek philosophy—texts from which we glean aspects of our Western knowledge of the ancient world and its perceptions and relations with environment.

2.3

Mesopotamian Flood: Genesis and Gilgamesh

By 2340 BCE, a Mesopotamian Empire, west of the Zoroastrian Triangle, was flowering like an Edenic garden. Its territory formed an arc from the Nile River Valley’s Mediterranean Delta, northeastward through the Levant (today’s Palestinian territories, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria) and Anatolia (Turkey) before gently curving into Akkad, Babylonia, Sumer (Iraq) and flowing with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers southwards through salt marshes to the waters of the Persian Gulf. Scholars, archaeologists, and cartographers have plotted the fabled site of the biblical Eden to several sites located within the Tigris-Euphrates watershed. The toponymical verses in Genesis 10–14 chart out the Western mythological loci of human creation. The Living Bible translation of the first book of the Hebrew

2.3 Mesopotamian Flood: Genesis and Gilgamesh

Bible credits “J,” a ninth century BCE woman from Jerusalem, with situating the garden in the fluvial region of Mesopotamia: Out of Eden flows a river; it waters the garden, then outside, branches into four: one, Pishon, winds through the whole of Havila, land with gold – excellent gold, where the bdellium is, lapis lazuli. The second, named Gihon Moves through the length of Cush; Tigris, the third, travels east of Asshur; and Euphrates is the fourth.9

Within the riverine geographies of the Fertile Crescent, gardens in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic texts and traditions signified places of erotic joy (Song of Songs), turmoil and pain (Gethsemane), refuge and paradise (Qu’ran). Gardens not only emerged in the literature of these monotheistic religions as leitmotifs to represent human cultivation of the earth in concert with the divine, but also as defensive boundaries to ward off spiritual and cultural violence, in addition to natural entropy. In Genesis’ cosmological chronicle, the garden serves as a spatial metaphor for the first human footprint of resource consumption left upon the Earth. Indeed, the story of Eve, the serpent, and the apple plucked from the Tree of Knowledge and bitten by Adam can be parsed as one of the first instances of a “bitter harvest.” The Mesopotamian culture from which this creation myth springs utilized irrigation to cultivate barley and wheat. By 3000 BCE, the incorporation of soils, stone, wood, and metals in the construction of Sumerian city-states to defend agricultural wealth from nomadic raiders was accompanied by investments of “energy in war, metal helmets, spearheads and shields to do battle.”10 The emergence of such military forces organized labour and contributed to the rapid spread of irrigation technology across Mesopotamia. Inextricable links between the environment and warfare are symbolically featured in the urban planning of metropolises such as Ur and Babylon. Often, “at the center of the city were two large sanctuary complexes, one for Inanna, the goddess of love and war, and one for An, the sky god.”11 Cuneiform tablets dating to 2500 BCE record the increase in rival city-states across the region of the Fertile Crescent, with many

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city-state kings proclaiming their power by erecting temples and palaces adorned with regal inscriptions.12 William H. McNeill notes that “as soon as the cities of the plain had been made to flourish” in the lower Tigris and Euphrates watershed, “they became tempting objects of plunder.”13 One of the raiders and conquerors was Sargon, king of Akkad who in 2340 BCE unified the warring lower Mesopotamian city-states, establishing the first known Western empire—one he ruled until his death in 2279 BCE.14 The goddess Inanna was often beseeched by King Sargon, who called upon her support in politics and war, both longestablished theatres of battle, as he consolidated his Akkadian power base.15 The next centre of the empire was Babylon, a city nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Between 1792 and 1750 BCE, this imperial capital was ruled by Hammurabi, who in homage to Marduk, the King of Gods, constructed a temple, and erected a terraced tower named Etemenanki, denoted as the “House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.” The ziggurat, rebuilt in 625 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar, imperator of the second Babylonia empire, is argued to be Genesis’ Tower of Babel. Supposedly razed by Persian King Xerxes I (485–465 BCE), the “bartizan” is mentioned by Herodotus in Babylonios logos (484–425 BCE). According to lore, Hammurabi dictated the Sun-God Shamash’s edicts to write the first Western legal code. However, it is the Epic of Gilgamesh, described as “the mother of all literature, from Tolstoy to Tolkien and beyond,” that comprises “the most important information revolution since the emergence of speech.”16 Its original twelve clay tablets, inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform script in 2100 BCE, relay the epic journey of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk (in present day Iraq) undertook in 2700 BCE. In the tale, he travels with Enkidu, a wild-man birthed by the gods, to hunt and kill the animal-god Humbaba, guardian of the Cedars of Lebanon. At first, Gilgamesh is daunted by the grandeur of the vast woodland. However, Enkidu sees the trees as soldiers of an enemy army, and thus hunting Humbaba transforms into an act of warfare:

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2 As the cedar [cast] its shadow, [terror] fell on Gilgameš. [Stiffness took] a grip of his arms, and feebleness beset his legs. [Enkidu] opened his mouth to speak, saying to Gilgameš: “[Let us go] into the midst of the forest, [set] to it and let us raise (our battle) cry!” (V 27–33)17

The passage can be parsed as one of the first accounts of a “resource war.” Situated east of the Euphrates River, Uruk sits on a treeless plain, and Gilgamesh’s objective was to harvest the timbers of Lebanon in order to build the infrastructure of his kingdom. He and Enkidu enter into battle with a manifestation of drought—the enormous “Bull of Heaven”—whose huge snorts blast sinkholes into the landscape, and hooves create earthquakes as it paws the ground before charging.18 Enkidu dies in the conflict, and Gilgamesh, shaken by his death, follows the path of the Sun on the advice of the Scorpion People to meet the goddess of wisdom, Siduri, in a seaside tavern. She tells Gilgamesh to journey across the Water of Death with the ferryman Ur-Shabani to a place holding the secret of eternal life. On arrival, he is greeted by Utnapishtim, legendary survivor of the Great Flood, and learns that: For six days and seven nights, Was blowing the wind, the downpour, the gale, the Deluge [laying flat the land], When the seventh day arrived, The gale relented, … The sea grew calm, that had fought like a woman in labour, The tempest grew still, and the Deluge ended. I looked at the weather, and there was quiet, However, all the people had turned to clay. (SBV XI: 128–135)19

Informed that he cannot be given eternal life, Gilgamesh learns about a secret youth-reviving herb, but before he can pluck it, a snake snatches the plant and slithers away, leaving the king to return to Uruk, older, but wiser for his journey.20 Catastrophic stories of flooding, such as the one survived by Utnapishtim, were common throughout the Middle East, emerging first in Sumer, in Lower Mesopotamia near the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun River delta, a low-lying Persian Gulf marsh known as the “Sea Country.”21

Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE

Comparable accounts of massive Mesopotamian flooding are recorded in the Quran (Surah 11: 37–49) in addition to Genesis (6:5–8:22). The latter lists the number of cubits needed to construct an Ark of gopher wood to preserve selected pairs of flora and fauna, in addition to Noah and his family, so Yahweh can “weaponize” monsoon rains against human wickedness and scour the earth of its traces. At the British Museum in 1871, George Smith, an Assyrian scholar self-tutored in cuneiform, deciphered a Gilgamesh tablet to discover “a poetical description of the eve of the deluge” similar to the one in Genesis. Predating the Biblical version by at least one thousand years, the Sumerian inscription became known as the “Flood Tablet.”22 Twenty-first-century geoscientists have chimed in with four theories on the origins of Gilgamesh and Noah’s floods and, by extension, Islamic and Sumerian accounts. First, the Persian Gulf was subject to rapid early Holocene postglacial flooding; second, massive tsunami waves triggered by a meteorite strike approximately 10,000 years ago created global deluge events; third, a rapid refilling of the Black Sea basin approximately 8400 years ago occurred when the Mediterranean Sea spilled over the ridge of the Bosphorus Strait (separating the Black and Marmara Seas) in the early Holocene, and finally and most likely, a seasonal megaflood swamped the lower Mesopotamian Tigris and Euphrates watershed, leaving archaeological and geological traces of sediment deposits near the ancient settlement mounds (tells) of Ur and Uruk, regions close to where cuneiform inscription first emerged.23

2.4

The Torah

Like the ancient Zoroastrian and Sumerian texts preceding it, the Hebrew Torah (8–1 BCE) employs environmental imagery and phenomena to convey human conflicts between the sacred and the profane. However, in contrast to the pantheon of gods in the Avesta and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Torah (Tanach or Pentateuch, and its five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,

2.4 The Torah

Numbers, and Deuteronomy) stands as one of the first testaments to monotheism. Specifically, Exodus provides the origin-story of how enslaved Hebrews consolidated as a people and nation in the Nile Delta. Under the leadership of patriarchs Moses and Aaron, the Jews were led out of bondage according to Exodus, only after Egypt suffers a series of divine-ordinated natural disasters and pandemics, due to Pharaoh, King Ramses II’s stubborn refusal to free Yahweh’s “chosen people.” The “ten plagues” visited on Pharaoh and the Egyptians provide a seminal case study on how environmental factors and assemblages were transmuted through the prism of eschatological perception into weapons of retribution and liberation: (1) Exodus, 7.18: “The fish in the Nile will die, the river will be a stench: it will impossible for Egypt to drink from the Nile.”24 In the King’s James Bible edition, the waters of the Nile turn to blood, and this suggests the growth of an microbial algae bloom, turning the river crimson with dinoflagellates, and killing fish and other aquatic life.25 (2) Exodus, 8.2: “I will strike down your borders with frogs.”26 Because of the Nile’s toxic bloom, amphibious creatures beat a “hasty retreat,” from the river, hopping onto its shores and migrating to other areas.27 (3) Exodus, 8.16: God “smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man, and in beast.” With their main predators absent, the moist, ecotonic soil of the delta comes to serve as a breeding ground for lice (Phthiraptera). However, in other Biblical editions, gnats and midges come to pester Pharoah and the Egyptians. (4) Exodus, 8.20: “powerful droves of flies entered Pharaoh’s palace, his officers’ houses; through all the land of Egypt land was ruined under flies.”28 Clouds of stable flies (Stomoxys calcitrans) proliferated and buzzed from their feasts on the dead fish and rotting vegetation floating in the Nile.29 (5) Exodus, 9.3– 4: “Yahweh’s hand will grasp your cattle … your horses, donkeys, camels, oxen, sheep – a hard thing, a stiff plague, [but] among the Israelites not one thing will die.”30 Gnats and midges carrying Bluetongue and African Horse Sickness transmitted the viral diseases to livestock, striking Egyptian camels, oxen, horses and sheep,

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penned near the Nile, but sparing animals of the Jews, stabled away from the river in the desert.31 (6) Exodus 9.8–9 (King James Edition): sprinkle ashes of the furnace and there “shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man and upon beast.” Now the flies, carrying the bacteria of glanders and anthrax, spread in handfuls of ashes, bit people and animals creating boils. (7) Exodus, 9.23: “hail fell on the land of Egypt; a hard hail.”32 A thunderstorm up draft moving in from the Mediterranean brought damaging hailstones. (8) Exodus, 10.15: “Now the locusts ascended over Egypt, obliterating all borders.”33 It can be conjectured that a swarm of desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) migrated from their breeding grounds on the Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea coast. (9) Exodus, 10.21 (King James Edition): “Stretch out thine hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt.” The soil from croplands stripped bare by the locust swarm is lifted by the west wind, and howls across Egypt to blot out the sun.34 (10) Exodus 11.5–7: (Kings James Edition) “And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die” and “there shall be a great cry throughout the land of Egypt … But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue.” Traditionally, the first born in Egyptian families were also the first to be served meals. It is conjectured deaths attributed to the tenth plague to afflict Pharoah and his people were caused by foods infested with Stachybotrys atra, a deadly mycotoxin growing in the mildew spores sprouting on the damp walls and floors of Egyptian granaries in the humid Nile Delta.35 In chronicling the Israeli fight for liberation, the authors of Exodus realized, … what God needed was nature’s arsenal -blights that aroused a deep sense of mystery and fear. Winning a war by “shock and awe” would render a conquered foe psychologically beaten and disheartened. If the natural world was loosed on the enemy, they would not soon forget.36

After the tenth plague, the Israelites were released, but in spite, Pharaoh sends a legion of charioteers in pursuit. Moses and his people are trapped by a body of water, named in various accounts as the Red Sea or the Sea of Reeds.

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2.4.1 Parting the Sea Several geoscientific explanations have been proffered to substantiate the three to four thousand year-old historical geography of Moses’ parting of the Red Sea. Computer simulations of hurricane force winds blowing from the northeast illustrate, theoretically, that a reef near the modern-day Suez Canal could have been exposed by gales to create a land bridge across its channel. Another study identified a site in the eastern Nile Delta, where an ancient Pelusiac branch of the river flowed into a coastal lagoon named the Lake of Tanis. In Exodus, 14.1–2, the Israelis are instructed to “encamp near Pi Hahiroth (translated as mouth of the canals) between Migdol and the sea … directly opposite Baal Zephon.”37 Archaeology studies have placed “Migdol of Egypt’s New Kingdom period near Magdolum.”38 In a further study, satellite and geological surveys of the Late Bronze Age (circa 1250 BCE) bathymetry were parsed with geographical descriptions of the eastern Nile Delta in fourth century BCE and first century CE chronicles of Herodotus and Ptolemy, in conjunction with reports of Major-General Alexander B. Tulloch, a nineteenth-century British Army surveyor.39 Mapping the topography between Port Said and Kantarah in 1882, Tulloch reported that “a gale

2

Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE

of wind from the eastward set in and became so strong,” that he had to cease surveying.40 Returning to the site the next morning the MajorGeneral was startled to find, … that Lake Menzaleh, which is situated on the west side of the Canal, had totally disappeared, the effect of the high wind on the shallow water having actually driven it away beyond the horizon and the natives were walking about on the mud where the day before the fishing-boats, now aground were floating … it suddenly flashed across my mind that I was witnessing a similar event to what had taken place between three and four thousand years ago, at the time of the passage of the so-called Red Sea by the Israelites.41

Tulloch noted that the waters of the lake, only five or six feet in depth, had “absolutely disappeared” and been “packed up” seven miles to the northwest.42 In Exodus, Moses parts the waters, and the Jews flee across the seabed. The pursuing Egyptians drown as a wall of waves collapses upon their chariots (Fig. 2.1). Wandering across the Sinai Peninsula for forty years, the Hebrews develop a belief in one supreme god called Yahweh. Later, settling in the land of Canaan, the Israelis consolidate as a group of monotheistic tribes unified under the legal and moral code of the Ten Commandments. The ancient kingdom of Israel was later founded around 1020 BCE in the southern Levant region of Palestine on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.43

Fig. 2.1 Moses parting the Red Sea as the Pharoah’s army drowns. After Raphael’s Stanza di Eliodoro (1650–70). Source Wikimedia Commons

2.4 The Torah

2.4.2 Biogeographic Warfare, Salt, and Summits Once Israel was established, entomological defences were deployed to protect the fledgling nation and its territory. The Book of Exodus tells of wasp (‫ )ִצרָעה‬swarms sent to “drive out … the Hivites, the Canaanites and the Hittites,” from the promised land.44 Biblical locust plagues seem to be a feature of ancient, as well as modern warfare in the region: “during a time of extended military conflict, fields cannot be ploughed. In western Asia this situation allows grasshopper egg pods, deposited by the female in the topsoil, to survive and reach maturity. Consequently, there is a high chance that the region will face a locust plague in the following year. Such was the case, for example, in Afghanistan after the war in 2002. For ancient western Asia, locust plagues after lengthy periods of war are evidenced by various letters.”45 I Samuel 5.6 contains one of the first accounts of the weaponization of the Bubonic Plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by fleas and rodents.46 In 1320 BCE, soon after the Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Israelites, infected rats mysteriously appeared in southern Palestine cities, spreading the disease: “Then, the LORD’s heavy hand struck the people of Ashdod and the nearby villages with a plague of tumors; and rats appeared in their land, and death and destruction were throughout the city.”47 In response, Philistine priests called for the Ark to be returned to the Jewish people along with (I Samuel, 6.4–6) “five gold tumors and five gold rats, just like those that have ravaged your land. Make these things to show honor to the God of Israel.”48 In contrast, the Book of Deuteronomy established biogeographical rules of engagement on the use of environmental resources during siege warfare: When you lay siege to a city for a long time … do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees people, that you should besiege them? However, you may cut down trees that you know are not fruit trees and use them to build siege works until the city at war with you falls. (Deut. 20.19–20)49

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Despite scriptural injunctions against harming the environment, many critics place blame for the Western utilitarian view of nature and the promulgation of creationism-pseudoscience on the manner in which biblical texts have been interpreted. In Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967), Clarence Glacken identifies the origin of such perspectives in early modern Christian exegetical practices: “The intense otherworldliness and rejection of the beauties of nature … are elaborated upon far more in theological writings than in the Bible itself.”50 Furthermore, geologist Yaakov Bentor notes that the “concept of a changing Earth, of nature in evolution, is possibly the deepest insight the bible achieved into a central aspect of geology,” observing that “the number of geological features described or alluded to in the bible is very large.”51 The Jordan Valley, shaped by the same plate tectonic forces that are slowly widening the Syria-East Africa Rift, is a prominent feature in biblical geology. Sodom (and its twin, Gomorrah), the city upon which “Lot’s wife stopped to look backand crystallized into a statue of salt,” shares a valley with Masáda, a cliff-top fortress defended by the Sicarri, Judaic zealots and assassins, against a Roman siege prior to the Jewish exile at the end of the first century CE.52 Sodom, sitting south of the Dead Sea, was destroyed according to biblical lore by God due to the wickedness of its people. Genesis 19 takes narrative liberties to dramatize a moral lesson: “Now Yahweh spilled on Sodom and Gomorrah a volcanic rain: fire from Yahweh, from the sky.”53 Although Roman imperial geographer Strabo also describes the twin cities’ destruction by “fire and brimstone,” modern geological studies dissent and reveal that Sodom was destroyed by the “liquefaction failure of alluvial fan and flood-plain deposits,” that occurred when the upper level of the Dead Sea breached the Lisan Peninsula, flooding the coastal cities of its southern basin.54 In Genesis, Lot is commanded by Yahweh to “escape to the mountain or be crushed,” an act more consistent with fleeing the rising waters of a flood, rather than climbing up to the mouth of an erupting volcano.55 The crystallization of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt also “belongs to the type of myths

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created to explain unusual features of landscape or customs,” as well as convey the “shock and awe” of Genesis’ moral lessons.56 As Bentor notes, on the southwestern shore of the Dead Sea, … rises the diapiric salt-ridge of Mount Sodom. The cap-rock at the top of the salt mass is dissected by the rare rains into bizarre erosional remnants, one of which is still presented to tourists as Lot’s wife turned into salt. The fact that it consists largely of anhydrite overlying the salt is of minor importance.57

Three centuries later, the Siege of Masáda (73–74 CE) illustrated how the mesa of “an immense rock, half a mile long by an eight broad,” towering over the southwestern coastal plain of the Dead Sea acted as a defensive stronghold for Jewish zealots after the Roman sacking of Jerusalem and destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.58 Masáda, one of the Judaic garrisons erected by King Herod, was captured in 6 CE by Roman legions occupying the Levant. In 66 CE, the cliff-top fortress was seized by the rebel Jewish leader Manaemus and fell into the hands of the Sicarri—“extremist knifemen” and assassins. Under the leadership of Eleazar be Yir, the Sicarri established Masáda as a base from which to attack the Romans and their Jewish collaborators (Fig. 2.2).59 The massif features in The historical geography of the Holy Land (1919) by Scottish theologian George Adam Smith (1856–1942) who in the explosive wake of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, navigated the “strong currents of geographical, theological, and scientific thought,” reshaping biblical geography and exegesis in the late Victorian period.60 Rising over the western coast of the Dead Sea, Smith writes that the pinnacle of Masáda was a formidable defensive weapon: “It is isolated, precipitous on every side and inaccessible except in two places, where winding paths, half goat-tracks half ladders, may be followed by men in single file.”61 To the west, Masáda rises 400 ft., and facing east, towers more than a mile over the Dead Sea Valley: The fortresses are very few that match this one in natural strength … it is only when you come to it, as those who would attack it had come, through

Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE

the waterless wilderness of Judaea, that you feel its awful remoteness, its savage height, its fitness to turn whole armies of besiegers into stony despair. Masáda is the Gorgon’s head magnified to a mountain.62

In 73 CE the Tenth Roman Legion was marshalled from Jerusalem and marched to the Dead Sea to recapture the fortress from 960 Sicarri. The zealots held off the legion for three months, but after failing to rally the greater Israeli nation to their cause, killed each other to circumvent the Judaic law’s prohibition on suicide. Only a few women and children who hid from the zealots survived. Roman calvary and auxiliary finally breached the cliff and Masáda’s walls with an enormous siege tower. Entering the garrison strewn with the corpses of zealots, the legionnaires described Masáda as “a citadel of death.”63

2.5

Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles, and the Plagues of War

Over the arc of Homer’s two epic poems of war and peace, the Iliad and the Odyssey (800 BCE) Ulysses is geographically transformed from a warlord into a statesman as he journeys from the Siege of Troy back to his home at Ithaca. The Grecian ideals of courage, fortitude, and sacrifice in the environmental sweep of Homer’s epics are balanced by the vagaries of the gods, human agency, and the role of nature.64 A famous example of Grecian sacrifice is the oft told tale of how Spartan and Greek armies employed the tricks of topography to entice King Xerxes I’s massive Persian invading force to jam into a narrow mountain pass. By dictating the location of battle, a cohort of 300 Spartan soldiers led by Leonidas turned their environment into a weapon at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. The Spartans fought a pitched battle for seven days before being utterly defeated, but in their loss, they stalled the larger army. This gave the Greeks time to retreat, reorganize, and fight again in a naval clash near the island of Salamis. The war culminated in triumph with a decisive Greek victory in 479 BCE at Battle of Platae. With the

2.5 Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles, and the Plagues of War

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Fig. 2.2 Bird’s Eye and Southern Views of Masada. From, Palestine Exploration Fund, Survey of Western Palestine: Memoirs III, 1883 and W. Tipping engraving

in Flavius Josephus, The History of the Jewish War, 1842. Source Wikimedia Commons

help of Spartan allies at Thermopylae, the Persian invasions of Greece were ended. Homer’s verses on the Siege of Troy in the Iliad (8 BCE) allude to armies being decimated by an epidemic.

refuge behind the city walls.67 During the Peloponnesian War, three combustible chemicals “pitch, sulphur and quicklime” were deployed as weapons.68 At the Siege of Plataea in 429 BCE, Spartans circled the city with pine bonfires, stoking the flames with lumps of sulphur. The smoke and toxic fumes of the fires wafted across Plataea’s ramparts with deadly effect (Fig. 2.3).69 In The History of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), Thucydides writes that the bubonic plague that helped the Spartans to victory in 430 CE originated from an epidemic in “parts of Ethiopia” that spread into “Egypt and Libya,” and suddenly fell “upon Athens.”70 Thucydides records the plague “first attacked the population in Piraeus” who blamed the Spartans for poisoning their water reservoirs.71 Thucydides describes with a clinician’s eye how Athenians were “breaking out into small pustules and ulcers,” and records how in the city “bodies of dying men lay one upon another, and halfdead creatures reeled about the streets and gathered round all the fountains in their longing for water.”72 The disease vectors of pandemics portrayed in the Iliad, during the Peloponnesian War, and in Sophocles’ drama Oedipus Rex (429 BCE)

He in wrath Against the king had stirred throughout the best Fell plague, whereby the troops lay perishing.65

Homer’s poetic reference is rooted in the ancient practice of dropping bodies of cholera and plague victims “over the walls of beleaguered cities” and leaving infected corpses “on the ground the enemy was expected to occupy” to “poison water sources.”66 Prior to the alliance fostered at the Battle of Thermopylae, such practices were deployed during the Peloponnesian War (431–405 BCE) between two of ancient Greece’s most powerful city-states. Democratic Athens, whose navy controlled the sea-lanes, was led into war by its leading statesman, Pericles. However, the autocratic Spartans, who annually raided other city-states, possessed the strongest and most feared army on the Grecian Peninsula. Strong walls, extending to the port of Piraeus on the Saronic Gulf of the Aegean Sea, protected Athens from such raids. At the onset of the wars, Pericles ordered Athenians to move from the countryside and take

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Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE

Fig. 2.3 Siege of Plataea Frieze, Temple of Athena, Athens (425 BCE). Source Wikimedia Commons

… travel along the vertical routes followed by gods, prayers, smoke, and smells, and along the horizontal networks followed by sharp arrows, the traffic in prizes of war, and information. The plague exposes and hijacks the porosity of spaces whose physical boundaries and symbolic identities are conventionally perceived to be stable and autonomous.73

Nowhere is this more evident than in Oedipus Rex, where the plague-stricken city-state of Thebes emerges as the Alpha and Omega, a space where triumph and tragedy intersect. As the drama opens, King Oedipus is called upon to purge the evil pestilence afflicting the city, tragically unaware of his own role in bringing the plague to Thebes. Sophocles’ play emphasizes that far from being divinely ordained, human existence is blighted by tragic and misguided choices, often with environmental contexts and consequences. As a baby, Oedipus is abandoned on Mount Citheron by his father Laius, the King of Thebes, who had been warned by a soothsayer that his son would eventually murder him. Rescued by a shepherd, Oedipus is adopted and raised by King Polybus of Corinth. As a young man he seeks advice from the Oracle at Delphi, only to learn he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother (whom he believes to be his adoptive parents). Oedipus then abandons Corinth and sets out for Thebes, his actual birthplace. Encountering Laius on the way, he quarrels with the disguised king and slays him. Arriving in the city, Oedipus kills the terrifying Sphinx, is named king of Thebes and unknowingly marries Laius’ widow, who is his actual birth mother. The queen Jocasta bears him four children before plague descends upon the city-state. In the first act of Oedipus Rex begins, we find the chorus lamenting,

Our famous land is barren earth; its ample harvests fail. Women labor, giving birth, but all to no avail. … Countlessly, the city dies. No compassion’s found. A deadly generation lies unpitied on the ground.74

Oedipus soon learns that Thebes’ plight is a divine judgement for King Laius’ murder. Tackling the case like a detective trying to solve a mystery, Oedipus consults the blind seer Teiresias and to his shock learns that he is Laius’ murderer. Enraged with horror, Oedipus recalls the Oracle’s prophecy at Delphi. As the news of his complicity spreads across Thebes, Jocasta hangs herself. In response, Oedipus blinds himself, donning a mask of crimson, and is exiled with his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, by Creon the newly crowned king. Sophocles’ tragic cycle continues with Oedipus at Colonus (401 BCE), regaling the exiled king’s death and secret burial at Colonus. Antigone (441 BCE), the last drama of the cycle, finds the corpse of Oedipus’s son Polyneices left on waste ground outside of Thebes, denied burial, and decreed to rot as battle-carrion by King Creon. Often performed in large urban, open-air theatres sitting up to fifteen thousand spectators, Oedipus Rex’s Chorus paints the portrait of a disease and war ravaged the city: The fruitful buds of earth are failing, herds are failing, women bear their labor pains in vain, and plague attacks, the hateful fire-bringing god.75

Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle reflects “the disastrous effects wars always have,” and

2.6 Roman Literary Geographies, Environment, War

ultimately, the choruses of his dramas place blame on the hateful, fire-bringing Greek god of war, Ares, instigator of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta—for the plagues and various tragedies that befall Oedipus and his children.76

2.6

Roman Literary Geographies, Environment, War

Arguably, the story of modern relations between environment, war, and Western imperialism can be traced to the roots of the Ficus Ruminalis, a sacred fig tree in Italy located on the banks of the Tiber River, where the twins Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. The ancient festival of Lupercalia celebrates their birth as the founders of Rome, a city-state that ascended to an Age of Kings (625–510 BCE), then a Republic (510– 31 BCE) before reaching its apogee and eventual decline as an empire (31 BCE–476 CE). The boys, progeny of Mars the god of war, and Rhea Fig. 2.4 Romans Legions retreating from Germania and the the Suevi, by burning their military bridge across the River Rhine in 56 BCE. Speculative Artifical Intelligence Image generated by Charles Travis

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Silvia, daughter of the deposed King Numitor, were ordered drowned by their grand-uncle Amilius, the king who had taken the throne from their grandfather. Floating in the Tiber, the boys were rescued by a she-wolf and nursed in a grotto at the foot of Palatine Hill. Adopted and raised by Faustulus, a herdsman and his wife Acca, the twins grow older, and come to lead a gang of youths. After they kill Amilius in revenge they establish the city of Rome near the sacred fig tree on the River Tiber. A tragic power struggle ensues between the twins and Romulus murders Remus, setting a violent precedent for how the course of Roman political and imperial history would come to unfold. As the city of seven hills expanded into a republic and then a “world” empire, the festival of Lupercalia (a progenitor of St. Valentine’s Day) became an arena of political theatre for those with leadership ambitions, including Julius Caesar, who by “inventing” Gaul, deployed the province’s physical and human geography as a political weapon to climb to the pinnacle of Roman power.

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2.6.1 Bellum Gallicum Before the first century CE, Roman frontiers in continental Europe were largely determined by the alluvial, geological, and topographical features of rivers, mountains and forests. Such borders were reinforced and defended by garrisons and designated military perimeter lines. From the first century BCE to the fourth century CE, the Rhine River formed the principal border between the Gallic territories acquired by the Roman Empire and the “barbarian” forests of Germania. Originating in a high, Alpine spring, replenished by rainfall, melting snow, and ice, the headwaters of the Rhine flow north out of present-day Switzerland. As the river winds across its Central and Eastern European watershed to the North Sea, it widens and deepens, becoming more difficult to ford. Consequently, the Lower Rhine serves as a natural boundary between Germany on its east bank and the present countries of the Netherlands and France on its western shore. In Roman times, the waterway protected imperial Gaul from eastern raids and attacks by the forest-dwelling Germanic tribes.77 In his quest to return to Rome in triumph and assume power after serving as consul of the Republic in 59 BCE, Julius Caesar composed the Bellum Gallicum (Gallic Wars), a series of heroic commentaries describing his campaign to carve the colonial province of Gaul out of a barbaric wilderness. Caesar’s letters dispatched back to Rome’s intelligentsia, chronicle how from 58 to 52 BCE he marched his legions to the edge of the Roman frontier, subduing the Gallic tribes and bringing their territory into the Republic. Caesar’s representation of Gaul served as a rhetorical device he used to shape the budding imperial imaginations of Roman citizens and his peers. Caesar’s letters described his struggles in a landscape of a “barbaric” people, while promoting his military prowess, courage, and the fealty of his legions. The letters portray Gaul as the setting of a drama for Caesar’s Senate and Roman mob audiences. Upon the literary proscenium of Bellum Gallicum, Caesar heroically performed the brave acts required in a supreme leader of the Republic, by conquering

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an uncivilized wilderness north of the Alps and making it Roman. Caesar proclaimed “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres” (Gaul is divided into three parts) and inhabited by a triumvirate of “barbaric” tribes. The Belgae lived in the northeast; the southeast was the territory of the Aquitani, with Gaul’s largest tribe “who in their own language are called the Celts,”78 occupying the centre of a liminal, imperial geography. Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum gave its “readers access to the theatre of action” as “if they were at the scene itself.”79 At the decisive Battle of Alesia (52 BCE), Caesar defeated the Gallic warlord Vercingetorix and captured Gaul by erecting a donut-shaped garrison with an inner wall encircling Alesia and an outer defensive perimeter to ward off attacks from the warlord’s allies. In the northeast region of his new Roman province, Caesar established a series of limes supplied by a serpentine, military highway fortified by earthen banks, ditches, wooden palisades, watchtowers, and forts, constructed from timbers culled from the heavily forested Gallic landscape. Caesar’s frontier line along the Rhine was reinforced by fleets of Navis Lusoria, small Roman vessels that patrolled the river protecting Gaul from the threat of Germanic forest tribes on the eastern banks of the Rhine. Adopting the name of the largest Gallic tribe, Julius Caesar called his European subjects “Celts,” including the Eburones, Condrusi, Menapii, Usipetes, and Tenchter tribes who lived west of the Rhine. These “Romanized” groups had been pushed across the river by Germanic tribes, the Cherusci, Sigambri, and Suevi whom Caesar deemed in his letters “untamed savages.”80 In 56 BCE, Julius Caesar preparing the invasion of Britannia felt the need to secure his flank against the tribes that lived on the eastern shores of the Rhine. Roman engineers constructed a massive wooden bridge, and Caesar marched his legions across the river’s 300-foot span. The bridge, a technological marvel of its age, stunned the Germanic tribes into sending peace hostages or fleeing to the forest. Only the fierce Suevi people stood their ground. After eighteen days of combat, the Romans retreated back across the

2.6 Roman Literary Geographies, Environment, War

Rhine, burning the bridge in their wake (Fig. 2.4). Wishing to justify his decision to limit Roman control to the Rhine and no further, Julius Caesar designated the river as the boundary between the pacified and cultured “Celts” and the tribes of more “savage” and barbaric eastern forestlands. This was necessary, Caesar argued in Bellum Gallicum: … lest the Germans, who dwell on the other side of the Rhine, should, on account of the excellence of the lands, cross over from their own territories [and] become borderers upon the province of Gaul.81

In the Roman geographical imagination of first century BCE, the west bank of the river came to symbolized “order,” while the east bank of the Rhine represented “chaos.” By 50 BCE, Gaul comprised a Roman Province encompassing modern-day France and parts of Belgium, western Germany, and northern Italy. Caesar’s “invention” of Gaul in Bellum Gallicum provided him with a territory to conquer, the power to become supreme leader of Rome, and the means to transform the Republic into to an Empire.

2.6.2 Pax Romana On the Ides of March in 44 BCE, Julius Caesar was assassinated by the Roman Senate, sparking a series of Civil Wars. In 27 BCE, Octavian succeeding where his uncle Julius failed, became the first Roman Emperor. Assuming the title of Caesar Augustus, he inaugurated an epoch of imperial growth that established a two hundredyear Pax Romana. Strabo, the sub-altern Roman imperial geographer, citing his fellow Greek countryman Eratosthenes, boasted about the potential reach of Roman military power: “if the extent of the Atlantic Ocean were not an obstacle, we might easily pass by sea from Iberia to India, still keeping in the same parallel.”82 In his epic poem Æneid (29–19 BCE) Virgil prophesied that the imperial heirs of Julius Caesar would conquer the Atlantic and, Renew a golden age in Latium, In fields where Saturn once was king, and stretch His rule beyond the Garamantes and

19 The Indians—a land beyond the paths of year and sun, beyond the constellations, where on his shoulders heaven-holding Atlas revolves the axis set with blazing stars.83

In 117 CE, after the end of the Dacian and Parthian Wars, the extent of Pax Romana stretched to Britannia in the north, Egypt in the south, and the Persian Gulf in the east. The Roman Empire was girded with limes and spiderwebs of roads to transport legions, citizens and trade, alongside the arching lattices of aqueducts that served as a vital imperial infrastructure. The Roman navy, harried by pirates, eventually conquered the Mediterranean Sea, designating it Mare Nostrum (Fig. 2.5). However, the construction of the Vallum Hadriani (Hadrian’s Wall) between 122 and 128 CE signalled that the empire had reached its territorial limits. As a stone barricade studded with turrets, ramparts, and barracks, the long sprawling wall was built to defend the Roman province of Britannia from the raiding Pictish tribes of Caledonia (Scotland). The earthen barrier and its ditches straddled eighty miles across the landscape of present-day Northumberland and was supplemented in 142 CE by the Vallum Antonini (Antonine Wall) stretching between present-day Glasgow and Edinburgh. However, in the early days of the Empire, the loss of three legions in the dark, brooding forests of Germania belied the bravado of Bellum Gallicum, and the shining vision of Virgil’s Æneid. The Augustan military disaster illustrated imperial limits, foreshadowing the decline, sacking and fall of Rome in the fifth century.

2.6.3 The Teutoburg Forest In 9 CE, Roman general Quinctilius Varus received orders from Caesar Augustus to lead three Roman legions across the Rhine to pacify tribes in Germania’s forests. One of Varus’ allies was Arminius, a Cherusci tribesman granted Roman citizenship in the Equestrian Order after serving in a legion. In the first century, the Roman Army, organized and trained to fight in coordinated, open area formations, was the most

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Fig. 2.5 Roman Empire 117–300 CE. Map by Charles Travis84

formidable military force on the face of the earth. Arminius, like the warring Germanic chieftains under his leadership, was disgruntled with the Romanization and occupation of his homeland. As a former legionnaire he understood that Roman methods of warfare possessed both strengths and weaknesses. Realizing a frontal assault against an organized Roman Army would be suicidal, Arminius cunningly set a topographical trap to snare and destroy Varus’ legions. As a ruse, he warned the Roman general that a rebellious Germanic tribe dwelling in the Teutoburg Forest needed to be pacified (Fig. 2.6). Arminius planned to spring his surprise attack in the forests of northern Germany between the Weser and Ems rivers. With thick stands of one hundred-foot-tall pines thrusting from a primeval floor, the forest appeared to Romans soldiers from the sunny Mediterranean as “a dark and sinister wilderness” snaking with “primitive trails, trampled out by wild beasts.”85 Weighed down by heavy body armour, Roman soldiers tramped along in a seven-mile column, on a “narrow and slippery” path “crossed with thick roots” that needed to be cut to allow the heavy carts carrying supplies for 20,000 men and their camp followers

to pass.86 As the column wound its way between Kalkriese Hill and a marshy bog, Arminius sprung his trap. Javelins and fire arrows rained down on the Romans, as Germanic warriors roared down the hill’s slope, catching the legions by total surprise. Unable to assemble into defensive formations, the Roman column disintegrated. During the brutal, hand-to-hand combat, Varus’ three legions were decimated with surviving Roman soldiers beheaded and sacrificed on large bonfires to the Germanic gods.87 The historian Suetonius recorded in The Twelve Caesars (121 CE) that the Roman loss at the Teutoburg Forest “threatened the security of the empire itself … Upon receiving intelligence of this disaster,” Caesar Augustus “gave orders for keeping a strict watch over the city, to prevent any public disturbance, and prolonged the appointments of the prefects in the provinces, that the allies might be kept in order.”88 Augustus then vowed “great games in honor of Jupiter, Optimus, Maximus,” to “restore the state to more prosperous circumstances” a precedent established after the “Cimbrian and Marsian wars.”89 Augustus “was in such consternation” over the loss of his troops “that he let the hair of

2.6 Roman Literary Geographies, Environment, War

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Fig. 2.6 Furor Teutonicus at Kalkrieser Berg, Teutoburg Forest. Paja Jovanović. 1899. Source Wikimedia Commons

his head and beard grow for several months, and sometimes knocked his head against the doorposts” lamenting “Quintili Vare, legiones redde! (Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!).”90

2.6.4 The Spatial Histories of Empire It has been argued that with Eratosthenes’ calculation of the spherical nature of the Earth “the Greeks created a science of geography,” whilst the Romans crafted the discipline as “a branch of literature” with their colourful, if not biased portrayals of the various cultures and landscapes their imperial ambitions encountered. The historian Tacitus’ Germania (98 CE) is an example of one of the great works of Roman literary geography.91 In his work, Tacitus chronicles how the Germanic Songs of Arminius celebrated a “barbarian” insurgency against Caesar Augustus’s imperial thrust east of the Rhine. It was a landscape Tacitus writes, that Germania’s tribes imbued with sacredness: “their holy places are woods and groves, and they apply the names of

deities to that hidden presence which is seen only by the eye of reverence.”92 However, the Romans became wise in defeat. In 15 CE, Germanicus Tiberius Caesar reconnoitred “obscure forestpasses,” and raised “bridges and causeways over watery swamps and treacherous plains,” to lead Roman legions back into the forest where the remains of Varus’ soldiers lay. Using the Roman gladius, a short sword suited for close terrain combat, Germanicus’s soldiers overcame the guerrilla attacks of the woodland tribes.93 Tacitus writes that after their victory, Roman soldiers— some who had survived Arminius’ slaughter— visited the Teutoburg battle site and found, … the whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees. In the adjacent groves were the barbarous altars, on which they had immolated tribunes and first-rank centurions. Some survivors of the disaster escaped from the battle or from captivity … pointed out too, the raised ground from which Arminius had harangued his army, the number of gibbets for the captives, the pits for the

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2 living, and how in his exultation he insulted the standards and eagles.94

To the German tribes, the victory over Varus’ legions in 9 CE vanquished myths about the supremacy of Roman military power. Germania became the rock upon which the Roman Empire’s ship eventually foundered. Marcus Aurelius’ ascension to Caesar instigated the Germanic Wars (66–180 CE) and the demise of the Pax Romana. However, while it lasted, and still visible on the territories of its vanquished empire, the power and myth of Rome was reinforced in the built environment. An imperial network of roads, agora, fora, and amphitheatres and their stone structures girded the empire’s landscape, to signify the solid nature of Roman presence. Such infrastructure provided the means to circulate and diffuse citizens, commerce, political propaganda, drama, and poetry from the Tiberian hub of the Roman capital to the diverse cultures of Europe, the Mediterranean Basin, North Africa, and the Middle East around which the wheel of imperial power revolved. Defeats such as at Teutoburg Forest, along with the mud, blood, filthy lucre, gains, and losses of imperial conquest reinforced the need for a utopian “new world perspective,” unspoiled by the caprices and pitfalls of Roman colonial occupations. Promises of an Elysium in the west “seemed to offer Rome the possibility of social and cultural renewal, of escape from the decline of Mediterranean civilization, or even-in the extreme view of the philosopher Seneca-of the final, apocalyptic metamorphosis of the human race.”95 In his dialogue-drama Medea (50 CE), Seneca speculated on the possibility of Roman rebirth in a land far across the waters of the Atlantic: … venient annis saecula seris quibis Oceanus vincula rerum laxet et ingens pateat tellus Tethysque novos detegat orbes Nec sit terras ultima Thule. (375–379) … … An age shall come, in later years, when Ocean will lose creation’s bonds, when the great planet will stand revealed and Tethys will disclose new worlds, nor will Thule be last (ultima) among lands. (375–379)96

Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE

Stories of Rome’s successive ages of kings, as a republic, and far-reaching empire are often chronicled in linear narratives to simplify the historical complexities of the polity’s various iterations within the time-span of its rise and fall as an ancient civilization. However, it is the cadence of Latinate poetry, reflecting the rhythms of imperial expansion and contraction that provided a “new way of seeing and of writing” the history and geography of the Roman ascension to an imperial power.97 As evidenced by Livy in his last books, in Velleius Paterculus’ historiography and Strabo’s geography, a new, poetic, and spatialized language influenced the works of Roman geographers Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder, who in a fit of fancy claimed “the oikoument (or in Latin -the orbis terrarum) had at last been completely circumnavigated!”98 Julius Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum established a template on how geography and environment could be deployed to shape the idea of empire in the public imagination. It is echoed by Ovid’s assertion in The Books of Days (8 CE): “Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem” (The extent of Rome’s city is the same as that of the world). It emerges in Seneca’s Medea prophecy of a novos orbes and Virgil’s translation of place in the Aeneid from the Greek to the Latin vernacular. In conclusion, Julius Caesar’s poetic discourses and invention of Roman geohistory served as a lesson for nineteenth-century European and American imperialists on how to spin the myths of empire to justify their own territorial ambitions for the globe.99 Notes 1. Herodotus. 1862. History of Herodotus, (Ed.) George Rawlinson, Henry Rawlinson, J. G. Wilkinson. London: John Murray. Ref. 353. 2. Gnoli, G. 1998–2022. Helmandd River ii. In Zoroastrian Tradition, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Vol. XII, Fasc. 2, pp. 171–172. 3. Foltz, R. and Saadi-Nejad, M. 2007. “Is Zoroastrianism an Ecological Religion?” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture 1, no. 4: Ref. 418. 4. Gnoli, Helmandd River, Ibid.

2.6 Roman Literary Geographies, Environment, War

5. Choksy, J. K. 2003. “To Cut Off, Purify, and make Whole: Historiographical and Ecclesiastical Conceptions of Ritual Space.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 123, no. 1: 21–41. Ref. pg. 31. https://login.ezproxy. uta.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest.com. ezproxy.uta.edu/docview/217140680?accountid =7117. 6. Fox, W. L. 2007. “The grid, the city & the mind (William Hodges).” Western Humanities Review 61, no. 3 (2007): 9–19. Ref. 13. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Rosenberg, D. 2009. A Literary Bible, Berkeley: Counterpoint. Ref. 9–10. 10. O’Sullivan, P., and Miller, Jr. J. W. 2015. The Geography of Warfare, London and New York: Routledge Ref. 10. 11. Bowen, W. and Gleeson, R. E. 2018. The evolution of human settlements: from pleistocene origins to anthropocene prospects. Springer: Cham, Switzerland. Ref. 129. 12. MOMA. 2000. “Mesopotamia, 8000–2000 B.C.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/? period=02®ion=wam (October 2000). 13. McNeill, W. H. 1963. The rise of the West: A history of the human community. University of Chicago Press. Ref. 22; 27. 14. MOMA, Mesopotamia, 8000–2000 B.C. 15. Leick, G. 2010. The A to Z of Mesopotamia, Lanham: Scarecrow Press. 16. McNeill, J. R. 2021. The Webs of Humankind: A World History, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Ref. 92. 17. Al-Rawi, F. H. N. and George, A. R. 2014. “Back to the Cedar Forest: The Beginning and End of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 66:69–90. Ref. 77. 18. Heathcote, R. L. 2016. Drought and the human story: braving the bull of heaven. London and New Routledge. 19. George, Andrew R. 2003. The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic: introduction, critical edition and cuneiform texts. Vol. 1. Oxford University

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20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

Press; Pryke, L. M. 2019 Gilgamesh. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Print. Ibid. Bentor, Y. K. 1990. Geological events in the Bible. Terra Nova, (1): 326–338. Worthington, M. 2019. Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, Print. Ref. 13. Brückner, H., and Engel, M. 2020. “Noah’s Flood—Probing an Ancient Narrative Using Geoscience.” In (Eds.) Jürgen Herget and Alessandro Fontana, Palaeohydrology: Traces, Tracks and Trails of Extreme Events. Springer, Cham, Switzerland. Ref. 135–151; Bentor, Geological Events in the Bible, Ibid. Rosenberg, A Literary Bible, 111. Lockwood, J. A. 2008. Six-legged soldiers: using insects as weapons of war. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ref. 11. Rosenberg, A Literary Bible, 112. Lockwood, Six-legged soldiers, 12. Rosenberg, A Literary Bible, 113. Lockwood, Six-legged soldiers, 11. Rosenberg, A Literary Bible, 114. Lockwood, Six-legged soldiers, 11. Rosenberg, A Literary Bible, 115. Ibid. Lockwood, Six-legged soldiers, 12–15. Wildfish, B. M. 2002, Parting Seas, Magic Stars, and Miracles, Can Science Explain Events in the Bible? Skeptic, 9, (4): 1–6. Lockwood, Six-legged soldiers, 11. Drews, C. 2011. Could Wind Have Parted the Red Sea?, Weatherwise, 64(1): 30–35. Ref. 34. https://doi.org/10.1080/00431672. 2011.536122. Ibid. Drews, C., and Han, W. 2010. Dynamics of Wind Setdown at Suez and the Eastern Nile Delta. PLoS ONE 5(8): e12481. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0012481. Tulloch, A. B. 1896. Passage of the Red Sea by the Israelites. Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute, 28: 267–280. Ibid. Ibid. Gerstenberger, E. S. 2011. “Zoroastrianism and the Bible: Monotheism by Coincidence?”

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44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

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Religion Compass 5 (4): 104–113. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00266.x; McNeill, The Webs of Humankind. Neufeld, E. 1980. “Insects as Warfare Agents in the Ancient Near East (Ex. 23:28; Deut. 7:20; Josh. 24:12; Isa. 7:18–20).” Orientalia, NOVA SERIES, 49(1): 30–57. Wright, J. L. 2008. “Warfare and Wanton Destruction: A Reexamination of Deuteronomy 20: 19–20 in Relation to Ancient Siegecraft.” Journal of Biblical Literature, 127(3): 423–458. Ligon, B. L. 2006. “Plague: a review of its history and potential as a biological weapon.” In Seminars in pediatric infectious diseases, 17(3): 161–170. W.B. Saunders. Ref. 161. I Samuel 5:6, Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation https:// biblehub.com/nlt/1_samuel/5.htm#footnotes. Ibid. Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. https://www.biblegateway. com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2020% 3A19-20&version=NIV. Glacken, C. 1967. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ref. 151. Bentor, Geological events in the Bible, 326. Rosenberg, A Literary Bible, 35. Ibid. Harris, G. M., and Beardow, A. P. 1995. “The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah: a geotechnical perspective.” Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology 28(4): 349–362. Ref. 349–350. Rosenberg, A Literary Bible, 34; Bentor, Geological events in the Bible, 331. Bentor, Geological events in the Bible, 331. Ibid., 332. Smith, G. A. 1919. The historical geography of the Holy Land, especially in relation to the history of Israel and of the early church. 20th ed. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Ref. 512–513.

Ancient Warfare, 1500 BCE–128 CE

59. Richmond, I. A. 1962. “The Roman SiegeWorks of Masada, Israel”. The Journal of Roman Studies. Washington College. Lib. Chestertown, MD: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. 52: 142–155. 60. Butlin, R. 1988. George Adam Smith and the historical geography of the Holy Land: contents, contexts and connections, Journal of Historical Geography, 14(4): 381–404. Ref. 401. 61. Smith, The historical geography of the Holy Land, 512–513. 62. Ibid. 63. Richmond, The Roman Siege-Works of Masada, 142–155. 64. de F. Lord, G. 1954. The “Odyssey” and the Western World. The Sewanee Review, 62 (3): 406–427. 65. Homer, 1884. The Iliad of Homer with a Verse Translation, Trans. William Charles Green, UK: Arkose Press. Ref. 3. 66. Neufeld, Insects as Warfare Agents in the Ancient Near East, 38. 67. Hughes, J. D. 2013. Responses to Natural Disasters in the Greek and Roman World, in (Eds.) Katrin Pfeifer and Niki Pfeifer, Forces of Natural and Cultural Responses, Springer Press: Cham, Switzerland, 111–137. 68. Mayor, A. 2008. Greek fire, poison arrows, and scorpion bombs: biological & chemical warfare in the ancient world. London: Penguin. Ref. 226. 69. Madsen, J. M. 2005. Bio warfare and terrorism: toxins and other mid-spectrum agents. Army Medical Research Inst of Chemical Defense. Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. 70. Thucydides. 1910. The Peloponnesian War. London, J. M. Dent; New York, E. P. Dutton, citation http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn: cts:greekLit:tlg0003.tlg001.perseus-eng3:2.48. 71. Ibid., citation http://data.perseus.org/citations/ urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0003.tlg001.perseus-eng3: 2.48. 72. Ibid., citation http://data.perseus.org/citations/ urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0003.tlg001.perseus-eng33: 2.49;52. 73. Michelakis, P. 2020. Routes of the Plague in Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian

2.6 Roman Literary Geographies, Environment, War

74.

75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

81. 82.

83.

84.

85.

War, Society for Classical Studies, New York: New York University. https://classicalstudies. org/annual-meeting/150/abstract/routes-plaguehomer%E2%80%99s-iliad-sophocles%E2%80% 99-oedipus-king-and-thucydides%E2%80%99. Sophocles. 2011. Oedipus Rex, Trans. David Mulroy, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ref. 14. Ibid., 5. Kousoulis, A., Economopoulos, K. P., Poulakou-Rebelakou, E., Androutsos, G., and Tsiodras, S. 2012. “The plague of Thebes, a historical epidemic in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.” Emerging infectious diseases vol. 18(1): 153–157. https://doi.org/10.3201/ eid1801.AD1801. Winters, Harold A. 1998. Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Caesar, Julius. ‘Chapter 28’ The Gallic Wars, (Bellum Gallicum). Trans. By W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn, http://classics. mit.edu//Caesar/gallic.html. Evans, R. M. 1999. Forma orbis: geography, ethnography and shaping the Roman empire. Unpublished dissertation, University of Southern California. Ref. 48–49. Wells, C. M. 1974. “The Ethnography of the Celts and of the Algonkian-Iroquoian Tribes” in J. A. S. Evans, Polis and Imperium, Studies in Honour of Edward Togo Salmon, Toronto: Hakkert. Caesar, The Gallic Wars. The Geography of Strabo, Vol. I. 1903. Trans. H. C. Hamilton. London: George Ball & Sons. Ref. 101. Mandelbaum, Allen. 1971. The Æneid of Virgil: A Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Books. Ref. 158–159. Data Source: McCormick, M. et al. 2013. “Roman Road Network (Version 2008)”, DARMC Scholarly Data Series #2013-5. Center for Geographical Analysis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138. Durschmied, E. 2012. The Weather Factor: How Nature Has Changed History. Arcade. Ref. 25.

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86. Ibid. 87. Goulding Jr, V. J. 2000. “Back to the future with asymmetric warfare.” The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters 30(4): 7; Hudson, Myles. “Battle of the Teutoburg Forest”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 Aug. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-theTeutoburg-Forest. Accessed 24 May 2022. 88. Tranquillus, C. Suetonius. 1896 [121 CE] The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. trans. Alexander Thomson and Thomas Forester. London: G. Bell. Ref. 86. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Syme, R. 1988. Military geography at Rome. Classical Antiquity, 7(2): 227–251. Ref. 227. 92. Tacitus, 1993 [109 CE]Germania IX, referenced in Davidson, H. E. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe. London: Routledge. Ref. 64. 93. Goulding, Back to the future with asymmetric warfare, 7. 94. Tacitus. 1995–2021 [109 CE]. Tacitus on the Teutoburg Forest, Section 1.60–62 of Annals, Trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. Livius.org. https://www. livius.org/sources/content/tacitus/tacitus-onthe-teutoburg-forest/. 95. Romm, J. S. 1994. The edges of the earth in ancient thought: geography, exploration, and fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ref. 157. 96. The Medea of Seneca Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Trans. Hugh MacMaster, Kingery Crawfordsville, Indiana,. Ref. 34 (This version translated from Kingery’s text by author, Charles Travis). 97. Nicolet, C. 1991. Space, geography, and politics in the early Roman empire. Vol. 19. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ref. 8–9. 98. Romm, The edges of the earth in ancient thought, 122. 99. Baritz, L. 1961. The idea of the West. The American Historical Review 66(3): 618–640. Ref. 621.

3

Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE

Hrothgar spoke; he examined the hilt, that relic of old times. It was engraved all over and showed how war first came into the world and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants. Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation

3.1

Poetry, Nature, and War

In the heroic tales recited by poets such as the Nordic skall, Anglo-Saxon scribe, Gaelic fili, Mongolian shaman, and West African griot, warfare and nature are deeply intertwined strands. Distinctive and regional epic tapestries set in Ireland, Denmark, Mongolia, and West Africa were woven on looms of the Medieval poetic imagination. Originating as oral lore and histories, polished, and embellished over time by countless storytelling sessions, the epics were eventually recorded, and transmuted from the medium of the tongue and ear, to the pen, parchment, and library. As bookbinded sentinels from the past, Medieval epics offer us unique sources to apply geomythological methods in historical geography and the geosciences in order to address a question posed by Tim Ingold: “How can we make a space for art and literature, for religion, or for the beliefs and practices of indigenous peoples, in an economy of knowledge in which the search for the true nature of things has become the exclusive prerogative of rational science?”1 Anglo-Saxon and Nordic perspectives merge in Beowulf (975–1010 CE), the tale of a Geats Prince

who comes to the aid of a Danish King suffering the savage attacks of an ecotonic, wetlands monster. In the case of Gaelic Ireland, Dindseanchas (the lore of placenames) and the demi-god Cúchulainn play strong roles in depicting how landscape influenced the military strategies, and tactics of a pre-Medieval war over cattle as recounted in the Táin (1100–1200 CE). Both the Táin and Beowulf’s nonlinear structures of “arc and circles where persons, events, histories, and stories continually intersect”2 call to mind Celtic and Norse designs that poet Seamus Heaney muses in his collection North (1975) resemble a form of “… calligraphy / like an eel swallowed / in a basket of eels […] interlacings elaborate / as the netted routes / of ancestry and trade.”3 East Asian shamanism, mythology, and history blend in accounts of the imperial horse-nomadic campaigns of Genghis (Chinggis) Khan and his heirs in the Uighur-Mongol epic The Secret History of the Mongols and The Travels of Marco Polo. Published in the thirteen century, these respective East Asian and Genoese chronicles provide contrapuntal insider and outsider voices that speak about the rise, size and exploits of the Mongol Empire (1206–1368 CE) in fostering a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Travis, Environment as a Weapon, Historical Geography and Geosciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_3

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3 Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE

type of ‘proto globalization’ along the Silk Road, which ironically laid the seeds of the Pax Mongolica’s demise. Lastly, West African oral histories concerning the Islamic Malian Empire (1235–1670 CE) collected by Belen-Tigui (Masters of the Word) at Griot schools and published in the twentieth century as Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, prefaces the story of Malian King Abu Bakr II’s Atlantic sea-faring ventures and battles with the “Blades of the Ocean.” Reading through these various epics, it becomes evident that environmental and geographical tropes in the oral poetry of pre-modern European, Asian, and West African cultures are echoed in contemporary eco-literature. Such tropes include, voices recognizing the independent nature of the world, a scepticism towards hyperrationality, leavened by a humble awareness that human and environmental relations, if not kept in balance, can lead to social and ecological catastrophe.4 Fusing the poetic with the positivistic, this chapter’s readings point to a more holistic approach for historical geography and the geosciences to engage Medieval literary sources on the relations between warfare and environment.

3.2

Beowulf: Wetlands Warfare

The epic poem Beowulf (975–1010 CE), one of Anglo-Saxon’s oldest pieces of literature, draws heavily upon the Nordic skall (oral lore) and Fig. 3.1 Beowulf’s Geography. Map Collage by Charles Travis. Source Wikimedia Commons

Germanic storytelling traditions.5 The poem opens with the Scandinavian prince Beowulf, nephew of King Hygelac of the Geats (Swedes) hearing horrifying news from the Danes, across the Øresund Strait. The monster Grendel, a descendant of the Biblical Cain has ravaged Heorot, Danish King Hrothgar’s court at Lejre, near Roskilde. Setting sail with his warriors, Beowulf crosses the water, rides to Hrothgar’s aid, and slays Grendel. Celebrated as a hero, he returns to Geatland (Sweden) and ascends its throne after his uncle Hygelac’s death. Fifty winters pass peacefully, when suddenly a dragon attacks the Geat Kingdom in revenge for gold stolen from its treasure lair. Beowulf slays the beast, but in turn is mortally wounded. Dying he bequeaths his legacy to Wiglaf, the sole surviving Geat warrior: “You are the last of us, the only one left of the Waegmundings. Fate swept us away, sent my whole brave high-born clan to their final doom. Now I must follow them.” That was the warrior’s last word.6

J. R. R. Tolkien described the poem Beowulf as a “great scene hung with tapestries woven of ancient tales of ruin,” where the reader can see “the hæleð (hero) walk.”7 Written in a vernacular spoken in the proto-Anglo provinces of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria between the fifth and twelfth centuries, Beowulf is “one of the earliest surviving works of English literature, or indeed in any northern European vernacular language”8 (Fig. 3.1).

3.2 Beowulf: Wetlands Warfare

Although it has been argued that Beowulf is “profoundly a work about place,” the poem is also geographically ambiguous.9 Furthermore, within the poem, “there is almost no attempt to locate the events of the poem within a world geography. What is present in the poem is a shifting sense of regional space, at times relatively precise, at others vague.”10 Beowulf’s inter-tidal zones, marshes, bogs, and meres reflect the shifting, eco-tonic landscape of Lejre near Roskilde. The poem’s sense of “menaced borders,”11 emerges in King Hrothgar’s depiction of the location of Grendel’s lair: A few miles from here a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch above a mere; the overhanging bank is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface. At night there, something uncanny happens: the water burns. And the mere bottom has never been sounded by the sons of men. On its bank, the heather-stepper halts: the [stag] in flight from pursuing hounds will turn to face them with firm-set horns and die in the wood rather than dive beneath its surface. That is no good place.12

Beowulf’s ecology is also mediated by the mysterious, dangerous, liminal geographies of the sea, tidal oscillations, surging waves, and storms. In early, pre-literate recitations of Beowulf, a preCartesian “sense of place,” seems to have shaped the geographical imaginations of the poem’s author and its audience. As Tolkien notes, they … were thinking of the eormengrund, the great earth, ringed with garsecg, the shoreless sea, beneath the sky’s inaccessible roof; whereon, as in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage … went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat. That even this “geography,” once held as a material fact, could now be classed as a mere folktale, affects its value very little.13

Yet, with a modern, Cartesian perspective, we can situate King Hrothgar and Heorot, his royal mead hall (in present-day Denmark), at the centre of Beowulf’s chorographic yet poetic compass and genius loci.14 Frank, Frisian, and Heathobard tribes populate southern points of this compass, strung along an east to west axis, roughly tracing the shorelines of the North and Baltic Seas

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(present-day Germany and Poland), with Angle and Jute tribes gathering in clusters on the Jutland Peninsula, west of Danish tribal lands.

3.2.1 Fens, Bogs, Meres, Slopes, and Marshes As the poem opens, our hero Beowulf embarks from Geatland with fourteen warriors “to sail the swan’s road and search out that king / the famous prince who needed defenders.”15 The vessel crosses the Øresund Strait to land of the Danes, Over the waves, with the wind behind her And foam at her neck, she flew like a bird Until her curved prow had covered the distance On the following day, at the due hour, Those seafarers sighted land, Sunlit cliffs, sheer crags And looming headlands, the landfall they sought.16

Upon landing in Denmark, Beowulf and his men are escorted to Heorot, King Hrothgar’s hall at Lejre, a place depicted in the Scandinavian Sagas, as a sacred space sanctified for the worship of Thor and other Norse gods. As a “meðelstede” Heorot is “a ceremonial place, a primitive form of court.”17 It’s eventual decline is foreshadowed in the poem’s lines: “The hall towered / its gables wide and high and awaiting a barbarous burning.”18 Heorot symbolizes the “lost and ruined social world” of “pagan Denmark.”19 From an eco-critical perspective, … the depiction of ruins in Beowulf provides a more nuanced perspective on the environment, demonstrating the potential for human inability to control environmental factors. The non-human world is, when it comes to ruins, not fixed or stable, but mutable, sometimes because of human actions but other times because of natural processes.20

In contrast, Grendel, an ecotonic monster, “is defined in terms of his environment and, in turn, determines his environment,”21 as a “mære mearcstapa, / se þe moras heold” (a “famous border-stepper, the one who ruled the moors, fen and stronghold”).22 Hrothgar describes Grendel and his troll-like mother as primeval beings spawned in the murk of a mere:

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3 Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE … two such creatures prowling the moors, huge marauders from some other world. … They dwell apart among wolves on the hills, on windswept crags and treacherous keshes, where cold streams pour down the mountain and disappear under mist and moorland.23

The Geats wait for Grendel “the shadowstalker” to emerge from his mere and come “in off the moor.”24 Entering Heorot, the ecotonic creature slays a warrior before Beowulf mortally wounds the monster, driving it back to die in its “desolate lair.”25 However, the next night, Grendel’s “troll-mother” kills one of the king’s counsellors in revenge. Following the creature’s bloody trail, Beowulf and his warriors come to the edge of the pool where the underwater lair rests: The water was infested with all kinds of reptiles. There were writhing seadragons and monsters slouching on slopes by the cliff, serpents and wild things such as those that often surface at dawn to roam the sail-road and doom the voyage.26

Beowulf descends to the bottom of the pool and slays Grendel’s mother with Hrunting, a consecrated sword that melts when it pierces the creature’s heart. Only the hilt, carved with a frieze depicting biblical stories from the book of Genesis, is left, to impart the poem’s originmyths: … that relic of old times. It was engraved all over and showed how war first came into the world and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants.27

Despite its fantastical exploits, depictions of early medieval warfare in the Anglo-Saxon poem are rooted in the wetlands, bogs, and coastlines embracing the North and Baltic Seas. J. R. R. Tolkien argues that Beowulf is “not so far removed from common mediaeval experience as it seems to us.”28 The Anglo-Saxon epic provides a “picture of a whole civilization, of the Germania which [the Roman historian] Tacitus describes,” and therefore remains “an important historical document.”29 However, Tolkien also warns that the mythical lyricism of Beowulf can

unwittingly fog the historian’s lens: “the lovers of poetry can safely study the art […] the lovers of history must beware less the glamour of Poesis overcome them.”30

3.3

Placenames, Landscape, and War in Gaelic Ireland

The Gaelic epic, Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley), is based upon the historic tale of an Iron Age Connacht chieftain who with his queen, went to war against a tribe in the province of Ulster over a stolen herd of cattle. Awareness of the topographical and toponymical dimensions of the Táin is important for a full appreciation of the epic. Much of its action consists of the march of Connacht’s armies across central Ireland and over the landscape of the Cooley Peninsula, a tongue of land that juts out into the Irish Sea between Carlingford Lough and Dundalk Bay in present-day County Louth.31 As a measure of wealth and medium of exchange essential to a Gaelic tribe’s survival, cattle in prehistoric Ireland were fiercely protected from hostile clan raids, wolves, and feral dogs. Irish rath (ringfort) comprised typically of elevated earthen enclosures played a key role in defending herds, people, and property. However, raths were insufficient to withstand prolonged attacks and sieges.32 Hence, the practice of dindseanchas (the lore of placenames) played roles in determining the geographies of offensive military campaigns, strategies, and tactics.33 Gaelic placenames very generally pair a description of the physical or topographical attributes of a location —imparting its geography, with—but not always —the name of the family or tribal clan possessing the land. As Charles Bowen notes: When we come to dindshenchas … we must try to imagine a science of geography based on seanchas [‘ancient or traditional lore’], in which there is no clear distinction between general principles of topography or direction-finding and the intimate knowledge of particular places.34

In preface to oral performances of the Táin, placenames were recited by fili (Gaelic poets) in semi-chronological order, to describe to

3.3 Placenames, Landscape, and War in Gaelic Ireland

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Fig. 3.2 Cattle Raid of Cooley. Black line: Invasion and Retreat. Yellow dotted line: The Bull of Cooley’s Death Throes. Concentric white lines: Intensity of Conflict &

Violence. Map by Charles Travis. Inset Map and Image Sources Wikimedia Commons

an audience the sequence of the war’s campaign, and locations of the battles between the armies of Connaught and Ulster, which culminates in a final epic clash between the Donn Cuailnge (Brown Bull of Cooley) and, Finnbennach (the White Bull of Connaught). As an epic piece of a dindseanchas, verses were memorized and transmitted down countless generations of fili before Irish monks recorded the legend in ink between 1100 and 1200 CE. The last chapter of the Táin—the Lebor na hUidre (Book of the Dun Cow)—was said to have been inscribed by Saint Ciarán on a dun (brown) cowhide, specially cured at Clonmacnoise monastery for the purpose (Fig. 3.2).

prompts Medb to summon a large army from most of the island’s family tribes to the circular High Rath of the Connacht’s royal hall: “Four of the provinces of Ireland gathered there at Crúachan Ai.”35 At the gathering of the tribes, a war is planned with the aim of raiding the Cooley Peninsula and stealing the Dun Cuailnge, -the brown Bull of Cooley, from the Ulaid tribe in Ulster. As the campaign commences, a heliocentric portent is sought by Queen Mebd’s charioteer:

3.3.1 Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) The Táin opens with Queen Medb engaging in “pillow-talk” with her husband Ailill, the King of Connacht, and we find that she begrudges his wealth, power, and most of all his prize possession, the white bull Finnbennach. Her envy

Wait a minute, … until I turn the chariot around to the right, with the sun, to draw down the power of the sign for our safe return.36

The “natural route” from Crúachain Ai to the Cooley Peninsula passes across “present day South Leitrim, Cavan and North Louth.”37 It has been argued that the northeasterly invasion course was deliberately picked to avoid the Black Pig’s Dyke, a series of linear earthworks that rise in places between the Irish Sea in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in west.38 It has been argued that the Dyke served as a defensive boundary and the route in the Táin was chosen by the Connacht army to avoid alerting the Ulaid about their

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3 Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE

raid.39 The pattern of the invasion, and withdrawal forms a figure eight across the belt of central Ireland, with the townland of Tailtiu, in present-day County Meath the fulcrum of the raid’s campaign. As the Connacht armies set out for Ulster, the Ulaid are stricken by a curse and only their teenage warrior and demi-god Cúchulainn is left to defend the Brown Bull of Cooley. Marching east, the Connacht warriors bivouac for the night in Cúil Sibrille (Kells, in County Meath), where a late spring freeze helps Cúchulainn stall their advance: “great snow fell on them, over the men’s belts and the chariot wheels. They could get no food ready.”40 The Connacht army then arrives at Ath Gabla, a ford on the River Mattock, the natural Medieval border between the provinces of Meath and Ulster. In the middle of its stream, Cúchulainn has planted the fork of a tree, its branches spiked with the heads of slain Connacht scouts. A message inscribed in Ogam warns Queen Mebd and King Ailill to go no further: Much of the Táin occurs within the liminal spaces of fords, themselves boundary zones, complex and flowing topographical areas serving as borders and gateways, transmuted into loci of bloodshed and confrontation, quite literally polluted through acts of violence and bloodshed. The ford, this symbolic boundary, becomes critical in understanding the implications of warfare and conflict.41

Despite the warning at Ath Glaba, the Connacht army crosses into Ulster and marches northeast towards the Cooley Peninsula to steal the Ulaid’s prize brown bull. Once again, Cúchulainn harnesses the environment as a defensive weapon. As Connacht invades the peninsula, its raiders ford the River Cronn without incident, but on their return, crossing at a ford named Áth Cruinn, Cúchulainn beseeches the forces of nature to come to his aid: … and the water reared up to the treetops. Then, Maine, son of Ailill and Medb, went out before all. Cúchulainn slew him in the ford, and thirty horsemen of his company were overwhelmed with him. Later, Cúchulainn slew another thirty-two warriors in the water.42

Cúchulainn’s ploy echoes the tactics recommended by Sun Tzu in the Art of War (5 BCE):

“When an advancing enemy crosses water do not meet him at the water’s edge. It is advantageous to allow half of his force to cross and then strike.”43 As a result, Fergus, the Connacht general, switches his allegiance to Ulster. This revives the Ulaid from their curse, and rallies Cúchulainn’s warriors to defend the Bull of Cooley, by defeating Queen Medb and King Ailill’s army at Gáirech. During one of the battles, Cúchulainn and his charioteer circle, … the outer lines of the four great provinces of Ireland … in hatred. He had the chariot driven so heavily that its iron wheels sank into the earth. So deeply the chariot-wheels sank in the earth that clods and boulders were torn up, with rocks and flagstones and the gravel of the ground, in a dyke as high as the iron wheels, enough for a fortress-wall.44

The circling motions of the chariot carve Ireland’s landscape into a “militarized space” of “defences, forts and fortresses” including “natural barricades to contain the enemy” similar to the topographic undulations of the Black Pig’s Dyke.45 In turn, the Connacht army had deployed a cattle herd to attack the High Rath of Finnabair on Cooley Peninsula: “They encircled the bull there and drove him toward Finnabair. And there he saw the cowherd Lóthar and attacked him in a fury, taking out his entrails on the horns. He attacked the camp with his three score heifers, and fifty heroes perished in his path.”46 The Táin culminates in epic clash between each side’s prize breeding studs at the ringfort Rath na dTarbh (fort of the bulls) on the Rathcroghan plateau in Connaught where Queen Medb and King Ailill’s war-campaign began. The Brown Bull of Cooley slays the White Bull of Connacht, but in turn is mortally wounded. With “the mangled remains of Finnbennach hanging from his horns,” the dying brown bull staggers home to Cooley, his death throes geomythologically sculpting and naming the drumlin belt landscapes of south Ulster and the Mourne uplands: He … drank … at Ath Luain, and left Finnbennach’s loins there -that is how the place was named … the Ford of the Loins. He uttered a bellow at Iraird Cuillenn that was heard through the whole province … He came to Etan Tairb and set his

3.4 The Steppe Land Emperors brow against the hill at Ath Da Ferta, from which comes the name … Bull’s Brow, in Murtheimne Plain. Then he went by the Midluachair road to Cuib, where he had dwelt with the milkless cow of Dáire, and he tore up the ground there — from which comes the name Gort mBúraig, the Field of the Trench. Then, he went on until he fell dead between Ulster and Uí Echach at Druim Tairb. So … the Ridge of the Bull, is the name of that place.47

On the Ridge of the Bull, and upon other innumerable hills scattered across the four provinces of Ireland, the ruins of between 45,000 and 47,000 raths remain visible. Lonely sentinels from the legendary Gaelic era of Irish history, such ring fortresses linger as testimonies to the dindseanchas culture that gave birth to the Táin, and its warring tribal landscapes.

3.4

The Steppe Land Emperors

The Mongol Empire (1206–1368 CE) possessed the most powerful, equestrian military force the world has ever known.48 It was maintained by a nomadic culture sustained by the resources of the Eurasian Steppe, one of the largest biomes on the face of the earth. By dominating the centre and periphery of this global region, a Pax Mongolica emerged to shape the histories of South and East Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. The Mongols practised a form of shamanism, worshiping Tngri (the spirits of ancestors) and a deity named “Eternal Blue Sky” (Tenger). Spirits of the cosmos (sun, moon, stars), and the environment (mountains, rivers, flora and fauna) of the steppe were also venerated.49 Genghis (Chinggis) Khan (“universal ruler”), founder of the Mongol Empire, was born in 1162 CE clutching a blood-clot in his tiny fist. Believed to be a spiritual descendant of the “blue‒grey wolf” and “red-doe” of Mongol creation myths, it was held by many after his death in 1227 CE, that Genghis had ruled his steppe empire as the divine incarnation of the Tenger spirit.50 The Uighur-Mongol epic The Secret History of the Mongols and The Travels of Marco Polo

33

provide contrasting thirteen-century insider and outsider views on the rise, size and exploits of the Mongol Empire at its height. As a chronicle produced by the nomadic culture of a grassland biome, The Secret History, recounts the life and times of Genghis in “the pure, unmitigated tradition of the … tribes of Mongolia and of the Turkic- and Mongolian-speaking inhabitants of the vast steppe-lands of Inner Asia.”51 Marco Polo’s travelogue in comparison provides a European’s impressions of Kubla (Qubilai) Khan’s court, and the Mongol military strategy and tactics, deployed by Genghis and his heirs.

3.4.1 Horses, Hawks, and the Mongol Yām The biotechnologies of the horse and hawk facilitated the expansive growth of Mongol “nomadic imperialism.” Coming off the steppe lands, Mongol Khans shrewdly adopted innovations from the cultures they conquered, and appointed advisors from the territories they colonized to manage the affairs on the peripheries of their empire. As Shamanists, Mongols promoted religious liberty by incorporating tenets from the Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Daoist, Hindu, and other faiths of the territories they conquered into their own belief system. The Secret History, a poetic mélange of history and myth, depicts the life of Temüjin (another name attributed to Genghis), a man “born with a destiny from heaven on high.” While the legendary Temüjin claimed to be a mystical progeny of blue‒grey wolf, the historical Genghis was an orphaned slave. Rising from obscurity, he matured into a fierce warrior and was elected Khan by the Kurultai council of tribal chiefs, unifying the various Mongol factions through bonds of Quad (marriage), Anda (brotherhood), and Nökör (friendship). The Secret History recounts how Temüjin’s (Genghis) early enemies underestimated the potent weapon that equine warfare under his leadership would become:

34

3 Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE Where can the Mongols who rebelled against us and went with Temüjin go? They have become riders with [nothing but] horses, shelterers with [nothing but] trees.52 … Eating remnants [of blades] of grass [for food], Burning dried dung [for fuel]53 … Passing high passes, Passing over wide rivers, Campaigning a long campaign, Hath thought of setting in order his many peoples.54

To sustain their imperial conquests, Genghis Khan always argued that the: “Mongols should attack as ‘targets of opportunity,’ the great settled empires and draw tribute from them” however, he insisted that the “main body of the Mongols … should stay in the grazing lands [and] maintain the pastoral economy and the traditional great autumn hunts or drives. By doing so “their young men would grow up to

replenish the ranks of the mounted archers and would never be short of remounts bred on the open steppe.”55 Genghis was succeeded by his son Ögödei (1186–1241 CE). Later his grandsons Batu (1205–1255 CE) and Kubla (Qubilai) (1215–1294 CE) inherited the mantle as Khan of the Mongols. Under their successive leadership, Mongols launched coordinated lighting calvary raids and carried out sieges across the Eurasian Steppe into South Asia, Islamic Persia, and Eastern Europe. Closer to home, Ögödei overran the Northern Chinese Kin Dynasty in 1234 CE, and in 1279 CE, Kubla deployed Muslim Trebuchets (catapults) to breach the Great Wall of China and conquer the Southern Song Dynasty. In the 1230s and 1240s CE, during interregnums of the Mongol conquests of China, Genghis’ grandson Batu conquered Eastern European kingdoms ruled by the Rus, the Slavs, the Poles, and the Hungarians (Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.3 Fourteenth-century mounted Mongol warriors pursue enemies. Source Wikimedia Commons

3.4 The Steppe Land Emperors

Mongol armies appeared in the eyes of their enemies like barbaric horsemen, rolling in phantasmagoric waves off of the Eurasian steppe lands. In truth, Mongol calvaries were composed of highly coordinated battle cohorts, whose mobility gave the steppe warriors a big advantage over their more sedentary, and settled agrarian foes. By cultivating the horses and hawks of their grassland biome, the seminomadic Mongol hunting and herding culture came to dominate a region of Eurasia that dwarfed the size of the combined Egyptian, Greek, and Roman empires. In The Secret History, a Mongol named Bodonchar captures a raptor and trains the bird of prey to hunt for him: … he saw a young female hawk catch and eat a black pheasant. Using the tail hairs of his off white, mangy-tailed, sore-ridden horse with the blackstriped back as a snare, he captured the hawk and reared it […] Spring arrived, bringing the ducks with it. He starved his hawk and flew it at them. He hung up the ducks and geese that the hawk caught until, bad odours rose from every withered tree, dank smells from every dried-up tree.56

By developing mobile hunting and warfare methods, the Mongols, not tethered by the traditional supply lines essential to conventional land armies, could range far and wide in search of land, resources, and wealth. Following Genghis’ death in 1227 CE, Ögödei conquered northern China. Heeding his father’s advice, the new Khan established the Mongol Yām. As the empire’s central and peripheral nervous system, the Yām allowed Ögödei to administer the outer territories he and his father had conquered from the Mongol imperial centre in Karakorum. Yām waystations, the synapses of the system, served as supply depots and relay hubs for mounted Mongol messengers carrying communiqués, back and forth along the routes or “nerves” that linked the empire’s “brain” in Karakorum to its holdings in Eastern Europe, and South and East Asia.57 Threaded approximately forty kilometres apart like drops of dew on an imperial spider web, the waystations supplied messengers, soldiers, and merchants fresh mounts, food, water, lodging, and refuge.58

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3.4.2 Mongol Invasions of Eastern Europe As their empire was growing in East and Central Asia, several years of drought in the thirteenth century drove the Mongols west in search of fertile pasture for their large horse and yak herds. Under the command of Genghis’ grandson Batu, the Mongol calvary swarmed off the icy Russian steppe in the winter of 1237 CE. Thundering down the frozen Volga, Batu used the river as a highway to capture Moscow and take control of the trading routes that “zigged and zagged outwards” from its mercantile outpost “like the irregularly shaped spokes of a lopsided wheel.”59 Appointing Rus supplicants as regional chiefs and tax collectors, Batu returned to Mongolia and administered the Muscovy trading hub with the Yām System his father Ögödei, had established. In turn, the Rus, stunned by Batu’s wintry, equine blitzkrieg and their own capitulation, began calling the Mongols “Tartars” (Greek word for “hell”) and the “Golden Horde.”60 In 1239 CE, Batu and 130,000 Mongol horsemen swept into the Ukrainian steppes along the Eurasian grassland highway. At the Siege of Kiev in 1240 CE, the Mongols defeated combined Slav, Rus, and Turkic armies and then crossed the Carpathians to feed their horses on the lush eastern pastures of Hungary. Once the Mongol calvary was well grazed, the paddocks served as staging grounds for Batu’s invasions of the lands of the Transylvanians, Poles, Moravians, and Bohemians. The Mongols cemented their Eastern Europe campaign in 1241 CE with a victory over the Teutonic Order of Knights in Polish territory. Burning reeds and wafting “foul smelling smoke” over the city walls of Leignitz, Batu’s calvaries feigned retreats, followed by rapid fire charges to defeat Henry the Pious, Duke of Silesia, and his forces. By Christmas 1241 CE, Batu stood on the banks of the frozen Danube, with Mongol scouts ranging in sight of the Adriatic Sea.61 During the winter of 1242 CE, thaws began to hinder Mongol campaigns as they probed further west. When Batu’s forces reached Székesfevehérvár, a central Hungarian city circled by marshes, “they could

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3 Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE

not take it because the snow and ice was about to melt.”62 In Croatia, floods engulfed the city of Trogir in a sea of mud, again forcing the Mongol calvary to withdraw.63 Dendrochronological records of the period indicate that the spring and summer of 1242 CE were cold and rainy.64 Such conditions suggest that Mongol staging grounds in Hungary became sodden and unsuitable for grazing calvary herds. Then, news of Ögödei Khan’s death—carried from the Mongol heartland over four thousand miles in forty days by the Yām System—reached Batu in Budapest.65 With deteriorating climatic conditions and questions over Ögödei’s successor, Batu withdrew from Eastern Europe in 1242 CE, leading his army back to the Mongolian capital of Karakorum.

3.4.3 The Mongols, Marco Polo, and the Silk Road The Yām System, which had brough Batu the sad news of his father’s death, became instrumental in conducting and completing the Mongol Empire’s tax census in 1252 CE. Perhaps more importantly, the system resurrected the fabled Silk Road, established by Han Dynasty in China between 260 BCE and 220 CE. The trading route, made famous by The Travels of Marco Polo sparked the imaginations of Italian adventurers whose exploits included facilitating the Columbian Exchange and the circumnavigation of the globe. The southern Chinese Sung Empire resisted the Mongols until 1279 CE, before falling to the armies led by Kubla (Quibilai) who except for Genghis, is the most famous Khan, thanks in part to an 1816 poem Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote under the influence of opium: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. […] And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean; And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!66

Arrested for commanding a Venetian galley in a war against Genoa, Marco Polo was

imprisoned in the Palazzo di San Giorgio from 1296 to 1299 CE. After regaling prison guards and inmates with tales of the Silk Road journeys with his father, Niccolo, and uncle Maffeo and accounts of his seventeen-year service to Kubla Khan, Polo dictated the stories to his cellmate, romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa. Published in 1300 CE, The Travels of Marco Polo, lit fires in the geographical imagination of fourteenthcentury Europeans. By introducing leaders, merchants, and clergy, particularly the Jesuits, to the mysteries, histories, and cultures of South and East Asia, Polo underscored the untapped colonial potential of the region for exploitation, in addition to further cultivating European markets for the region’s “exotic” goods. He also provided insights into the strategies and tactics of Mongol warfare that had conquered the eastern fringes of Europe. During his travels, Polo often encountered Mongol calvaries. His observations provide evidence of why their military strategies, equine tactics, and eco-shamanistic philosophies were so successful. Polo noted that “each man has, on average, eighteen horses and mares, and when that which they ride is fatigued, they change it for another.”67 If it is true, as Napoleon maintained, that an army marches on its stomach, it is a truism that the bellies of Mongolian ponies and horses fed Genghis Khan and his heirs’ armies. Mare’s milk, according to Polo, was poured into a skin bag, and suspended under the belly of the Mongol calvary’s mounts. Then, the animal’s warmth and gait churned the milk into a hummuz that could be consumed on long campaigns.68 On the march, the Mongol calvary could also “subsist upon the blood drawn from the horses, each man opening a vein and drinking.”69 But in the main it was the supply ponies rather than Mongol war horses that provided the “meat on the hoof,” increasing an army’s range and time in the field for up to six months.70 Mongol horses, or “ponies,” bred on the grasslands of the open steppe, without hay or other supplemental feeds, were diminutive in size compared to larger European farming and military breeds. But according to Polo, Mongol mounts were “so well broken - in to quick changes of movement, that

3.4 The Steppe Land Emperors

upon the signal given, they instantly turn in every direction; and by these rapid manoeuvres many victories have been obtained.”71 In Mongolia’s northern river valleys, handsome and sturdy colts were captured, fed in stalls, and matured into horses possessing great stamina to carry the accoutrements of a Mongol camp over great distances.72 However, Genghis, born in the rich pasturelands of northeast Mongolia, where horses grazed at will, preferred the “wilder” breeds of the high pastures which possessed the ability to run at full gallop for over thirty kilometres without a pause.73 Archery augmented the lighting mobility of Mongol calvaries. Each horse-warrior was able to draw a bow with the tensile strength of one hundred and sixty-six pounds. Choreographed cohorts could launch deadly, coordinated volleys of arrows accurate up to seven hundred feet.74 In the Secret History, the prowess of a legendary Mongol warrior’s skill with the bow and arrow is praised: In battle with the enemy he draws [his bow] and releases his keyibür arrow which pierces and transfixes his enemies across the steppe. When he draws his bow back to the full, his arrows fly nine hundred fathoms.75

In The Travels, Marco Polo observed that mounted Mongol battle cohorts were organized according to a decimal system and when a Khan launched a military campaign, he placed “himself at the head of an army of a hundred thousand horse,” appointing an “officer to the command of every ten men, and others to command a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand men, respectively.”76 According to Polo, “Every company of a hundred men is denominated a tuc, and ten of these constitute a toman. When the army proceeds on service, a body of men is sent two days’ march in advance, and parties are stationed upon each flank and in the rear, … to prevent its being attacked by surprise.”77 Battle orders were communicated by Mongol generals to their officers by coloured pendants, lanterns, and smoke signals. This enabled Mongol army tucs and tomans to spread across a frontline, responding quickly in battle and deploying flying

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horse columns to flank, encircle, and block enemies from escaping.78 The overwhelming nature of a choreographed Mongol calvary assault was witnessed first-hand by Polo: … they never mix with the enemy, but keep hovering about him, discharging their arrows first from one side and then from the other, occasionally pretending to fly, and during their flight shooting arrows backwards at their pursuers, killing men and horses … In this sort of warfare, the adversary imagines he has gained a victory, when in fact he has lost the battle; for the Tartars, observing the mischief they have done him, wheel about, and renewing the fight, overpower his remaining troops.79

Genghis and his armies developed and modelled combat strategies based upon the flora, fauna, and aquatic features of the steppe land. The execution of the “bush-clump-marching” formation, named the Qaragana yorchil (for the flora—caragana arborescens, and yorchil for marching) involved dividing soldiers into small cohorts, who staying close to the ground, advanced slowly on the enemy like hopscotching shrubs. Another called Na’ur bayidu bayildu, the “lake array,” sent soldiers in “waves” to surround, and “deluge” their foes.80 To end the siege of the city of Xi Xia, during the Mongol invasion of China in 1209 CE, Genghis offered citizens amnesty if they gifted him all their pet sparrows and cats. Mongols then tied strips of wool soaked with flammables to the tailfeathers of the birds and set them on fire. Streaming flames, ten thousand sparrows were released over the city, where they plummeted from the sky, incinerating structures, and detonating powder magazines. Then the tails of the cats were entwined with burning cloth and one thousand flaming felines were loosed upon Xi Xia.81

3.4.4 Pax Mongolica and the Decline of Empire Although the Yuan Dynasty was under the thumb of the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Yām System’s revival of the Silk Road trade under successive Khans ironically contributed to the growth of China into

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3 Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE

a regional power. The security provided by the Pax Mongolica increased trade and cultural exchange between Asia and the West. Nourished by the Silk Road, the Renaissance flourished in Southern Europe. The import of Chinese innovations such as papermaking, and the technologies of printing, and the magnetic compass set off an oceanic race in the Iberian Peninsula to discover the shortest route to India and “Cathay,” resulting in the accidental “discovery” of the Americas.82 Silk Road caravans also carried a Chinese recipe dated to 1044 CE. By adding sixparts saltpetre (potassium nitrate), to one part sulphur, and two parts charcoal, the recipe’s ingredients mixed an incendiary concoction that whet the appetites of military leaders in the Middle East and Europe. In effect, the Silk Road, revitalized by the Pax Mongolica, brough the explosive gift of gunpowder to the armies of the West.83 The arsenals of bureaucracy, Confucianism, innovation, and trade contributed to China’s eventual political and geographical ascendancy over their northern Mongol masters. In turn, the Khans that succeeded Genghis had forgotten his sage advice to keep their imperial centre of power inside Mongolia:

… when they moved their capitals into China and Persia, that hastened the break-up of the Mongol Empire. It was the Mongols in Russia, the Golden Horde, who most nearly adhered to the principle of staying on the fringe and collecting tribute from within -and it was they who lasted the longest.84

The continental reach of Pax Mongolica included the seeds of its own destruction, its leaders having strayed from their founder’s clear “geographical concept of empire”—one that Genghis Khan believed was inextricably tied to the advantages and strengths Mongols derived from the grassland biome of their steppe land (Fig. 3.4).

3.5

West Africa Griot Geographies: Abu Bakr II’s Farfina Fleets

The prehistoric Mandé language kingdoms of West Africa were reputed to be ruled by Musas (kings) who had established themselves as “mighty hunters.” From these kingdoms emerged the prehistoric empire of Ghana, followed by the Malian Empire. Ghana, on the fringe of the Sahara, occupied the Sahel, while Mali emerged from the Niger River Valley and its surrounding

Fig. 3.4 Abu Bakr II (left) and Marco Polo (right) in Catalan Atlas, 1375. Collage by Charles Travis. Source Wikimedia Commons

3.5 West Africa Griot Geographies: Abu Bakr II’s Farfina Fleets

savannas.85 One early Mandé Musa, Mamadi Kani, is said by West African Griots to have carved a “hunter’s whistle” from a Mahogany branch to communicate with the jinn (spirits) and learn the secrets of the West African forests. Enlightened by this wisdom, Kani assembled a formidable army of hunters steeped in the environmental arts of war and medicinal botany. Gathering a large following, Kina “became king of a vast country” after conquering all the lands from Sankarani River to Bouré in present-day Guinea. In this region of the Niger River Valley, a seed was planted that would flower into the great Islamic Empire of Mali (1235–1670 CE).86 In West Africa, from prehistoric days, to the present, Griots held the roles of tribal poets, counsellors, judges, and memory keepers.87 Centuries after the demise of the empire, oral histories, collected by Belen-Tigui (Masters of the Word) at Griot schools, were assembled by African scholars and published under the title Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. By celebrating the Mari-Diata (Lion King) founder of the Malian Empire, the poetic volume provides insights on the perceptions of war and environment in Medieval West Africa.88 The epic begins with the young prince Sundiata, born as a weak and sickly child to Sogolo, hunch-backed sorceresses, and one of the many wives of a Mandé Musa. The prince’s infirmity brings joy to the Musa’s first wife, as Sundiata had been prophesized to be king, and she covets the throne for her own son Dankaran. But on his father’s death bed, Sundiata rises and stands on his own two legs. Fearing for his safety, Sogolo flees with Sundiata. Returning as grown man the exiled Mandé prince finds his father’s kingdom in ruins, destroyed by the Sosso. In a rage, Sundiata raises an army and, defeating the Sosso at the Battle of Kirina in 1235 CE, establishes the Malian Empire.89 He then chooses the city of Niani on the Sankarani River to be its capital. On the edge of a forest rich with kola nuts, palm oil, and gold, Niani, encircled by a crescent of defensible hills, is dominated by Manu Kani’s rocky peak on the east.90 Located far from the Sahel’s warring nomads, Niani’s merchants are able to barter

39

cotton, copper, and other staples, without fear of raids. Caravan trails soon wind north (Mandingsila) and northeastward (Sarakolle-sila) out of the city, establishing Niani as the major West African terminal of a vast Mandé trading system that carried gold and other goods to Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula and intersected with the Silk Road on the Asian subcontinent.91 The Sundiata celebrates the elevation of the sleepy West African village to the centre of the Malian Empire: The griots, fine talkers that they were, used to boast of Niani and Mali, saying: “If you want salt, go to Niani is the camping place of the Sahel caravans. If you want gold, go to Niani, for Bouré, Bambougou and Wagadou work for Niani, If you want fine cloth, go to Niani, for the Mecca road passes by …, If you want fish, go to Niani, for it is there that the fishermen of Maouti and Djenné come to sell their catches. If you want meat, go to Niani, the country of great hunters, and the land of the ox and the sheep. If you want to see and army, so to Niani, for it is there that the united forces of Mali are to be found.”92

Sundiata’s son Mansa Moussa presided over the Malian Golden Age and between 1312 and 1337 CE, and expanded the imperial reach of the Mandé Empire from the western Atlantic Coast to the cities of Timbuktu and Gao in the east, and the northern salt mines of Taghaza, while securing the imperial gold mines of Niani in the south. Between 1324 and 1325 CE, Moussa performed the hajj to Mecca, and in Cairo informed Emir Abu al-Hassan how he became to be the Musa of the Islamic Malian Empire, after his older brother, Abu Bakr II, abdicated to go explore the Atlantic Ocean.93

3.5.1 Swallowed by the Blades of the Ocean After annexing the Atlantic coast kingdom of Djolof, the Malian Empire instituted a Ministry of Water to explore the aquatic frontier of its western ocean and extend its terrestrial trading system seaward. News of oceanic discoveries

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3 Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE

and legendary feats of Arabic navigators brought to Mali by caravan trains, piqued Musa Abu Bakr II’s interest in discovering “the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean,” and a shorter passage to the markets and goods of India and Cathay: … if his predecessor on the throne had dominated the roads, savannahs, forests, and deserts of the kingdom, [Abu Bakr II] dreamed of inscribing himself into the pages of Mandé history by revealing the richness of maritime spaces, and fluvial highways as the means to foster communications between people across the waters.94

Abu Bakr II studied watercraft plying the Senegal, Gambia, and Niger rivers, and consulted the shipwrights of Lake Chad, the best nautical engineers in the Sahel. Modelling the vessels of his Farafina Fleet after long-range Egyptian and Phoenician sea-faring ships, he salted his Mandé crews with seasoned Arab navigators and sailors from the Indian Ocean trade.95 It is chronicled that Abu Bakr II then “equipped 300 ships filled with men and the same number equipped with gold, water, and provisions enough to last them for years,” and launched his fleet to explore the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.96 After a very long period, only one ship returned from the expedition. Abu Bakr II questioned its surviving captain, whom it is conjectured, sailed to the mouth of the Amazon River in present-day Brazil: … Yes, O Sultan, we travelled for a long time until there appeared in the open sea [as it were] a river with a powerful current … The [other] ships went on ahead but when they reached that place, they did not return … As for me, I … did not enter that river.97

It is written that Abu Bakr II was sceptical of the captain’s report, suspecting a possible mutiny: “the sultan disbelieved him [and] got ready 2,000 ships, 1,000 for himself and the men whom he took with him and 1,000 for water and provisions.”98 Syrian historical geographer Al-Umari (1301–1349 CE), who chronicling Moussa’s conversation with the Emir of Cairo, recorded how the Mandé Musa Abu Bakr II “embarked on the Atlantic Ocean with his men. That was the last we saw of him and all those who were with him, and so I became king in my own right.”99 Embarking in 1301 CE, the second Mandé

expedition, piloted by Arabic navigator Ibrahim Ismael, was comprised of warriors, artisans, and gold merchants. Battling Atlantic storms, the fleet was speculated to have been caught in a gigantic whirlpool swirling at the mouth of the Amazon River. It is where, as the West African Griots remember, that Abu Bakr II and his crews perished “at sea with hundreds of canoes, … swallowed up by the blades of the ocean.”100

3.5.2 Gold and the Canary, North and South Equatorial Gyres Abu Bakr II launched his Farafina Fleet one hundred and eighty years before Columbus’s caravels the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria landed on a Bahama islet in 1492 in their quest to find a passage to India. Exploring the Caribbean, Columbus learned that “there had come to Española a black people who have the top of their spears made of a metal … they call guanin.”101 On his return to Spain, samples of the spears were “assayed,” and it was discovered that of the “32 parts” of gua-nin, “18 were gold, 6 silver, and 8 of copper,” similar in metallurgy to the gold mined and smelted in the Mandé regions of West Africa. In addition, the etymology of the word guanin can also be traced to the Mandé languages of “Mandingo, Kabunga, Toronka, Kankanka, Bambara, Mande,” and specifically to “Vei,” where “the form of the word kani,” is “transliterated into native phonetics” creating the word “gua-nin.” Columbus’s journals listed “coa-na,” as the name Caribbean islanders attributed to gold, and “gua-nin” as the “island where there is much gold.”102 Setting sail in May 1493, on his third voyage to the New World, Columbus ordered three of his six caravels to sail directly to Española. Then sailing southwest, he led the other three to the small group of Cape Verde islands sitting off the coast of West Africa, as he intended to chart a course that “would be on a parallel with the lands of the Sierra Loa [present day Sierra Leone] and the Cape of Sancta Anna in Guinea, … below the

3.5 West Africa Griot Geographies: Abu Bakr II’s Farfina Fleets

equinoctial line.”103 Determined to find if a possible West African—New World trade route had previously been established, Columbus sailed west into waters where the Canary and North Equatorial currents join off the Senegambian and Sierra Leone coasts of West Africa. The Atlantic currents pulled his three caravels towards South America. Sailing into equatorial waters, Columbus recorded that the flotilla endured eight days of “intense and ardent heat.”104 Below decks barrels of “wine and water” swelled, “breaking the hoops of the casks,” stored “wheat burned like fire,” and “pork and salted meat roasted and putrefied.”105 After crossing the “burning latitude,” of the Equator, Columbus sighted “frigate pelicans” and landed on “the isle of Trinidad” (Trinidad and Tobago) off the coast of present-day Venezuela.106 Skirting the Boco del Drago (Dragon’s Mouth) strait between the island the mainland, Columbus landed in August 1498 on the South American continent. After his arrival he recorded being gifted “handkerchiefs of cotton very symmetrically woven and worked in colours like those brought from Guinea, from the rivers of Sierra Leona (sic) and of no difference.”107 The Canary and North Equatorial currents that carried Columbus from the Cape Verde islands to the northern coast of South America provide a degree of plausibility to stories about the fate of Abu Bakr II’s lost Farafina Fleets. In modern West Africa however, the story of the Mandé Musa lost at sea is a tragic epic. Recited by present-day Griots in whispers and furtive glances, Abu Bakr II’s war with the ocean serves as a cautionary tale of naked ambition, hubris, and a warning not to go into battle against the forces of the natural world. Notes 1. Ingold, T. 2013. Dreaming of dragons: on the imagination of real life. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(4): 734–752. Ref. 735. 2. Overing, G. 1990. Language, Sign, and Gender in “Beowulf”. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Ref. 47, 35.

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3. Heaney, S. 1992. Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces, London: Faber and Faber. 4. Scott, B. J. 2002. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. 1–16. Ref. 5–6. 5. For a further discussion see: Gräslund, B. 2022. The Nordic Beowulf. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press; Sayers, W. 2022. The Origin of the Name Beowulf in a Gutnish *baþolfr “Battle-Wolf”, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0895769X.2022.2056428; O’Donoghue, H. 2014. English poetry and Old Norse myth: A history. Oxford University Press, USA; Taylor, P. B. 1998. Sharing Story: Medieval Norse-English Literary Relationships. New York: AMS Press Inc. 6. Heaney, Seamus. 2000. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company. Ref. 189. 7. Tolkien, J. R. R. 2018. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, in Mittman, Asa Simon, and Marcus Hensel, eds. Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume One. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press. Ref. 10. 8. Elden, S. 2009. Place symbolism and land politics in Beowulf. Cultural Geographies 16(4): 447–463. Ref. 448. 9. Howe, N. 2008. Writing the map of AngloSaxon England: Essays in cultural geography. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ref. 188. 10. Hiatt, A. 2009. Beowulf off the map. AngloSaxon England, 38: 11–40. Ref. 18. 11. Heaney, Beowulf, xii. 12. Ibid., 95. 13. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, 10. 14. Instead of pinning names on a map, a paint by number cartographical exercise, or the attempt to transpose a modern Google Maps sensibility upon a medieval epic poem, a chorographic approach, can trace the choreography of Beowulf’s characters as they move in space, with the compass

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15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

3 Medieval Age Perceptions of War and Environment, 975–1493 CE

points designated phenomenologically based on the physiography of the region. Reminiscent of the Second World War pilots who flew missions over this region, and called out enemies by their position on an imagined clock-face. According to Ptolemy, chorography “sets out the individual localities, each one independently and by itself, registering practically everything down to the least thing therein.” Berggren, J. L. and Jones, A. 2000. Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’: an Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ref. I.i. Heaney, Beowulf, 16–17. Ibid. Whitby, E. J. 1994. Thinking about Beowulf. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Ref. 55. Heaney, Beowulf, 7. Estes, H. 2017. Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ref. 76. Ibid. Ball, C. 2009. Monstrous Landscapes: The Interdependence of Meaning Between Monster and Landscape in Beowulf. Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies, 5(1): 1–26. Translation from Fulk, Robert D., Bjork, R. E., and Niles, J. D., eds. 2008. Klaeber’s ‘Beowulf’ and ‘The Fight at Finnsburg’: Fourth Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ref. Lines 103–104. Heaney, Beowulf, 95. Ibid., 47–49. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 117. Strong, A. 1925. Beowulf translated into modern English rhyming verse, London: Constable. Ref. xxvii. Strong, A. 1921. A Short History of English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ref. 15. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, 246.

31. Kinsella, T. and Brocquy, L. L. 2002. The Táin. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Kindle Edition). Ref. xiv. 32. Legg, R., Ludlow, F. and Travis, C. 2020. Mapping the Irish Rath (Ringfort): Landscape and Settlement Patterns in the early Medieval Period, in (Eds.) Charles Travis, Francis Ludlow and Ferenc Gyuris, Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis: Landscape of Place and Time. Cham Switzerland: Springer Nature. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37569-0_12 33. Literally translated from Gaelic, Dindseanchas can parsed accordingly: Dind—signifies “hillock, raised ground, landmark or notable place,” while seanchas signifies “ancient or traditional lore”—accumulated and transmitted by the memories of Fili, who were tasked with preserving tribal histories, genealogies, conquests, losses, migrations as well as encomiums and elegiac poems for tribal leaders. From another perspective, Dindseanchas can be translated as a higher perspective of knowledge, or seeing and understanding a landscape from an elevated position (see Charles Bowen, A Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas). The modern Gaelic Irish word dinnseanchas translates into the English word topography. 34. Bowen, C. 1975/76. A Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas, Studia Celtica 10–11: Ref. 115. 35. The Táin, 60. 36. Ibid. 37. Gosling, R. 2014. The Route of Táin Bó Cúalnge, Emania: Bulletin of the Navan Research Group, 22: pp. 145–166. Ref. 151. 38. Dobbs, M, E. 1912 The Black Pig’s Dyke and the campaign of the Táin Bó Cúalnge in Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie 8: 339–346. 39. Ibid. 40. Mulligan, A. C. 2019. Place-making heroes and the storying of Ireland’s vernacular landscape. In A landscape of words, Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700– 1250. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Ref. 80; The Táin 72.

3.5 West Africa Griot Geographies: Abu Bakr II’s Farfina Fleets

41. Knox, A. J. 2013. Conflict, carnage, and cats: toward a comic Cu Chulainn in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Comparative Drama, 47(3): 367–392. Ref. 380. 42. The Táin, 111–112. 43. Tzu, S. 1963. The Art of War, trans. with an introduction by Samuel B. Griffith. New York: Oxford University Press. Ref. 116. 44. The Táin, 153. 45. Mulligan, Place-making heroes and the storying of Ireland’s vernacular landscape, 84. 46. The Táin, 101. 47. Ibid., 167. 48. The word Mongol derives from the toponym Onongol for the Onon River that flows through present-day Mongolia and the Russian Federation (gol the UyghurMongol word for river). 49. Man, J. 2004. Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection. London, England: Bantam Press; Onon, P. U., & Onon, U. Trans. & Eds. 2001. The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan (1st ed.) London: Routledge. 50. Man, John. 2004. Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection. London, England: Bantam Press. 51. Rachewiltz, I. D. 2015. The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, Book 4. (Ed.) John C. Street, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ref. vii. http://cedar.wwu. edu/cedarbooks/4. 52. Onon, & Onon, The Secret History of the Mongols, 150. 53. Cleaves, F.W., Trans. & Ed. 1982. The Secret History of the Mongols, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ref. 173. 54. Ibid.,100; 173; 189. 55. Lattimore, O. 1963. The Geography of Chingis Khan. The Geographical Journal, 129(1): 1–7. Ref. 7. 56. Onon, & Onon, The Secret History of the Mongols, 46. 57. Ibid., 6.

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58. Silverstein, A. J. 2007. The Mongol Yām and its legacy. In Postal Systems in the PreModern Islamic World (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: pp. 141–164. 59. Lincoln, B. 2007. The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. Ithica: Cornell University Press. Ref. 19. 60. Onon, & Onon, The Secret History of the Mongols, 16. 61. Turnbull, S. 2003. Genghis Khan and the Mongol Conquests 1190–1400. London: Routledge. Ref. 21–22. 62. Büntgen, U. and Di Cosmo, N. 2016. Climatic and environmental aspects of the Mongol withdrawal from Hungary in 1242 CE. Scientific Reports, 6(1): 1–9. Ref. 3. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Onon, & Onon, The Secret History of the Mongols, 6. 66. Coleridge, S. T. 1916. Kubla Khan, Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment. Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poems/43991/kubla-khan. 67. Polo, M. 1921. The travels of Marco Polo: the venetian (No. 306). JM Dent. Ref. 130. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Turnbull, S. 2003. Genghis Khan and the Mongol Conquests 1190–1400. London: Routledge. Ref. 18. 71. Polo, The travels of Marco Polo, 30. 72. Lattimore, The Geography of Chingis Khan; Onon, & Onon, The Secret History of the Mongols. 73. Ibid. 74. Onon, & Onon, The Secret History of the Mongols. 75. Ibid., 178. 76. Polo, The travels of Marco Polo, 128–129. 77. Ibid. 78. Onon, & Onon, The Secret History of the Mongols. 79. Polo, The travels of Marco Polo, 130. 80. Onon, & Onon, The Secret History of the Mongols, 175.

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81. Johnson, S. M. 2011. The Mongol Hordes Invade China, Military Heritage, 13(2): 40–45. 82. Weatherford, J. 2004. Ghenghis Khan and the making of the modern world. New York: Crown Publishers. 83. Andrade, T. 2016. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 84. Lattimore, The Geography of Chingis Khan. 7. 85. McCall, D., and Stewart, R. F. 1974. Reconstructing Early Mande Civilizations: Ghana and Mali. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Supplementary Studies, 20: 41–48. 86. Niane, D. T. 1984. “Mali and the second Mandigo expansion,’ in (Ed.) D. T. Niane, General History of Africa, IV, Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Ref. 129. 87. Diawara, G. 2010 [1992]. Abubakari II: Explorateur mandingue (La Sahélienne) Paris: L’Hartmattan; Sherman, J. (Ed.) 2015. Storytelling: an encyclopedia of mythology and folklore, London: Routledge. Ref. 209. 88. Niane, Mali and the second Mandigo expansion. 89. Austen, R. A. (Ed.) 1999. In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature, and Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Niane, D. T. 1965. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. (Trans.) G. D. Pickett, London: Longman.

90. Niane, Mali and the second Mandigo expansion, 127. 91. Ibid. 92. Niane, Sundiata, an epic of old Mali, 82. 93. Thornton, J. K. 2012. A cultural history of the Atlantic world, 1250–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 94. Diawara, Abubakari II, 584–585. 95. Hopkins, J.F.P., and Levtzion, N. 2000. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers. 96. Diawara, Abubakari II, 584–585. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Babou Condé, quoted in Westphal, B. 2016. The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place and Maps. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Press. Ref. 84; Thornton, A cultural history of the Atlantic world, 1250–1820. 101. Van Sertima, I. 1976. They Came before Columbus. 1st ed. New York: Random House. Ref. 11–12. 102. Ibid. 103. Thacher, J. B. 1903. Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Works, His Remains, as Revealed by Original Printed and Manuscript Records, Together with an Essay on Peter Martyr of Anghera and Bartolomé de Las Casas, the First Historians of America. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Ref. 380. 104. Ibid., 381. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 382. 107. Ibid., 393.

4

Seachange: Early Modern Oceanic Wars, 1588–1762

… O, brave new world, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1.1

4.1

Neptune, the New God of War

The European discovery of the northern and southern hemispheres of the Americas in the fifteenth century inaugurated the age of mercantile capitalism, opening the world’s oceans as major theatres of war, and resource extraction: “the development of ocean-going sailing ships, the biggest and most complex machines” ever built “enabled Europeans to establish their control over almost half the world” during their era of imperial expansion.2 From the fifteenth century, a naval arms race between England and the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal led to the creation of massive Man ‘O Wars—“ships of the line” with three masts, square rigs, and at least sixty guns: “by the late sixteenth century, European warships had become large, heavy cannon platforms, built to withstand enemy fire more than to evade it. They were as large as any wooden ships ever built, as much as two thousand tons.”3 Bourgeoning imperial and mercantile wars over “New World” gold, silver, furs, cod, timber, and territories led to an unprecedented need for oak and other hard woods: “at the beginning of the eighteenth century the building of a warship could consume 4,000 trees and for smelting iron. Forests were being depleted faster that they could regrow.”4 The manufacture of ordnance and

gunpowder outfitting period ships also consumed trees and agrarian land at unprecedented rates. At the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in 1603, English furnaces were smelting 1000 tons of ordnance, while her government’s “saltpetremen” confiscated fields fertilized with manure to harvest the sodium nitrate required to produce military grade gunpowder for the Royal Navy.5 In William Shakespeare’s maritime drama, The Tempest (1610–1611), the spirit Ariel, notes the transformation of war from Mars’ traditional terrestrial territory to Neptune’s oceanic domain: Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange. The Tempest, Act I, Scene I.6

The inauguration of early modern oceanic warfare occurred during the Little Ice Age, when temperatures in the North Atlantic experienced a pronounced decline from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century due to the impacts of orbital forcing, shifts in oceanic circulation, and low solar radiation cycles. In addition, increases in volcanic eruptions releasing particulate matter into the Earth’s atmosphere impacted global climates as well.7 During the bitter winter of 1595,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Travis, Environment as a Weapon, Historical Geography and Geosciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_4

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4 Seachange: Early Modern Oceanic Wars, 1588–1762

Shakespeare composed Richard III, opening his historical drama with the proclamation: “Now is the winter of our discontent.”8 The Bard of Avon composed most of his canon in an age when Arctic Sea ice was expanding and European glaciers were advancing. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Coriolanus, the general, exiled from Rome after failing to become consul, joins and leads a Volscian attack on the city. The London bread riots, caused by poor harvests and climatic conditions in 1605 and 1608, were recast by Shakespeare to ancient Rome, with Coriolanus debuting at the Globe Theatre perched on the banks of a River Thames glazed with thick coat of ice.9 This chapter will discuss the early modern confluence of emerging sea power and impacts of the Little Ice Age on the destruction of the Spanish Armada, the creation of the Hollandic Waterline, and the strategic role that Newfoundland’s Grand Banks cod-fishery played in developing the British empire.

caravels, galleons, and the vessels of disaffected English and Scottish nobles trailed in the flotilla’s wake. The Catholic King Philip II’s naval campaign to depose Elizabeth I, of England, defender of Protestantism, was underway, instigated by the Virgin Queen’s support of a Dutch rebellion against his rule during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). English privateer raids on Spanish merchant ships and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, Catholic heir to the Tudor throne of England, were also aggravating factors. The plan involved ferrying soldiers from the Spanish Netherlands, across the channel, to invade England. However, only thirty ships from Philip’s massive fleet would return to the Iberian Peninsula by the end of the year. The majority of the Armada's ships fell victim to Little Ice Age storms that howled out of the North Atlantic and pounded the west coast of Ireland in the summer and fall of 1588, illuminating that “history provides the material that geography alone can weave into shape.”10 Six years after the Spanish naval disaster, William Shakespeare in Midsummer’s Night’s Dream (1594) mused on the unpredictability of the period’s confusing climate:

4.2

The Wreck of the Spanish Armada, 1588

The spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter, changed their wonted liveries and the mazèd world By their increase now knows not which is which Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Act II. Scene I.11

On May 29, 1588, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia issued a command to launch, and a colossal forest of masts and sails heaved in the port waters of Lisbon, as one hundred and thirty ships of Spain’s “Invincible Armada” hoisted dripping anchors from the muddy floor of the Portuguese harbour. It took two full days for the bulbous sterns of the Man ‘O Wars, outfitted with twenty-five hundred guns, to clear port.1 Squadrons of urquas, zebras,

In the late sixteenth century, Little Ice Age climatic impacts on upper atmospheric circulation created blocking highs over the eastern North Atlantic, affecting seasonal weather. The highs, often accompanied by latitudinal shifts southwards

1 As the Armada set sail for Queen Elizabeth’s kingdom, it was figuratively “time-traveling”—going back in time. Catholic Spain measured time according the “New” Gregorian Calendar, whilst Protestant England still adhering to the “Old” Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE, was ten days “behind” the flotilla as it sailed to the English Channel in the summer of 1588. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced his Gregorian system, to correct an eleven-minute miscalculation in the Roman emperor’s system over the length of the solar year. Caesar’s error threw the Catholic ecclesiastical calendar out of time with the seasons. In particular Easter, a feast of re-birth, had fallen further away from its celebration close to spring equinox with each passing year. To remedy the problem, Pope Gregory decided that

ten days would be removed from the calendar in October —but only for the year 1582, decreeing that the 4th of the month would be followed by the 15th. The Gregorian Calendar was implemented during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only by Catholic Europe. England and the rest of Protestant Europe did not convert to the “New” Calendar until the eighteenth century. And Russia and the Orthodox churches of Europe adhered to the Julian Calendar until the Soviet Revolution in the early twentieth century. Dates concerning the Armada’s locations, battles, and wreck listed in this chapter were converted or adhere to the “New” Gregorian Calendar. (C. R. Cheney, 1945. Handbook of Dates for Students of English History, London: Royal Historical Society.)

4.2 The Wreck of the Spanish Armada, 1588

of low air pressure, created major cyclonic oceanic disturbances, including the storms that struck the Irish coast, splintering at least thirty or more Armada ships to pieces in September 1588.

4.2.1 Failed Invasion After sailing from Lisbon, the Armada, with its crew of twenty thousand sailors, landed at the port of Coruna, Spain, on June 25 to seek shelter from stormy weather, and restock its supplies of food and water. Returning to sea again Philip’s fleet was buffeted so badly by foul weather that it needed to return to Coruna for repairs. Launching again, the Armada was spotted in the English Channel off the “Lizard,” a peninsula in West Cornwall on the 29th of July. Elizabeth ordered her navy to sea from Plymouth, and on July 31, near Eddystone Rocks in the English Channel, fifty-five Royal warships exchanged broadsides with the Armada, and chased the Spanish fleet eastward up the English Channel to Portland Bill. On August 2 the wind turned, and the Spanish swung about to engage the English. A running battle ensued, but the Armada, was unable to match the speed and manoeuvrability of the Royal warships. The metallurgy of English gunnery was also superior to the powerful, but short-range Spanish cannons which fired stone balls and barrels full of packed rock, often missing their targets and plunging into the channel. The Royal Navy simply tacked just beyond the Armada’s limited cannon range, and returned multiple, overwhelming broadsides from longrange guns, fitted with swift reloading carriages.12 After a battle on August 4, near the Isle of Wight, the Armada sailed for France to board thirty thousand soldiers of the Duke of Parma’s Army for the invasion of England. However, the deep keels of its ships kept the Spanish from entering the harbours of Calais and Dunkirk. In addition, Dutch rebel patrols on flat-bottomed boats prevented the Duke’s soldiers from being ferried to the offshore fleet. On August 7, as the Armada clustered together in a crescent to shelter from a storm roaring through the Straits of Dover,

47

Spanish lookouts sighted flaming Royal Navy fire-barges filled with pitch, gunpowder, and tar, bearing down on their ships. Suddenly a “miraculous change of wind” swirled out of the tempest allowing the Armada to slip its moorings and escape an oceanic inferno. In pursuit, the English intercepted the fleet on August 8, and at the ensuing Battle of Gravelines, two thousand Spanish sailors perished. On August 11, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, licking his wounds, realized an English invasion was futile, and abandoned Philip II’s glorious campaign to capture Elizabeth’s throne for Catholic Europe. Blocked on the west by English warships, the Armada was driven east by the winds of an approaching cyclonic disturbance and sailed into the North Sea and up the east coast of England. The Royal Navy tailed the flotilla up to the Firth of Forth, off the coast of Edinburgh, Scotland, where on August 13, the Armada’s commander, issued a navigational order for his fleet captains to set bearings: … to the North-North-East, until you be found under 61 degrees and a half: and then to take great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland, for fear of the harm that may happen unto you upon that coast.13

An English fishing boat from Shetland reported sighting one hundred of the Armada’s “monstrous great ships, with all sheets aftward” (running before the wind) making for the sound between Fair and Orkney islands, at the top of Scotland.14 On August 19 and 20, Armada logs record the wind running northeast, with ships passing the Scottish islands of Shetland, Orkney, Lewis, and Harris, and then sailing four hundred miles in three days, before sighting the northern coast of Ireland. Stormwinds then shifted from the south, driving the Armada out to Rockall, a granite islet jutting out of the North Atlantic three hundred nautical miles north of Ireland, and two hundred miles west of the Outer Hebrides. On August 25, MedinaSidonia held a conference for the Armada’s captains’ on the deck of the San Martin, and informed them that he had decided to sail for Galicia in Spain. However, over thirty captains, their crews dying from hunger and thirst, decided to seek refuge in Ireland, despite the admiral’s warning

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about the treachery of its rocky coastline, and the presence of English garrisons.

4.2.2 The Great Irish Gale of 1588 Without proper charts, experience of sailing the North Atlantic or seasoned Irish pilots onboard, many of the Spanish captains seeking safe harbour in Ireland foundered on the craggy coasts and hidden shoals of the island’s northern and western shores in September of 1588. Fortunate captains sailing downwind from Rockall sheltered safely in Donegal Bay, but many unfortunate windward vessels were driven down the jagged coastlines of counties Mayo, Clare, Galway, and Kerry. More than thirty Armada ships, swept by the North Atlantic Drift, the eastern flowing current of the Gulf Stream, and the cold, and surging storm tides of the Little Ice Age were splintered into flotsam and jetson on Irish rocks and beaches. Remains of the vessels jutted like broken wooden rib cages from the surf pounding the island’s western shores (Fig. 4.1).15 Blasket Sound, one of the Armada’s watery graveyards, was at the time, a poorly charted fivemile strait between Fereter’s Island (Great Blasket Island) and Dunmore Head, County Kerry, Munster in southwestern Ireland.17 With tides running a swift five knots, and iron deposits skewing compass readings, the channel was a tricky passage of water to navigate and “at best a poor anchorage in calm weather.”18 Blasket Sound fili (bardic poet-storytellers) recalled that between September 20 and 21 “there blew a most extreme wind and cruel storm the like whereof hath not been seen in a long time.”19 The gale hit two Armada ships, the Nuestra Senora De La Rosa and the San Juan Ragusa sheltering in Blasket Sound “with terrible fury.”20 One fili recounted: That hurricane came down from the South Land. High winds … and the place was terrible with swells. Swells going up to the sky and foam. And the seethe and the surge and their sails were torn to rags until they came to the Blasket Strand. And when they came to the Blasket Strand there was a heavy current passing through a little gap there and they call it “the Ebb Tide” and it was a very bad place but they insist that they were stranded. They

don’t know the right place to anchor and they let their anchors out in the middle of the Tide and the tide was so strong they drifted, drifted down and they had to let their anchors go.21

Dragged by gale-force winds, the two ships collided. With the tide turning, the Senora de la Rosa, under the command of Prince d’Ascoli, son of the King of Spain, swung broadside, struck Stromboli Rock, and sank with all souls on board. The San Juan de Ragusa wrecked further along the Kerry coast, its surviving sailors hunted by the English. The fili observed that any northwestern gale coming of the Atlantic would shoot “straight down the Sound and blow any vessel not overwhelmed by the sea out the other end like a dart from a blow gun”22 (Fig. 4.2). Over the course of the Armada’s failed campaign, an estimated fifteen thousand men perished, four thousand drowning in Irish coastal waters. English combat casualties were lower, but by Christmas 1588, it was reported that half of the Royal Navy’s 16,000 men waiting to be demobilized had died from disease.24 Lamenting about his ill-fated invasion campaign, King Philip II of Spain declared to his advisors that “I sent them to fight the English, not storms.”25

4.2.3 The Winds of God: Edmund Spencer’s Literary Geography In late August 1588, Lord Deputy William Fitzwilliam, appointed to govern Ireland after overseeing the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587, received false intelligence that the Royal Navy had been defeated and the Spanish were preparing to invade Ireland. Panic gripped the halls of Dublin Castle as Armada ships began appearing off the west coast in early September. In the Lord Deputy’s fevered imagination, their presence was perceived as the first wave of a coordinated attack led by Spanish Admiral Medina-Sidonia to foment an Irish rebellion against English rule. Consequently, Fitzwilliam ordered all his colonial officials to hunt down and execute Spanish sailors, soldiers and their Irish allies. In turn, Provincial English colonial

4.2 The Wreck of the Spanish Armada, 1588

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Fig. 4.1 Irish Wreck Sites of the Spanish Armada, September 1588. Map by Charles Travis16

administrators reported to the Lord Deputy in the Irish Pale, that many of the Armada survivors who washed ashore were murdered by “the wild Irish tempted by the sight of gold chains and rings.”26 However, Catholic Gaelic chieftains, sympathetic to the Spanish cause, attested that Armada crews, including sailors from Ireland were slain by soldiers from the provincial English garrisons.27 New intelligence arrived to Dublin Castle in mid-September bringing news of the Royal Navy’s victory over the Armada, revealing that Spanish ships off the Irish coast were not part of an invasion, but rather a scattered fleet that soon became storm-driven wrecks, littering the shores of Ulster, Connacht, and Munster. The English poet Edmund Spencer, one of Lord Fitzwilliam’s deputies, participated in hunting the Spanish survivors. Possessing the ambition to be the “Virgil of the Elizabethan Age,” Spencer moved to Ireland in 1580, and

acted as secretary to several colonial officials before being appointed the Sheriff of Cork. As a Munster Plantation shareholder and Protestant landlord to a largely Gaelic, Catholic peasantry, Spencer despised his tenants. Of the Irish dispossessed, he wrote: Out of everye corner of the woode and glens they came creepeinge forth upon theire hands, … they looked Anatomies of death, they spake like ghostes crying out of their graves; they did eat of carrions … and if they found a lott of watercresses or shamrocks theyr they flocked as to a feast.28

The adventures of Spencer’s knights in his epic The Faerie Queene (1596) can be read as “a transcript of the warfare” between the English colonizers and Catholic Gaelic chieftains.29 Spencer’s poem portrays Irish rebels as savages rushing out of dark forests to attack his knights. With its “trackless woods and unexplored fastnesses, Ireland provided a fit theatre for the

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Fig. 4.2 The Great Gale of 20–21, September 1588. Map by Charles Travis23

ambushes, temptations, and enchantments against which Spenser’s champions of virtue must be continually on guard.”30 Joining hunting parties to capture Armada survivors and their Irish allies, Spencer “certainly beheld the immense wreckage of Spanish ships on the coasts of Connaught and Ulster,” events that impressed themselves greatly on his poetic works (Fig. 4.3).31 Spencer’s poem, Virgils Gnat, deploys the metaphor of “storms and ships wrecked in tempestuous seas” to depict the “toppling of monumental edifices by natural elements to allude to and celebrate the defeat of Catholic Rome” and “Spain under Philip II, whose Babylonian pride was humbled by little England with the help of the ‘winds of God’.”33 Conversely, the defeat of the evil tyrant Sould in The Faerie Queene symbolizes the destruction of the Catholic Counter-Reformation forces of Phillip II’s fleet and the denial of Gaelic chieftain and Earl of Tyrone, Lord Hugh O’Neill’s Irish territorial claims.34 In “Book V” of the poem, Souldan’s

chariot crashes in battle, serving as an allegory for the Spanish wrecks strewn along the shores of the Irish coast: At last they have all ouerthrowne to ground Quite topside turuey, and the pagan hound Amongst the yron hookes and graples keene, Torne all to rags, and rent with many a wound, That no whole peece of him was to be seene, But scattred all about, and strow’d vpon the greene. The Faerie Queene, Book V, 42–43.35

During the Nine Year’s War (1593–1603) King Phillip II sent two more Armadas to invade England, but North Atlantic storms enhanced by Little Ice Age pressure fronts extending from the Arctic Circle, destroyed the first flotilla, before sweeping the second back to Spain. In 1598, ten years after Phillip’s first Armada foundered on Irish shores, his ally, the Gaelic Chieftain Hugh O’Neill, burned Edmund Spencer out of his estate at Kilcolman, Cork. Other colonial administrators suffered similar fates, during the Nine Year’s War, but the momentous wreck of

4.3 The Hollandaic Waterline

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Fig. 4.3 Edmund Spencer’s Literary Geography. Map by Charles Travis32

the Spanish Armada in 1588 vanquished any hopes that the Catholic Irish could rid the island of English Protestant rule: “The old Gaelic chiefs, their chance gone, returned the internecine squabbling which was their principal pastime; it was their inability co-operate which had lost them [the] … final chance to smash English rule and re-create the Ireland of which they were now last becoming relics.”36 Spencer fled Ireland for London and died in 1599. Nevertheless, the aspiring Elizabethan Virgil’s weaponization of the “Armada Gale” was echoed in Reformation War tracts published by Protestant printers in England and the Low Countries of Flanders and the Netherlands. The pamphlets declared that “God was fighting against the Spaniards,” when its Armada was “strow’d vpon the greene” coasts of Ireland by the Great Gale of 1588.37 In the end, the “bones of Spanish sailors hidden under golden sand at Streedagh and Ballycroy and Rosbeg, wedged in rock and reef in the Rosses and the Blaskets and Lacada Point,” remain to this day “as a silent yet eloquent monument to the lost enterprise of Philip II, King of Spain.”38

4.3

The Hollandaic Waterline

During the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) polities in the Netherlands counted the North Sea and the Helinium River Delta as allies in their wars with the Spanish Hapsburg Empire. Fed by the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers, the delta was a braid of winding streams and islets that emptied into the North Sea. This ecotonic landscape engineered by the Dutch, formed an artificial aqueous frontier that became an effective, if not controversial environmental weapon.39 On October 3, 1574, during the Spanish Siege of Leiden, Dutch soldiers destroyed dikes to flood the Low Country with seawater and drive the Catholic forces out of the “Garden of Holland.” Conceived by Maurice of Nassau in the early seventeenth century, the Hollandaic Waterline was implemented by his brother Prince Frederick Henry. The military engineering strategy was designed to protect the political and economic cockpit of the Dutch Republic. In 1629, engineers began to construct a series of forts from which the Dutch army could artificially

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manipulate flood levels to counter military assaults on the Netherlands from both land and sea. This aqueous defensive system “relied on a high-maintenance hydraulic system of dike, drains, sluices and windmills to keep the seas at bay” but was also “highly vulnerable to humanmade and natural disasters.”40 Within this system, flat-bottomed gunboats were launched to navigate the artificially flooded maze of inland waterways, emerging with stealth to strike enemy vessels anchored at sea, before withdrawing to a defensive warren within the inundated lowlying Dutch coastal landscape (Fig. 4.4). At the Siege of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in 1629, armies allied to the Spanish captured the city and deliberately waterlogged its surrounding soils by channelling the Aa, Dieze, and Dommel rivers. Countering this tactic, Prince Henry’s army manufactured twenty-one horse-drawn mill-pumps and drained the swampy land surrounding the besieged

city. Henry’s forces then rediverted the courses of the Aa and Dommel rivers, creating an insurmountable barrier for Spanish troops coming to relieve the city. In doing so, Henry carried out one of the most famous military engineering feats of the Eighty Years’ War.41 The port of Amsterdam emerged as a global trading hub during the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic (1588–1672). In its trading houses, Russian, Scandinavian, and Baltic wheat were exchanged for English cod, herring and textiles, which in turn was bartered for French, Spanish, and Portuguese fruits, wine, salt, and more exotic goods filtering in from the Far East. The city was also a fishing port and market for North Sea fish, and whales. The sea-faring knowledge of Dutch mariners found confluence with the art of Rembrandt and Vermeer and the mathematics and science of Descartes and Huygens to situate Amsterdam as the leading world centre of early modern nautical cartography.

Fig. 4.4 Bird’s Eye View of The Hague, Leiden, and Delft. Siege of Leiden, 3 October 1574. Frans Hogenberg (1540– 1590). Source Wikimedia Commons

4.4 North Atlantic Fishery Wars

The English and the French looked on Dutch riches with envy and in 1670 signed a secret treaty to raise an army to invade and gain control of Amsterdam’s mercantile power. The shipyards of the city had built a formidable navy to protect Dutch colonial interests in the New World and Far East. And although the Dutch navy inflicted significant defeats on English and French fleets from 1650 to 1680, the land forces of the Republic paled in comparison. In 1672, King Charles II of England declared war on the Netherlands, a year remembered by the Dutch as the Rampjaar or “Disaster Year.” By June, the allied armies of England, France, and Münster collectively numbering one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers were wading the shallow waters of the drought-stricken Rhine River, and marching across the Dutch Peninsula, capturing towns, forts, and the city of Utrecht. However, the Dutch landscape west and north of the city, where The Hague, Leiden, and Amsterdam reside, lay below the tide levels of the North Sea and the Zuider Zee inlet. In response to the capture of Utrecht, the Dutch retreated north of the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers into the Helinium Delta. There they opened the sea gates of the Hollandaic Waterline, flooding the low lying terrain to stall the advances of English and French armies.42 By July 1672, the drought had lifted and the sea-water inundation, compounded by heavy rainfall, deluged Utrecht turning the city into a swamp, and causing French forces to depart for Paris. Ironically, the greatest resistance to the Hollandaic Waterline in 1672 came not from the English or French armies but from the Dutch peasantry, whose farmlands and soil were ruined by salt water. William Prince of Orange was required to decree death on any Dutch citizen interfering with the dikes or the inundation. Despite its military effectiveness, the deployment of the waterline led to widespread political unrest and rioting, fatally unseating Johan de Witt, the Dutch Estates’ chief statesman after the eastern part of the submerged Republic was ceded to their foes.43 The Dutch Golden Age poet Joost van den Vondel referred to Haarlem Lake, one of the waterline’s reservoirs, as the “Water Wolf.”44

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Although a successful “natural” weapon for “chasing foreign enemies,” Vondel advocated draining the lake permanently: Enclose with a dike this animal that plagues you That the prince of the winds flies there on his [wind]mill’s wings The fast prince of winds knows how to chase the Water Wolf To the sea, whence he came, ever voracious.45

To the poet, the Hollandaic Waterline was a symbol of an unjust environmental defence system that destroyed valuable agricultural land in the central part of the country to protect the coastal enclaves of the rich Dutch burghers and their trading houses. In any event, Dutch military engineers were quick to exploit opportunities afforded by man-made or natural disasters: “In 1757, when melting ice water from the Rhine and Meuse basins destroyed dikes and flooded large areas of land,” the “engineers came to the aid of local governments” charting the “regional hydrography to provide the military with a new mechanism of control.”46 The use of the sea and its tidal forces in the Netherlands illustrated the transformation taking place over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from the medieval military siege and entrenchment tactics of master carpenters, masons, and artillerymen to the professionalization of civic and hydraulic combat engineering in European armies.47

4.4

North Atlantic Fishery Wars

O wonder! How many creatures are there here! The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1.48

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Northwest Atlantic cod fisheries, anchored by Newfoundland, extended from the Gulf of St. Lawrence south to Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts. Sponsored by King Henry VII of England, John Cabot’s discovery of the Grand Banks fishery in 1497 inaugurated the Fish Revolution, a biogeographic and cultural phenomenon spanning Newfoundland, New England, Scandinavia, and Western Europe. The sea-changing event impacted the nature of

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transatlantic war, economics, and politics, from the decline of the fifteenth-century city-state Hanseatic League to the signing of the Declaration of American Independence in the seventeenth century.49 Northwest Atlantic cod fisheries served as naval training centres for Britain, France, and the rebellious Continental Congress and were transformed into theatres of battle during Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), the Seven Year’s War (1657–1763), and the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Apocryphal histories claim that sailors from Bristol, England, harvested cod off the coast of Newfoundland prior to its official discovery by John Cabot, but kept the location a secret to hold on to their monopoly over a fishery of Biblical proportions. Over the next two centuries, Newfoundland and the Grand Banks become a profitable Oceanic Plantation for England. In 1719, the Jesuit priest Pierre Xavier de Charlevoix, the first historian of New France, claimed that the Grand Banks was “properly a mountain, hid under water” and noted that its cod population “seems to equal that of the grains of sand which cover this bank.”50 The shallow bathymetry, gravelly sea-floor, and confluence of the warm Gulf Stream and cold Labrador currents off Newfoundland’s shore created the ideal conditions for a fecund cod nursery. Fed by prodigious phytoplankton food webs, the Grand Banks became a strategic natural resource site that contributed to capitalizing the growth of the British Empire. From the sixteenth century onwards, the consumption of cod and herring almost doubled, rising from 2.9 to 5.7 kg per capita by 1790, with total seafood consumption in Western Europe averaging 10 kg. The supply of cheap, dried maritime protein was critical to food security in proto-industrial early modern societies. Dried or salted fish kept well and were less expensive than beef during the spring months when grain and meat stocks ran low. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cod, and herring, which were expensive and limited resources in the late Middle Ages, turned into a relatively cheap and available commodity. As the mass consumption of sea sourced protein increased in Europe, ensuing demographic shifts occurred, creating

long-term social, political economic and environmental impacts.51 After Cabot’s return to Bristol in August 1497, a clandestine letter was dispatched to Italy by observant eyes. Received by the Duke of Milan from Lorenzo Pasqualigo, his ambassador to England, the correspondence confirmed rumours about the discovery of a “newfoundland,” its waters, “swarming with fish, which can be taken not only with the net, but in baskets let down with a stone.”52 And in William Shakespeare’s drama The Tempest (1611) it is Prospero, the fictionalized Duke of Milan, who features prominently in Shakespeare’s “New World” island-bound drama.

4.4.1 The Tempest: William Shakespeare’s Literary Geography First performed for King James Stuart, on Hallowmas nyght, November 1, 1611, in the candlelit space of the Blackfriars Theatre in London, The Tempest tells the story of the Duke of Milan, and his daughter Miranda, exiled in coup by his brother Antonio, to a mysterious isle. Many of Shakespeare’s dramas possess conflicts of a maritime nature with “the sea (including its fish and storms), ships, voyaging, and sailing” playing literal and figurative roles.53 In The Tempest, Prospero is attended to by two servants: Ariel, a spritely spirit, and the indigenous Caliban, who is rendered as “legged like a man, and his fins like arms!”54 Prospero orchestrates a storm with his alchemical powers, weaponizing it to wreck the ship his brother Antonio, along with Alonso the King of Naples, and son Ferdinand are returning on, from the wedding of the king’s daughter, Claribel, in Tunis. Scene 1 of The Tempest opens to the “tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard”55 on a ship’s deck surrounded by “the cheeky wind blowers of sixteenth and seventeenth century world maps.”56 The vessel’s Boatswain exhorts the storm to “Blow till thou burst thy wind,” but neither he nor the ship’s Master can keep the caravel from being lost on

4.4 North Atlantic Fishery Wars

the shore of Prospero’s cryptic isle. Miranda witnesses the shipwreck: A brave vessel, Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her, Dashed all to pieces. O, the cry did knock Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished. The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 1.57

However, survivors do begin to emerge from the sea and straggle their way to Prospero’s castle. Ferdinand the first to appear, is imprisoned by the exiled Duke, but later freed by Miranda (a retelling of the story of Dido and Aeneas in Virgil’s Æneid).58 Caliban is found amidst the flotsam and jetsam by the King’s jester Trinculo, and butler Stephano who are saved from the wreck by clinging to a “butt of sack which the sailor’s heaved o’erboard.”59 The drunken trio hatch a plan to slay Prospero (recalling the 1605 Gunpowder Plot against England’s King James). With the aid of Ariel, Prospero thwarts the conspiracy and conjures up a series of magical encounters between the play’s various characters, that leads to the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand and the restoration of his dukedom in Milan. The Tempest speaks to the rise of English oceanic nationalism, the development of a formidable British Navy, the first modern bathymetric surveys of the Grand Bank fishery and the emergence of an international cod market that situated Tudor London as a hub of global, oceanic commerce. Shakespeare’s drama expresses the accumulation of maritime knowledge from Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian navigators, incorporated by Henry VIII’s establishment of Trinity House in 1514 to promote English nautical cartography: “like a palimpsest holding the cultural memory of five centuries” The Tempest preserves “the many traditions of the sea.”60 Symbolizing the “brave new world” of emerging English sea power, Shakespeare drew upon ancient imperial topo-poetic precedents: “the sea in The Tempest is highly ambiguous from the geographic point of view: partly Mediterranean, partly Atlantic Ocean, partly Irish Sea, it is a highly wrought intertextual phenomenon evoking Virgil’s Æneid and the Homeric poems, [and] Ovid’s Metamorphoses.”61

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Shakespeare’s drama traces a Virgilian path from Troy, Athens, and Rome to London and across to the “New World” of the North American continent, articulating a rhetorical form of cartography with which to imagine the wider realms of an emerging British oceanic empire. The literary geographies of the Shakespearean canon represent the widening webs of early modern English nautical, commercial, and colonial entanglements: “Moors (Titus Andronicus, Othello), a Jew (The Merchant of Venice), Egyptians (Antony and Cleopatra) […] an American (The Tempest)” and emplacement of “landlocked Verona, Milan, Padua, Bergamo,” to Old and New World coastal regions indicates a wider “maritime sensibility at work.”62

4.4.2 The Oceanic Plantation Many studies of The Tempest cite the influence of English naval activity in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Bermuda, and Virginia Colony as Shakespeare’s inspiration for the drama’s mysterious isle.63 In particular, William Strachey’s account of the 1609 wreck of Sea Venture between Bermuda and Virginia was thought to have a direct influence on The Tempest. However, scholars now look to English entanglements in the Ottoman Empire, Ireland, and most recently the northwest Atlantic oceanic plantation of Newfoundland’s Grand Banks fishery industry. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert declared English possession of Newfoundland at St John’s Harbour, before a fleet of over thirty fishing ships from Spain, Portugal, France, and England. The “deep nook,” one of the natural features in Shakespeare’s representation of the island in The Tempest, can certainly be attributed to Newfoundland’s southwestern fjords: Safely in harbour Is the King’s ship; in the deep nook, where once Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew From the still-vexed Bermoothes, there she’s hid; The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2.64

Because of the high number of ships sunk on its shoals, Sable Island, the “Graveyard of the

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Atlantic,” southwest of the Grand Banks, also serves as a potential inspiration for Shakespeare’s island.65 Due to its shifting shorelines, Sable’s waters are treacherous to navigate in fair or foul weather, and it is where Sr. Gilbert met his fate after his flagship the Delight foundered off the isle’s shore with the loss of 93 souls.66 In 1610, a year before the premiere of The Tempest, the London and Bristol Company underwrote the first English fishery settlement at Cupids Cove, Newfoundland. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the island’s fisheries were viewed as extensions of the three kingdoms of England, rather than as a distinct region of the New World. Between 1604 and 1620, more than 33% of the MPs in the English Parliament invested in the Grand Banks Cod and Sack trade.67 English merchants dominated the lucrative salt-dry codfish and wine trade with the Lenten Catholic countries of France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. In The Tempest claims on the island’s fishery as a new source of English wealth may be seen reflected in the lines:

but not before desperate colonists had resorted to cannibalism.71 In contrast to losses incurred by English investors at Roanoke and Virginian, the colony at Newfoundland housed a fluid, well-fed, mobile labour force that created New World profits from Old World trade in Poor John [cod], whilst maintaining a “nursery of seamen” for the Royal Navy to counter Dutch, French, and Spanish incursions.72 Caliban’s indigenous claim on the island can be read as an allusion to English colonial encounters with Newfoundland’s indigenous Beothuk people:

Had I plantation of this isle, my lord- … I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things, for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; … I would with such perfection govern, sir, T’ excel the Golden Age. The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1.68

The economic impact of the London and Bristol Company’s Newfoundland colony vastly eclipsed Sir Walter Raleigh’s failed settlement attempt at Roanoke (1585–1590) and the Jamestown Company’s in Virginia, due in part to climatic variations of the Little Ice Age. George Percy, Jamestown’s first governor, described how settlers in 1609 regressed to the baser conditions of human existence after a drought created a “a worlde of miseries.”69 Feeling the “sharpe pricke of hunger” colonists fed on “horses and other beastes,” then turned to “doggs, catts, ratts and myce,” and “bootes, shoes or any other leather,” finally seeking food from the indigenous Powhatan people.70 Jamestown was abandoned in 1610 for several years,

This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first … And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile. … Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’ th’ island. The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2.73

However, as Prospero informs Miranda, Caliban “serves in offices / That profit us,” a claim that applies to the fishery labour and settler pool drawn from districts on the Thames, and the west of England, and Ireland, who generated the wealth for the Newfoundland Company, its subscribers in London, and also, supplied sailors for the Royal Navy (Fig. 4.5).74

4.4.3 London and Imperial Cod … but Nature should bring forth, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1.76

The Tempest inhabits a larger web spun from various historical, geographical, cultural, and commercial strands anchored at the intersection of Newfoundland’s Cod and Sack Trade triangle, with the Atlantic Sugar, Tobacco, and Slavery triangle. Indeed, the diets of enslaved Caribbean plantation workers depended upon the island’s Grand Banks cod, as it was nearly impossible for any other type of animal protein, shipped to the West Indies to “endure […] untainted, but the fish of that country salted and

4.4 North Atlantic Fishery Wars

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Fig. 4.5 Newfoundland and Grand Banks Fisheries indicated by English, Dutch, and French nautical charts drafted between 1613 and 1693. Map by Charles Travis75

dried there.”77 The hub of this trade was centred in London, on the River Thames close to where The Globe and Blackfriars theatres were situated: “it would have been impossible to cross London Bridge or work in Southwark without seeing galleys, galleons, barges, wherries, pinks, hoys, cogs and all manner of fishing and trading craft on the river.”78 Located on the north side of the Thames, the Blackfriars sat in an atmosphere pungent with the language of fishmongers and sailors drinking at the Mermaid Tavern. On its southern bank. The Globe, established in 1599, was located outside the walls of London in the bull-bear baiting, gambling and brothel district of Southwark, called “the Bermudas” by the playwright Ben Johnson. In The Tempest, Prospero’s isle is sheltered from the “still-vexed Bermoothes”79 (Fig. 4.6). The original foundations of Shakespeare’s theatres also occupy the same sedimentary layers of London’s early modern landscape, which host a scattering of fishbone deposit sites. Archaeological excavations of historical fish markets, taverns, and rubbish dumps identify many locations dated between 1200 and 1900, where cod was consumed and its bones discarded.81 The digs infer that in 1500, there was an explosive leap in cod consumption (based upon frequency densities of fish vertebrae sites in London) before

demand dipped and stabilized in the 1600s.82 In Act II of The Tempest, Caliban is described seemingly as half-human and half-cod: What have we here, a man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish, he smells like a fish -a very ancient and fishlike smell, a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-John. A strange fish. Were I in England now, … but would give a piece of silver. The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 2.83

The mention of silver alludes to the lucrative cod-trade taking place in the environs of The Globe and Blackfriar theatres. The French historian de Charlevoix recorded that Newfoundland fisheries were the “true mines, which are the more valuable, and require much less expence [sic] than those of Peru and Mexico.”84

4.4.4 Environmental Theatres of Drama, Cartography, and War The script and performance of The Tempest can be seen as “a prologue to the whole thrust of technological modernity,” that emerged with the “the modern world-system” to become one and the same.85 The Globe Theatre, crafted by timbers harvested from English woodlands, offered a

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4 Seachange: Early Modern Oceanic Wars, 1588–1762

Fig. 4.6 Shakespearean London and Cod Bones. Map and Graph by Charles Travis80

public space where Shakespeare proclaimed to his audience: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely Players.” Echoing Emery Molyneux’s 1592 globe of the earth, the Southwark theatre manifests as a metaphor for the geographical imaginations shaping the early modern English perceptions of the world. The motif of “theatre-as-ship” also circulated in London’s dramatic circles during the period, and the “discovery of a vast global ocean was the condition of possibility for reconceptualizing the globe as an aquatic ball instead of an enclosed garden,”86 with “poets, cartographers, and surgeons” employing the spatial metaphor of a “theatrum orbis terrarium.”87 In 1590, the Thames School of Cartography was established on London’s north bank, concentrated in a warren of alleys and streets on the Thames waterfront. The school’s drafting houses sat cheek by jowl alongside the city’s theatres, taverns, and cod markets, operating in its milieu of ships, mariners, and merchants. As members of the Drapers’ Company of London, the school produced portolan style maps, called platts, often traced from the grids of the Netherlands’ nautical cartography. Although accurate by the period’s

standards, the platts emphasized the commercial and naval interests of England, and contributed to the propaganda war the Crown launched to secure its strategic Newfoundland fishery.88 Between 1504 and 1888, over two hundred and three nautical charts of the Grand Banks were drafted and published in Europe for commercial and military purposes. In the early modern period, charts of the fishery were drafted by Portuguese, Spanish, and Venetian cartographers. With the emergence of the North Atlantic political economy, the mapping of the Grand Banks became the provenance of French, Dutch, English, colonial, and early American cartographers. A correlation can be found between increasing English and French cod catch landings and the swelling size of Newfoundland fishery symbolism in eighty-eight charts published between 1504 and 1831.89 An example of the Thames School’s cartographic efforts is exemplified by the 1693 A chart of the coasts of Newfoundland, with the fishing districts marked, by Augustine Fitzhugh. The platt, adorned with two elaborate compass-roses, politicizes the Grand Banks fishery with blue and red flag symbols to differentiate the small, inshore English fishing boats from the large, French

4.4 North Atlantic Fishery Wars

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Fig. 4.7 Visualization of Augustine Fitzhugh’s 1693 A chart of the coasts of Newfoundland (upper left) with Grand Banks bathymetry and British-French cod landing amounts, 1700–1900, geo-statistically graphed in red

and yellow. Blue dots: English offshore boats. Red dots: French fishery ships. Lower right: 1762 French attack on Newfoundland near St. John’s. Map by Charles Travis91

offshore vessels to shape British public perception that France was encroaching upon the Crown’s fishing waters (Fig. 4.7).90 Fitzhugh’s cartography situates Newfoundland and the Grand Banks as a contested ecotonic and political-economic theatre, pitting the British against the French in a conflict that would not be resolved until the end of the French and Indian War (1756– 1763). The dispute depicted by the 1693 chart resonated in the 1762 anonymous staging of a revised The Tempest of Enchanted Island as the war was reaching its conclusion.92 At the end of the play, Prospero, restored as the rightful Duke of Milan, proclaims, with a prophetic resonance:

The Tempest’s restaging in September, the British counterattacked, bringing its “roaring war” and “dread-rattling thunder” to life by recapturing Newfoundland from the French and securing the Grand Banks, which as illustrated by Fitzhugh’s chart, was an essential ecological cog and economic jewel in the colonial machinery of its growing global empire.

… I have bedimmed The noontide sun called forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war; to the dread- rattling thunder Have I given fire. The Tempest, Act V, Scene I.93

In June 1762, the French captured St. John’s, Newfoundland, burning English vessels and fishery infrastructure. However, coinciding with

Notes 1. Shakespeare, William. 1611. The Tempest. (Eds.) Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library https://www. folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/thetempest/read/. 2. Dwyer, G. 1985. War. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. Ref. 66. 3. McNeill, J. R. 2004. Woods and warfare in world history. Environmental History 9 (3): 388–410: Ref. 397.

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4. Lovelock, J. 2019. Novacene: The coming age of hyperintelligence. UK: Penguin, Random House. Ref. 33. 5. Martin, R. 2015. Shakespeare and Ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 6. Shakespeare, The Tempest. https://www. folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/thetempest/read/. 7. Koch, A., Brierley, C., Maslin, M. M., Lewis, S. L. 2019. Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. Quaternary Science Reviews. 207: 13–36. doi: https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.004. 8. Shakespeare, W. 1633. Richard III, Act I, Scene IV, 9. 9. Blom, P. 2017. Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present. London & New York: Liveright. Kindle Edition. Ref. 37. 10. Green, W. S. 1906. The Wrecks of the Spanish Armada on the Coast of Ireland. Geographical Journal, 27(5): 429–448: Ref. 429. 11. Shakespeare, W. 2022. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Eds.) Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, Rebecca Niles. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library https:// shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/amidsummer-nights-dream/. 12. Miles, J. 2021. Spanish Armada Wrecks on the Irish Coast, History Ireland. 29(5): 1–10. 13. Green, The Wrecks of the Spanish Armada on the Coast of Ireland, 434. 14. Laughton, J. K. 1894. State Papers Relating to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, anno 1558. London: Navy Records Society. Ref. 137. 15. Mattingley, G. 1988. The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. London: Penguin; Green, The Wrecks of the Spanish Armada on the Coast of Ireland. Ref. 434. 16. Green, The Wrecks of the Spanish Armada on the Coast of Ireland; Fallon, N. 1978. The Armada in Ireland. London: Stanford Maritime; Miles, Spanish Armada Wrecks on the Irish Coast; Beck, H. 1971. The Prince of

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17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

Spain, 1588. Journal of the Folklore Institute, 8(1), June: pp. 48–56. Fereter’s Island was named after Pierce Fereter, a Irish poet and patriot who built a stronghold on the Blaskets, and was hanged in the seventeenth century. Beck, The Prince of Spain, 53. Marcus, G. J. 1961. A Naval History of England, The Formative Centuries, Vol. I. London: Longmans, Green & Co.: Ref. 108–109. Ibid. Beck, The Prince of Spain, 1588, 4. Ibid., 53. Lamb, H. H. 1988. The Weather of 1588 and the Spanish Armada, Weather, 43(11) November: 386–395. Ref. 392, Fig. 8. Lamb, The Weather of 1588 and the Spanish Armada. Fuller, J. F. 1976. Weather and War. Aerospace Historian, 23(1) Spring/March: 24–27. Ref. 24. Beck, The Prince of Spain, 53; Woodroofe, T. 1958. The Enterprise of England. London: Faber and Faber. Ref. 286; Haverty, M. 1885. The History of Ireland. New York: T. Kelly: 402–408. Ibid. Jenkins, R. 1952. Spenser and Ireland. ELH, 19(2): 131–142. Ref. 132. Ibid., 134. Ibid. Ibid., 131. Inset images sourced from Wikimedia Commons are for illustrative purposes, and not actual images of the Senora de la Rosa and San Juan Ragusa, but are respective depictions of Armada Wrecks by Rev. Samuel Manning (1870) a “A ship of the Spanish Armada, wrecked in the storm” in Spanish Pictures and Robert Crawford (1897) Captain Cuellar’s Narrative of the Spanish Armada, London: Elliot Stock, 62 Paternoster Row. Ardolino, F. 2004. Spenser’s Allusion to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada in Virgil’s Gnat (550–92). Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, 19(1): 239–244. Ref. 239.

4.4 North Atlantic Fishery Wars

34. Herron, T. 2002. The Spanish Armada, Ireland, and Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene.” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua, 6(2): 82–105. Ref. 83. 35. Spencer, E. 1596. THE FAERIE QVEENE, Difpofed into twelve books, Fashioning XII. Morall vertues. London. Printed for VVilliam Ponfonbie. https://faeriequeene.org/fqbk5.html#5.8. 36. Fallon, N., quoted in Ashely, L. R. N. 1978. The Armada in Ireland by Niall Fallon, in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 40 (3): 713–716. Ref. 716. 37. Spencer THE FAERIE QVEENE, Dixon, F. E. 1959. Weather in Old Dublin: Part II. Dublin Historical Record, 15(3): 65–73. Ref. 67. 38. Fallon, N., quoted in Ashely, The Armada in Ireland by Niall Fallon, 716. 39. Govaerts, S. 2021. Armies and Ecosystems in Premodern Europe: The Meuse Region, 1250–1850. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press. 40. Kreike, E. 2021. Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare As a Crime Against Humanity and Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ref. 25. 41. Govaerts, Armies and Ecosystems in Premodern Europe. 42. Lindgrén, S. and Neumann, J. 1983. Great historical events that were significantly affected by the weather: 6, Inundations and the mild winter 1672–73 help protect Amsterdam from French conquest. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 64(7): 770–778. 43. Sundberg, 2022. A. Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 44. Kreike, Scorched Earth. 45. Ibid., 24. 46. Govaerts, Armies and Ecosystems in Premodern Europe. 83. 47. Ibid. 48. Shakespeare, The Tempest, https://www. folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/thetempest/read/. 49. Holm, P., Ludlow, F., Scherer, C., Travis, C., Allaire, B., Brito, C., Hayes, P., Matthews,

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50.

51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

62. 63.

A., Rankin, K., Breen, R., Legg, R., Lougheed, K., & Nicholls, J. (2019). The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500). Quaternary Research. 108: 92–106. Roberts, C. 2007. The unnatural history of the sea. Washington, DC: Island Press. Ref. xxvii. Travis, C., Holm, P., Ludlow, F., Kostick, C., McGovern, R. and Nicholls, J. 2023. Cowboys, Cod, Climate, and Conflict: Navigations in the Digital Environmental Humanities. In (Ed) C. Travis, et al., Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities. London: Routledg: 17–39. Lawrence, A. W., & Young, J. 1931. Narratives of the Discovery of America. New York: J. Cape, and H. Smith. Ref. 274. Cohen, W. 2000. The Undiscovered Country: Shakespeare and Mercantile Geography. In (Eds.) J. Howard, & S. Shershow. Marxist Shakespeares. London: Routledge: 128–158. Ref. 158. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2. Ibid., Act 1, Scene 1. Brayton, D. 2012. Shakespeare’s ocean: An ecocritical exploration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Ref. 180. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 1. Hamilton, D. B. 1990. Virgil and The tempest: the politics of imitation. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Shakespeare, The Tempest: Act 2, Scene 2. Sobecki, S. I. 2008. The Sea and Medieval Literature. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Ref. 165. Scuriatti, L. 2012 “Sea changes: the Sea, Art and Storytelling in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Isak Dinesen’s Tempests and Marina Warner’s Indigo” in: (Eds.) C. Ferrini, R. Gefter Wondrich, P. Quazzolo, A. Zoppellari, 2012. Civiltà del mare e navigazioni interculturali: sponde d’Europa e l’ “isola” Trieste. Trieste: EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste. Ref. 92. Cohen, The Undiscovered Country. Brotton, J. 2004. “This Tunis, sir, was Carthage”: Contesting colonialism in the tempest. In (Eds.) A. Loomba, & M. Orkin.

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66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

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Post-Colonial Shakespeares. London, UK: Routledge: 35–54. Fuchs, B. 1997. Conquering Islands. Contextualizing The Tempest. Shakespeare Quarterly, 48: 45–62; Kermode, F. (Ed.). 1980. The Arden edition of the works of William Shakespeare: The Tempest. New York: Methuan & Co.; Mentz, S. 2009. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. New York, NY: Continuum. Mulready, C. 2013. Romance on the early modern stage: English expansion before and after Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; Nosworthy, J. M. 1948. The narrative sources of the tempest. The Review of English Studies, 24: 281–294; Wylie, J. 2000. New and old worlds: The Tempest and early colonial discourse. Social & Cultural Geography, 1: 45–63. The Tempest, Act I, Scene II, p. 269. Cameron, H. L. (1965). The shifting sands of Sable Island. Geographical Review, 55: 463– 476. Ref. 463. Ibid. Cohen, The Undiscovered Country. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1. Percy, George. 2020. “This starveing Tyme”; an excerpt from A Trewe Relacyon of the procedeings and ocurrentes of Momente which have hapned in Virginia by George Percy Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities (07 Dec. 2020) https://encyclopediavirginia. org/entries/this-starveing-tyme-an-excerptfrom-a-trewe-relacyon-of-the-procedeingsand-ocurrentes-of-momente-which-have-hapnedin-virginia-by-george-percy/. Percy, A Trewe Relacyon; Kelso, W. M. 2017. Jamestown, the truth revealed. Charlottesville: UVA Press. Ibid. Test, E. M. 2008. The Tempest and the Newfoundland Cod Fishery. In (Eds.) B. Sebek, S. Deng. Global traffic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 201–220. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2. Ibid., Act 1, Scene 2. Fishery symbolism sourced from: Samuel de Champlain (1612–1613) Carte geographique de la Nouvelle Franse; William Alexander

76. 77.

78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87.

(1625) Map of New England and Nova Scotia; Nicolas Sanson (1656) Le Canada; Johannes van Keulen (1685) Pascaarte vande Noorder Zee custen van America, and Augustine Fitzhughe (1693) A chart of the coast of Newfoundland with the fishing districts marked. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1. Innis, H. 1971. Cod fisheries: The history of an international economy. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Ref. 52. Brayton, Shakespeare’s ocean, 92. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2; Skura, M. A. 1989. Discourse and the individual: The case of colonialism in “The Tempest”. Shakespeare Quarterly, 40:42– 69. Refs. 53; 59. Data Sources: Orton, D. C., Morris, J., Locker, A. and Barrett, J. H. 2014. Fish for the city: meta-analysis of archaeological cod remains and the growth of London’s northern trade. Antiquity, 88(340): 516–530. Insets: Detail of The Globe Theatre, Southwark, London, England c. 1612. After the engraving from Wilkinson’s Theatrum Illustrata (1825). The Cobbe Portrait of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) (Wikimedia Commons). Orton et al. Fish for the city. Ibid. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 2. Quoted in, Travis, C., Ludlow, F., Matthews, A., Lougheed, K., Rankin, K., Allaire, B., Legg, R., Hayes, P., Nichols, J., Towns, L. Breen, R. Holm, P. 2020. Inventing the Grand Banks: A deep chart, Humanities GIS, Cartesian and literary perceptions of the north-west Atlantic fishery, ca 1500–1800. Geo: Geography and Environment. 7(1): Ref. 3. https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.85. Bate, J. 1991. Romantic ecology: Wordsworth and the environmental tradition. NY: Routledge. Ref. 77. Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean, 53. Chamberlain, P. G. 2001. The Shakespearian globe: geometry, optics, spectacle. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19(3): 317–333. Ref. 331.

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Visualization NOAA/Canadian Bathymetric 88. Maeer, A. S. 2006. The Cartography of Data. Inset chart: Augustine Fitzhugh (1693), Commerce: The Thames School of Nautical A chart of the coasts of Newfoundland, with cartography and England’s Seventeenth the fishing districts marked (1693, London) Century Overseas Expansion. Unpublished Inset image: 1762 Perspective view of PhD dissertation Arlington: University of the French attack on Newfoundland near Texas at Arlington; Smith, H. D. 1968. St. John’s (Wikimedia Commons) Public The geography of the sea. Geography, 71: Domain. 320–324. 92. Taylor, D. F. 2012. The Disenchanted Island: 89. Travis, et al., Inventing the Grand Banks. A Political History of “The Tempest,” 1760– 90. Maeer, The Cartography of Commerce, 192. 1830. Shakespeare Quarterly, 63: 487–517. 91. Sources: English 1675–1698 catch per Newfoundland port (HMAP Data), 3D 93. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1.

5

Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777

Winter is Worth an Age, if Rightly Employed. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776

5.1

Weather and Revolution

The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) was fought in the rain and wind of New England “nor easters,” the torrid humidity of New York and Long Island summers, the freezing hail and snow of New Jersey and Virginia winters, and in coastal hurricanes that ranged from the Gulf of Mexico to Chesapeake Bay. The revolution, end of the Little Ice Age and rise in the transatlantic publication and circulation of Enlightenment Age political discourse, all overlapped. Printed materials influenced principals involved in the rebellion, whose epistolary correspondence described and facilitated the gestation of an independent American nation from the thirteen colonial pupae hatched by the Britain Empire. During the conflict, environment and literature intersected as weapons of a quarrel that began as a transatlantic civil war to ensure that English colonials were treated with the rights of British citizens, but quickly flamed into a revolutionary struggle for republican liberty and national, democratic self-determination. Environment, climate, and weather served as metaphors in the propaganda conveyed by the poetry and pamphlets printed by both redcoats and rebels. The gazette, almanac, diary, ship log, and political and private letters, aided by thermometer and barometer measurements, signified the Enlightenment

Age’s ecological awakening and perceptions of human interaction with nature and climate which blended confessional, folkloric, and empirical perspectives on the relations between environment and war during the period.

5.2

The Early Winters of Rebellion and Resilience

In February 1775, the House of Commons agreed with King George III that his colony of Massachusetts was in revolt due to its citizens’ reaction to the British Parliament’s 1774 Coercive Acts passed in punitive reply to the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Following this in August 1775, the American Continental Congress petitioned the crown for independence, prompting George III to angrily declare in October 1775, that all his thirteen colonies were in open and brazen rebellion. Jonathan Odell, a loyalist poet in the colonies, cast blame on the environs of New England for causing the “Wizards” Samuel Adams and John Hancock to foment colonial dissent: “Sprung from the soil next hit, where witches swarm’d of yore, / They come well skill’d in necromantic lore.”1 The transatlantic conflict would draw in the French army and navy, Hessian mercenaries, convicts, indentured servants, enslaved and free

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Travis, Environment as a Weapon, Historical Geography and Geosciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_5

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Africans, colonials, and indigenous North Americans to fight a war that established the modern age’s first democracy. In the eighteenth century, classically trained generals rarely led armies into battle during the winter season. Snow, sleet, and freezing rain hampered fighting conditions, turning dirt roads into muddy tracks, bogging down marching columns, and hindering the transport of artillery pieces and supply wagons. Sub-zero temperatures exposed soldiers to hypothermia and made troops vulnerable to illnesses. Generally, early modern armies lay in winter quarters, trying to keep warm, preserve their strength and numbers, and wait out the snow, sleet, and cold for a warming spring thaw to resume combat. However, four major campaigns in the revolution, The Siege of Boston, 1775–1776, The Transport of British Guns from Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 and The Crossing of the Delaware to Trenton and the Capture of Princeton, 1776–1777, marked Washington’s deployment of winter as a weapon against a superior foe.

5.3

The Siege of Boston, Winter 1775–1776

Although present-day Boston occupies land mostly reclaimed from the sea, in 1775, the port city was perched on a peninsula rooted to the southern coast of a bay by a slender strip of land named Boston Neck. During flood tide, the causeway, surrounded by salt marshes, was at times submerged, reducing the colonial seaport to an island. A spring and summer of revolutionary fire preceded Washington’s icy 1775– 1776 winter siege of the city. On April 19, 1775, the “shot heard around the world” was fired at Concord and Lexington when General William Gage, and the Massachusetts Royal Governor sent British troops to confiscate weapons and gunpowder from a colonial militia. After retreating to Boston, on June 17, the Redcoats mounted a costly defence of Bunker Hill, a strategic height overlooking the city on the northern Charleston headland. Abagail Adams, writing on June 25, to her husband John, and member of the Continental Congress who

would be named head of the revolution’s Board of War and Ordnance in January 1776, rejoiced at the pyrrhic British victory, despite the burning of Charleston. In her letter, Abagail commented on the weather factor that saved rebel lives: ...we have abundant cause of thankfulness that so few of our Breathren are numbered with the slain, whilst our enimies were cut down like the Grass before the Sythe... the fire from fort hill and from the Ship, the Town in flames all round them and the heat from the flames so intence as scarcely to be borne; the day one of the hottest we have had this season and the wind blowing the smoke in their faces—only figure to yourself all these circumstances, and then consider that we do not count 60 Men lost. My heart overflows at the recollection.2

Two other heights, one at Roxbury on the southwestern coast of the harbour and the second at Dorchester, east of Boston Neck, offered strategic military opportunities. However, it has been argued that the cost in blood paid at Bunker Hill restrained the British from completing similar attacks and capturing Washington’s army in New York and New Jersey in 1776 to quell the rebellion. Therefore, General William Howe, relieving the disgraced Gates, bunkered down with his colonial mistress (wife of a prominent Loyalist) and 6500 troops on the heavily fortified Boston Peninsula and waited for orders from London (Fig. 5.1).

5.3.1 A Weapon They Are Using Against Us In response to Howe’s siege, the Second Continental Congress (1775–1776) nominated George Washington, a British Army, French and Indian War veteran and Virginia planter to bring an end to an affair that the American colonials initially perceived as an English Civil War. Washington arrived on July 2, in Boston and set up headquarters on the King’s Highway near Harvard College in Cambridge in a three-story Georgian House which possessed an unobstructed view of the Charles River. However, a lack of funds, gunpowder (due to the lack of imported saltpetre) and artillery hindered his efforts to organize an

5.3 The Siege of Boston, Winter 1775–1776

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Fig. 5.1 Left: British Army Map. A plan of Boston, and its environs: shewing the true situation of His Majesty’s army, and also those of the rebels (1775) Right: Sketch

of British and American Lines and Fortifications in the Boston Area by John Trumbull. Sources Wikimedia Commons and National Archives, Unrestricted Use

undisciplined and poorly armed volunteer force of 16,000 tradesmen and farmers into an army, no matter how keen they were to serve the “Cause.” Washington was also stymied by the Continental Army’s lack of cartographic documents and the strategic intelligence and reconnaissance they provided. The British Army retained maps and skilled topographical engineers, trained in surveying and drafting. A Plan of Boston and its Environs: shewing the true situation of His Majesty’s army, and also those of the rebels, drafted in 1775, illustrates the pedantic detail with which Howe’s engineers plotted the city’s streets, the shoals of its bay, and the landscape elevations of its surrounding towns and peninsulas. However, as a former British officer, Washington was not without cartographic insight, resources, or experience. In 1749, at the age of seventeen, he had been appointed official Surveyor of Culpeper County in the British colony of Virginia. At the Siege of Boston, Washington would turn to John Trumbull, a Brigade Major with the Continental Army, who would go on to become renowned visual artist of the early American Republic, for a hand-drawn, annotated field sketch of the bay’s shorelines and heights, which served as a basic,

but effective map that played a crucial role in turning the Boston Siege in favour of the colonial rebels. While the British navy reigned supreme on the sea and could sail supplies and men in and out of Boston Bay, American privateers, recruited by Washington from colonial fishing fleets, whalers and trading vessels, harassed and captured sundries, weaponry and gunpowder from English trading ships. Towards the end of summer, the British ensconced on the island-likepeninsula began to suffer shortages of fuel and food. In late August 1775, the Liberty Tree, an enormous elm and symbol of American rebellion and an object of Tory opprobrium, was felled for firewood, killing a British soldier in the process.3 Philip Freneau, the “Poet of the American Revolution,” memorialized the incident as an ecological omen in The Midnight Consultations; Or, a Trip to Boston, (1775): The Tory Williams and the Butcher Gage... Each, axe in hand, attack’d the honour’d tree, Swearing eternal war with Liberty;... A Tory soldier on its topmost limb... with headlong force he fell, Nor stopp’d descending ‘till he stopp’d in Hell.4

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The New England autumn set in early with severe temperature dips, and large quantities of coal and wood were acutely needed by the British. Raiding parties were sent to procure cattle and forage staples from the Noodles and Hog islets in Boston Bay. In October, orders from London, delayed by trans-Atlantic passage, arrived for Howe to abandon Boston for New York City, but with winter setting in and a lack of ships, the British were forced to wait until the coming spring to sail. On November 25, a smallpox epidemic broke out in Boston, and three hundred ill citizens were ferried by flatboat to Cambridge. Colonial rebels dealing with dysentery and other camp ailments suspected Howe had sent the sick and infected with the “design of spreading the smallpox through this country and this camp.”5 Washington did not initially suspect the British general’s motives, but after another one hundred and fifty pox-ridden men, women, and children landed on the banks of the Charles River, the American general concluded that the disease was but another “weapon they are using against us.”6 In an age when world affairs were dictated by sea power, the supreme military force afloat on the earth was the Royal Navy. However, Boston Harbour became an aquatic cul-de-sac for the British, its fleet, sitting like a cork in the mouth of a bottle of rebellion. For if American forces gained the artillery to assemble batteries on the high grounds of Dorchester and Roxbury Heights, overlooking the city and its port, dispatching Howe, his men and ships with a coordinated cannonade would be as easy to the green American rebels as shooting cod in a barrel. With early snows arriving and adhering to the European military convention of not engaging in winter campaigns, Howe believed the “Sons of Liberty” lacked both the competence and the cannons to dislodge his troops, and felt his British corks could safely berth in the frozen jug of Boston Bay until the spring thaw. In doing so, Howe drastically underestimated the resolve of Washington and his self-tutored artillery officer, Colonel Henry Knox, the former proprietor of the city’s once trendy The London Book Store.

5 Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777

5.3.2 Surrounded by a Circle of Fire In November 1775, with winter drawing close, Knox informed Washington that, in May, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys had captured the British cannons and mortars at Fort Ticonderoga in the Champlain Valley of upstate New York. Christened Carillon by the French, the fort was captured by the British in 1759, and renamed Ticonderoga after the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) term tekontaró: ken for “at the junction of two waterways.”7 Strategically perched on Crown Point, jutting out between Lakes Champlain and George, the fort sat on the main artery between the English town of Albany in the Hudson Valley and the French port of Montreal on the St. Lawrence Seaway. In the French and Indian War novel, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, Vol. 1., James Fennimore Cooper depicted the military importance of the waterway: “The lengthened sheet of the Champlain stretched from the frontiers of Canada, deep within the borders of the neighbouring province of New York, forming a natural passage across half the distance that the French were compelled to master to strike their enemies.”8 The waterway and Carillon served as staging grounds for French General de Montcalm’s infamous 1757 siege of Fort William Henry on Lake George. As depicted in The Last of the Mohicans, after the British surrender, the garrison’s soldiers and dependents were attacked and slaughtered by Huron warriors: Living masses of the English,... of near three thousand, were moving slowly across the plain,... as they converged to the point of their march,... where the road to the Hudson entered the forest ... directly, there arose such a yell along the plain, and... More than two thousand... broke from the forest at the signal, and threw themselves across the fatal plain with instinctive alacrity... Death was everywhere, and in his most terrific and disgusting aspects.9

After the French and Indian war ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Ticonderoga became “more like a backwoods village than a fort.”10 Colonial veterans of the war such as Washington and Ethan Allen learned that the art of

5.3 The Siege of Boston, Winter 1775–1776

combat practiced in the wilderness by their Iroquois, Huron, and Delaware allies and foes differed considerably from the nature of eighteenthcentury European open plain battles. Writing about Colonel Henry Bouquet’s campaign against the War-Chief of the Ottawa and his Ojibwa and Potawatomi allies, during Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763–1766), William Smith noted that the indigenous “invisible enemies” were “cautious to avoid a close engagement”, but “as indefatigable in harassing his troops.”11 Smith concluded that “notwithstanding all his endeavours, [the colonial soldier] will still find himself surrounded by a circle of fire, which like an artificial horizon follows him everywhere” and was a bad mistake in his estimation, to view indigenous warriors as “undisciplined savages” for in combat they displayed “all the essentials of discipline.”12 Swiss born British brigadier general Henri Bouquet warned his peers that light troops in “America must be trained upon different principles” than the ones learned in Europe, as the New World’s war parties were “infinitely more active and dangerous than the Hussars and Pandours.”13 In the early hours of May 10, 1775, Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, employing indigenous stealth, silently paddled across the waters of Lake Champlain from present-day Vermont and captured Ticonderoga from the British without firing a shot. After receiving Washington’s blessing in Boston, Knox arrived on December 17 to the snow shrouded fort at Crown Point, and immediately dispatched a letter to his general in Cambridge: There will scarcely be any possibility of conveying [artillery] from here to Albany... but on sleds the roads being very much gullied,... trusting that between this and then we shall have a fine fall of snow which will enable Us to proceed further and make the carriage easy... to be able to present to your Excellency a noble train of artillery....14

After the guns were floated across Lake George, a ten-day freeze set in on December 20, after which a cavalcade of artillery laden oxdrawn sledges began to slide south down the belly of the Hudson Valley. Knox’s ingenious plan to deliver the guns from the northern coast of Lake George to the hinterlands of Boston took over

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forty days. Periodic thaws delayed the journey. When crossing the Hudson at Albany, teamsters cut holes in the river’s ice, allowing water to seep up, freeze, and thicken the surface in order to support the train’s eighty yoke of oxen, forty-two sledges, and fifty-eight cannon with a combined weight of 120,000 pounds. Crossing the Berkshire Mountains, teamsters rigged block and tackle lines to control the ascent and descent of peaks from which Knox claimed, “we might almost have seen all the kingdoms of the earth.”15 If the milder weather of 1774 had repeated itself, Knox’s mission would have been near impossible, as the crude, colonial roads would have been reduced to gullies of mud, miring any oxen, wagon or sledge burdened with Ticonderoga’s heavy guns.16 On their arrival in Massachusetts, Knox and his teamsters where met with celebrations and steaming flagons of hard cider.

5.3.3 The Ink Freezes in the Pen On December 20, an arctic cold front descended across the Boston region with temperatures in Salem northwest of the city dropping to 6 °F. The Rev. Samuel Cooper recorded in his journal: “the bay was frozen in two nights,” and that the “cold... Froze Urine as well as water in our Chambers.”17 At the end of December 1775, British relief ships arrived in the harbour carrying King George III’s October speech to Parliament. Rebel colonial militias received copies of the royal address and found themselves accused of a “desperate conspiracy” to form an “independent empire,” whilst also learning that their rising would be vanquished by the British with “foreign assistance.”18 Washington’s army reacted with indignation, with General Nathanael Greene prompted to proclaim that he was “ready at all times to bleed in my country’s cause, a Declaration of Independence.”19 On January 1, 1776, “a flag of thirteen stripes, one for each colony” was hoisted over Washington’s headquarters in response to the King’s speech.20 In the New Year, a figurative as well as literal cold winter season was setting in between the rebel and redcoat armies facing each other in New

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5 Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777

England. On January 27, Capt. William Bamford of the British 40th Foot Regiment described a “very severe frost last night,” so cold that “The Ink freezes in the Pen, as I write by the fireside” and recorded that there was “a good deal of snow on the ground.”21 British Admiral Samuel Graves, on patrol for American privateers between Cape Ann, New Jersey and Cape Cod, Massachusetts logged: ...the severity of the winters be such in this climate that the sentinel onshore is frequently found frozen to death upon his post although though relived every half-hour, the reader may frame some idea of what the seamen of a watch, especially in small vessels, must suffer.22

Despite an order by Howe to desist from scrapping city structures for fuel, British soldiers scavenged firewood from the houses and barns of leading rebel Whigs, and broke up wharfs for kindling. Sites that would later earn historical reputations such as Old North Church, where the steeple lanterns signaling Paul Revere were hung, and Puritan leader John Winthrop’s house were ransacked. A deacon’s pew from the Old South Church was redeployed as a pigsty, and one can only speculate if the printed stock in Henry Knox’s abandoned London Book Store was commandeered as fuel.23 Faneuil Hall, once a meeting hall for rebel patriots was repurposed into a theatre for amateur dramatics, thus restoring a pastime made illegal in Puritan Boston. On its stage, Washington was lampooned in British general John Burgoyne's comedy, The Blockade of Boston, “as an uncouth countryman; dressed shabbily with large wig and long rusty sword.”24 Playbills were sent across Boston Bay to rebel soldiers with the intent of goading them as incompetent buffoons: “YE tarbarrell’d Lawgivers, yankified Prigs, / May I see you all hang’d upon Liberty Tree.”25 On the eve of January 8, the night of the premier of Burgoyne’s play, thirteen colonial militia men responded to the taunts of the amateur English thespians by raiding Charleston. A British soldier playing the part of a Yankee sergeant in the play announced the attack from the stage by proclaiming “Turn out! They are hard at it, hammer and tongs.” 26

The Middlesex Journal reported: “the audience thinking this was the opening of the new piece, clapped prodigiously, but soon finding their mistake, a general scene of confusion ensued.”27

5.3.4 A Rabble in Arms At the end of January 1776, a thaw followed by a precipitous drop in temperatures froze the bay and its encircling marshes and creeks. Taking advantage of the plummeting weather conditions, Washington devised a plan to march across the frozen bay and attack the British stronghold guarding the southern isthmus of Boston Neck, as Royal Navy warships frozen in their berths would be unable to sail to its defence. In the mornings, Washington jumped up and down on the bay’s ice to test its strength. Conditions seemed ideal as the siege entered February 1776, with Captain Bamford recording in his diary that the surrounding “rivers were frozen over on the 5th and so they remained for ten days until the 16th,” when American Colonel Jeduthan Baldwin reported warmer temperatures had opened the channel “into the bay between Lechmor and Boston.”28 Luckily for Washington, the thaw in all probability saved the fledgling Continental Army from the jaws of a disastrous defeat that could have decimated the patriot cause in body and spirit. Historians agree that the aborted assault was just one of many, that if carried out in the early days of Washington’s campaign, may have extinguished the flame of the colonial rebellion. The British army contained battle-hardened veterans. In contrast, Washington’s newly assembled Continental Army, with exceptions, was, as the British described, more like a disorganized “rabble in arms.” At the siege, Washington’s green army was composed largely of militias of farmers, tradesmen, and ne’er do wells. New Englanders, ScotsIrish from the Carolinas, and Virginians lived in camps infected with dysentery and disease that devolved at times into drunken donnybrooks due to regional rivalries and temperaments. Though ardent, the roiling mass of colonials had yet to be forged into a disciplined fighting force that could wage a sustained war against the well-trained and

5.3 The Siege of Boston, Winter 1775–1776

seasoned troops of the world’s most powerful eighteenth-century empire. After the mid-month thaw, rather than any all-out military clash, it would be the sage advice of Washington’s officers and shrewd deployment of Boston Bay’s coastal topography that would safeguard the future of the unseasoned Continental Army.

5.3.5 Enwrapp’d in Tempest and a Night of Storms At a council of war on February 16, Washington decided, after consulting John Trumbull’s annotated field sketch of Boston Bay, to place the “noble train of artillery” Knox had procured from Fort Ticonderoga on the Dorchester Heights. The general and his officers believed the position would render the British occupation of Boston untenable, as a “battery placed on the Eastern extremity would carry its shot across the deepwater approach to the harbour; and a battery on the Western horn could annihilate the town.”29 The 112-foot promontory provided Washington with an environmental advantage, one the British had keenly wasted, and ruefully acknowledged by General Howe and his officers who had decided that their line running south from Bunker Hill through Boston would be over-extended if their forces had been entrenched on Dorchester’s summit. The first of March 1776, arrived like a proverbial lion, bringing an icy northwest wind and “excessive cold” that plummeted the mercury to 13 °F.30 But on March 3, a “warm and pleasant” southern airflow, known to the colonials as a “New England weather breeder” thawed out the lower grounds, coastlines and marshes surrounding Boston Bay. On the night of March 4, a ferocious cannonade exploded from Continental Army guns in the west on Roxbury Heights. As the diversionary fire roared across Boston Bay, a wall of hay bales hid troops and four hundred pair of oxen, pulling carts laden with Ticonderoga’s heavy cannon to the still frozen summit of Dorchester Heights. An atmospheric inversion had developed and concealed the efforts of six thousand soldiers, who toiled in two shifts of three thousand men to place

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the guns. The Rev. David Gordon recorded overnight conditions “hazy below [the heights] so that our people could not be seen, tho’ it was a bright moonlight on the hills.”31 Gordon further noted that “the wind lay to carry what noise could not be avoided, by driving the stakes and picking against the frozen ground (for the frost was still more than a foot thick).”32 On the morning of March 5, with the night mist and early dawn fog clearing, General Howe tumbled out of bed, and was stunned to find himself looking up at a fortified rebel battery overlooking his southern flank. Not only did the American guns loom over Boston, they were also in range of the British Army’s lifeline to London —the Royal Navy ships moored in the city’s harbour. From his spies, Washington learned that Howe, astonished at such a military feat, would not let the arming of Dorchester Heights stand and planned to send his forces to capture the newly placed Continental Army battery. In anticipation, four thousand infantry men had been assembled on the banks of the Charles River, ready to sail in flatboats on the noon tide across the bay to flank the British assault from Boston’s Neck. Howe’s troops, however, did not mobilize until later in the afternoon, and Washington was left waiting for the high tide at midnight when “a hurrycane, or terrible storm,” in the words of Massachusetts militia man Timothy Newell swept into the bay.33 Hindcasting suggests that the centre of a strong cyclonic disturbance passed just north of Boston, roaring out of the Ohio Valley across central New York and New England on a path parallel to the St. Lawrence River Valley.34 American general William Heath reported that “about midnight” as Washington’s infantry in Cambridge was about to shove off, “the wind blew almost a hurricane from the south. Many windows were forced in, sheds and fences blown down and some vessels blown on shore.”35 In 1775, Boston Harbour was open to the east‒southeast, and particularly vulnerable to storm wind flows from this quarter. Given such conditions, a heavy surf would have broken out on the south and western waters of Boston Bay, making it dangerous to land rebel flatboats and counter Royal Navy reinforcements

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5 Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777

on the Dorchester Peninsula’s lee shore.36 Washington’s staff officer Samuel Webb observed that “the heavy gale from S.E. blew two of the [British] transports on the shore of the harbour at Boston,” and the log of the Royal H. M.S. Centurion recorded that the weather on the morning of March 6 consisted of “fresh gales and squally weather.”37 The Rev. William Gordon noted seasonal conditions had generated “such a storm as scarce any one remembered to have heard.”38 Washington held that the storm was a “remarkable interposition of Providence,” turning to the prophetic verses sent to him during the Siege of Boston by the West African born poetess Phillis Wheatley: How pour her armies through a thousand gates, As when Eolus heaven's fair face deforms, Enwrapp’d in tempest and a night of storms; Astonish’d ocean feels the wild uproar, The refluent surges beat the sounding shore.39

This “providential tempest” halted all combat operations in Boston Bay, bringing an end to the siege in a relatively bloodless manner. The storm was only the first of several weather-related events that interceded to save and support the Continental Army during their fledgling 1776 and 1777 campaigns. It has been speculated “had rain and wind and thunder not intervened, there would have been on Boston Neck such a battle as the Continental Army actually was to fight only once, at Fort Washington in upper Manhattan, where the entire American force that was engaged fell to the enemy.”40 On 17 March, 1000 British troops and some 1000 Loyalists departed Boston by ship and sailed north to the safety of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In response Washington turned south and marched his Continental Army to New York City.

5.4

“Key to the Continent”: New York and Long Island, April–August 1776

New York City in 1776 was situated at the southern tip of 10-mile-long hillscaped island, indigenously named “Mannahatta,” which

Washington’s adjutant John Reed described as a “tongue of land” poking out between the watery jaws of the East and North (Hudson) rivers. The green slope of Staten Island at the time of the revolution could be seen south-west of the city as it rose between the upper and lower bays of New York Harbour, flanked by New Jersey’s saltmarshes. Looking east, Long Island’s farmland and woody ridges tumbled down to sandy beaches, framing for Ambrose Searle, secretary to Royal Navy Admiral Richard Howe “one of the finest and most picturesque scenes that imagination can fancy, or the eye behold.”41 Continental Army General John Charles Lee observed that New York City was “so encircled with deep navigable water that whoever commands the sea, must command the town.”42 John Adams, Head of the Second Continental Congress’ Board of War and Ordnance, recognized the geographical significance of New York to the “Cause,” and emphasized to Washington, ...the vast Importance of that City, Province, and the North [Hudson] River which is in it, in the Progress of this War, as it is the Nexus of the Northern and Southern Colonies, as a Kind of Key to the whole Continent, as it is a Passage to Canada to the Great Lakes and to all the Indians Nations. No Effort to secure it ought to be omitted.43

The North River, as the Hudson named at the time, is a fjord, with tidal flows reaching all the way to Albany. The “noble river,” as a British general observed, served as a conduit to Lake George, and then Lake Champlain, from which the Richelieu River flowed into the St. Lawrence and on to Montreal, Quebec and then Newfoundland, Labrador and the North Atlantic. As General Lee had stated, New York favoured the British, and in its harbour, Admiral Howe moored his flagship the Eagle, alongside fivehundred Royal Navy vessels, comprisingmost of the British fleet. The majority of the ships carrying 32,000 English soldiers and Hessian mercenaries arrived between June and August 1776, prompting a Pennsylvania rifleman to declare that “all London was afloat” on the waters between Lower Bay, Staten and Manhattan islands.44

5.4 “Key to the Continent”: New York and Long Island, April–August 1776

5.4.1 In Almost Every Street There Is a Horrid Smell After freezing in Boston, Washington’s army in 1776, baked in the humid, dogdays of a middlelatitude New York summer, a city where Tories owned two-thirds of the properties and dominated the Chamber of Conference. Supervising the construction of Continental batteries, Col. Henry Knox wrote to his wife: “I am boiling in a sun hot enough to roast an egg.”45 Quartered within a square mile of cobblestone streets and four thousand wood and brick buildings, dysentery, typhoid, typhus, malaria, and smallpox ran rampant among the American soldiers who drank water from ponds that were also used as privies and bathtubs. An army physician noted that “in almost every street there is a horrid smell” and that the “air of the entire city seems infected” from poorly kept latrines.46 Witnessing Washington’s army fortify lower Manhattan, Col. John Peters, a Loyalist composed a rhyme, published as The Toriade, depicting rebel soldiers, “veterans, at least of the spade,”47 entrenching their positions: New York, in ev’ry Street, was Fortify’d: Numbers upon each Green, and Dock beside: The Island’s width, and length, full fourteen Miles Was full of Ditches, Forts, Redoubts, and Piles: And still beyond; so great was Rebel Sence, They plac’d, their Idol Fort; Independence On each side, up and down is ditch and Fort, It seems that labour was their daily Sport.48

Looking across the estuary of the East River, Washington, concluded that if New York City was the key to the Continent, as John Adams advised, a woody bluff on Long Island named Brooklyn Heights was the lock securing the city. Subsequently, he deployed the majority of his 10,000 troops around its summit. To the general’s tragic chagrin, the bluff became a trap, from which Washington, with a lucky turn in the weather, would spring his army, after the first actual American battle with British forces ended in a savage, and demoralizing defeat.

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5.4.2 Battle of Long Island (1776)—“The Whole Empyrean Was Ablaze with Lightning” A severe electrical storm struck New York City on the evening before British troops mobilized for the Battle of Long Island. At around seven o’clock on August 21, a monstrous thundercloud, “as solid as marble” and “surcharged with electricity” burst over the city streets with a “crash louder than a thousand cannon.”49 Swinging for three hours “round and round” Manhattan island, the storm clouds lurked in the sky like dark galleons barraging Washington’s camp with thunderbolts.50 Major Abner Benedict recalled how the “entire heavens became black as ink, and from horizon to horizon the whole empyrean was ablaze with lightning,” that “fell in masses and sheets of fire to the earth,” seeming “to strike incessantly and on every side.”51 The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury reported: ...we had here as violent a Thunder Gust as has been remembered by the oldest man now living among us. The lightning struck a Marque in Gen. McDougal’s camp, near the Bull’s Head [Tavern] in the Bowery and instantly killed Capt. Van Wyck and his Lieutenants Versereau and Depyster.52

Major Benedict claimed that “the points of their swords melted off, and the coin melted in their pockets,” describing how “their bodies appeared as if they had been roasted, so black and crisp was the skin.”53 The next day on August 22, British General William Howe began shipping a 30,000-man force across the Narrows from Staten Island. Consolidating his lines on Long Island Howe then launched a three-forked pincer attack against Washington’s troops, who were arrayed in lines from the marshes of Gowanus Cove, northeast along Brooklyn Heights’ summit and in a crescent around the foothills at its base. The British left fork led by generals Sterling and Grant marched up the west coast of Long Island to the marshy right flank of the rebel

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entrenchment. Von Hester’s Hessian mercenaries led the vanguard of the British middle fork up the Heights of Gowanus and across the glacial moraine rising like a spine above the village of Flatbush. The third British fork mounted by generals Clinton and Percy, supported by Cornwallis, Howe and Miles used the cover of night on August 26, to approach Washington’s left flank along the Jamaica Road after descending from the Woody Heights ridge in the east (Fig. 5.2). The first real battle of the American Revolutionary War launched on August 27 when the spear-points of Howe’s three battle forks converged in a well-coordinated strike against Washington’s defensive line. Sixteen Continental brigades “fought like wolves” from behind drystone walls and across farm fields, but despite fierce rebel resistance, British and Hessian columns flanked the American line, driving the battered militias back to the base of Brooklyn Heights. In spite of their supreme commander’s years as a British officer and colonial land assessor, the defeat of the Continental Army in August 1776 was coloured by a geographical irony:

5 Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777 ...Washington had only a cursory grasp of the terrain... His surveyor’s eye failed to take measure of the land he intended to defend; nor had he considered how to fight a major battle on Long Island.54

Witnessing the carnage below Brooklyn Heights, Washington cried “Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose!”55 An eighteen-year-old Pennsylvania volunteer retreating through the swampy foot of the heights found it hard to “describe the confusion and horror” of men “mired and crying to their fellows for God’s sake to help them out,” concluding he “could not account for how it was that our troops were completely surrounded.”56 One month after the Declaration of Independence had been signed in Philadelphia, the Continental Army’s confidence in Washington plummeted. A Delaware colonel lamented “Would to heaven General Lee were here, is the language of officers and men,” and John Adams wrote to his wife Abagail: “in general, our generals were outgeneraled.”57 A letter published in the Massachusetts Spy reported that the Black Watch Regiment of Scottish Highlanders and Hessian mercenaries gave no quarter, pinning dying rebels to trees with

Fig. 5.2 Battle of Long Island, and Washington’s East River Crossing, August 1776. Collage by Charles Travis. Sources Wikimedia Commons

5.4 “Key to the Continent”: New York and Long Island, April–August 1776

bayonets.58 General Howe estimated that 3300 soldiers of the Continental Army were killed, wounded, or drowned, with 1000 prisoners taken.59 Although captured American generals were treated as military peers and guests, lower rank officers and soldiers were afforded no such privileges. Many suffered the depravities of captivity depicted in American privateer and writer Philip Freneau’s poem The Prison Ship: Half sunk floating on fair Hudsons waves... No Masts nor Sails these sickly hulks adorn ... From morn to night along the decks we lay Scorchd into Fevers by the solar ray... ... Three hundred Captives banishd from the Light Below the Decks in Torment spend the Night... Shut from the blessings of the cooling air...60

It has been argued that “the Revolution might have ended then and there,” on August 28, if not for three tactical, environmental, and weatherrelated factors.61 First, Howe paused a final attack on Brooklyn Heights, fearing a bloody repeat of the loss of the British officer corps at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.62 Second, Howe’s brother, the Admiral, assumed British warships were blocked on the East River by a flotilla of sunken vessels, their masts jutting above the surface, and third, in any case, a persistent north wind and ebb tide hindered the Royal Navy from sailing upstream to Brooklyn Ferry where its warships would have cut off Washington’s escape route to New York City.

5.4.3 That Heavenly Messenger, the Fog The dawn of August 29, greeted the summit of Brooklyn Heights with a hard rain and drifting veils of fog. At its base, British soldiers occupied an inclined trench that prevented rebel sharp shooters from firing into their lines, even if their powder had been dry. The log of the Royal Navy ship H.M.S. Rose, berthed in the Narrows, recorded “little wind and cloudy with hard showers of rain,” in addition to “light airs and foggy” conditions at noon, after which “such a heavy rain fell as can hardly be remembered.” The Royal Navy

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Secretary to Admiral Howe reported from behind British lines that “fog and mist obscured the fleet” moored in New York Bay.63 At 5 p.m. Washington’s war council decided to withdraw to Manhattan island and began scouring the East River for any vessel with oars or sails. To maintain secrecy, line officers were informed that the boats would ship in reinforcements from New Jersey. With a rear guard to maintain fires and the façade of a camp at rest, regiments began quietly withdrawing to Brooklyn Ferry at dusk.64 A north wind delayed the start of the retreat, but “providentially” it shifted southwest at 11 p.m. and Col. John Glover’s sailors and fishermen of the 14th Marblehead, Massachusetts regiment began ferrying one thousand soldiers an hour, across the strong ebb tide in the East River. Mayhem ensued when troops clamouring the boats became “infected with ungovernable alarm.”65 Only Washington’s stern threat to sink a boat “to hell,” backed up by the muscle of sentries with bayonets, restored order.66 At 2 a.m. a cloud like a pillar descended and rolled over the East River so that the boats pushing off from the landing disappeared after they had travelled six feet from shore. Brooklyn residents stated: “had it not been for... that heavenly messenger, the fog,” the Continental Army would “have sustained considerable losses.”67 In the mist, rear guard soldiers posted within one hundred yards from the British frontlines, withdrew invisibly. On the morning of August 30, Washington stepped on the last boat’s gunwale, completing a strategic retreat cloaked by weather and carried out with guile. Troop confidence in the general rose again. Alerted to Washington’s escape, Howe, his British dragoons firing vainly into the clouds of fog, stood incredulously on the slipway of Brooklyn Ferry, stunned by the audacity of the Continentals, who had vanished like wisps of smoke right before their eyes.

5.4.4 Flying Before the British On September 9, 1776, King George III’s thirteen colonies were redesignated as American states by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where

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in July, delegates had signed the Declaration of Independence to proclaim the birth of a new and sovereign, republican nation. Thomas Jefferson deployed his pen as a weapon on a battlefield of parchment, his document an assemblage of various eighteenth century trans-Atlantic philosophies and geographies. Its opening salvo, “We the People,” inscribed on vellum of Dutch origin, was printed by an Irishman. The declaration’s signatories enlightened by the cosmopolitan ideals of English and French philosophers John Locke and Voltaire, scratched their names with quills dipped in inkwells fashioned from Peruvian silver, and smithed in an Irish metal works.68 During September 1776, Washington’s demoralized army, licking its wounds in New York City, was depleted by a mass desertion of 10,000 men, prompting congressional delegates to urgently create eighty-eight new state-aligned battalions. Signing bonuses of $20 and promises of 100 acres of land aimed to attract recruits who would remain with the Continental Army until the end of the war. John Hancock pressed the thirteen new state governors to “bend all your Attention to raise your Quota of the American Army,” because the enlistments of soldiers who had not deserted Washington, would be expiring between December 1 and Christmas Day 1776.69 In October, Washington decided to quit New York City after a topographical survey of Manhattan determined that the British would trap the Continental Army in a “Bad Box” if its brigades remained on the island.70 Withdrawing north, Washington split his forces to counter British threats from both the East and North (Hudson) rivers and suffered his second major defeat at the Battle of White Plains on October 28. A British rout of American troops on the east bank of the North River at Fort Washington on November 16, comprised the American general's third catastrophic loss, compounded by the Continental Army’s withdrawal from Fort Lee on the river’s west bank on November 20th. In the space of four days Washington had lost his Hudson Valley sentinels and was in full retreat, “flying before the British,” to New Jersey.71 In early December 1776, the dwindling Continental

5 Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777

Army slogged southwest through the swampy plains of the newly minted Garden State, across a landscape that Washington observed was “dead flat,” and with none of his men possessing “an entrenching tool,” of any kind.72 The American army straggled over sleeping strawberry beds and ducked through the bare branches of cherry, apple, and peach orchards, their bloody footprints leaving a crimson trail in the snow for British Generals Cornwallis and Howe to follow. Arriving at Trenton, Washington ordered all boats on the New Jersey bank of the Delaware River to be confiscated or sunk. The soldier-artist Charles Willson Peale wrote that the “whole army followed that night and made a grand, but dreadful appearance. All the shores were lighted up with large fires.”73 On December 7, Washington’s army crossed the river to Pennsylvania to escape the pursuing British Army. To Peale the spectacle reminded him of a scene from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “The hollowing [hollering] of hundreds of men in their difficulties of getting Horses and artillery out of the boats, made it rather the appearance of Hell than any earthly scene.”74 In panic, the Continental Congress evacuated Philadelphia, but then on December 14, a heavy freeze descended and General Howe in keeping with the military conventions of the period issued a general order to his officers that with the “Approach of Winter putting a Stop to any further Progress” the British Army was to stop and “march into Quarters.”75 A string of posts was manned to defend New Jersey over the winter, with the one at Trenton, garrisoned by 1500 Hessian mercenaries. Despite Howe’s quartering order, Washington’s spies informed him that if on Christmas Day, the Delaware River was frozen the British would march across the ice to attack and capture his army.

5.5

Trenton and Princeton: December 1776 and January 1777

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, iron ore deposits provided an indirect geological contribution to Washington’s first combat victory of the war. In

5.5 Trenton and Princeton: December 1776 and January 1777

1683, with a charter from King Charles II, William Penn surveyed southeastern Pennsylvania finding “copper and iron in divers places.”76 By 1727, the Durham Iron Works, had been established on the Delaware River, forty-five miles north of Trenton, inspiring the colonial poet Thomas Makin to craft the following rhyme: Here num’rous mines of many kinds are found, And precious metals, treasured in the ground— Here too the magnet’s found, whose wondrous power Directs the seamen to each distant shore.77

By 1750, “Durham” boats had been constructed and were in use, allowing three-man crews to “pole” the works’ pig iron down the Delaware River, past Trenton, to the port of Philadelphia. The large, canoe shaped vessels, with blunted prows and sterns, ran sixty feet in length. With eight-foot beams, the heavy barges carried 20 tons, but drafted no more than thirty inches below the waterline.78 Like the crafts commandeered for his East River escape, Washington on Christmas Day eve, 1776, launched the Durham boats to transport troops, horses and artillery across the Delaware River at McKonkey’s Ferry, which was located nine miles upstream from the Hessian garrison at Trenton.

5.5.1 The Storm Is Changing to Sleet and Cuts like a Knife Thomas Paine, an English émigré was a failure in most endeavours, but the anti-monarchist did possess one singular gift. He was a brilliant and natural polemical writer. Paine’s 1776 essay Common Sense, was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution.79 As a volunteer aide-de-camp in Washington’s rag-tag army during the retreat across New Jersey, Paine published his political essay The Crisis, in the Pennsylvania Journal, on December 19, invoking seasonal imagery as a means to steel the faltering morale of the battered Continental Army: These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in

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this crisis, shrink from the service of their country ... The present winter is worth an age, if rightly employed; but, if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the evil;...80

Apocryphal stories circulate that before the attack on Trenton, Washington ordered Paine’s essay read to his shivering troops. At 11 p.m. on Christmas night, in heavy snowfall, Col. Glover’s Marblehead regiment began ferrying the twenty-four hundred men, horses, and artillery of Washington’s vanguard. All day, a 32 °F isotherm oscillated over the Delaware Valley, pelting McKonkey’s Ferry and Trenton with freezing rain and hail.81 Snowfall amounts in the TrentonPhiladelphia, and Maryland seaboard regions were not uniformly recorded in 1776. However, on Christmas night, Thomas Jefferson recorded in his Weather Memorandum Book that a deep winter mantle covered Monticello, reminding the American political sage of a previous storm when snow “fell in one night 24 inches deep.”82 The storm preceding the Battle of Trenton on December 26, has been compared by historical climatologists to the great ‘Knickerbocker Nor’ “Easter” of 1922, that left Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C. buried in 28 inches of snow, the highest amount ever recorded for the nation’s capital.83 In 1776, the snow, sleet, and rain in the Delaware River Valley were driven by the northern fringe of a vast anticyclone that shifted offshore near the North Carolina-Virginia border. The system circulated warmer maritime air and moderate snow over southern Pennsylvania and central New Jersey. But over Delaware, a higher freezing atmospheric band began to spit cold rain and ice pellets on the Continental troops crossing the river in the Durham boats. At 3 a.m. on December 26, one of Washington’s officers recorded in his diary that “the storm is changing to sleet and cuts like a knife.”84 Three supporting Continental Army column crossings at Trenton, Bristol and Dunk’s Ferry were aborted because “the river was so full of ice that it was impossible to pass.”85 Upriver, the Durham boats succeeded by “breaking a passage thro’ the ice,” with the downstream failures

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contributing to Washington’s success by not alerting the Hessians and other British posts along the Delaware of the impending American assault.86 At 4 a.m. with the crossing at McKonkey’s Ferry complete, the vanguard of Washington’s army marched south down the Bear Tavern Road, and reaching the hamlet of Birmingham, split into two columns. The western column led by Maj. Gen. Sullivan and Col. Glover advanced down the River Road alongside the Delaware River. The column led by Washington, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, Brig. Gen. Hugh, Mercer, with Col. Knox’s artillery in tow, detoured south along the Scotch Road. Skirmishing with a small post of Hessians before reaching Trenton at 8 a.m. as daylight was breaking, the Continentals discovered that their gunpowder was wet. Affixing bayonets to cold rifle barrels, Washington’s men charged the garrison, the north wind at their backs. Startled Hessian soldiers, boiling from their barracks, were instantly blinded by the wind, rain and ice pelting their faces, and made easy work for the Continentals.

5.5.2 Artillery as Environmental Art Northeast of Trenton, Col. Knox placed his artillery on a small rise, looking down over the lattice of alleys running between the town's King and Queen Streets. Discharging a cannonade into the Hessian troops who had been flushed into the streets like gamebirds, Knox, and his gunners dropped a score of German mercenaries in their tracks. South of town, Assunpink Creek emptied into the Delaware, fed by four slender tributaries shaped like the veins of a leaf, with Trenton and an apple orchard nesting near its stem on the river’s bank. At the confluence of King and Queen streets, a road curving like the tail of the letter “Q” led to a bridge crossing the creek. Troops from Col. Glover’s River Road regiment trampled over the wooden span leaving the Hessian garrison surrounded.87 Rousted from their “Weihnachten” slumbers, Hessian mercenaries and their mortally wounded commander Col. Johann Gottlieb Rall, fell back to

5 Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777

the orchard and surrendered to Washington. John Trumbull, a Brigade Major who had sketched the battery map of Roxbury and Dorchester Heights at the Siege of Boston, memorialized Washington’s first victory in the oil painting The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, December 26, 1776. In the painting, Trumbull, situates Washington at the focal centre of the portrait to symbolize the “spatial mastery” of his command for Knox to place his cannons on the northeast knoll overlooking Trenton’s latticed streets.88 The painting (in which Knox is portrayed fourth from the right) casts, ...art as a kind of artillery, [its] linear visual corridors... like projectiles hurled into the future to control posterity’s understanding of the past, history itself envisioned as a vast spatial field.89

Trumbull’s military engineering experience gave his brush strokes the means to apply a “dimensional mode of perception to the physical landscape, rigorously sculpting raw space into a rational operating environment.”90 Savouring his first victory in 27 years, Washington decided that pursuing the fleeing Hessians with exhausted troops was too risky. Having suffered only two fatalities from soldiers who fell asleep and froze on the march into Trenton, Washington led his army, with nine hundred German prisoners back to McKonkey’s Ferry, crossing the Delaware back to the safe environs of Pennsylvania (Fig. 5.3).

5.5.3 An “Old Fox” Bags the Weather Washington’s defeat of the formidable Hessian Knyphausen Regiment caught the attention of British General Howe wintering in New York City. On December 29, Washington, anticipating a British response, crossed the Delaware River from Pennsylvania again with four thousand, six hundred men, entrenched around Trenton, and sent two columns up the Princeton Road to delay any Redcoat advance. On January 1, 1777, Cornwallis set out from New Brunswick, New Jersey and gathering six thousand British and Hessian troops at Princeton tramped on thawing roads towards Washington’s position. By January 2, Cornwallis’ forces had pushed the

5.5 Trenton and Princeton: December 1776 and January 1777

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Fig. 5.3 Casting artillery as art. The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, December 26, 1776. John Trumbull (1756– 1843). Image by Charles Travis. Source Wikimedia Commons

Continentals back up the mucky road to Trenton. Rushing to Assunpink Creek to help repel the attack on Washington, Charles Willson Peale recalled that conditions were “very muddy, almost over our shoe tops. The number of troops, badness of the roads, so many runs to cross, and fences to remove, ma[de] it a very tedious march.”91 Meeting fierce Continental resistance, British and Hessian soldiers found themselves “a great deal fatigued on account of the deepness of the road.”92 With night falling, Cornwallis, seeing Washington’s retreat blocked by the ice-clogged Delaware River, decided to pause the attack, telling his officers “We’ve got the old fox safe now. We’ll go over and bag him in the morning.”93 However, the “old fox,”—a seasoned Virginia planter, with an eye for weather—took notice that a cold wind blowing steadily all day out of the northwest, had kept temperatures around the Trenton area low. In Washington’s judgement the muddy roads would freeze soon after the sun dropped below the horizon, allowing his troops to outflank Cornwallis and march to Princeton and attack its British garrison. By 9 p.m. the temperature had dropped to 31.5 and Washington

created the illusion for Cornwallis’ pickets of a bustling Continental camp by leaving bonfires stoked and a rear guard raising a mighty clamour by striking the frozen soil with picks and shovels. At midnight, Washington’s troops muffled the iron hoops of their wagon and cannon wheels with canvas and slipped out on a highway that ran parallel to the Post Road connecting Trenton to Princeton. At 2 a.m. Lieutenant Step Olney of the 11th Continental Infantry reported that “roads which the day before had been mud, snow and water, were congealed now and had become hard as pavement.”94 The fifteen-hour freeze allowed Washington’s troops to slip eighteen miles through the Jersey Pine Barrens north to Princeton, where on January 3, Continental soldiers captured the British garrison depleted by Cornwallis’ march on Trenton.95 Defeated for the first time on American soil, King George III’s army retreated to New York City, as Washington led the Continental Army to winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey. The winter victories of 1776–1777, boosted the morale of Washington’s officer core, his troops and the Continental Congress of the newly

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5 Winter Revolutions, 1775–1777

declared United States. The American revolutionary army gained confidence during their unconventional December and January campaigns, that independence from Britain could be won on the battlefield. As Commander-In Chief, Washington recognized the crucial roles that geographical, climatic and environmental factors, and intelligence, alongside the acquisition of cartographical knowledge would play if the forces of the fledging nation were to succeed in its military campaign against the British. On January 26, 1777, wintering at Morristown, Washington appealed to the Continental Congress President John Hancock: The want of accurate Maps of the Country which has hitherto been the Scene of the War, has been a great disadvantage to me. I have in vain endeavoured to procure them and have been obliged to make shift, with such Sketches, as I could trace from my own Observations and that of Gentlemen around me.96

While Washington’s surveyor’s eye failed him at the Battle of Long Island, his planter’s sense of weather and experience as a British colonial commander during the French and Indian War came to his aid in the winter of 1776–1777, giving conventional adherents to “the eighteenthcentury concept of war... a rude shock in the American wilderness.”97 At the time of the Revolution, the British were cognizant of the unorthodox methods employed by Continental commanders. Lord Germain, charged by King George III to administer the war, wrote to his generals in America: “The manner of opposing an enemy that avoids facing you in the open field is totally different from what young officers learn.”98 Howe, after chasing Washington across New York and New Jersey replied that “The enemy moves with so much more celerity than we possibly can.”99 In turn, Philip Freneau’s poem On the Departure of the British from Charleston (1782) celebrated American General Nathaniel Greene’s unconventional use of terrain: Through barren wastes and ravaged lands, He led his bold undaunted bands; Through sickly climes his standard bore Where never army marched before.100

Indeed, leaders of the small, hastily assembled colonial militias comprising the core of Washington’s early Continental Army leavened the larger revolutionary armed force that consolidated between 1777 and 1783, with strategies and tactics learned in colonial clashes with the Mohawk, Iroquois and other indigenous peoples. Tempered by a colonial society’s familiarity with climate, weather, and topography, the American rebels having adapted to their environment, were able to gain advantage over the superior and more seasoned officers and soldiers of the British Empire. Notes 1. Odell, J. 1857. The American Times, Part I, in The Loyalist Poetry of the Revolution, Philadelphia: Collins, University of Virginia Library. https://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/ view?docId=chadwyck_ap%2FuvaGenText %2Ftei%2Fchap_AM0706.xml&chunk.id= 0&query=soil. 2. Haytock, J. 2018. The Routledge introduction to American war literature. N. Y.: Routledge. Ref. 34. 3. French, A. 1911 [1969] The Siege of Boston. New York: The MacMillan Company. 4. Freneau, Philip, Morin. 1902. The Poems of Philip Freneau: Poet of the American Revolution, Volumes 1–2. (Ed.) F. L. Pattee, Princeton: C.S. Robinson, & Co. University Press. Ref. 173–172. 5. McCullough, D. 2006. 1776. N.Y.: Simon & Schuster. Ref. 62. 6. Ibid. 7. Afable, P.O., and Beeler, M. 1996. Place Names. In (Ed.) Ives Goddard, Ives. Languages. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 17. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. 8. Cooper, J.F. 1854. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative Of 1757, Vol. 1. New York: Turner and Townsend. Ref. 10. 9. Ibid., 255; 257. 10. Ward, C. 1952. The War of the Revolution. New York: Macmillan. Ref. 69.

5.5 Trenton and Princeton: December 1776 and January 1777

11. Smith, W. 1765. An Historical account of the expedition against the Ohio Indians, in the year 1764. Philadelphia: W. Bradford. University of Pittsburgh: Darlington Digital Library Ref. 44. https://digital.library.pitt. edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735056288 214. 12. Brumwell, S., 1998. A Service Truly Critical’: The British Army and Warfare with the North American Indians, 1755–1764. War in History, 5(2): 146–175. Ref. 155. 13. Ibid., 152. 14. Knox letter, quoted in Flick, A. 1928. General Henry Knox’s Ticonderoga Expedition. The Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association. 9(2): 119–135. Ref. 128. 15. McCullough, 1776, 84. 16. Ludlum, D.M. 1974. The Weather of American Independence-2: The Siege and Evacuation of Boston 1775–1776, Weatherwise, 27(4): 162–168. 17. Ibid., 165. 18. His Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech to Both Houses of Parliament on Friday, October 27, 1775 (sc.26 October 1775) (Philadelphia, PA, [1776]), broadside. 19. McCullough, 1776, 68. 20. Trevelyan, G.O., 1915. The American Revolution: Part 1, London: Longmans Green & Co., Ref. 359. 21. Ludlum, The Weather of American Independence-2. 166. 22. McCullough, 1776. N.Y., 73. 23. French, A.. 1911 [1969] The Siege of Boston. New York: The MacMillan Company. 24. Silverman, K. 1976. A cultural history of the American Revolution: painting, music, literature, and the theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763–1789. Retrieved from https://hdl-handle-net.ezproxy.uta.edu/2027/ heb01400.0001.001. Ref. 292. 25. Ibid., Ref. 293. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid.

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28. Ludlum, The Weather of American Independence-2, 166. 29. Trevelyan, 1915. The American Revolution, 362–363. 30. Ludlum, The Weather of American Independence-2, 166. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid.,167. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Wheatley, P. 1753–1784. His Excellency General Washington, poets.org. https:// poets.org/poem/his-excellency-generalwashington. 40. Flexner, J. F. 1967. Providence Rides a Storm. Amer. Heritage, 19(1). Ref. 12–17; 98–99. 41. Serle, A. 1940. The American Journal of Ambrose Serle. San Marino, California: The Huntington Library. Ref. 72–74. 42. Lee, C. 1871. The Lee Papers, Vol. 1, 1754–1776, N.Y.: New York Historical Society. Ref. 309. 43. Adams, J. 1776. From John Adams to George Washington, 6 January 1776, Founders Online, Massachusetts Historical Society. https://founders.archives.gov/ documents/Adams/06-03-02-0200. 44. Ketchum, R.M. 1973. Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton. New York: Henry Holt and Co. 45. McCullough, 1776, 147. 46. Schoepff, J.D., 1875. The Climate and Diseases of America. Trans. James Read Chadwick. Boston: Houghton and Co. Ref. 15. 47. McCullough, 1776, 127. 48. Silverman, A cultural history of the American Revolution, 325. 49. McCullough, 1776, 155–156. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 156. 52. Ludlum, D. M. 1975. The Weather of American Independence—3: The Battle of

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53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

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Long Island, Weatherwise, 28(3): 118–147. Ref. 119. Ibid., 119. Atkinson, R., 2019. The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777 (Vol. 1). Boston: Henry Holt and Company. Ref. 364. McCullough, 1776, 177–178. Ibid. Adams, C.F. (Ed.) 1876. Familiar Letters of John Adams and his wife Abigail Adams. Cambridge: The Riverside Press. Atkinson, The British Are Coming. McCullough, 1776. Leary, L., 1942. The Manuscript of Philip Freneau’s The British Prison-ship. The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, 6(1). Ref. 14–18. Ward, Christopher. The War of the Revolution. New York: Macmillan, 1952. Print. In a prelude to the Siege of Boston, the British had taken the high ground at the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775, in Charleston, but did so at a great cost. Of the battle’s 226 dead and 828 wounded, a disproportionate number were British officers. The casualty count of 1054 men would prove to be the highest suffered by the British Army in any single encounter with American rebel forces during the entire Revolutionary War. Ludlum, The Weather of American Independence—3: The Battle of Long Island, 120. Ibid. Atkinson, The British Are Coming, 364. Ibid., 376. Ludlum, D. M. 1989. The Weather Factor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Ref. 37. Armitage, D. 2007. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. John Hancock to the States, 24 September 1776. In Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, Vol. 5. (Washington, D.C., 1976–2000) Ref. 228– 230.

70. William Heath to George Washington, 31 August 1776, Rufus Putnam to George Washington, 3 September 1776 in W. W. Abbott, Dorothy Twohig, and Philander Chase (Eds.). 1985. The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, Vol 6. (Charlottesville) Ref. 179–81, 210–211. 71. Wilson, R.R. (Ed) 1904. Heath’s Memoirs of the American War. 1798. Reprint. New York. Ref. 98–99. 72. Flexner, J.T. 1968. George Washington in the American Revolution, 1775–1783. [1st ed.]. Boston: Little, Brown. Ref. 157. 73. Peale, C. W., in Lillian B. Miller (Ed.), 1983. The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Volume 1, Charles Willson Peale: Artist in Revolutionary America, 1735–1791. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ref. 50. 74. Miller, Ibid.; Sellers, Charles Coleman. 1969. Charles Willson Peale. New York: Scribner. https://hdl-handle-net.ezproxy.uta. edu/2027/heb00747.0001.001. 75. Gen. Sir. William Howe’s Orders, 1776, The Kemble Papers, Vol. 16, New York Historical Society, 1883. 425. 76. Billinger, R.D., 1938. The Durham Furnaces. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry, 30(4): 428–431. Ref. 428. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Philp, M. 2021. Thomas Paine, in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Edward N. Zalta (ed.). https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2021/entries/paine/. 80. Paine, T. 1776. The Crisis, in The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Writings of Thomas Paine—Volume 1 (1774–1779), by Thomas Paine and Moncure Daniel Conway. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/ epub/3741/pg3741-images.html#link2H_4_ 0002 81. Ludlum, D. M. 1976. The Weather of Independence—5: Trenton and Princeton. Weatherwise 29(2): 74–83. Ref. 76. 82. Ibid., 74–75. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid.

5.5 Trenton and Princeton: December 1776 and January 1777

85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

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95. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 78. 96. Letter from George Washington to the Ludlum, The Weather Factor, 40. President of Congress, dated Head Quarters, Ketchum, Winter Soldiers, 306. Morris Town, January 26, 1777, in John C. Gamble, L.J., 2015. Art-Artillery: Mapping Fitzpatrick (Ed.) 1931. The Writings of the Military Logic of John Trumbull’s George Washington, vol. 7: 63–68. WashRevolutionary War Paintings. American ington, D.C. Ref. 65. Art, 29(2): 10–18. Ref. 11. 97. Ketchum, Winter Soldiers, 226. Ibid., 13. 98. Ibid., 225. Ibid. Sellers, H.W., 1914. Charles Willson Peale, 99. Ibid. Artist-Soldier. Pennsylvania Magazine of His- 100. Freneau, Philip Morin. 1809. Poems Written and Published During the American tory and Biography, pp.257–286. Ref. 278. Revolutionary War, and Now Republished Ibid., 80. from the Original Manuscripts: InterFlexner, George Washington in the Amerispersed with Translations from the can Revolution, 183. Ancients, and Other Pieces Not Heretofore Williams, C.R. 1839. Biography of Revoluin Print. Vol. 1. From the Press of Lydia R. tionary Heroes, containing the Life of BriBailey, no. 10, North-Alley. Ref. 416. gadier Gen. William Barton, and, of Captain Stephen Olney. Providence. 194–200. Ref. 195.

6

The Decay of Nature and Birth of Total War, 1798–1815

...the whole monstrosity called war. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832) Theirs was the ghost of an army, but it was the ghost of the Grande Armée. They felt they had been defeated only by Nature.1 Philippe-Paul comte de Ségur, Histoire de Napoléon et de la grande-armée pendant l'année 1812 (1824) Nature decayed around me, and the sun became heatless; rain and snow poured around me; mighty rivers were frozen; the surface of the earth was hard, and chill, and bare, and I found no shelter.2 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

6.1

The Terrestrial Armadas

The death knell for the European monarchistaristocratic classes began to toll with the storming of the Bastille in 1789. However, the bloody terror of the French Revolution which followed, cast an apocalyptic shadow over the dawn of a new republican age. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte seized the power of the French Republic and, in a series of audacious military victories, stitched together a European imperial system from the corpora of Belgium, Holland, Spain, states in Germany, Italy and dependencies in Switzerland, Poland, and Croatia. After forcing Austria, Prussia and Russia into an alliance, only Great Britain across the waters of the English Channel eluded the grasp of the Le Petit Caporal. Subsequently, France decreed a Continental Blockade against England, and from 1803, the two nations engaged in naval and terrestrial warfare ending

with Bonaparte’s ultimate defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. But it was the French invasion and disastrous retreat from Russia in 1812, that acted as the midwife of Total War, manifesting as a portent of how the nature of combat environments would evolve over the next two centuries. In the Napoleonic Era, the populations of France, her allies and possessions were conscripted en masse to serve in Grande Levée armies. Deployed like cattle-herds into the abattoir of battle, the mass slaughters that ensued, heralded the arrival of the true horrors of Total War. The magnitude of the leviathan armies emerging in the nineteenth century eclipsed any medieval or early modern predecessors. Approximating the size and scope of King Phillip II’s ill-fated 1588 Spanish fleet, the “Terrestrial Armadas” of Total War armies enforced military discipline like their naval counterparts, by the general confiscation of an individual’s “body, life, and time.”3

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Travis, Environment as a Weapon, Historical Geography and Geosciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_6

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Grande Levée armies conscripted a nation’s entire populace. On European home fronts, children, elders, and all ages in between were drafted into war efforts to serve in factories, farms, mines, hospitals, and civic morale boosting organizations. In the eighteenth century, small professional forces were deployed in circumscribed battles, but with the arrival of mass conscription in the early nineteenth century, troops and the mobilization of citizenry in newly industrializing nation-states altered the calculus and trajectory of modern warfare and the environments of combat. “Suddenly,” as Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), the Prussian soldier, military theorist and veteran of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, noted, “absoluter Krieg” (Total War) “became the business of the people.”4. With the size of armies increasing, “theatres” of war transformed into vast, panoramic amphitheatres, which in turn reshaped military thought, strategy and tactics during the period.

Sevastopol, a besieged Crimean port city on the Black Sea in 1854, he endured and survived nearly a year of nonstop Turkish shelling, an experience he recounted in Sevastopol Sketches (1855).6 Serving as the foundation for War and Peace Tolstoy’s Crimean War chronicle conveys “the ‘feel’ of war rather than the logistics of campaign and battles,” giving us “the territory of the battlefield rather than the map which would render it transparent, rationalize it, and make it seem more orderly than in fact it was.”7 In contrast, Shelley’s Frankenstein, read as an allegory for the birth of Total War, is shaded by historical and eco-critical impressions dating from the French Revolution in 1789, to the demise of the Napoleonic Era in 1815. Shelley’s novel “systematically places” the phenomenon of warfare and its “gothic horrors within the geographical and political particularities of European and world history” by portraying “forces that cannot be confined by […] political control or geographic space.”8 François-Félix Nogaret’s The Looking Glass of Actuality, or Beauty to the Highest Bidder: A Two-Faced Tale (1790), published a year after the Bastille was stormed, served as a prototype for Shelley’s novel.9 Both feature a protagonist named “Frankenstein,” but in comparison with Shelley’s dystopian “Creature,” Nogaret’s “kindly automatons,” built by beneficent, and revolutionary inventors employing “state-of-the-art tools in microscopy, astronomy, and aeronautics” promote the French Republic’s utopian ideals of “scientific progress and industrial innovation in a state governed by talent, not tradition.”10 Commenting on the ideals of the new republic in the 1790s, Chartist writer James Bronterre O’Brien claimed that “nature appeared just then to conspire with politics, in giving éclat to the new Revolutionary era.”11 In 1793, the year King Louis XVI and his Queen Consort, Marie Antoinette, were dispatched by the guillotine, the French Republic inaugurated a decimal calendar that replaced religious and royalist references with seasonal, climatic, and environmental motifs. The first day of the new calendar, September 22, the day of the autumnal equinox, commemorated the fall of the French monarchy by establishing:

6.2

Panoramas and Cartographies of Total War: Tolstoy, Shelley, and Minard

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, (1867) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), fit Walter Benjamin’s notion of “panoramic literature,” as works that broadly engage the wider historical, cultural, and ideological geographies coalescing to shape the dynamics of a period and the personalities of its places. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, is the main concern of Tolstoy’s epic novel. Woven from three thematic strands, War and Peace, describes the relations between four Russian noble families in the early nineteenth century; second, the novel provides a historical chronicle and critique on the historiography of Napoleon’s wars with Russia, and lastly, comprises a philosophical treatise synthesizing the concerns of the novel’s first two strands.5 A veteran of the Crimean War (1853–1856), Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant with the Russian Army’s 14th Artillery Brigade, and was no literary armchair general. Shipped to

6.2 Panoramas and Cartographies of Total War: Tolstoy, Shelley, and Minard ...a corollary between nature and revolution, moving as they do from Vende'miaire through Fructidor, or, in English, through the months of Vintage, Fog, Sleet, Snow, Rain, Wind, Budding, Flower, Pasture, Heat, Harvest, and Fruit.12

While The Looking Glass of Actuality reflected the Edenic and egalitarian ideals of the Republic’s revolution, Frankenstein is a jaundiced tale that tempers the Enlightenment Age’s idealistic balance between society and nature, with intimations of Edmund Burke’s horrifying, and sublime reflections on the course of the French Revolution. Contrary to Nogaret’s utopian vision of the French Republic’s aspirations, Shelley’s novel speaks to Michel Foucault’s notion that in the late eighteenth century, “military discipline begins to be the general confiscation of the body, time, and life; it is no longer a levy on the individual’s activity but an occupation of his body, life, and time.”13 In Frankenstein, Victor, a Genevese medical student confiscates human corpses from dissection rooms to harvest organs and pieces of anatomy. Stitching together a body, he reanimates a new “being” with the electro-therapeutic techniques of galvanism. In this sense, Shelley’s novel provides an analogy for the period’s military conscription practices which “by the late eighteenth century” as Foucault observes had evolved to where: ...the soldier has become something that can be made: out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; ...ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has “got rid of the peasant” and given him “the air of the soldier.”14

Clausewitz notes that the introduction of the metric system, bureaucracy, and mandatory enlistments following the French Revolution, enabled Napoleon to build his massive war machine.15 In Frankenstein, Victor assembles a “being of gigantic stature” that reads as a symbol of the size and composition of the early nineteenth century Grande Levée armies.16 The reanimated “being” rejected by Victor and society at large turns against his creator, and like Napoleon’s Grand Armée leaves a murderous trail across the landscapes of Europe. From

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another perspective, Napoleon’s Total War army coalesced “under the control of a genetically distinct population of individuals” and like the heterogenous anatomy of the Creature in Shelley’s novel, was sewn together from the differing ethnic regions of Continental Europe into a “French” military behemoth.17 Assembling his “being”, Victor studies the “natural decay and corruption of the human body,”18 and Frankenstein comes to serves as metaphor for the Grand Armée’s decomposition in Russia, and particularly the physiological effects of climate, combat, and environment on the minds and bodies of its individual soldiers: “the atmosphere of baffled movement, wintry disorientation, and despair which envelops the novel’s characters is a figurative counterpart to the plight of Napoleon’s retreating forces.”19 Tolstoy observed that “the French army” in Russia “melted away at the uniform rate of a mathematical progression.”20 Consequently, depictions of the force’s decimation, literally in War and Peace and figuratively in Shelley’s Frankenstein, can be spatially and statistically contextualized by Charles Joseph Minard’s 1869 cartograph- of the Grande Armée’s disastrous invasion and retreat from Moscow in 1812. During the French invasion, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'armée française dans la campagne de Russie, 1812–1813, correlates the diminishing number of Napoleon’s troops with the locations, names and dates of successive battles. During the army’s retreat, the cartograph correlates plummeting autumnal and winter temperatures with the dwindling number of men and location of battles along the French escape route, foolishly chosen by Napoleon (Fig. 6.1).1 1 The English translation of the title of Minard’s map: Figurative map of the successive losses in men of the French army in the Russian campaign, 1812–1813. In Minard’s map, months and dates from June to December are calibrated to the modern Gregorian Calendar, while Russian accounts, such as Leo Tolstoy’ War and Peace, described as a novel, history, and philosophy, are charted according to the Julian Calendar. Therefore, the early modern Cartesian perspective on Napoleon’s campaign featured in this section will be juxtaposed with phenomenological impressions and allusions to battlefield

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Fig. 6.1 Minard’s Carte Figurative. Source Wikimedia Commons2

Minard’s Carte figurative serves as an example of how in the nineteenth century, the production, and dissemination of civic, military, demographic, and medical cartography, alongside the use of graphs, and charts of all description began to proliferate in great numbers. The growth in the visualization of warfare

experiences which unconstrained by map borders, bleed out from the locations of combat, to colour the historical, cultural, and literary landscapes of the period. Additionally, the estimate of troop deaths listed in Minard’s flowmap vary with other historical and literary accounts of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. All figures listed in this chapter are approximate. 2 Figurative Map of the successive losses of men in the French army during the Russian Campaign 1812–1813. Drawn by M. Minard, Inspector general of Bridges and Roads, retired. Paris, November 20, 1869. The numbers of men present are represented by the width of the coloured zones at a rate of one millimetre for every ten thousand men; they are also written perpendicular to the zone. The red represents the men who enter into Russia, the black those who leave it. The information which has served to draw the map has been extracted from the works of M.M. Thiers, of Ségur, of Fezensac, of Chambray and the unpublished diary of Jacob, pharmacist of the army since October 28th. In order to better judge with the eye of diminution of the army, I have assumed that the troops of Prince Jérome and Marshal Davout who had been detached at Minsk and Mohilow and have rejoined around Orscha and Witebisk, had always marched with the army.

and associated data was enhanced between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries by large, battle tableaux paintings, displayed to audiences in enveloping three hundred and sixtydegree public exhibits, and circular mechanized dioramas. Similarly, the panoramic literature of Tolstoy, and Shelley, immersed readers literally and figuratively in the carnage and battlescapes of the ill-fated French campaign in Russia that ended the Napoleonic spell over Europe, providing flesh and blood to Minard’s time–space skeleton to further illuminate the birth of Total War in the early nineteenth century.

6.3

Napoleon’s Invasion

In 1812, Napoleon decided to attack Russia after Emperor Alexander I broke with the French Continental Blockade of Great Britain. On the eve of the invasion, Count Caulaincourt, French envoy to the Russian emperor at St Petersburg, warned Napoleon: “Sire, beware of the vastness of the Russian countryside and the ordeal of its winter,” to which Bonaparte replied without irony: “you imagine yourself already frozen. I have no intention to remain that long.”21 On June 24, 1812, in spite of his envoy’s counsel, Napoleon crossed the Nieman River into Russia

6.3 Napoleon’s Invasion

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Fig. 6.2 Grande Armée Invasion, 1812. Map by Charles Travis

with 422,000 soldiers, the largest army ever gathered on the soil of the European continent.3 The lumbering Grande Armée, marching on roads from Warsaw to Moscow, followed a slightly elevated corridor of glaciated terrain, carved by the Eurasian ice cap’s retreat, ten thousand years before. Napoleon’s columns passed north of the boggy Pripet Marshes, headwater of the Nieman, and Dnieper rivers that flow into the Baltic and Black Seas, respectively. By commencing in June, Napoleon hoped to avoid the twice-yearly swampy season the Russians called rasputitsa, when the landscape liquifies due to spring snowmelt and autumnal rain.22 East of the Nieman, Bonaparte split his forces into three branches. He first sent 28,000 men north to the Baltic Sea coast, to mount the 3 Napoleon’s Grand Armée, was supranational in composition. In addition to France, conscripted soldiers included the Dutch, Belgians, Italians, Austria, Illirians, Dalmatians, Spanish, Portuguese, Croats, and the Swiss. Conscripts from the German States included Bavarias, Prussians, Saxons, Westphalians, Wuerttembergers, Badens, Bergs, Hessians, and Mecklenburgers, and troops from the Rhine Confederation, regions of North Germany, and West of the Rhine River.

Siege of Riga. His second column of 33,000 men, was dispatched north-east where on July 16 and 18, it fought to protect his main flank at the Battle of Polotsk. Napoleon then proceeded east from Vilnius with the main column of his Grande Armée, winning pyrrhic victories at Smolensk in August (with 145,000 soldiers) and Borodino in September (with 100,000 soldiers), before briefly occupying and retreating from Moscow in October. Despite the persistent myth that the French army was destroyed by the Russian winter, Napoleon lost most of his troops prior to September 1812, from dysentery, disease, and desertion (Fig. 6.2). However, it is equally true that Napoleon’s late autumn withdrawal bled the remains of the Grande Armée dry. As temperatures plummeted, hypothermic French soldiers staggered through ice and snow, fighting off the Russian army and brutal Cossack calvary raids. After the battle and ill-fated crossing of the Bérézina River at the end of November, Napoleon staying true to his word that he had no intention of freezing, abandoned his emaciated Grande Armée for Paris. Before French troops reached the Nieman and crossed the

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river to depart Russian soil, starving soldiers had resorted to cannibalism. Of the nearly half a million officers and conscripts that Napoleon had begun his campaign with in June, only about 10,000 or so straggled back across the river in December 1812 to recuperate or die in the overcrowded hospitals of Königsberg and Warsaw.

native to the Russian soil and climate afforded brief respite. French surgeons brewed tea from huckleberries and tormentilla root to treat diarrhoea, stomach ailments, and fever. The postmortem medical reports of Grand Armée casualties bring to mind the studies of anatomy and dissection rooms in Frankenstein:

6.3.1 Dysentery and Scorched Earth Warfare By starting the invasion in the month of June, Napoleon broke an age-old rule never to begin marching before grain ripened in the field.23 The invading French soldiers arrived at the Nieman River ill-nourished and dehydrated: “meat from cattle that had suffered from starvation and exhaustion was for a longtime the soldiers’ only food. The great heat, and the inhalation of sand and dust, dried the tissues of the body.”24 After crossing the Nieman, a large mid-latitude cyclone showered his army with five days of rain, turning the roads into muddy tracks, leaving supply and artillery wagons mired. Exhausted draft horses and wagons stocked with stores started to be abandoned in the Russian forests and marshlands.25 Belying the historian Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s equestrian metaphor of Napoleon as a “world soul on horseback”: The improper feeding of the animals caused gastric disturbances, alternately diarrhoea and constipation, enormous tympanitis, peritonitis. It is touching to read of the devotion of German cavalrymen to their poor horses. They would introduce the whole arm into the bowel to relieve the suffering creatures of the accumulated fecal masses.26

The Grand Armée crawled eastwards, and the summer heat matched mercury readings in Cairo, Egypt. As Russia’s “gloomy forests and sterile soil met the eye” of conscripted soldiers, and supply lines began to snap, the morale of Napoleon’s troops began to plummet. Minard’s Carte figurative illustrates that by August 1812 nearly half of the 422,000 men that had crossed the Nieman River in June with Napoleon had deserted or died due to extreme temperatures, hunger, or dysentery.27 Medicinal plants

...the necropsy of those who had died from dysentery revealed derangement of the digestive organs; the stomach, the large intestine, mostly the rectum, were inflamed [...] in some cases there were small ulcers, with jagged margins, in the stomach.28

Reaching the city of Smolensk, Napoleon’s victory on August 18, provoked the implementation of Russian General Mikhail Kutuzov’s “scorched earth policy.”29 A veteran of wars with France and the Ottoman Empire, Kutuzov, “destroyed everything on retreating.”30 The Russian army now viewed Napoleon’s invasion as an existential threat to its motherland. The French having trudged through the Russian Empire’s buffer regions in present-day Poland and Latvia had arrived to the fierce “heart of Holy Russia.”31 In War and Peace Tolstoy observed: From the time of the burning of Smolensk, a war began which did not follow any of the old traditions of warfare. The burning of towns and villages, the retreat after every battle [...] the whole of the irregular warfare was a departure from the rules.32

Writing the new rules of Total War, Kutuzov’s army fell back eastwards, burning fields, and storehouses, rendering Napoleon’s Grande Armée incapable of feeding itself from the fruits of the Russian landscape.

6.3.2 The Nursery of Total War: Battle of Borodino Seventy-five miles west of Moscow, nestled in a glacially sculpted landscape of creek and river beds, knolls, and fields sat the village of Borodino. Encircled by swamps, stands of white birch, forests of fir, and wheat crops, the rolling countryside was well suited for defensive military entrenchments and would serve as the birth

6.3 Napoleon’s Invasion

theatre for a new scale of warfare. Digging in, the Russian army prepared for the lumbering might of the Grande Armée. As the largest and bloodiest single day of combat in all of the Napoleonic Wars, the Battle of Borodino fought on September 7, 1812 is a centre piece of War and Peace.4 Tolstoy’s novel revolves around three main characters—the hapless, French educated, illegitimate son of a Russian Count Pierre Bezuhov, who unexpectedly inherits his father’s title and wealthy estate; Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, Russian military officer and son of an eccentric, retired general, and Natalya Rostov, friend and love interest of both Pierre and Andrey, who find themselves at the Battle of Borodino. Described as a “camera with intelligence,” Tolstoy journeyed to Borodino in 1867, where he sketched a topographical map of the French and Russian lines as they were laid out before and after the battle in 1812.33 In War and Peace, Pierre Bezuhov travels as a curious civilian to the site of the impending clash to view the large, gathering French and Russian armies. On a hill near the village of Gorki, Pierre looks down upon a “huge panorama that stretched in an amphitheater before him” with the “Smolensk high-road winding. [...] through a village with a white church.”34 The sight confuses him: Everything Pierre saw was so indefinite, that in no part of the scene before him could he find anything fully corresponding to his preconceptions. There was nowhere a field of battles such as he had expected to see but fields, dells, troops, woods, camp-fires, villages, mounds, and streams. With all Pierre’s efforts, he could not discover in the living landscape a military position.35

Later in the day, Pierre discusses the impending battle with Prince Andrey, remarking he has 4

The dates listed in this chapter of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia are listed according to the “New” Gregorian Calendar implemented during the sixteenth century for Catholic Europe which was adopted by all European nations in the twentieth century. Tolstoy’s War and Peace like Russia in the nineteenth century adhered to the “Old” Julian Calendar until the Soviet Revolution in the early twentieth century. Thus, in War and Peace, the Battle of Borodino takes place on August 26, according to the Julian Calendar established at Rome in 45 BCE.

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heard that “war is like a game of chess.”36 As a civilian conversant with eighteenth-century military strategy, Pierre is perplexed by Borodino’s landscape because he imagines warfare playing out on the uniform plane of a map, according to “geometrical principals” with a hierarchy of opposing pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, and queen, -all masterly manoeuvred by generals to capture an enemy’s king. Pierre’s prebattle perspective reflects the conventions of period’s warfare, illustrated by French Military Theorist Marquis de Puysegur’s proposition in 1749 that combat could be understood “without war, without troops, without an army, [...] simply by means of study, with a little geometry and geography (Fig. 6.3).”37

6.3.3 Battle Panorama: The Raevsky Redoubt At 6.30 a.m. on September 7, General Kutuzov and his soldiers gird for battle by praying to the Virgin of Smolensk, icon of the Russian Orthodox Church. In contrast, Napoleon, nursing a head cold, greets the dawn as “the sun of Austerlitz” in hopes of repeating his famous 1805 victory over the armies of the Russian and Austrian Empires.39 On Bonaparte’s command, one hundred French cannons roared into life, shelling Russian lines, in an arc from the Bagration Flèches, to an entrenchment that would become known as the Raevsky Redoubt, just south of the Kolocha River, near the village of Borodino.5 In War and Peace, Tolstoy writes that the “redoubt consisted of a knoll, on three sides of which trenches had been dug. Within [...] stood ten guns that were being fired through openings in the earthwork [...] A little behind the guns stood infantry.”40 The redoubt’s location provided clear and unobstructed 180° views of Russian and French lines from the New Smolensk Road in the north, down to the Bagration Flèches in the south. After being 5 The entrenchment was named Raevsky Redoubt, in honour of Nikolay Nikolayevich Raevsky the Russian general who deployed the battlement as a defensive weapon to protect the right flank of the Kutuzov’s army as it retreated east to Moscow after the Battle of Borodino.

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Fig. 6.3 War and Peace’s Literary Cartography. Views from the Bagration Flèches and Raevsky Redoubt. Map collage by Charles Travis. Source Wikimedia Commons38

granted leave by Kutuzov to wander the battlefield, Pierre rides on horseback from the hamlet of Gorki and peers down on the battlefield, in Charles Baudelaire’s phrase, like “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness:”41 ...the whole place was full of troops and covered by smoke clouds from the guns and the slanting rays of the bright sun... cast upon it through the clear morning air penetrating streaks of rosy, golden-tinted light and long dark shadows. The forest at the farthest extremity of the panorama seemed carved in some precious stone of a yellowish-green color; ...to the left where the Voyna flowing between its marshy banks falls into the Kolocha, a mist had spread which seemed to melt, to dissolve, and to become translucent when the brilliant sun appeared and magically colored and outlined everything....42

Unlike Prince Andrey or Russian and French soldiers engaged in combat, Pierre, in Walter Benjamin’s terminology, drifts like a flaneur across Borodino’s battlefield. Unrestricted by the period’s regime of military order, or command, Pierre moves freely up to the Russian front lines. Finding the village of Borodino in the hands of the French, Pierre rides south, ascends a knoll, and unwittingly finds himself at the Raevsky

Redoubt. Standing in the furious eye of the battle, he joins Russian soldiers manning the cannon battery. By mapping the battle through Pierre’s eyes, Tolstoy critiques how geographical assumptions informed by eighteenth-century military theorists like de Puysegur caused, ...historians [to] turn narratives into static maps. They are military strategists in reverse, drawing causal lines in history to fit their knowledge of the outcome. This reduction of complexity is further aggravated by the focus on individual commanders. For it excludes the hundred million contingent factors [...] identified as the essence of battle.43

From his own 1867 mapping, Tolstoy concluded in War and Peace that: “The chief action of the battle of Borodino was fought within the seven thousand feet between Borodino and Bagration’s flèches [...] When ascending that knoll Pierre had no notion that this spot, on which small trenches had been dug and from which a few guns were firing, was the most important point of the battle.”44 Because of its strategic value, Napoleon ordered three assaults to capture the position. For fifteen hours, French and Russian soldiers fought “like furious lions [...] devoid of all human

6.3 Napoleon’s Invasion

feeling,” with the redoubt changing hands twice.45 Possessed with the “phantasmagoria of the flaneur,” Pierre illuminates for War and Peace’s readers how combat in Total War dissolves the Cartesian human-nature binary, illustrating how the “environment [...] become[s] part of the fighting front [and ...] the sights and sounds of war become entangled with the landscape.”46 Viewing combat from the Russian earthworks, “Pierre’s vision blurred, everything looked weird and hazy. The cannonballs came whistling down one after another, smashing into everything—breastwork, soldiers, cannons.”47 Pierre volunteers to fetch ammunition, but as he arrives to collect ordnance, the depot is struck by French fire: Suddenly, a terrible concussion threw him backward ... At the same instant he was dazzled by a great flash of flame, and immediately a deafening roar, crackling, and whistling ... made his ears tingle.48

In Shelley’s Frankenstein, allusions to the impact of French munitions, the result of period engineering, science and technology, anticipate the twenty-first century Anthropocene trope that humans have acquired the power of a geological force. Attending a lecture at the University of Ingold, Victor hears his professor pronounce that with “the microscope or crucible,” the new philosophers of science: “have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature” and “have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake.”49 Pierre survives the French shell strike on the ammunition depot, but in the afternoon as the battle is waning, Napoleon’s Saxon and Polish cavalries recapture the knoll. That night, after the battle, Kutuzov, cured of the delusion that he had beaten Napoleon, orders a general retreat. Soon the road to Moscow is cluttered with Russians dying from starvation and thirst as much as their wounds, drinking ditch water infected by cadavers and soiled with all sorts of toxins.50 Tolstoy’s depiction of Borodino’s aftermath inverts the Biblical aphorism of swords beaten into ploughshares: Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davydov family and to

93 the crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodino, Gorky, Shevardino and Semyonovskye had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the dressing stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space of some three acres around. [...] there now spread a mist of damp and smoke and a strange acid smell of saltpeter and blood.51

By the end of the battle, 75,000 soldiers lay dead and 1200 French and Russian cannons had been fired continuously for eight hours. The birth of Total War at Borodino manifested with the force of a natural disaster.52 In the twentieth century, such a scale would be equal to the fatalities caused by “a jumbo jet crashing ... every three minutes from breakfast to sundown.”53

6.3.4 The Burning of Moscow The subtitle of Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus, refers to the Greek mythological Titan who stole fire from Mount Olympus and brought its power to humans. During his reign, Napoleon styled himself as a Promethean figure, and deployed a “propaganda machine,” to circulate such an image as he was conquering Europe.54 As the Grand Armée marched on Moscow, its 270,000 citizens fled as Kutozov, retreated to St. Petersburg. Tolstoy described the abandoned city like an entomologist: “It was empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty. [...] there is a floor littered with bits of wax, excrement, dying bees scarcely moving their legs, and dead ones that have not been cleared away.”55 After the withdrawal of the Russian army, Count Fyodor Rostopchine, Moscow’s governor packed the city’s wooden buildings with flammables. With the Grand Armée on the outskirts, Rostopchine emptied the prisons of criminals and gave an order to “empty all the vodka from the distilleries of the crown into the street.”56 Witnesses recalled “the liquor was running in rivulets, and the rabble drank until they were senselessly drunk, they had even licked the stones and the wooden pavement. Shouting and fighting naturally followed.”57 On September 14, as Napoleon passed through the gates of Moscow, Rostopchine’s liberated prisoners set fires,

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stoking an inferno that consumed two-thirds of the city.58 Clausewitz claims Cossack calvary were the arsonists, and Rostopchine, for his part, blamed Napoleon, the French Prometheus and Anti-Christ, for bringing fire and apocalypse to Moscow.59 In turn, Napoleon’s memoirs provide an impressionistic depiction of the burning city:

Moscow in the month of October there was no government and no churches, shrines, riches, or houses—... All was destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and indestructible.”66 Preparing to withdraw, Napoleon commissioned a meteorological study that reported temperatures in Moscow and its environs had “rarely dropped below freezing until mid-November” over the previous twenty years.67 Confident that a departure by the end of October would ensure an arrival in Smolensk and access to French stockpiles before the season’s first freeze, Napoleon drew up marching orders for the Grand Armée.

It was a spectacle of a sea and billows of fire, a sky and clouds of flame-mountains of red rolling flames, like immense waves of the sea, alternately bursting forth and lifting themselves to skies of fire, and then sinking into the ocean of flame below.60

Such imagery colours the last chapter of Shelley’s Frankenstein, when the Creature announces his impending self-immolation: “Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames [...] my ashes will be swept into the sea by winds.”61 The Grand Armée wreaked havoc on Moscow, despite officers’ attempts to maintain order and marshal food stocks. Rostopchine, watching the French soldiers loot his city, asked with contempt: “how will they adapt themselves to Russian habits?” [...] the cabbage will make them bloated, the gruel will make them sick, and those who survive the winter will perish by the frost at Epiphany.”62 With winter approaching, Moscow in ashes, and French soldiers reduced to eating the city’s dogs, Napoleon sent a peace proposal to the Russian Emperor. In a letter, Rostopchine argued that Alexander I should refuse to negotiate, advising: Your empire has two strongholds, its immensity and its climate, It has these 16,000,000 men who profess the same creed, speak the same language, and whose chin has never been touched by a razor. The long beards are the power of Russia and the blood of your soldiers will be a seed for heroes.63

The emperor claimed he would prefer to let his “beard grow to the waist and eat potatoes in Siberia,”64 than appease the French general. In turn, the “long beards” declared: “Napoleon cannot conquer us, he would have to exterminate us all.”65 Tolstoy compared the resilience of Muscovites to that of an ant colony “whose heap has been destroyed,... dragging bits of rubbish, larvae, and corpses,” and wrote that “though in

6.4

Napoleon’s Retreat

On October 18, as the French skirmished with the Russians at Tarantino, the temperature according to Minard’s Carte figurative registered 32 °F.6 The next day, on October 19, Napoleon led his Grand Armée in a column ten miles long, trailing camp followers “like a caravan, a wandering nation” bloated with loot, out of Moscow.68 English novelist Thomas Hardy’s account of the Napoleonic Era, The Dynasts (1903–1908) depicts the retreating French army “moving as a single monster might” in a “caterpillar shape” creeping “laboriously nearer, but instead of increasing in size by the rules of perspective,” becomes smaller and smaller.69 As the army retreated west between October and December 1812, it marched in a meandering line between the 56th and 54th parallels. At these high latitudes, with autumn passing into winter, the hours of daylight decreased, while the hours of darkness increased. Marching day after sunless day, many in the army were afflicted with “arctic hysteria” caused by the lack of vitamin D from sunlight. Soldiers exhibited symptoms of “extreme timidity, passivity or fright, morbid Temperature listed in Minard’s Carte figurative follow the Réaumur Scale, established by René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, in 1730 with zero set at the freezing point of water and its 80° mark at the boiling point of water at normal atmospheric pressure. For this chapter Réaumur temperatures were converted to the Fahrenheit scale. The Réaumur temperature for October 18 was 0°.

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6.4 Napoleon’s Retreat

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Fig. 6.4 Grande Armée Retreat, 1812. Map by Charles Travis

depression, insomnia, suicidal tendencies, and claustrophobia (Fig. 6.4).”70 At the hill-town of Maloyaroslavets on October 24, the French army, numbering 100,000 soldiers and 500 cannon, secured a victory against Kutuzov’s forces but in the process lost 6000 men. Napoleon, rattled after being nearly captured, arguably made the worst decision a general in his position could. Although reported to have proclaimed that an army marches on its stomach, Bonaparte turned away from the lightly defended Kaluga Road leading to southern districts overflowing with the spoils of harvest, and drove his hungry Grand Armée north to the Smolensk Road across fields scorched and ravaged by his invasion. Passing Borodino nearly two months after the September battle, the army came upon “50 thousand cadavers lying still unburied” where “the victims had fallen in large numbers one could see clouds of birds of prey rending the air with

their sinister cries.”71 On November 3, at Vyzama (Wisma), the French fought another battle with the Russians and were reduced to 550,000 men. On November 6, as Napoleon received news of a failed coup d’état against him in Paris, the first major blizzard of the season struck the soldiers of his Grand Armée: Their wet clothes froze upon them; this covering of ice chilled their bodies, and stiffened all their limbs ... soon the snow covered them, and small hillocks marked where they lay. Such was their sepulchre. The road was filled with these undulations, like a burying-place. A number of them froze as they stood still, and looked like posts, ... around them, all was snow; the horizon seemed one vast winding-sheet, in which nature was enveloping the whole army.72

Unacclimatized to the higher latitude Russian winter, the French army suffered temperatures that by November 9, on Minard’s Carte figurative had dropped to 11.5 °F.73 The experience of

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Napoleon’s soldiers can be compared to Shelley’s description of Victor Frankenstein pursuing his Creature across Russia in a “cold that few of the inhabitants could long endure, and which I, the native of a genial and sunny climate, could not hope to survive.” 74 On the nights of November 8 and 9, nearly 10,000 men and horses perished.75 French surgeons noted in their diaries the macabre physiology of “death from frost”: The men staggered as if drunk, their faces were red and swollen, it looked as if all their blood had risen in their head ... The moment they lost their strength tears came to their eyes, repeatedly they arose, apparently deprived of their senses, and stared shy and terror-stricken at their surroundings. The physiognomy, the spasmodic contractions of the muscles of the face, manifested the cruel agony which they suffered. The eyes were very red, and drops of blood trickled from the conjunctiva. Without exaggeration it could be said of these unfortunates that they shed bloody tears.76

Reduced to 37,000 men, the Grand Armée arrived in Smolensk, on November 12 only to discover their supply depots ransacked and empty. Engaged by urban guerrillas in fierce street-to-street combat, Napoleon abandoned his plan to winter in the town. On November 14, with temperatures dropping to − 15.25 °F, Napoleon left for Minsk, a city stocked with forty days’ worth of French rations, uniforms, shoes, and gun powder.77 But on November 15, the city and its supply depot also fell to the Russians.

6.4.1 Bérézina and the Jaws of Total War After fighting the Battle of Krasnyi between November 15 and 18, Napoleon crossed the frozen Dnieper River, with Russian regiments and Cossack cavalries shadowing and skirmishing with his fraying column. The demoralized Grand Armée was now marching west into the jaws of Total War. Infuriated because Orthodox churches had been used by the French as horse stables, the Russian peasantry rose in a killing rage from the winter landscape, hunting and slaughtering thousands of soldiers in Napoleon’s straggling units:

The Decay of Nature and Birth of Total War, 1798–1815 Some were impaled on stakes, some thrown into vats of boiling water. Others had their eyes pulled out, their limbs severed, nails hammered into their bodies or wooden stakes driven down their throats. Some were burned alive, others buried alive in huge pits. Vicious beatings with hammers, sticks, stones, farm implements, almost anything that came to hand, were commonplace. One ... band of serfs was seen beating the brains out of a line of prisoners to the tune of a song.78

At Bobr, 30,000 French soldiers dispatched by Napoleon to Polotsk, joined the soldiers of his dwindling 20,0000-man column and marched to the eastern bank of the Bérézina River. Anticipating that the Grand Armée would cross at Borisov, the Russians burned its bridge. In a stroke of luck, a Polish peasant informed French officers that the river could be forded twelvemiles upstream at Studyanka. Napoleon ordered General Eblé, a French military engineer, to the village with instructions to construct two bridges, one for the Grand Armée’s infantry and the other for its artillery. On November 25, Studyanka’s houses and forests were stripped of wood for the planking and forty-six trestles required to build the twin bridges. French feints led the Russians to believe Napoleon was attacking Borisov, while at Studyanka, four hundred Dutch engineers toiled in temperatures of – 13 °F.79 Working in frigid currents, with ice crusts forming around their shoulders, arms, and legs, the engineers died in droves.80 Allusions to the terror running through the soldiers of the Grand Armée waiting helplessly to cross the Bérézina can be read in Frankenstein’s last scene, as Captain Walton and his horrified crew watch the Creature “borne away by the waves” on an iceraft, becoming “lost in darkness and distance,”81 from the deck of a ship frozen above the Artic Circle, in the icy Barents Sea. In turn, PhilippePaul comte de Ségur, Napoleon’s QuartermasterGeneral employed the “metaphor of a ship on a sea of ice,” to describe the terror coursing through the mass of soldiers and camp followers as they crossed the Bérézina on November 26 and 27: There was no longer any question of adorning or embellishing our lives, but merely of saving them. In this shipwreck, the army, like a great vessel

6.5 The Battlefield Flâneur tossed by the most violent storm, was throwing overboard on a sea of ice and snow everything that might encumber it or delay its progress.82

As Napoleon’s soldiers, artillery, horses, and supply wagons crossed the river, a Grande Armée rear guard defended the east bank of the Bérézina, and arriving French cadres deflected assaults on the west. On November 29, General Eblé torched the bridges and havoc ensued as the Russians and Cossacks attacked. The writer Honoré Balzac describes the chaotic scene in his novel Adieu (1830): This hurricane of human beings, the flux and reflux of living bodies, ... One officer sprang from icecake to ice-cake, and reached the opposite shore. A soldier clambered miraculously over mounds of dead bodies and heaps of ice ... “Let us make a raft!” he cried ... the whole group rushed to the ruins, and began to pick up iron bolts, and screws, and pieces of wood and ropes, “The Russians! the Russians are coming!”83

30,000 civilian camp-followers and stragglers died or were left stranded on the eastern bank of the Bérézina,84 Between December 3rd and the 7th, 14,000 Grand Armée survivors struggled from Smorgony to Vilnius in temperatures as low as − 35.5 °F, as Minard’s Carte figurative illustrates.85 On December 5, Napoleon fearing another coup, ‘d’état, in France transferred his command to General Murat. Disguised as the Duke of Vicenze, Bonaparte hastened past his troops on a horse-drawn sled, hoping to arrive in Paris before the news of his military disaster. Between the 14th and 19th of December, as the command of Murat faltered, General Ney fought rear-guard actions against the Cossack cavalry to protect the withered flanks of the tattered Grand Armée. Ney, the last French officer to leave Russian soil, crossed the Nieman River with 4000 soldiers, joined by 6000 troops retreating on December 18, from the Siege of Riga. A further 40,000 soldiers from scattered French detachments not enumerated in Minard’s cartograph found their way to the Vistula River, in the Duchy of Warsaw, in present-day Poland. In one tragic coda, during its retreat, the Grand Armée became infected with Typhus. As soldiers

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travelled back to France and other countries, they carried and spread the disease, extending the death and destruction of Napoleon’s failed invasion back into their homelands.

6.5

The Battlefield Flâneur

Napoleon’s Grand Armée, artillery, Russian resistance, climate and geography were all midwifes attending the birth of Total War. During the period the Industrial Revolution was gathering strength in Britain, America and Continental Europe, nineteenth-century combat environments began to generate their own industrialized atmospheres, microclimates, and weather. The thunder, smoke, and fire of exploding shells and shrapnel, hails of bullets, fogs of burning gunpowder, kerosene, and coal–oil created shadowy and shrieking milieus. Soldiers in the massive, conscripted armies of the nineteenth century were subject to battlefield conditions only previously experienced by humans in geo-hazardous environments created by forest fires, landslides, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. Furthermore, these Total War environments manufactured their own natural resources. From the early to mid-nineteenth century, phosphate for fertilizer and livestock feed was gleaned from battlefield sites by excavating the skeletons of dead soldiers and grinding their bones into powder.86 Serving as an analogy for the historic period that birthed Total War, Shelley’s Frankenstein maps out the environments of terror that emerged with the guillotines of the French Revolution and culminated in the massive carnage and bloody battles of the Napoleonic Era. Her novel “recreates the violence of the wars through [the] figure of the monster as a wounded body composed from multiple corpses.”87 Touring France after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Paris 1814, Shelley witnessed the retribution Russians paid to the city’s suburb, Nogent-sur Marne. Finding the village “entirely desolated by the Cossacs,” Shelley described the havoc created by the new tactics of Total War:

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6 Nothing could be more entire than the ruin which these barbarians had spread as they advanced; perhaps they remembered Moscow and the destruction of the Russian villages; but we were now in France, and the distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed, and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war, which none can feel who have not travelled through a country pillaged and wasted by this plague....88

Between 1740 and 1897, approximately two hundred thirty wars and revolutions convulsed the landscapes of Europe.89 The battles that gave birth to Total War were in the public eye equivalent to natural disasters, perceptions reinforced by the artistic spectacles of painted and mechanized panoramas that began to be exhibited in the late eighteenth century.90 Ancient precedents for such artistic installations include the spiral frieze of the Dacian Wars (101–106 CE) carved on Trajan’s Column in Rome; Chinese Landscape paintings and the Bayeux Tapestry’s embroidery of the Battle of Hastings that led to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. Emerging with the phenomena of the Total War, panoramas became mediums of mass communication prior to the advent of large circulation newspapers, photography, and cinema.7 Walter Benjamin mused that panoramas served as “aquariums of the distance and past,” expressing the new, public attitude toward life in the nineteenth century.91 Comprising paintings, mechanized dioramas, and later photographs hung inside purpose-built structures, panorama exhibits offered the paying public a 360° panoptic experience of being immersed in the landscapes of battles, historical, and geological events. A dynamic exhibit “The word “panorama” is a neologism taken from the Greek translated as “all seeing”; it was originally coined in 1792 in a notice in the London Times announcing the appearance of the new spectacle: a 360° painting taken from an elevated vantage point and allowing a visual survey that extended from the fore or middle ground to the distant horizon. This circular or stationary panorama was the invention of the Irish-born artist Robert Barker, who first exhibited his work—a picture of Edinburgh—in London in 1789.” Miller, A. 1996. The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular, Wide Angle. 18 (2) Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Ref. 35.

7

The Decay of Nature and Birth of Total War, 1798–1815

illustrating the Battle of Navarino (1820), an Ionian Sea clash off the coast of Greece, was first displayed in Dublin, Ireland, in 1828. A visitor entering the exhibit’s rotunda described its effect: The canvass [sic] does not hang straight down, but is stretched in a convex semicircle, and moved off slowly upon rollers, so that the pictures are changed almost imperceptibly, and without any break between scene ... the distant thunder of cannon, military music, and the noise of the battle, increase the illusion. By means of panoramic painting, and a slight undulation of that part which represents the waves and the ships, the imitation almost reaches reality.92

An English sailor in W.H. Barker’s short story The Battle of The Nile (1838) attends a mechanized diorama illustrating Admiral Nelson’s duel with the French Navy. Fuelled by grog, the sailor joins in the sea battle by throwing oranges at the small mechanical gunships, before jumping on stage and demanding that the French strike their colours, as a “parcel of pollis-officers” arrive to subdue him.93 Although a piece of fiction, Barker’s story seems informed by apocryphal accounts of war veterans attending battle panoramas and having similar post-traumatic stress reactions upon viewing the virtual spectacles of war. Though first published under the title 1805 as a serial in the periodical Russkiy Vestnik in 1865, when War and Peace was published as a novel in 1867, it became a discursive sensation and spectacle, equivalent to the popular panorama exhibits of the nineteenth century (Fig. 6.5). Tolstoy’s epic narrative marked a transformation from the literary and historical depictions of battle framed by two dimensional perceptions of eighteenth-century military cartography, to the vast, dynamic and immersive third-dimensional tableaux experiences, emerging with the phenomena of Total War. In 1912, Tsar Nicholas II commissioned the artist Franz Roubaud to paint a panorama 115 meters long and 15 meters high of the Battle of Borodino which was to be hung in a circular pavilion erected to commemorate the 1812 centenary of Russia resistance and patriotism. In a sense, Roubaud’s panorama allows a

6.5 The Battlefield Flâneur

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Fig. 6.5 The Battle of the Nile. Source Wikimedia Commons94

viewer familiar with War and Peace to gaze at the battle from Pierre’s perspective as a battlefield flâneur. Although the Raevsky Redoubt is featured in the panorama, Roubaud’s initial plan to portray the knoll’s recapture from the French was rejected by Nicholas II. Instead, the focal

point of the panorama features a sweeping vista of Napoleon’s calvary attack on the Bagratian Flénches. In the years leading up to the First World War, the Russian Tsar perhaps mindful of the power of images, wished to maintain friendly relations with his allies, the French (Fig. 6.6).95

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The Decay of Nature and Birth of Total War, 1798–1815

Fig. 6.6 Battle of Borodino Museum Panorama. Source Wikimedia Commons

Notes 1. de Ségur, P.P. 1824. Histoire de Napoléon et de la grande-armée pendant l'année 1812. Project Gutenberg. Ref. 242. 2. Shelley, Mary. 2017. Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Ref. 116. 3. Foucault, M., 2008. Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de France, 1973– 1974 (Vol. 1). London: Macmillan. Ref. 47. 4. von Clausewitz, C. 1989. On War, Ed. and Trans., Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ref. 592. 5. White, H. 2007. Against Historical Realism: A Reading of ‘War and Peace’, New Left Review, 46: 89–110. Ref. 107.

6. Wilson, A.N. 1988. Tolstoy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., Ref. 114. 7. White. Against Historical Realism, 108. 8. Randel, F.V. 2003. The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. Elh, 70(2): 465–491. Refs. 487–488. 9. In the French, Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou la belle au plus offrant: Histoire à deux visages. See: Julia V. Douthwaite & Daniel Richter. 2009. The Frankenstein of the French Revolution: Nogaret’s automaton tale of 1790, European Romantic Review, 20(3): 381–411. 10. Douthwaite and Richter, The Frankenstein of the French Revolution, 382. 11. Sterrenburg, L. 1978. The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions. NineteenthCentury Fiction, 33(3): 324–347. Ref. 325.

6.5 The Battlefield Flâneur

12. Ibid. 13. Foucault, Psychiatric power, 47. 14. Foucault, M. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (Trans.) Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin. Ref. 135. 15. von Clausewitz, On War. 16. Shelley, Frankenstein, 37. 17. Ibid. 106. 18. Ibid 33. 19. Randel, The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, 468. 20. Tolstoy, Leo. 2020 [1867] War and Peace, Minneapolis: Lerner Publishing Group. Ref. 1449. 21. Durschmied, E. 2012. The Weather Factor: How Nature has changed History, New York: Arcade Publishing. Ref. 92. 22. Keegan, J. 1994. A History of Warfare, New York. Alfred A. Knop. 23. Durschmied, The Weather Factor, 94. 24. Rose, Achilles. 2005. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, Anno 1812; Medico-Historical. Ref. 13. 25. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 20; Winters, H.A. 1998 Battling the Elements, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 26. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 20. 27. Ibid., Winters, Battling the Elements. 28. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 13–14. 29. Ibid., 20. 30. Ibid. 31. Torrance, M.C., 1986. Some Russian Attitudes to France in the period of the Napoleonic Wars as revealed by Russian Memoirs (1807–1814). Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature, pp. 289–303. Ref. 296. 32. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 940. 33. Wilson, A.N. 1988. Tolstoy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., Ref. 114; Orwin, D., 2012. The Awful Poetry of War: Tolstoy’s Borodino. Ithica: Cornell University Press. 34. Tolstoy, L. 2005 [1897] War and Peace. Intr. Joseph Frank, Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics. Ref. 698.

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35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 709. 37. Engberg-Pedersen, A., 2015. Governed by Chance: On War, Disorder, and Representation. boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, (September 29). 38. Map: Johnston, A.K. 1850. Alison’s history of Europe Atlas, Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Son. Insets: Battle of Borodino Panorama by Franz Roubaud, 1912. Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons. 39. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 22. 40. Tolstoy, War and Peace Lerner Publishing Group,1047. 41. Cited in Benjamin, W. 2003. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire in (Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1838–1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ref. 328. 42. Tolstoy, War and Peace, Lerner Publishing Group, 1043–1044. 43. Engberg-Pedersen A. 2015. Critique of Cartographic Reason: Tolstoj on the Media of War, Russian Literature LXXVII/III, Ref. 321. 44. Tolstoy, War and Peace, Lerner Publishing Group, 1055; 1047. 45. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 22. 46. Morrison, J.V., 2020. “One step beyond the line”: the sensory experience of the battlefield in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Canterbury. Ref. 39. 47. Tolstoy, War and Peace, Lerner Publishing Group, 1052. 48. Ibid. 49. Shelley, Frankenstein, 30. 50. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 24. 51. Tolstoy, War and Peace, Lerner Publishing Group, 1079. 52. Mieszkowski, J. 2012. Watching War. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2012. Ref. 64. 53. Dyer, G. 1985. War. New York: Crown Publishers. Ref. 75. 54. Paulson, R. 1983. Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820. New Haven: Yale University. Press. Ref. 245.

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55. Tolstoy, War and Peace, Lerner Publishing Group, 1155–1156. 56. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 32. 57. Ibid. 58. Sidorov, D. 2000. National Monumentalization and the Politics of Scale: The Resurrections of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90(3):548–572. Ref. 553. 59. Mikaberidze, A., 2014. The Burning of Moscow: Napoleon’s Trial By Fire 1812. Barnsley: Pen and Sword. 60. Bell, D. 2010. Was Tolstoy Right? The New Republic, 11 May. https://newrepublic.com/ article/74843/was-tolstoy-right. 61. Shelley, Frankenstein, 37; 106. 62. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 36. 63. Ibid. 64. Adams, M. 2006, Napoleon and Russia, London: Bloomsbury. Ref. 396. 65. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 35. 66. Tolstoy, War and Peace, Lerner Publishing Group, 1465. 67. Adams, Napoleon and Russia, 372. 68. Ibid., 375. 69. Hardy, T. 2002 [1926] The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes, Project Gutenberg EBook. Ref. 311–312. 70. Winters, Battling the Elements, 81. 71. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 41. 72. Watson, H. 2017 [1867] The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Campfires of Napoleon, Ref. 375. 73. − 9° on the Réaumur Scale. 74. Randel, The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, 467–468. 75. Adams, Napoleon and Russia, 386. 76. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 25. 77. − 21° on the Réaumur Scale. 78. Adams, Napoleon and Russia, 384. 79. − 20° on the Réaumur Scale. 80. Rose, Napoleon’s Campaign in Russia, 65. 81. Shelley, Frankenstein, 187. 82. Randel, The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. 467–468.

83. Balzac, H. 2016 [1830], The Project Gutenberg EBook of Adieu, by Honore de Balzac. Trans., K.P. Wormeley. Ref. 16–17. 84. Adams, Napoleon and Russia, 397. 85. − 30° Réaumur Scale. 86. von Clausewitz, C. 1996. The Russian Campaign of 1812. London and New York: Routledge; Bell, D. 2007. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.; Broers, M., 2008. The Concept of Total War in the Revolutionary -Napoleonic Period. War in History, 15(3): 247– 268.; Pollard, T. 2021. These spots of excavation tell: using early visitor accounts to map the missing graves of waterloo, Journal of Conflict Archaeology, 16(2): 75–113. 87. Ramsey, N. 2020. Mary Shelley and the Monstrosity of War: Frankenstein and the Post- Waterloo Politics of Life. EighteenthCentury Life, 44(3) Ref. 109. 88. Shelley, M., 1817. History of A Six Week’s Tour through A Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: With Letters Descriptive of A Sail Round The Lake of Geneva, And Of The Glaciers of Chamouni. London, Hookham, Jun. and Ollier. Ref. 19. 89. Glikson, A.Y., 2021. The Fatal Species: From Warlike Primates to Planetary Mass Extinction. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. 90. Gerould, D., 1989. Historical Simulation and Popular Entertainment: The “Potemkin” Mutiny from Reconstructed Newsreel to Black Sea Stunt Men. TDR, 33(2): 161–184. 91. Benjamin, Walter. 1972. “Aquarien der Ferne und der Vergangenheit,” Benjamin, “Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert,” in Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften, 6(1) Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Ref. 241.; Benjamin, W., Eiland, H. and Smith, G., 1996. Selected Writings: Vol. 3, 1935– 1938, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 92. Huhtamo, E. 2013. Illusions in Motion: Media Archaelogy of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Ref. 65.

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93. Barker, M.H. 1838. The Battle of the Nile, 95. Egorov, B., 2018. Russian panoramic historical museums that are a trip through time, Nights at Sea; Or, Sketches of Naval Life Russia Beyond, 14 Aug. https://www.rbth. during the War”, in Bentley's Miscellany, com/travel/328956-5-russian-panoramicVolume 1 N.Y.: William Lewer, Publisher. historical-museums. Ref. 382–382. 94. Description: Depicting a scene from “Nights at Sea; Or, Sketches of Naval Life during the War” by Matthew Henry Barker.

7

Industrial War of Organic Beings, the American Caesura 1860–1865

A Power of Renowned Cold, The Climate of the Grave A Temperature just Adequate So Anthracite, to Live— Emily Dickinson, More life—went out (422), 1862.

7.1

The First Anthropocene War

Viewed through an ecological prism, the American Civil War (1861–1865) manifested as an internecine conflict pitting an industrialized, mechanized North against the South’s feudal, agricultural slaveocracy. The war, fought for the preservation of the United States in opposition to the right of individual states to secede, was sparked by Southern efforts to expand slavery, countered by Northern calls to limit and abolish the practice. Manifesting as an “industrialorganic event,” the clash can be described as the earth’s first Anthropocene War, catalysed by the latent agencies of the Industrial Revolution’s complex interactions between carboniferous fuels, technologies, humans, physical environments, and other species.1 It has been speculated that “had the South seceded in the thirties, it could have won its independence, as, in that year, the North was not yet equipped with a large network of railroads, electric telegraph and a full navy of steamships.”2 Because of the Union’s industrial agency, the war was expected initially

to last only a few months. But as the conflict stretched into years, it became clear to both Northern and Southern armies that the side which defined and dominated the environment of battle would be the one that would win the war.3 It has been argued that: . . . the Civil War was a duel in which two social and biological entities battled one another in the medium of nature. This was a struggle not simply between two economies—between the stereotyped industrial North and the agrarian South, for example—but between ecologies . . . an organic struggle in which two societies fought to use and overcome nature in the service of competing national objectives.4

A turning point in the war came in 1863, with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that freed peoples of African descent, who from 1619, had been held as chattel slaves in North America. Lincoln’s presidential edict redefined the war between the Union and the Confederacy, transforming the conflict into an existential struggle to determine the nature of the human and political geography that would come to characterize the future of the United States.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Travis, Environment as a Weapon, Historical Geography and Geosciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_7

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7.1.1 The Industrial Revolution In 1712, blacksmith and lay Baptist preacher Thomas Newcomen assembled a steam-powered mechanical engine to pump water from flooded English coal mines and pits. Reporting his death in 1729, the Monthly Chronicle, a London periodical, cited Newcomen as the inventor of a “surprising machine for raising water by fire,”— which manifested as one of the early industrialorganic assemblages inaugurating the Anthropocene (Fig. 7.1).5 Ironically named the “atmospheric engine,” Newcomen’s pump expedited fossil fuel extractions. With James Watt’s design improvements in the late eighteenth century, the pump ensured a steady supply of coal to stoke steam boilers and furnaces of mills, factories, trains, and ships. The fuel’s combustion began to emit unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide gas into the Earth’s atmosphere and left long, sooty trails of smoke lingering in the skies above cities, the countryside, Fig. 7.1 Steam Pump (Atmospheric Engine), 1734. Source Wikimedia Commons6

and the planet’s oceans. In L’ Évolution Créatrice (1911), Henri Bergson mused: A century has elapsed since the invention of the steam engine, and we are just beginning to feel the depths of the shock it gave us . . . In thousands of years, when, seen from a distance, . . . our wars and revolutions will count for little, . . . but the steam engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of pre-historic time: it will serve to define an age.7

In part bolstered by England's response to the Napoleonic Continental Blockade (1803–1815), the spread of the Industrial Revolution in Britain had a minimal impact on the early nineteenthcentury military campaigns that gave birth to the phenomena of Grande Armées and Total War. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the political rupture in the United States between Northern and Southern states, the assemblage of fossil fuels and mechanized manufacturing processes, and leviathan sized armies irreversibly transformed the environments of war: “The

7.2 Emily Dickinson and the Industrial-Organic Assemblages of War

French Revolution had made shambles of the old-fashioned, numerically limited mercenary armies, introducing instead large-scale national warfare. Napoleon had yet been able to mobilize four times as many men as any big power before him; now, the sweeping, gigantic forces of industrialism and technology were setting the stage for warfare on a scale hitherto never seen.”8 On the eve of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, the country’s growing industrial base was extracting and burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate in human history. Bituminous coal deposits in the Appalachian Mountain range, supplied much of this fuel, but in particular the opening of anthracite fields in Pennsylvania in the 1830s, provided factories in the industrial northeast with an inexpensive coal that burned at the high temperatures required for superior-grade metallurgy.9 The Appalachian coal fields were deposited during the Carboniferous Age (358–298 Mil BCE) when lush tropical forests shed their leaves into the region’s valleys.10 As centuries passed, forests flourished and decayed, laying carpets of organic detritus over fossilized ancestors. This inexorable organic-geological cycle was disrupted seventy million years ago, when a tremendous tectonic shock thundered across the American northeast. Under immense pressure, large chunks of surface crust, torqued by heat, thrust up into the sky to form the Appalachian Mountains. Embedded within the range of its peaks and valleys, beds of bituminous and anthracite coal lay dormant for millions and millions of years, waiting in geological hibernation for humans to release the solar energy in their stores.11 By the 1840s, the amount of anthracite and bituminous fossils burning in thousands of American furnaces, forges and factories, prompted period journals to declare that the United States had entered the “Coal Age.”12

7.2

Emily Dickinson and the Industrial-Organic Assemblages of War

The Civil War fostered large corporate investments in bituminous mining, making the softer coal the dominant fuel of the second wave of the

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American Industrial Revolution.13 The integration of war, and the technologies generated by the revolution, created industrial-organic assemblages between soldiers, armies, mines, coal-diggers, factories, free and enslaved workers, iron and steel furnaces, cotton plantations and mills, railroads, steamships, and other mechanized and agricultural processes. These assemblages generated new theatres and practices of warfare in which armies, troops, food supplies, battlefields, and the matériel of combat became inextricably enmeshed with the physical geographies of battlefields and their underlying carbonate geologies.14 In Poem 754, written in 1862, the poet Emily Dickinson (1830– 1886) situated the remains of Civil War soldiers as “legacy sediments,” to be impressed in the stratigraphic layers of the earth, like Carboniferous Age deposits: A Power of Renowned Cold, The Climate of the Grave A Temperature just adequate So Anthracite, to live—(Poem 754)15

Indeed, the industrial-organic assemblage of carboniferous deposits, and factories, linked to theaters of combat, vastly increased the extent and scale of killing during the Civil War, as rifles, artillery, ammunition, and ordnances were shipped with greater speed and in higher numbers to the U.S. and Confederate front lines by coal-fired, steam-powered trains and ships.16 With the outbreak of the war in 1861, the demand for coal greatly increased in the North and the South, with each army trying to disrupt the other’s supply lines: “each side remade its relationship with nature. Each attempted to fashion a system of extraction, production, and supply, a military ecology, so to speak, the goal of which was to defeat the enemy.”17 The Confederate government created its own industrial-organic assemblages by taking control of Richmond Virginia’s Tredegar Iron Work, nationalizing southern iron forges, building mills to manufacture war matériel, and commissioning “geological surveys to find coal, iron ore, and niter,” -the latter a key ingredient of gunpowder—an ordnance not produced on an industrial scale in the Southern states prior to the start of the war.18

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Industrial War of Organic Beings, the American Caesura 1860–1865

Despite the North’s industrial lead, Confederate General Robert E. Lee was able to successfully deploy the topography and terrains of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland as weapons so skilfully, that President Lincoln, the plodding Army of the Potomac, led by General George B. McClellan, and a succession of mediocre generals, were left thwarted and demoralized, despite the North’s manufacturing might and deep reserves of coal. Lee’s adroit deployment of environment as a weapon is illustrated by his 1862 invasion of the North. Beginning with a Confederate victory on August 30, at the Second Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) in Pennsylvania, Lee’s offensive culminated in a titanic clash with McClellan’s army at Sharpsburg, Maryland, in September 1862. In the days leading up to the Battle of Antietam Creek, the Confederate general cannily utilized passes in the northern range of the Blue Ridge Mountains, like the Spartans at Thermopylae. Lee skirmished with McClellan’s forces in the narrow, quartz walled valleys of Maryland’s South Mountain to hinder the Union’s advance on the town of Sharpsburg. When the Army of the Potomac did arrive to the fields surrounding Antietam Creek, the cornfields and forests sitting upon undulating beds of limestone, kept Union corps commanders from being able to see each other’s position on the battlefield or communicate clearly across the front line, much less coordinate their attacks against Lee’s Confederate forces.19 Hostilities at Antietam erupted on the morning of September 17. Waged in the cornfields and thickets around Dunker Church, both sides fought stumbling battles that raged across a washboard bedrock of Conococheague limestone.20 In the afternoon, the battle coursed down an old sunken farm road, later christened the “Bloody Lane,” culminating at a bridge over Antietam Creek, just south of Sharpsburg. Despite multiple assaults, the Army of the Potomac, hindered by the terrain and General McClellan’s failure to brief Union corps commanders of his battleplan, was unable to break Lee’s lines. The battle ended when A.P. Hill’s Confederate division, marching from Harpers Ferry, Virginia, arrived to deliver a conclusive blow to

McClellan’s corps and cover Lee’s withdrawal. The casualty figure for the Battle of Antietam stood at 22,717 and remains the single-bloodiest day of warfare in the history of the United States.21 Its carnage prompted Dickinson’s Poem 656: The name—of it—is “Autumn”— The hue—of it—is Blood— An Artery—upon the Hill— A Vein—along the Road— Great Globules—in the Alleys— And Oh, the Shower of Stain— When Winds—upset the Basin— And spill the Scarlet Rain— It sprinkles Bonnets—far below— It gathers ruddy Pools— Then—eddies like a Rose—away— Upon Vermilion Wheels—(Poem 656)22

The eviscerated Maryland battlefield portrayed in Dickinson’s poem “is a strikingly accurate transcription of the terrain around Sharpsburg, the town through which Antietam Creek flows.”23 Poem 656 conveys a poetic insight that the Civil War manifested as an ecological catastrophe which entangled human bodies with the environment on savage, intimate, and microscopic scales. In doing so, Dickinson’s imagery reverberates with observations Charles Darwin jotted down in his 1839 notebook entry: “It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings, going on in the peaceful woods, and smiling fields.”24 The images of “arteries upon the hills, bodies of stone, winds that make as to devour” indicate that Dickinson’s ecological allusions “may be far less metaphoric than we assume.”25 In the early years of the Civil War, Dickinson felt “possessed by a daemonic force,” and in its thrall “invented a language more varied, more compressed, more dense with implication, more complex of syntax, than any American poetic language to date.”26 Dickinson did not venture far from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, but followed the ebb and flow of the war in a local newspaper the Springfield Republican, a publication linked to the Civil War’s front lines by the telegraph, a technology she celebrated in Poem 630: The Lightning playeth—all the while—... With Insulators—and a Glove—... Upon the Ropes—Above Our Head— Continual—with the News—(Poem 630).27

7.3 The Anaconda Blockade: Coal and Steam

Dickinson corresponded with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Union officer, literary critic and radical abolitionist and was a keen reader of Harper’s Weekly and The Atlantic Monthly. During the years of the Civil War, she composed 852 of her 1656 poems, musing in one that she “sang off charnel steps” and in another that she “stood—a Loaded Gun.”28 Dickinson’s poems were also informed in part by a formal education she declared was fairly balanced between the humanities and natural sciences: “I have four studies. They are Mental Philosophy, Geology, Latin, and Botany.”29 In particular, she drew on Edward Hitchcock’s, Religion of Geology (1851) and Almira H. Lincoln’s Familiar Lectures on Botany (1854). Hitchcock, Dickinson’s geology professor, was a proponent of “natural theology” a subject that blended “scientific observation with religious teleology to create an iconography of cultural nationalism.”30 Although Dickinson’s poetry cleaves from Hitchcock’s latent jingoism, her perceptions contain the tint of an ecological aesthetic, not untouched by the Civil War, and conscious of the increasingly larger and greater amounts of human and natural resources devoured by the clash’s

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industrial dimension. Selections from Dickinson’s canon contextualize the accoutrements of coal, steamships, and railroads that shaped the Civil War’s theatres of combat. The Union’s Anaconda Blockade of the Confederacy (1861–1865), General Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea” (1864), General Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, and disastrous Battle of the Crater at the Siege of Petersburg (1864) serve as prime examples of the complex industrial-organic-assemblages between humans, technologies, and the physical geography of war (Fig. 7.2).

7.3

The Anaconda Blockade: Coal and Steam

After the rebel shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, South Carolina on April 12, 1861, and secession of the southern states signalling the start of the U.S. Civil War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ administration anticipated that exports of raw cotton to English textile mills would infuse the South with the cash required to fund an armed conflict with the Union. Eighty

Fig. 7.2 Civil War Industrial-Organic Assemblages. Map by Charles Travis31

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per cent of Britain’s cotton was supplied by America’s southern plantations, but the power behind “King Cotton’s rickety throne” were the brokers in the markets of New York and Liverpool, not the plantation owners of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas who cultivated the plant fibre with the industry of enslaved labour.32 Cognizant of the Confederate’s Achilles heel, Winfield Scott, the war’s first Union General-inChief, devised a strategy later named “Anaconda” to block southern ports from exporting cotton to England and importing war matériel from Europe. U.S. Flag Officer Silas Stringham anticipated that steam power was to be the critical factor in ensuring the success of the Union’s naval strategy: “I will trade you my two sailing frigates and a sloop for one of the new steamers now building.”33 U.S. Rear Adm. Samuel F. DuPont, who implemented Anaconda, concurred that steam was “the new element in the history of blockades.”34 Although Dickson’s Poem 585 comments on rail travel, her paean to the speed of a steam train attests to the exponential increase in horsepower provided by coal-fired boilers: I like to See It Lap the Miles— And Lick the Valleys up— And stop to feed itself at Tanks—(Excerpt, Poem 585).

U.S. Navy steamships, gunboats, and ironclads fuelled by anthracite and bituminous coal, enforced Scott’s Anaconda strategy. Lasting the duration of the war, the naval gunboat blockade, like the python it was later named for, strangled the South’s international cotton trade. The deepwater blockade enforced along the Atlantic seaboard from Chesapeake Bay to the Florida Keys, curved west, hugging the Gulf of Mexico’s coast all the way to the Mexican port of Matamoros. In 1852, Engineer-in-Chief Charles B. Stuart recommended that the U.S. Navy burn anthracite because its ships could carry more of the coal due to its smaller bulk, and thus remain at sea twothirds longer without having to call to port to refuel.35 Most of the hard, anthracite coal bought by the U.S. Navy, was mined in Pennsylvania and shipped by sailing sloop from New York or

Philadelphia to Union coaling stations on the Atlantic coast in Cuba, and along the Gulf Coast of Florida.35 Gunboat captains enforcing the Anaconda Blockade preferred anthracite coal because the soft bituminous fuel left trails of smoke, while the hard coal burned clean, making it difficult for Confederate smugglers to spot and elude U.S. Navy patrols.37 Anaconda’s second goal was to capture New Orleans and liberate the lower Mississippi River in order to open the United States’ vital trade artery to the Gulf of Mexico.38 By the 1860s, timber in the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi River Valleys was being depleted by the number of farms and towns proliferating in the wake of America’s westwards expansion. Consequently, the war effort to wrest the southern portion of the river from the Confederacy was fuelled in part by one of the largest bituminous coal deposits in the nation, located under the state of Illinois.39 Once ancient peatlands, the bituminous fields ran parallel to the Mississippi and along with soft coal deposits from Pennsylvania, fuelled the Union gunboats and ironclads that captured Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers in 1862. Coal powered gunboats contributed to the Confederate capitulation of the city of Vicksburg to General Ulysses S. Grant, which secured the war’s Western Theatre for the Union in 1863, leading President Abraham Lincoln to proclaim that “the Father of All Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”40

7.4

War of Ecological Annihilation, 1864–1865

Until the Second Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee was able to deploy the topography and terrain of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland as weapons so skilfully that the lugubrious, industrial Northern armies were left demoralized and defensive in the war’s Eastern Theatre. In 1864, after the Union victory at Vicksburg, Mississippi, President Lincoln plagued by a series of incompetent generals, promoted the pugnacious store-clerk

7.4 War of Ecological Annihilation, 1864–1865

from Galena, Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant to the rank of Lieutenant-General, and gave him free reign. Unlike his predecessors, Grant a graduate of West Point, and superior horseman, did not retreat in the face of Southern forces, or seemed daunted by the environmental obstacles in his path. Under his command, the Union industrialized Napoleon’s concept of Total War and deployed ecological strategies and tactics to destroy the Confederate army and the affluent Southern plantation society it was fighting to defend. By 1861, the western coal-bearing region of Virginia voted to leave the Confederacy and in 1863 joined the Union as the state of West Virginia. Although the Richmond Coalfield was located ten miles from the Confederate capital, Lee’s Army of North Virginia was deprived of a strategic source of fuel.41 In 1864 Grant ordered General Tecumseh Sherman to Georgia, a state that Confederate President Jefferson Davis stated “produces food enough not only for her own people and the army within it, but feeds too the Army of Virginia.”42 Atlanta Georgia, sitting strategically at the junction of four railroads in the northwest of the state, operated as the Confederacy’s second largest supply hub. Sherman marched to the city and attacked Confederate General John Bell Hood’s army on July 22. The Union Army left the landscape of northern Georgia appearing as if “some giant ploughshare had passed through the land, marring with gigantic and unsightly furrows the rolling plains, laying waste the fields and gardens.”43 On September 2, Sherman’s forces captured Atlanta, boosting the Union’s morale and securing President Lincoln’s re-election in 1864. Sherman’s campaign exposed “the tenuous nature” of the “southerner’s control” over its slaveocracy. The Union strategy destroyed the Confederate’s primary relationship with its natural environment: The soil which formerly was devoted to the peaceful labors of the agriculturalist has leaped up, as it were, into frowning parapets, supported and surmounted by logs, and guarded in front by tangled abattis, palisades, and chevaux de fries, [reflected] in quiet rippling streams.44

On November 15, Sherman ordered the business district of Atlanta burned to the ground. Over

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three thousand factories, hospitals, warehouses, schools, and homes went up in flames. The general’s troops also heated and twisted the city’s train rails into “Sherman Neckties,” destroying the Confederate Army’s access to a vital supply hub. An image of the burning southern metropolis flickers in Dickinson’s Poem 601: “The solemn— Torrid—Symbol— / And Cities—slip—slide—melt —ooze away.”45 With Atlanta in flames, Sherman’s army turned southeast towards the port city of Savannah and began its famous “March to the Sea,” which ended on December 21. The Union’s scorched-earth campaign left the smouldering ruins of towns and plantations in its wake and enforced Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation on its way. Sherman observed: The people of Georgia don’t know what war means but when the rich planters of the Oconee and Savannah see their fences and corn and hogs and sheep vanish before their eyes they will have something more than a mean opinion of the “Yanks.”46

After taking command in 1864, Grant’s strategy and Sherman’s tactics illustrated that their perception of the Confederate “landscape was not simply a backdrop to the events of the war—a place where battles took place—but a powerful military resource and an important factor in military decision making.”47 With the Union capture of the South’s “great granary” in the Shenandoah Valley, and the losses of large agricultural swathes in the Carolinas and Georgia, Lee’s army was forced in 1864, to withdraw to the region around Richmond, Virginia to defend the Confederacy’s capital.48

7.4.1 The Overland Campaign: “Forests of the Dead” Generals Grant and Lee first faced each other in combat at the Battle of the Wilderness during the Overland Campaign in May, 1864. The dense forest in Northern Virginia, west of Fredericksburg and south of the Rappahannock River seemed to suit Lee’s deployment of environment as a weapon. Within the rough terrain of the Wilderness, the smaller Confederate army could match

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Grant’s larger force, as its thickets of woods and briars impeded the mobility of Union troops and restricted the range of rifle and artillery fire. The Rapidan, flowing east out of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, fed by the Rappahannock River served as a natural border between the Confederacy and the United States. After crossing the Rapidan on a pontoon bridge, Grant marched on Lee’s army in the Wilderness. The secondgrowth forest of thorny underbrush presented a battlefield of twisted vine, dense foliage, stunted pine, and scrub oak, its ravines littered with the decrepit houses and barns of abandoned farms. In the 1700s, trees from the forest supplied fuel for local pig-iron furnaces. When coal replaced charcoal in the early nineteenth century, the woodlands rewilded rapidly. To Union soldiers, the sleepy, overgrown roads of the Wilderness disappeared into a haunting and impenetrable labyrinth of trees, leaves, creepers, and thickets that on May 5 suddenly exploded into the “Iron Storm” of an intense battle.49 Returning the Confederate salvo, Union General Hancock reported: The fighting became very fierce at once. The lines of battle were exceedingly close, the musketry continuous and deadly along the entire line . . . The battle raged with great severity and obstinacy until about 8 p.m. without decided advantage to either party.50

Smoke from the battle’s gunpowder blinded soldiers and sparks from exploding Union shells set the bone-dry forest on fire. A surviving Union soldier recalled that the experience was like fighting in “the wildest regions of Dante’s Inferno.”51 Flames spread and soon the entire Wilderness flared into a firestorm that created a roaring, scorching wind from the amount of oxygen it was consuming. With the burning landscape incinerating his troops, Grant refused to retreat and ordered trenches dug to secure Confederate ground captured by the Union in the flaming forest. One soldier recalled the general sitting on a cracker box, smoking a cigar, with sparks falling all around him, watching Northern army wagons roll along the fiery roads of the Wilderness. During the battle, tree trunks as large as a man’s body were whittled down by rifle fire, and the slain were stacked in trenches like cordwood.52 30,000 Union

and Confederate soldiers were killed in the battle the ended on May 7. Like images in Dickinson’s Poem 615, skeletal remains laid strewn in the Wilderness for years after the end of the war, Our journey had advanced— Our feet were almost come To that odd Fork in Being's Road— Eternity—by Term— Our pace took sudden awe— Our feet—reluctant—led— Before—were Cities—but Between— The Forest of the Dead— Retreat—was out of Hope— Behind—a Sealed Route— Eternity’s White Flag—Before— And God—at every Gate—(Poem 615)53

Between May 31, and June 12, Grant suffered bloody losses to Lee in a series of battles at Cold Harbor. Dickson’s Poem 639 distils the emerging landscapes of industrialized carnage that emerged in the U.S. Civil War: ‘Tis populous with Bone and stain— And Men too straight to stoop again, And Piles of solid Moan— And Chips of Blank—in Boyish Eyes— And scraps of Prayer— And Death’s surprise, Stamped visible—in Stone—(Excerpt, Poem 639)54

During the Overland Campaign of 1864, “close-range fighting” became normalized. Civil War trench warfare, born at Vicksburg and the Wilderness, consolidated at Spotsylvania Court House, was institutionalized at Cold Harbor and at Petersburg, Virginia.55 After forty days of battles on the territory between the Rappahannock, Rapidan and James Rivers, the North, despite its losses, did not retreat from the fierce Confederate resistance being put up by Lee and his forces, confirming to allies and enemies alike, that Union General Grant was indeed intent on waging a war of total annihilation against the Southern slaveocracy (Fig. 7.3).

7.4.2 Siege of Petersburg and the Battle of the Crater After the brutal Overland Campaigns and Battle of Cold Harbor, Grant moved to capture

7.4 War of Ecological Annihilation, 1864–1865

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Fig. 7.3 Eastern Theatre Civil War Battles, 1862–1864. Map by Charles Travis56

Richmond and end the war by cutting off a vital railroad junction south of the Confederate capital. Lasting 292 days from June 15, 1864, to April 2, 1865, the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia, was the longest in the history of American warfare. Union soldiers outnumbered Southern rebels two-to-one, and by the end, with Grant's failure to capture a Confederate rail supply hub, resulted in 11,386 casualties. With the end of the war approaching, Northern and Southern commanders realized that “mastering nature as much as outmaneuvering and outfighting one’s opponent,”57 would be the key to victory. After four years, Union and Confederate armies had become “in effect, organic entities, intimately engaged with their local ecosystems and plugged into more distant networks and assemblages of natural resource production.”58 The vital organs of an environmental weapon assembly, possessing the volcanic force of a geohazard led to the infamous Battle of the Crater at Petersburg on July 30, 1864. The assemblage included Elliot’s Salient—a Confederate trench redoubt, anthracite miners from the 48th Pennsylvania Regiment, the sandy, clay marl soils of the coastal plain of Virginia and its oak, ash, and hickory trees, the Union IX Corps, the Army of

Northern Virginia, the United States Colored Troops’ 4th Division, Virginia, North and South Carolina regiments, and the ingredients of gunpowder—saltpetre (potassium nitrate), charcoal, and sulphur. Expectations were raised that an explosive, subterranean assault on the southern strong-hold would break Lee's lines, end the stalemate of the siege and win the war for the Union. However, although the North’s environmental weapon created a monstrous breach in the rebel trenches, its deployment led to a disastrous rout that brought the Confederates a savage, and unexpected victory. The Siege of Peterburg, was in many ways a rehearsal for the horrors of the First World War. In July 1864, the Union army’s advance was stalled by a Confederate trench line, that hugged the banks of the Appomattox River in defense of a transport hub where five supply railroads to the South converged.59 The Union 48th Regiment, a volunteer company from the Schuylkill Valley anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania, occupied the “Horseshoe,” -an entrenchment sitting onehundred yards across from a squat Confederate redoubt named Elliot’s Salient. This rebel stronghold sat in front of the high ground of the Jerusalem Plank Road, next to the aptly named

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Cemetery Hill, on the left flank of the rebel defensive line that curled around Petersburg's railheads.60 The 48th Regiment commander, Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants overheard his troop of Pennsylvania coal miners muttering “we could blow that damn fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it.”61 Pleasants, a mining engineer liked the idea and conducting a survey, discovered a geomorphological fault near Eliot’s Salient, and devised a plan to detonate a breach in the Confederate line with 8000 pounds of gunpowder. Passed up the chain of command to General Grant, Pleasants’ plan was approved because in 1863, at the Siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Grant witnessed an explosive breach of a Confederate bastion, and agreed that blasting a hole in a redoubt constructed from Virginia’s coastal plain soil, would bring about the same results.62 From June 25 to July 23, Pleasants and his men, taking bearings from a theodolite, tunnelled west through layers of sand and clay, scooping out a sloping passage that levelled out twenty feet under Elliot’s Salient. Shoring up the tunnel’s main shaft with oak, ash, and hickory timbers foraged from Petersburg’s woods and bridges, seventeen diggers used cracker boxes to carry dirt out of the 511-foot passage, before burrowing two 25-foot lateral galleries that gave the mine the shape of the letter “T.”63 320 barrels of gunpowder, rolled into arms of the “T” were packed with sand-bags to direct the explosion up through the floor of the Confederate redoubt. A fuse, spliced from two strands, into a 98-foot line, spooled out to the entrance of the mine was ignited at 3.15 AM on July 30. No explosion ensued. Two nervous soldiers were then forced to crawl into mine and repair the broken fuse. Meanwhile, 50,000 Union infantry soldiers from the 9th Corps lay on the ground waiting in baited silence. Suddenly at 4.45 AM, a tremendous roar was accompanied by “a great mass of earth hurled skyward like a waterspout. As it spread out into an immense cloud” Union troops in “the front ranks broke in panic; it looked as if the mass were descending upon their own heads.”64 In Poem 1705, Dickinson remarks, “Volcanoes be in Sicily / And South America / I judge from

my Geography—Volcanoes nearer here,”65 a theme she visited earlier in Poem 175: I have never seen “Volcanoes”— But, when Travellers tell How those old—phlegmatic mountains Usually so still— Bear within—appalling Ordnance, Fire, and smoke, and gun, Taking Villages for breakfast, And appalling Men—66

On September 2, the Boston Recorder reported on the tremendous detonation set off by Pleasants and his men under Elliot’s Salient. The newspaper published an excerpt of a letter written by a Union soldier who had seen the explosion: “I could see the whole fort up in the air, men, cannon, sand-bags and everything flying all around.”67 Another witness to the spectacle claimed a smoky plume rose “after the ascending column,” and “earth, cannon, timbers, sand-bags, human beings, smoke, and fire,” seemed suspended in mid-air for an instant.68 Then the massive greasy, carbonic, cloud of charnel imploded and “fell back into and around the smoking crater” where three hundred or so Confederate soldiers lay dead.69 The detonation of the mine carried the impact of a natural disaster: “the ground underneath trembled as if by an earthquake, a solid mass of earth shot two hundred feet into the air and a flame of fire burst from the vent as from a new-born volcano.”70 Petersburg's shockwaves seem to reverberate in Dickinson’s Poem 601: “A still—Volcano—Life —... / A quiet—Earthquake style—.”71 Four tons of ordnance were detonated to breach the Confederate line, so that Union troops storming through the gap could secure the high ground of the Jerusalem Plank Road, split Southern forces and give Northern guns the control and command of Petersburg and its railyards (Fig. 7.4).72 However, when the greasy cloud of smoke cleared, Union troops found themselves standing on the lip of an enormous crater 130 feet long, 75 feet deep and 30 feet deep, with sheer, jagged walls. The bottom of the pit was “filled with dust, great blocks of clay, guns, broken carriages, projecting timbers, and men buried in various ways.”74 Some men lay “with their legs kicking

7.4 War of Ecological Annihilation, 1864–1865

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Fig. 7.4 Battle of the Crater, 1864 Collage by Charles Travis. Source Wikimedia Commons73

in the air, some with the arms only exposed, and some with every bone in their bodies apparently broken.”75 Initially, the 4th United States Colored Troops Division was to lead the attack. However, General George G. Meade, believing soldiers of color incapable of the task, and fearing a political backlash, overruled the decision. Instead, battle-fatigued 1st Division soldiers of the IX Corps, led by drunken Brigadier General James Ledlie “looked down into the pit at the indescribable horrors, and then plunged into the crater. Here, they huddled in inextricable confusion... until the yawning pit was crowded with the disorganized mass.”76 Although a third of the men in the rebel South Carolina brigade were killed by the explosion, its survivors joined the North Carolina and Virginia brigades on the western lip of the crater: . . . . the stunned and paralyzed Confederates were not long in grasping the situation. Batteries were soon planted where they could sweep the approach to the crater . . . Into this death-trap, the sun was sending down its shafts until it became as a furnace.77

In a last-ditch attempt to reverse Union losses, Burnside ordered Lieutenant Col. H. Seymour Hall and Col. Delavan Bates to lead the United

States Colored Troops Division to the rebel lines. With an improvised pincer manoeuvre, the black troops joined their white comrades, pushing the Confederates back and capturing one-hundred and fifty prisoners and rebel battle flags. A private from the Virginia brigade remarked that black soldiers “fought like bulldogs and died like soldiers.”78 Not all rebel soldiers shared the private’s sentiments. An ugly and savage, racial animus rose in the southern troops taking part in Confederate General William Mahone’s decisive counterattack. Major John C. Haskell of the North Carolina Regiment recalled: Our men, who were always made wild by having negroes sent against them . . . were utterly frenzied with rage. Nothing in the war could have exceeded the horrors that followed. No quarter was given, and for what seemed a long time, fearful butchery was carried on.79

To many in the Confederate army, the presence of the United States Colored Troops Division was evidence that the Union was intent on fulfilling radical abolitionist John Brown’s aim to instigate slave insurrections and public massacres throughout the South. The Confederate Congress mandated that captured black soldiers were not to be classified as prisoners of war, but instead be

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summarily executed as criminals, guilty of participating in a slave rebellion.80 Racialized battlerage was not restricted to the Confederacy; in some instances, surrendering white Union soldiers, fearing the retribution of Southern rebel forces, turned on and killed their black brothersin-arms. Dickinson’s Poem 970, alludes to the violent and inextricable link between racial discord and the American Civil War: Color—Caste—Denomination— These—are Time’s Affair— Death’s diviner Classifying Does not know they are—81

As the Battle of the Crater reached a crescendo, Union soldiers were pinned down by Confederate batteries and crossfire, foiling Northern attempts to supply reinforcements. Dickson’s Poem 444, couches the panic and desperation of soldiers dying in the volcanic, killing pit, with a sense of their tragic heroism: Are we that wait—sufficient worth— That such Enormous Pearl As life—dissolved be—for Us— In Battle’s—horrid Bowl? It may be—a Renown to live— I think the Man who die— Those unsustained—Saviors— Present Divinity—82

Unable to retreat or broach the pit to capture Cemetery Hill, a thousand or so men remained trapped in “the bottom of the crater, without food or water, in an oven-like heat, unable to fight” and “vulnerable to mortar-fire.”83 The battle on July 30, an assemblage of an organic-industrial environmental weapon, resulted in 38,000 Union and 2500 Confederate casualties, resulted in a demoralizing defeat for General Grant, who called it the saddest day of the war.

7.5

The Ecological Memory of War

The U.S. Civil War, arguably the world’s first large-scale Anthropocene war, is inextricably tied to the bituminous and anthracite coalfields of Appalachia and the American Industrial Revolution. The conflict served as an ecologicaltechnological bridge between the Total War

environments of the early nineteenth century and the mechanized slaughter of the “War to End all Wars” in 1914. The Civil War deployed methods that “Napoleonic genius could only foresee but not realize,” as the French Grand Armée lacked “the technological means,” available in the 1860s, to both Union and Confederate commanders.84 Dickinson’s war poetry internalizes ideas about chemistry, geology, evolution, astronomy, and other scientific subjects circulating in the hot-houses of New England’s intelligentsia. Her utilitarian appraisal and critique in Poem 356, offer a radical, transhistorical perspective conversant with twenty-first century Anthropocene discourses: As Carbon in the Coal And Carbon in the Gem Are One—and yet the former Were dull for Diadem—85

The biophysical dimensions of disease and slavery also played environmental roles in the Civil War, with impacts lingering into the twentieth century and in the latter case, to the present day. During the conflict, charges of biowarfare were levelled against the Union in 1862, after three soldiers returned to the Confederacy in a prisoner exchange presented the symptoms of small pox. A full-blown epidemic broke out the autumn of that year: From October 1862 to January 1864 there were 2513 cases of smallpox among Confederate troops in the East, with 1020 deaths. While some charged that the Union sent the Fort Delaware cases to Richmond in order to spread disease, others argued that the outbreak occurred because Confederate troops were in areas of Maryland where smallpox prevailed.86

In the case of malaria, American physicians identified the parasitical ailment as “a disease that flourished mostly in the lower South with occasional forays into North Carolina or Kentucky during especially hot summers.”87 After the war began, Confederates propagandized malarial and yellow fever outbreaks to discourage Northern army invasions of the South. The infamous Confederate Andersonville Prison in southwest Georgia held thousands of captured Union soldiers, who were packed like cattle, without shelter, in

7.5 The Ecological Memory of War

the humid, fetid heat of summer, and chilling rain and snow of winter. Between 1864 and 1865, the camp served as a ground-zero for the militarized transmission of malaria, scurvy, and dysentery. Robert H. Kellogg, a Sergeant-Major in the 10th Regiment of the Connecticut Volunteers along with his men, was interned at Andersonville. In his 1867 war memoir Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, Kellogg wrote that in the centre of the camp’s stockade, . . . was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague spot.88

Out of 45,000 prisoners, 13,000 died due to starvation, disease and climatic conditions. The

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case of Andersonville Prison exhibits how “the agency of place in generating disease contributed to wartime rhetoric about the ways in which geography would support one side over the other,” including the deliberate manipulation of the built environment... to engender disease.”89 During the Civil War, the hard labour of constructing roads, earthworks, trenches, bridges, and redoubts, in addition to collecting the remains of soldiers after the end of battles, often fell to enslaved and free blacks. While Northern and Southern commanders countered the swampy malarial conditions of the Southern landscape by treating white troops with quinine laced whiskey, the Confederate enslaved, and Union soldiers of colour were sent to work in hazardous locations prone to the disease and other ailments (Fig. 7.5).

Fig. 7.5 Andersonville Prison. Source Wikimedia Commons

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The social and environmental ruin of the American South, after the end of the war, contributed to the development of the “Lost Cause” myth, first promulgated in 1866. This hagiographic revision of Confederate history and biography, denying slavery as a cause of the war, falsely painted the southern struggle as the fight for state's rights, with the nostalgic colours of a delusionary glory. Ecological memory, defined as “the capacity of past states or experiences to influence present or future responses of the community,”90 is reflected in Mississippi writer Willian Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), which imparts a sense of the South’s wounded and skewed ecological memory: “That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.”91 The racialized spaces and geographies of the Confederacy, enforced by Jim Crow Laws, from the end of the Civil War until 1968, still linger in the corporate, Anthropocene environments of the twenty-first century American South: . . . . the petrochemical domination of the region resembles that of the plantation regime across the “Old South” referring to the slavery era. In this region where enslaved folks once labored in plantations and ranches, now their descendants, too, find their lives and surrounding ecologies imperiled for the benefit of capital.92

At the height of the Civil War in 1864, George Perkins Marsh, reflecting on the industrial scale slaughter and Janus-faced deployment and destruction of largely southern environments by Northern and Southern armies, published Man and Nature, in which he asserted that humans had commenced to wage “an almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the forms of animal and vegetable existence” in the march towards a progressive society of an industrialized “civilization”.93

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

Notes 1. Browning J., and Silver T., 2020. An envi- 15. ronmental history of the civil war. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Ref. 4. 2. Luraghi, R., 1972. The civil war and the modernization of American society: social

structure and industrial revolution in the old south before and during the war. Civil War History, 18(3), pp. 230–250. Ref. 243–244. Fiege, M. 2004. Gettysburg and the Organic Nature of the American Civil War, in (Eds.) Richard Tucker and Edmund, Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War. (Corvallis: Oregon State Univ. Press), pp. 93–109. Ibid., 93–94. Lovelock, J., 2019, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, London: Allen Lane/Penguin. Ref. 33. Steam Pump from John Theophilus Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy, 1734, vol. 1. Wikimedia Commons. Bergson, H. 1911. Creative Evolution Trans., Arthur Mitchell, New York: Henry Holt and Co. Ref. 139. Luraghi, The civil war and the modernization of American society, 243–244. Chandler, A.D., 1972. Anthracite coal and the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the United States. Business History Review, 46(2): 141–181. Ref 165. Lasson, K., 1972. A History of Appalachian Coal Mines. Legal Problems of Coal Mine Reclamation: A Study in Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, pp. 3–18. Ibid. Binder, F.M., 1959. Pennsylvania Coal and the Beginnings of American Steam Navigation. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 83(4): 420–445. Ref 445. Newcomb, R., 1978. The American Coal Industry. Current History, 74(437): 206–228. Ref 207–208. Hippensteel, S. 2023. Sand, Science, and the Civil War: Sedimentary Geology and Combat. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Ref. 69. Dickinson, E., No Date. My Life had stood: a Loaded Gun. Poem 753, Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Life_had_ stood_%E2%80%94_a_Loaded_Gun_%E2% 80%94

7.5 The Ecological Memory of War

16. Fiege, M. 2021. Gettysburg and the Organic Nature of the American Civil War. 17. Ibid., 94. 18. Knowles, A.K., 2001. Labor, Race, and Technology in the Confederate Iron Industry. Technology and Culture, 42(1): 1–26. Ref. 1. 19. Hippensteel, S., 2019. Rocks and Rifles. Advances in Military Geosciences. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-030-00877-2_8. 20. Ibid. 21. American Battlefield Trust, 2023. Antietam/ Sharpsburg, Washington, County, MD. Sep 17, 1862. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/ civil-war/battles/antietam. 22. Dickinson, E. No Date. The name—of it— is “Autumn”— . Poem 656, Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_name_% E2%80%94_of_it_%E2%80%94_is_%22 Autumn%22_%E2%80%94. 23. Hoffman, T.B. 1994. Emily Dickinson and the limit of war. The Emily Dickinson Journal, 3(2): 1–18 Ref. 10. 24. Darwin, C. R., 1839. Notebook E: Transmutation of species. Ed., John van Wyhe, Darwin Online. http://darwin-online.org.uk 25. Marrs, C., 2017. Dickinson in the Anthropocene. ESQ: A Journal of NineteenthCentury American Literature and Culture, 63(2): 201–225. Ref. 218–219. 26. Rich, A. C. 1993. Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson. Ed., A.C. Rich, et al., Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton. Ref. 182. 27. Dickinson, E. N.D. The Lightning playeth— all the while—. Poem 630, Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Lightning_ playeth_%E2%80%94_all_the_while_%E2% 80%94. 28. Ford. T.W., 1965. Emily Dickinson and the Civil War, The University Review, Kansas City, pp. 99–203. Ref. 199.; Of Emily Dickinson’s 1775 known poems, 1656 can be given approximate dates. Out of these 1656 poems, 852 were composed in the four years of the Civil War between 1861 and 1865.

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29. Gerhardt, C., 2006. “Often seen-but seldom felt”: Emily Dickinson's Reluctant Ecology of Place. The Emily Dickinson Journal, 15(1): 56–78. Ref. 58. 30. Allen, T. M., 2008. A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press. Ref. 160. 31. Travis, C. 2023 Industrial-Organic Assemblages of the America Civil War GIS Data Collation. Sources: Coal Deposits-Material for the conterminous United States was collected from James Trumbull's Coal Fields of the United States, Conterminous United States map (sheet 1, 1960). The Gulf Coast region was updated using generalized, coalbearing geology obtained from State geologic maps. Civil War States, shapefile courtesy of ESRI, Redlands CA, attributes compiled by Chris Bunin. Civil War Battles shapefile created by R. Stewart, J. Newcomb, and C. Bunin using Civil War battle information from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program. Elevation and Hillshade Layers, courtesy of Dr. Robert Kolvoord, James Madison University. Major Rivers– courtesy of ESRI, Redlands CA. Railroads, Jeremy Atack, Historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database of U.S. Railroads for [selected years based on value of .dbf field “InOpBy 1865” (August 2015) Steamboats, Jeremy Atack, Jeremy Atack, “Historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database of Steamboat-Navigated Rivers During the Nineteenth Century in the United States.” (August 2015) Kernel Density Layer of Industrial Organic War Assembly Concentration by Charles Travis. 32. Woodman, H.D. (Ed.) 1996. Slavery and the Southern Economy, Sources and Readings. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Ref. 130. 33. Blume, K.J., 1995. Coal and Diplomacy in the British Caribbean during the Civil War. Civil War History, 41(2): 116–141. Ref. 117. 34. Ibid., 117–118.

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35. Binder, Pennsylvania Coal and the Beginnings of American Steam Navigation. 36. Blume, Coal and Diplomacy in the British Caribbean during the Civil War. 37. Ibid., 117–118. 38. American Battlefield Trust, 2023. Vicksburg Campaign: Unvexing the Father of Waters. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/ vicksburg-campaign-unvexing-father-waters. 39. Lasson, A History of Appalachian Coal Mines. 40. American Battlefield Trust, Vicksburg Campaign. 41. Lasson, K., 1972. A History of Appalachian Coal Mines. 42. Rhodes, J.F., 1901. Sherman's March to the Sea. The American Historical Review, 6(3): 466–474. Ref.471. 43. Brady, L.M., 2005. The Wilderness of War: Nature and Strategy in the American Civil War. Environmental History, 10(3): 421– 447. Ref 421. 44. Ibid. 45. Dickinson, E. No Date. A still—Volcano— Life. Poem 601, Wikisource. https://en. wikisource.org/wiki/A_still_%E2%80%94_ Volcano_%E2%80%94_Life_%E2%80%94. 46. Rhodes, Sherman’s March to the Sea. 470. 47. Brady, The Wilderness of War, 423. 48. Meier, K.S., 2016. Organic Armies: Military Engagement with Nature in the American Civil War. South Central Review, 33(1): 37– 52. Ref. 38. 49. Miller, F.T and Lanier, R.S., 1911. The Photographic History of The Civil War in Ten Volumes. New York: The Review of Review, Co. Ref. 41. 50. Ibid., Ref. 40. 51. Meier, K.S., 2010. Fighting in ‘Dante’s Inferno’: Changing Perceptions of Civil War Combat in the Spotsylvania Wilderness from 1863 to 1864, in (Eds.) Pearson, C., Coates, P. and Cole, T., Militarized landscapes: from Gettysburg to Salisbury plain. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Ref. 39. 52. Ibid., 49. 53. Dickinson, E. No Date. Our journey had advanced. Poem 615, Wikisource.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60.

61.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Our_journey_ had_advanced_%E2%80%94. Dickinson, E. No Date. My Portion is Defeat —today—. Poem 639, Wikisource. https:// en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Portion_is_Defeat_ %E2%80%94_today_%E2%80%94. Meier, Fighting in ‘Dante’s Inferno,’ 54. Travis, Industrial-Organic Assemblages of the America Civil War GIS Data Collation. Image Upper Right: Battle of Antietam. Undeployed reserve artillery in the fields near McClellan’s Headquarters at the Phillip Pry House, likely taken two days after the battle. Looking east toward the Keedysville Pike. Date 19 September 1862 (Wikicommons). Image Lower Right: Skulls remaining on the field and trees destroyed at the site of the Battle of the Wilderness, 1864. (Wikicommons) Image Bottom: Battery B, 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery deployed near the Col. John Avery's House south of Petersburg, Virginia, June 21, 1864. Photograph by Timothy H. O'Sullivan (1840– 1882) (Wikicommons). Meier, Organic Armies, 38. Ibid., 38. Five railroads served Petersburg, Virginia in 1864: The Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad (N&P), the South Side Railroad (SSR), the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad (R&P), the Petersburg and Weldon Railroad (P&W) and the Atlantic and Danville Railroad (A&D). Three of the railroads captured by the Union army during the Siege of Petersburg were the N&P, the SSR, and the R&P. The P&W and the A&D, although not captured, were heavily damaged by the Union’s artillery fire. The losses, cut off the supply of the Confederate army, contributing to Lee’s eventual surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865. James, A.P., 1938. The Battle of the Crater. The Journal of the American Military History Foundation, pp. 2–25. Lykes, R. W. 1951/1956. Petersburg National Military Park, Virginia, National Park Service Historical Handbook Series No. 13, United States Department of the

7.5 The Ecological Memory of War

62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

Interior, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1951 (Revised, 1956) Ref. 16. Eastler, T.E. 2004. Military Use of Underground Terrain: A Brief Historical Perspective, in (Eds.) D.R. Caldwell, J. Ehlen, R.S. Harmon, Studies in Military Geography and Geology. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer Academic Publishers; Hippensteel, S 2023, Sand, Science, and the Civil War: Sedimentary Geology and Combat, University of Georgia Press, Athens. Kiersch, G.A., Underwood, J.R. 1998. Geology and military operations, 1800– 1900: An overview, in (Eds.) J.R. Underwood and P.L. Guth, Military Geology in War and Peace, Boulder: The Geological Society of America, Inc., pp 5–28. Miller, and Lanier, The Photographic History of The Civil War in Ten Volumes, 193. Dickinson, E. No Date. Volcanoes be in Sicily (1705) Wikisource. https://en. wikisource.org/wiki/Volcanoes_be_in_Sicily. Dickinson, E. No Date. I have never seen “Volcanoes”—(175) Wikisource. https://en. wikisource.org/wiki/I_have_never_seen_%22 Volcanoes%22_%E2%80%94. “The Repulse at Petersburg.” Boston Recorder. September 2, 1864, page not listed. https://www.beyondthecrater.com/resources/ np/1864-np/sep-64-np/np-18640902-bostonrecorder-the-repulse-at-petersburg-July301864/. Miller, and Lanier, The Photographic History of The Civil War in Ten Volumes, 200. Ibid. Ibid. Dickinson, E. No Date. A still—Volcano— Life—. Poem 601, Wikisource. https://en. wikisource.org/wiki/A_still_%E2%80%94_ Volcano_%E2%80%94_Life_%E2%80%94. Slotkin, R. 2009. No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864. New York: Random House. Main Image: Cross-section view of a scale model of the Union tunnel, Lykes, R. W. 1951/1956. Petersburg National Military Park, Virginia, National Park Service

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75. 76.

77. 78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

Historical Handbook Series No. 13, United States Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Ref. 13. Inset Right: Confederate breastworks in front of Petersburg, Va., 1865. Mathew Benjamin Brady (1822–1896) War Department. Office of the Chief Signal Officer. (1866–1947) National Archives at College Park. Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S). Inset Left: Petersburg, Virginia. Interior view of Confederate works near Elliott's salient, 3 April 1865, The Library of Congress/American Memory (LC-DIG-cwpb-02634). Slotkin, R.S., Slotkin, R., Bernard, G., Petersburg, V.A., Burkhardt, G.S., Cavanaugh, M.A., Marvel, W., Hess, E.J., Levin, K., Suderow, B. and Massacre, W., 2021. The Battle of the Crater. Essential Civil War Curriculum. Blacksburg: Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech. Ref. 5. Ibid. Miller, and Lanier, The Photographic History of The Civil War in Ten Volumes, 201– 202. Ibid. Urwin, G.J. ed., 2005. Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Ref. 205. Haskell, J.C. 1960. Haskell Memoirs: The Personal Narrative of a Confederate Officer, Eds., Gilbert E. Govan, James W. Livingston. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Ref. 77–78. Levin, K.M. 2005. The Battle of the Crater, William Mahone and Civil War Memory, 1864–1937. Unpublished M.A. Thesis, Virginia: University of Richmond. Dickinson, E. No Date. Color—Caste— Denomination—. Poem 970. Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Color_%E2% 80%94_Caste_%E2%80%94_Denomination_ %E2%80%94. Dickinson, E. No Date. It feels a shame to be Alive—. Poem 444, Wikisource. https://en. wikisource.org/wiki/It_feels_a_shame_to_be_ Alive_%E2%80%94.

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83. Slotkin et al., The Battle of the Crater, 6. 84. Luraghi, The civil war and the modernization of American society, 231. 85. Dickinson, E. No Date. The Day that I was crowned. Poem 356, Wikisource. https://en. wikisource.org/wiki/The_Day_that_I_was_ crowned. 86. Humphreys, M. 2016. This Place of Death: Environment as Weapon in the American Civil War. The Southern Quarterly 53(3): 12–36. Ref. 26. 87. Ibid., 15. 88. Kellogg, R.H., 1867. Life and Death in Rebel Prisons: Giving a Complete History of the Inhuman and Barbarous Treatment of Our

89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

Brave Soldiers by Rebel Authorities, Inflicting Terrible Suffering and Frightful Mortality. Hartford: Stebbins. Ref. 58. Humphreys, This Place of Death, 12. Bruno, T., 2022. Ecological Memory in the Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–11. Ref. 3. Faulkner, W. 1990 [1930] As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage. Ref. 45. Bruno, Ecological Memory in the Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery, 3. Marsh, G. P. 2003 [1867] Man and nature. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ref. 40.

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Global Wars, Environmental Strategy, and the Military-Ecological Complex, 1914–1975

... numerous souls of ghosts and devils were born in that deadly defeat. They were still loose, wandering in every corner and bush in the jungle, drifting along the stream, refusing to depart for the Other World. From then on, it was called the Jungle of Screaming Souls. Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 1987 La géographie, ça sert, d'abord, à faire la guerre (geography is used, first of all, to wage war). Yves Lacoste, 1976

8.1

The Bloody Jigsaw of Political Cartography

The First World War (1914–1918) let slip the dogs of Global War across the landscapes of the early twentieth century. Although anchored in the muddy trenches of Europe, the tentacles of its warring sides—the Triple Entente of France, Russia and Britain, aided by the United States, versus the Central Powers (Germany, AustriaHungary)—grappled around the globe to destroy the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, dip into Lake Victoria in East Africa, and steam into the waters of the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. With the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Hungary, and his wife in Sarajevo in June 1914, warring armies, joined by soldiers from European Colonies and Dominions, were placed as actors in a new, industrialized, yet not fully understood theatre of war whose drama had been rehearsed in the environments of the Napoleonic and American Civil Wars. Consequently, the performances of

soldiers in the battles of the “War to End All Wars” were impacted by innovative shifts in technology and metallurgy, such as the kind that manufactured the German Maschinengewehr, British Maxim, and French Hotchkiss machine guns: “At the Battle of the Somme in 1916 British troops marched towards the German lines in formation to the sound of bagpipes without seeking cover, kicking a rugby ball ahead of them... stoically unfazed by the prospect of death in a hail of machine-gun fire”1. Any lingering eighteenth and nineteenth-century notions of battlefield etiquette and honour were dispelled on the mechanized, killing fields of Flanders: For their part, the German gunners merely had to reload their machine guns. They could not believe their eyes: the British were marching to their doom like lemmings, their officers at the fore ... The cult of the horse and the naked blade was apparently the last attempt on the part of the traditional warrior caste to escape the increasing depersonalization of warfare.2

The Battle of the Somme produced over a million casualties, in a war in which thirty-seven

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Travis, Environment as a Weapon, Historical Geography and Geosciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_8

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million people were killed or wounded.3 In 1919, the Paris Peace Conference that brought the “Great War” to a close, did so by redrafting the bloody jigsaw of European, African, Asian and Oceana’s political cartography. War reparations bankrupted Germany, paving the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party and the launch of Blitzkrieg War in August 1939. The U.S. oil embargo against Imperial Japan in 1942, preceded the latter’s attack on Pearl Harbor, bringing the “sleeping giant” of industrial America into wars in Europe and the Pacific. For Charles de Gaulle, World War II seemed but a continuation of the conflict sparked in 1914, -one the French General viewed as a second iteration of the seventeenth century Thirty Year’s War, albeit on a global scale. Indeed, from the late nineteenth century onwards, American, German, and British geopolitical theoreticians strongly emphasized the role of the world’s regional environments, in their prognostications and speculations on how the nature of Global War would manifest itself in the twentieth century.

8.1.1 Sea Power, Geopolitik, and the Heartland In 1890, the American military strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History. Mahan, citing the Royal Navy’s role in securing Britain’s global supremacy and maintaining the Eurasian balance of power, argued that every world empire in history had gained power by possessing naval superiority on the world’s oceans.4 To counter Great Britain’s maritime empire, Mahan believed the United States needed to establish a modern navy, a task that Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1897–1898), and later U.S. President (1901–1909) pursued with vigour. The construction of naval ports and fortifications, coaling stations, and completion of the Panama Canal in 1914 that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, allowed the U.S. Navy to establish a military presence over vast hemispheric regions of the world’s oceans. The rise of air power in the Second World War negated the

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thrust of Mahan’s claims, but it was on the oceans during the Spanish-American War in 1898, that the United States first emerged as a world power (Fig. 8.1). Likewise, Nazi Germany’s territorial ambitions were influenced by Friedrich Ratzel’s Der Lebensraum (1900) and Karl Haushofer’s School of Geopolitk. Jailed in 1924 after his failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler studied Ratzel’s work in Landsberg Prison while writing Mein Kampf (1925). After witnessing the U.S.– Indian Wars (1865–1890) during a visit to America, Ratzel conceived a dynamic and superorganic concept of space that drew upon elements of Charles Darwin’s biological theory of evolution to reframe the national conflicts emerging within Continental Europe’s fin de siècle political geography. His concept Lebensraum (Living Space), “equated a nation with a living organism and argued that a country’s search for territorial expansion was similar to a growing organism’s search for space.”5 In addition, Haushofer’s geopolitical theories posited that the German nation was incomplete and stunted by its location in Central Europe. Strains of nineteenth century nationalism held that Arminius’ victory over the Roman Empire at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, imbued Germany with a powerful and divergent destiny from the weaker countries surrounding it. In 1942, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889– 1976) argued that the Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) had written “an —other history,” for the German Volk (people), one that commenced in a “struggle” signifying “the arrival or flight of the gods.”6 To Heidegger, the literary geography of Hölderlin’s poetry suggested that the arms of the Rhine and Danube Rivers held the cradle of a “distinctive and significant place (Ort)” where Germanic tribes had first established “their dwelling place.”7 In his reading, Hölderlin’s Der Ister traces the course of an ancient branch of the Danube back to the origins of Germany: The river now founds in the country ... a delimited place of settlement, of communication, [giving] to the people a ... country which guarantees their immediate Dasein [being]. The river is not a

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Fig. 8.1 American Dreadnought Battleship, 1909. Source Wikimedia Commons

watercourse that passes by the place of men, it is its streaming, as a country ... [that establishes] the dwelling place of men.8

Placing the blame for the loss of German’s ancient identity and modern stagnation on economic and territorial concessions dictated by the 1919 Peace Conference, Hitler conflated the Romantic nationalism of Hölderlin and Richard Wagner’s opera Der Ring des Nibelungen with Ratzel and Haushofer’s geopolitical thought. The heady mix of “art and science” birthed a mystical, Nietzschean “Triumph of Will” in Hitler’s fevered imagination, providing the Nazi Party with the rationales for the Austrian Anschluss in

1938, and invasions of Poland in 1939, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and France in 1940 and the Soviet Union in 1941, to acquire the territories, raw resources and oil, in order to expand Germany’s lebensraum (Fig. 8.2).9 In contrast to the German Geopolitik school, British imperial geographer Halford J. Mackinder’s Heartland Theory (1904) situated the Eurasian Steppe as the “geographical pivot” around which the “inner crescent” of Western Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and “outer crescent” of the American hemispheres, sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania oscillated in their competition for global

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Fig. 8.2 Halford J. Mackinder’s Heartland. Source Wikimedia Commons

dominance. Although never empirically validated, Mackinder’s ideas have not been entirely dismissed. In Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919) Mackinder crafted a geopolitical mantra: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the WorldIsland: Who rules the WorldIsland commands the World.10

From the Second World War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, to the the Soviet Union and the United States’ failed occupations of Afghanistan, the Russian Federation’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Arab–Israeli wars from 1948 to this day, the historical gravity of Mackinder’s ‘Heartland’ geographical pivot remains insistent. More than a century ago, when Britain and Russia were competing imperial forces, Mackinder identified southern Russia and the Black Sea region as an epicentre of world history, that exerted a persistent gravitational pull. He also noted the impacts of the transfer of the power of England’s industrial technology from the world’s oceans to the Euro-Asian steppe lands:

A generation ago steam and the Suez Canal appeared to have increased the mobility of seapower relatively to land-power [...] But transcontinental railways are now transmuting the conditions of land-power, and nowhere can they have such effect as in the closed heartland of EuroAsia, in vast areas of which neither timber nor accessible stone was available for road-making. Railways work the greater wonders in the steppe, because they directly replace horse and camel mobility, the road stage of development having here been omitted.11

With the Ottoman Empire as the historical pivot, English industrial and technological power compressed time and space, overcame environmental obstacles, and launched the “Great Game” across the expanses of the Middle East and Southern Asia, establishing regional hegemonies and harvesting resources for the British Empire. Following the Second World War, President Harry Truman addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress on March 12, 1947. His dramatic speech announced that $400 million would be spent on Greece and Turkey, nations carved from the the carcass of the Ottoman Empire, in order to counter the expansion of the Soviet Union: “precisely at those points where

8.1 The Bloody Jigsaw of Political Cartography

the continental power of Russia and the maritime power of Britain had collided for generations.”12 Named the Truman Doctrine, the U.S. President’s policy financially lubricated the region of Mackinder’s “geographical pivot of history,” and signed “the Cold War’s birth certificate.”13

8.1.2 Geostrategies: Floods and Firestorms In terms of human lives lost, the most devasting acts of environmental warfare in the Second World War involved the use of water and fire as weapons. In the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) the Nationalist Army of China under the command of general Chiang Kai-shek dynamited the Huayuankow Dam in 1938, flooding the Huang He (Yellow River) Valley, to halt the advance of invading Japanese imperial forces. A tremendous tsunami like wave swept down the serpentine courses and gorges of Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces, spilling over the river’s banks, washing away topsoil, livestock, and homesteads from several million acres of farmland. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese were drowned in the deluge and millions were left homeless, as the artificial flood inundated eleven cities and four thousand villages, downstream from the demolished dam.14 The New York Times reported that the destruction may have benefited the Japanese Army nearly as much as the Chinese forces. Imperial troops were able to safely regroup and mobilize along the east side of the Huang He, its torrent protecting the Japanese flank from attack. However, after the waters receded, the Huang He settled into a new channel, and the Japanese lost most of the regions they had gained to Chinese guerrilla and bandit groups. The destruction of the Huayuankow Dam by the Nationalist Army returned to haunt Chiang Kai-shek as China’s Civil War (1927–1947) came to a close. The flood’s angry survivors rallied to Mao Zedong’s Red Banner, and only after the Communist victory was China’s hydrological management of the Huang He restored.15 In terms of the number of lives claimed, the military destruction of the

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Huayuankow Dam is speculated to have been the most devastating single act of environmental warfare in all of human history (Fig. 8.3).16 Ironically, a St. Patrick’s Day flood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the Ohio River originates from the confluence of the Monongahela and Alleghany rivers contributed to the development of tactical bombing strategies, first deployed in the Second World War. The 1936 flood inundated industries in Pittsburgh clustering along the banks where the branches of the three rivers joined.17 One was Hamilton Standard, a factory which at the time was the sole manufacturer of an aeroplane propeller spring. Without this vital part, the fledgling American aeroplane production industry came to a screeching halt. The sudden breakdown of a crucial manufacturing cog in an emerging and vital industry by a natural disaster caught the attention of the U.S. Army Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field, in Montgomery, Alabama.18 The school posited that if a crucial link in the infrastructure chain of an enemy’s industrial base, water or power source was destroyed by airborne munitions, such a tactic would severely hamper a foe’s warfighting capability.19 In May 1943, Royal Air Force Lancaster Bombers from the 617 Squadron based in Lincolnshire, England dropped “bouncing bombs” that skipped across the surfaces of German reservoirs destroying the Möhne and Eder Dams and flooding the Ruhr Valley.20 Over twelve hundred lives were lost, and twenty-five bridges were washed away. As the torrent roared down the valley, one hundred and twenty-five industrial sites were obliterated or severely damaged. Railway lines were washed away, power stations were inundated, and coal mines flooded. A total of 7500 acres of farmland lay in ruins, with the bloating carcasses of 6500 cattle, sheep, and various livestock floating in pools of water. Operation Chastise pleased RAF chiefs immensely, as their “Dambusting” strategy achieved “maximum effect with minimum effort (Fig. 8.4).”21 In 1945, airborne firestorms were unleashed from the bellies of Allied Force bombers on Dresden, Germany and Tokyo, Japan.22 Prior to

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Global Wars, Environmental Strategy, and the...

Fig. 8.3 Huang He (Yellow River) Flooding, June 1938. Source 中华民国史画, Wikimedia Commons

Fig. 8.4 U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, German–Japanese Village, South of Stark Road, 1943 incendiary test area, Dugway, Utah, U.S.A. Collage by Charles Travis. Source Wikimedia Commons

8.1 The Bloody Jigsaw of Political Cartography

the raids, “mock German and Japanese housing units, complete with authentic roofing materials, furniture, and clothing” were erected in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, to test and customize the incendiaries dropped on Dresden and Tokyo.23 Each city’s commercial, industrial, and residential districts contained oil and gas depots and buildings constructed and furnished with flammable wood, fabrics, and, in the case of Tokyo, rice paper. Dresden and Tokyo’s urban centres were set on fire by incendiary ordnances composed of magnesium, thermite, and white phosphorus released from the drop tanks of British and American bombers. By rapidly consuming oxygen, the firestorms created their own weather conditions. Stoked by intense heat, the firestorms’ updrafts and strong winds generated vortex-like funnels, similar in effect to tornadoes, that intensified the heat of the flames by rapidly sucking in tremendous amounts of oxygen and increasing the scale and scope of the storm’s destruction. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1952) Billy Pilgrim, an American P.O.W. held in a decommissioned German meat processing factory, experiences one of the firebombing raid: He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of highexplosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, ... There was a firestorm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn ... .24

Renowned for its architectural beauty and artistic treasures, Dresden also housed factories and transportation infrastructure critical to Germany’s war machine. In Slaughterhouse Five “When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.... and so it goes.”25 The exact number of casualties resulting from the Dresden firebombing remains a subject of debate among historians.

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Estimates range from approximately 25,000 to over 40,000 deaths, predominantly civilian. The firebombing of Tokyo, Japan in 1945, at the end of Second World War caused extensive damage, with estimated casualties ranging from approximately 80,000 to over 100,000 deaths, making it one of the deadliest air raids in history. James Dickey, appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966, served as a U.S. Army Air Force radio operator in the Pacific theatre during the Second World War. His poem The Firebombing depicts the perspective of a firebombardier: Snap, a bulb is tricked on in the cockpit And some technical-minded stranger with my hands Is sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light, Having potential fire under the undeodorized arms Of his wings, on thin bomb-shackles, The “tear-drop-shaped” 300-gallon drop-tanks Filled with napalm and gasoline. ... Gun down The engines, the eight blades sighing For the moment when the roofs will connect Their flames, and make a town burning with all American fire.26

Dickey’s novel To The White Sea (1993) tells the story of Muldrow, an American tail-gunner who parachutes from his B-29 bomber, after the plane is shot-down over Japan during the 1945 raid. Landing on the Tokyo waterfront, Muldrow hides in a sewer-pipe and witnesses the firebombing of the city from ground-zero: This was the three-hundred-plane raid ... I could hear the incendiaries hitting ... then all at once I felt my back warm up, a heavy slash of heat ... Up and down where I had been was on fire, with the deep orange of napalm and also the blue-white of white phosphorus, which is not so much like any fire you’d know, but was more like the end of a blowtorch, all spread out and shooting up curlicues and wriggles of itself like tracers that had gone crazy ... .27

The impacts of firebombings, the Luftwaffe’s London Blitz and massive Allied B-52 runs and fire raids over Europe and Japan destroyed the pre-war “sense of place” of many urban and rural landscapes that the U.S. Marshall Plan could rebuild, but not replace. The Irish writer Samuel

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Beckett who joined the French underground in Paris and later volunteered with the Irish Red Cross at Saint-Lô in Normandy, bore witness to the massive air raids on the German occupied French cities. Beckett’s poem Saint-Lô (1945) and 1946 short story Le Fin (The End) describe the dissolution of cities as ordering, social matrices. Featuring haunted voices wandering through ruins, and social worlds left behind, his writing depicts absent cities, forgotten, and cancelled out in the wake of war (Fig. 8.5). Both Beckett’s poem and short story intimate the firebombing of Saint-Lô on July 25, 1944, during the Allied invasion of Normandy. Occupied by the German Army at the time, the small city located on the River Vire, served as a landmark for the high-altitude bombing raids of Operation Cobra. The target area was pounded with “elemental fury and saturated with 50,000 general purpose and fragmentation bombs”.28 In 1946, Beckett prepared a radio broadcast The Capital of Ruins for the Irish broadcaster, Radio Éireann, documenting the city’s post-war reconstruction. He reported that “Saint-Lô was bombed out of existence in one night. German prisoners of war, and casual labourers attracted by the relative food plenty,... continued, two years after the liberation, to clear away debris, literally by hand.”29 In the poem Saint-Lô, Beckett depicts the river passing through the ruined city:

Vire will wind in other shadows unborn through the bright ways tremble and the old mind ghost-forsaken sink into its havoc.30

Fig. 8.5 Saint-Lô, Normandy, France 1944. Source Wikimedia Commons

Global Wars, Environmental Strategy, and the...

In turn, Le Fin is narrated by a post-war existential figure, his face “A mask of dirty old hairy leather, with two holes and a slit,” who is cast out from a charitable institution or asylum.31 Upon his expulsion, the man discovers his city “had suffered many changes, nor was the country as I remembered it.”32 At the end of Le Fin, as the man drifts offshore in a boat, Beckett leaves an impression that his character becomes the victim of an explosion or a bomb: “The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space.”33 Beckett’s story seems to transpose the destroyed cityscapes of St Lô and London upon the streetscape of Dublin, in the neutral Irish Free State. By mapping out the emerging post-war landscape Beckett renders urban space simultaneously familiar and alien to the citizens of European cities being rebuilt by the U.S. Marshall Fund: In the street, I was lost. I had not set foot in this part of the city for a long time, and it seemed greatly changed. Whole buildings had disappeared, ... There were streets where I remembered none, some I did remember had vanished and others had completely changed their names ...34

The Cartesian verisimilitude characterizing Beckett’s pre-war depictions of cities such as Dublin in More Pricks than Kicks (1934), and London in Murphy (1938), transformed in the aftermath of the Second Word War to phenomenological impressions imparting an existential dislocation, and culminating in the stark landscape of his drama Waiting for Godot (1952), which is stripped bare of any trace of urbanity. The firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo and the fury of Operation Cobra during the Allied invasion of Normandy made it clear that the days of the classical, Clausewitzian definition of warfare “as a symmetrical engagement between state armies in the open field [were] over. War... [had] entered the city...—the sphere of the everyday, the private realm of the house.”35

8.2 North Vietnam’s Military-Ecological Complex, 1959–1975

8.2

North Vietnam’s MilitaryEcological Complex, 1959–1975

The Vietnamese inhabiting the mountainous eastern and coastal lowlands of the Southeast Asian Peninsula, have resisted invasions from the Chinese, the Mongols, the Chams and various other Southeast Asian kingdoms, for over onethousand years. In the late nineteenth century, France extended its colonial dominion over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. With the eruption of the Second World War, Ho Chi Minh, who had travelled to Paris, London, Boston and New York, returned to Vietnam and led the Viet Minh (Vietnamese League for Independence) in the 1945 August Rebellion that ended Japanese occupation. Drawing on the American Declaration of Independence, Ho Chi Minh founded the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), serving in Hanoi as its Prime Minister and President from 1945, until his death in 1969. In 1946, the return of the French after Second World War sparked the First Indochina War, which ended with a Viet Minh victory in 1954, at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. After the French withdrawal, the Geneva Convention partitioned the country along the 17th parallel, establishing a DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) between North and South Vietnam. Opposed to the Southern Republic’s pro-Western capitalist rule, Ho Chi Minh and his politburo deputies Le Duan and General Vo Nguyen Giap, dispatched guerrillas from the National Liberation Front, also known as the Viet Cong in 1959, to infiltrate territory below the DMZ and attack the U.S. supported Saigon government. The Viet Minh, Viet Cong (VC), and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) fighters deployed the Indochina Peninsula’s rainy monsoon season, steamy climate, lush tropical flora, and mountainous, swampy and subterranean geographies as formidable environmental weapons. In addition, sex, venereal diseases, marijuana, opium, and heroin were allies in North Vietnam’s struggle with a technologically superior, but unacclimatized Western military force. Taking advantage of the geographies of the Mekong Delta, Central Highlands, and Coastal Lowlands,

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the VC and NVA turned the American foe into a “giant without eyes.”36 Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American (1955) set in the First Indochina War, captures the prelude to the United States’ entanglement in Vietnam. Driving to an annual religious festival eighty-kilometres northwest of Saigon for The Times of London, the English journalist Thomas Fowler, gazes upon the militarized, factional, French colonial landscape flashing by his car’s windows: Every kilometre, a small mud watchtower stood up above the flat fields like an exclamation mark, and every ten-kilometres, there was a larger fort manned by a platoon of Legionaries, Moroccans of Senegalese ... One passed out of the Frenchcontrolled rice-fields into the rice-fields of the Hoa-Haos and thence into the rice-fields of the Caodaists, who were usually at war with the HoaHaos: only the flags changed on the watchtowers ... it was not the kind of country one associates with ambush, but men could conceal themselves neck-deep in the drowned fields within a few yards of the road.37

In 1959, NVA and VC construction began on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through the Annamite Mountain Range that curved like a Triassic spine, skirting the border between Laos and Vietnam down the Indochina Peninsula before crossing into Cambodia and terminating northeast of the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam. Passing across the 17th parallel, the trail was used by the NVA and VC to infiltrate the Southern Republic. From 1960, until President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the United States sent military advisors and tactical air support to aid a corrupt, South Vietnamese government and its Army of the Republic (ARVN). Despite and because of such efforts, the VC were able to win the hearts and minds of the rural Vietnamese people, who were held in contempt by their American supported leaders. In 1963, Le Duan began to convince North Vietnam’s Communist politburo to adopt a more aggressive military strategy in the war, moving away from Ho Chi Minh’s slow, gradualist posture. In 1964, after murky, naval skirmishes between North Vietnamese and U.S. navies, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson wide and

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unspecified, war powers. Because of the failure of U.S. airpower to stem the flow of VC personnel and matériel down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Johnson acceded to General William Westmoreland’s request for troops from the Ninth Marine Expeditionary Brigade to be shipped to Southeast Asia. On March 9, 1965, a troop of 3500 marines came ashore on Da Nang Beach expecting fire from the VC, they were instead welcomed by local girls and shrouded with tropical garlands. The landing marked the official start of the American ground war and was reported in the New York Times by C.L. Sulzberger, who described the environment that the U.S. military personnel would come to struggle in, for the next decade: There are fetid mahogany forests tenanted by game and cut by sluggish rivers. In paddies near protected hamlets, peasants labor beneath their broad, conical hats. The uninformed would not know that burned-out slashes on the mountainsides show where the guerrillas grow their rice.38

In the Seminole Wars (1816–1858), U.S. Civil War (1860–1865) and Spanish-American War (1898) American soldiers fought in the tropical climates of Florida, and southern regions of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Cuba, and in the Philippines, but aside from diaries and memoirs, combat knowledge of the tropics had not been formally compiled by the American military. In 1916, the deployment of the U.S. Army’s 33rd Regiment to the Panama Canal Zone prompted the drafting of a jungle warfare manual, which published in 1941, for America’s campaign in the South Pacific against the Japanese, was dusted off in the 1960s, for use in the Vietnam War (Fig. 8.6).

8.2.1 Tropical Cartesian Illusions From the landing of Marines at the beach in Da Nang in 1965, to the departure in 1975, of a lone Marine helicopter from rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, despite a decade of massive increase in troop numbers, reinforced by the gigantic technological footprint of the American Military Complex, U.S. forces had been deeply

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Global Wars, Environmental Strategy, and the...

mired in the political quagmire of a lost Cold War cause. For nearly ten years, platoons fought an invisible enemy in a tropical environment that U.S. political and military leaders, veterans of the Second World War and Korea, never truly understood or fully adapted to. Due in part to the chimerical power of cartography, U.S. forces transformed the Indochina theatre of war into a Cartesian illusion. Journalist Michael Herr, war correspondent for Esquire Magazine, in his 1967 dispatch “Hell Sucks” reported that through the lens of American military cartography, Vietnam had been: ... converted to terrain, the geography broken down into its more useful components; corps and zones, tactical areas of responsibility, vicinities of operation, outposts, positions, objectives, fields of fire.39

For Herr, the “weather of Vietnam” had “been translated into conditions,” and he concluded that was “very much the same way with the people.”40 Ruefully, Herr noted that “even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind.”41 A pacification programme to secure rural hamlets and villages from VC and NVA infiltration, a strategy deployed unsuccessfully by the French, was adopted by the Americans, with similar, dismal results. U.S. Military cartography divided Vietnam into four combat zones, that determined where “Roman Plows,” -twenty-fourton armoured bulldozers named after the town in Georgia where they rolled off the assembly linescraped firebases, outposts, defensive perimeters, and landing zones (LZ) out of South Vietnam’s tropical landscape. The Army’s 1st Calvary Division, reinstated for the war, replaced horsemounted soldiers with helicopter pilots and gunners. The “First Cav,” a highly mobile and versatile unit, transported platoons, conducted arial reconnaissance, provided fire support to ground troops and performed rapid medical evacuations. Outpost “Stud,” one of the many LZs where the U.S. Army deployed its first helicopter war, was depicted as lesion in the jungle near Truong Song:

8.2 North Vietnam’s Military-Ecological Complex, 1959–1975

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Fig. 8.6 Clockwise from left: Agent Orange poster, U.S. Army UH-1H Huey Helicopters (1970), Boeing B-52D Stratofortress, 1st Battalion Bulldozer, south of

Da Nang, Vietnam (1967) Montage by Charles Travis. Source Wikimedia Commons

Soon the lush green ... encounters the impassable rows of razor wire that encompass the slash of red scar that is Stud. Having been scraped clear of vegetation by the onslaught of bulldozers, the dramatic contrast that separates the ugly, barren outpost and surrounding rainforest is vivid; ... the outpost resembles a bleeding wound. Like hungry flies feeding on the open wound, helicopters swarm above the churning dust ... red nylon cargo nets are hooked underneath their bellies ... filled with rations, ammo, artillery rounds, water cans, body bags, razor wire, and sandbags.42

hostile bush below. Robert Tonsetic a U.S. infantryman wryly observed:

After flying over Vietnam’s tropical terrain, Marine Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo, remarked that the U.S. Army’s field manuals for jungle operations seemed “written by men whose idea of a jungle was the Everglades National Park. There was nothing friendly about the Vietnamese bush.”43 Echoing Joseph Conrad’s Belgian Congo novel, Heart of Darkness (1899), Caputo concluded “it was one of the last of the dark regions on earth.”44 Furthermore, panoptic perspectives of the jungle gathered by U.S. commanders from the cabins of circling helicopters, stood in stark contrast to the experience of sweating soldiers, hacking their way through the

Flying hundreds of feet above us, the colonels and generals became impatient when it took us hours to traverse a couple of kilometers. The jungle is much less intimidating when you’re 500 feet above it, and very few senior officers ever crawled on hands and knees through a bamboo thicket or cut their way through secondary jungle growth with a machete.45

On the ground, U.S. infantrymen drafted from Northern ghettos, Southern backwaters, Appalachian hill towns and hundreds of other places in the mid-temperate regions of America became physically intimate on their 365-day tours, with the primordial jungles that the Huey troop helicopters dropped them into. Platoons struggled across muddy dikes and rice paddies filled with stagnant water, fertilized with water buffalo dung and infested with mosquito larvae. Infantry lieutenant A.T. Lawrence stated that “when we reached the other side of the rice paddies, my men dropped their pants and burned the already engorged leeches of their ankles and penises with lit cigarettes.”46 Another recalled that “the banks

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of the streams were especially treacherous. Each step through the soft muck was torture, and every few steps a man would sink in mud up to his crotch,” as “the putrid stench of rotting vegetation permeated the stifling humid air.”47 Lieutenant Caputo wrote, “it was difficult to see much of anything through the vines and trees, tangled together in a silent, savage struggle for light and air. A war of plant life.”48 John Edmund Delezen, a Marine with the Third Force Recon concurred, musing “perhaps it is the bush that is the enemy” adopted the Zen-like perspective of Vietnamese Buddhists:

above me. They knew more about the moon than I knew about this mysterious land where we wandered about, clinging to our ideals and our weapons, utterly lost.53

... the jungle is a “cat’s cradle” of twisted vines that seem alive, as if reaching for me... When moving, the only way to pass through the vines is to become a vine; it is impossible to push through the jungle, forcing, fighting, and struggling... We have learned that we must become a part of the bush, always searching for the passage that lies hidden through the entanglement.

In the Central Highlands, U.S. platoons learned to cut their own paths through the triple-canopied foliage, due to the dangers of punji stakes of split bamboo slathered with excrement and camouflaged tripwire booby-trap mines buried on the trails by the ghostly VC. Caputo stated that an infantryman assigned point on such trails recognized “that any moment the ground he is walking on can erupt and kill him; kill him if he’s lucky. If he’s unlucky, he will be turned into a blind, deaf, emasculated, legless shell.”49 To soldiers like Caputo, Vietnam’s tropical jungle was a “thing malevolent and alive.”50 Knapsacks, canteens and cartridge belts, chafed the sweaty shoulders and waists of soldiers raw, leaving troops with “saddle sores” and “in a constant world of hurt.”51 Realizing that “every scratch was a breeding spot for bacteria which could result in the rapid growth of jungle rot,” infantryman Downs came to the realization that “our clothes and our bodies were beginning the rotting process of the jungle.”52 In 1969, as the Apollo 11 Saturn Rocket was mounting the first lunar landing, William Broyles, a Marine infantry platoon commander recalled, I lay in the jungles in the black fecund Asian night, watching astronauts streak by in the sky high

Global Wars, Environmental Strategy, and the...

During the war, the Monsoon Season alternated across the length of Vietnam, bringing tempestuous rain and wind to the North and South from May to October, and to the DMZ and Central Coastal region from September to October. Jack Estes, a U.S. Marine lamented that when the clouds did break, “it rained like it had been waiting ten thousand years to rain.”54 Nathaniel Tripp, a platoon commander, experienced tropical storms “ripping, ravaging and slapping through the jungle... howling like a monstrous beast.”55 Marine aviators ruefully noted the weather increased the vulnerability of their ground troops: The rain is also the ally of our enemy. He will use the clouds to conceal the infiltration of his regiments through the mountains from Laos and from the north through the DMZ. The Third Marine Division will depend on its recon teams much more now and we will fill the void left by observation aircraft that are now grounded due to the weather.56

The wet, humid conditions hastened mosquito breeding, and the spread of malaria peaked during the monsoon season. Scratched bites became infected: “the jungle was a constant challenge to your immune system” recalled Christopher Ronnau, an infantry foot soldier: “if the VC didn’t get you, the germs would.”57 Between 1965 and 1969, troops infected with malaria and other tropical diseases comprised two out of three U.S. military hospital admissions. In his Vietnam War novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), Denis Johnston recreated the cacophonous, diurnal soundscape that Col. Francis X. Sands, head of Psychological Operations for the CIA in Southeast Asia, finds himself in. During the day, “the oppressive life of the jungle” is filled with “the collective roar of insects, as big as any city’s at noon.”58 At night, Sands listens to “Silence. Night. Not silence—the dark screeching insect conflagration of the jungle.”59

8.2 North Vietnam’s Military-Ecological Complex, 1959–1975

8.2.2 Agent Orange, Rolling Thunder and Arclight By 1965, the loud, tangled, foliage, and fauna of Vietnam’s tropical forests became such an impediment to American war efforts that the U.S. military implemented a campaign of ecocide, first named “Operation Hades.”60 Politically minded officers revised the name of the defoliation plan to destroy the dense, tropical foliage cloaking North Vietnam’s military operations, to “Ranch Hand.” Steven Wright’s novel, Meditations in Green (1984), based on his combat tour in Vietnam, depicts the impact of the herbicide’s dioxins on the jungle: Crops aged overnight, roots shriveled, stalks collapsed where they stood into the common unmarked grave of poisoned earth. Trees turned in their uniforms, their weapons, and were mustered out, skeletal limbs too weak to assume the position of attention ... Griffin sat on his stool and watched the land die around him.61

Marine infantryman Robert Thompson recalled patrolling through “the wet fermented air” of a chemically defoliated tropical forest, finding it “slimy, like a million snails had oozed across every leaf of every bush and turned them black and shrivelled... I remember thinking: ‘This must be Agent Orange.’”62 The herbicide was named for the orange stripes painted on its barrels it was shipped in to Vietnam by its manufacturers Dow Chemical and Monsanto. Despite being banned in 1971 in America, Platoon commander Trip observed that Indochina’s jungles proved resilient in the face of the defoliant’s toxic onslaught: ... the “wait-a-minute” vines seemed to have developed a liking for the stuff and taken over like a kudzu horror movie. The long, prickly vines hung in festoons from the stark skeletons of poisoned trees and covered the ground with a shoulder-high thicket. Sometimes it would take an hour to move forward a kilometer, hacking through the vines while the sun beat down unmercifully.63

Sir Robert Thompson, British veteran of jungle warfare in Myanmar (Burma) and Malaya quipped in 1967,—at the height of American involvement in Vietnam with 500,000 military

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personnel gathered in the country—that only but a few U.S. Army generals were “able to see the woods for the defoliated trees.”64 From 1965 to 1973, U.S. President Johnson and his successor Richard M. Nixon, ordered overt and clandestine arial bombing campaigns. Operation Rolling Thunder deployed Navy and Airforce fighter planes to target North Vietnam’s military infrastructures. Operation Arclight launched large squadrons of B-52 Stratofortresses from bases in Thailand and Guam on massive, saturation bombing raids. Payloads included Napalm B and E, incendiary mixes of petroleum distillates (gasoline or kerosene) and polystyrene based gels, produced in the U.S. by the DuPont Company. In his novel, The Sorrow of War, (1987) Bao Ninh, an NVA veteran, described the impact of a burning chemical attack on North Vietnam’s 27th Battalion during the 1969 dry season: ... the sun burned harshly, the wind blew fiercely, and the enemy sent napalm spraying through the jungle and a sea of fire enveloped them, spreading like the fires of hell. Troops ... went mad, became disoriented, and threw themselves into nets of bullets, dying in the flaming inferno ... bodies blown apart, bodies vaporized ... No jungle grew again in the clearing. No grass. No plants ... In the days that followed crows and eagles darkened the sky.65

Arclight Raids left huge bomb craters, creating further obstacles for U.S. troops, especially during the monsoon season. The “muddy holes” recalled a marine, sapped “our strength as we” slid “down into their depths” waded “through the stagnant water green rainwater and then” climbed “fifteen feet up the slope to the opposite rim.”66 A platoon commander surveying a landscape impacted by a saturation bombing raid, recalled “the only recognizable human fragments were the vertebrae,” and noted that thousands “lay bleaching in the sun and rain, mixed with the dirt so uniformly that it seemed more like a geological phenomenon than anything that had once been human.”67 By releasing multiple payloads over the same location, B-29 Superfortresses pounded Vietnam’s lush tropical rainforests into sterile, karstic, moonscapes, littered with rotting

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Global Wars, Environmental Strategy, and the...

Fig. 8.7 NVA / Viet Cong Tunnel Complex Map 1960–1970 by Charles Travis. Sources Wikimedia Commons

detritus: “The jungle had been torn to smithereens by the big bombs,” an infantryman recalled: “trees had been ripped from the ground forming an abatis of twisted, inter-attached splintered branches, vines, and roots that was more impenetrable than the worst the natural jungle had to offer (Fig. 8.7).”68

8.2.3 Uncle Ho’s Trails and Tunnels Despite the devastation wrought by American bombers, the arial campaigns failed to erode the morale of the North Vietnamese. Although the U.S. bombed the Dang Loc Mountain pass, “night and day,” the raids only seemed to stoke the selfless, resilience of young Vietnamese women volunteers, tasked to clear what they affectionately called “Uncle Ho’s” trail after the attacks: ... eleven girls were in charge of leveling the craters so the trucks could get through. They marked the time bombs and the magnetic bombs with flags, for the engineers. They were very young— their leader was under twenty-one—but they were filled with enthusiasm. “One day a plane dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb right in the middle of the trail. They went out to fill in the crater, and another bomber flew over. But they were

determined to open the trail for the midnight convoy, so they kept working. The plane dropped its bombs and buried them all—all eleven sacrificed at once.”69

The Ho Chi Minh Trail’s spider web of ancient trading paths, linked the labyrinth of tunnel complexes burrowed into the soft, limestone, sandstone, clay, and gravel bedrocks, allowing the VC and NVA to penetrate the width and breadth of Vietnam, despite bombings by the “terrifying birds of prey—may bay sau rom.”70 The trail carried supplies and soldiers south and ferried wounded fighters back north to Hanoi. North Vietnamese tunnels housed dormitories, kitchens, and served as weapon factories, food depots, and field hospitals. The largest subterranean complex consisted of a two-hundred-mile maze of tunnels in Cu Chi District, only twenty miles from Saigon. In the New York Times, journalist C.L. Sulzberger reported on the progress of North Vietnam’s underground campaign: ... below the plane an invisible war proceeds, marked by singular savagery, obscured by jungle or fought at night. Agitators pertaining to the ... shadow government installed by the Vietcong in huge regions ... execute Saigon’s representatives, extort intelligence, draft labor, conscript youth and levy taxes.71

8.2 North Vietnam’s Military-Ecological Complex, 1959–1975

The trails and subterranean spaces allowed NVA and VC fighters to suddenly appear like “will o’ the wisps” and then vanish “like ghosts into a different dimension, slipping into the friendly concealment of the green, lush, wet Asian environment.”72 In January 1968, the Tet Offensive launched by North Vietnam on the eve of the Lunar New Year, struck Saigon and over 100 other cities and villages from tunnel complexes and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. NVA commanders instructed their soldiers and guerillas to “crack the sky” and “shake the earth.”73 The Tet offensive, beaten back by U.S. and ARVN forces prompted General Westmoreland, in a facesaving exercise, to declare the debacle an American victory. However, televised images of the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon being breached by the VC, were beamed back to an incredulous, American prime-time audience which was becoming increasingly divided over the war.

8.2.4 Sex, Drugs, and R&R In South Vietnam’s cities, the VC utilized Western gender and sexual attitudes within the social environments of nightclubs, red-light districts, and other “rest and relaxation” (R&R) spots, to target U.S. troops, as well as their Australian and Korean allies. Marine platoon commander William Broyles described the pull of the vibrant, urban R&R milieu on his troops: To enter Saigon from North Vietnam is like going from Moscow to Los Angeles. The place is loud, raucous, colorful; it spills onto the street—more discreetly now, of course, but its basic energy has yet to be sapped. Everything is still for sale—everything. Within five blocks of my hotel, I was offered Buddhas plundered from Cambodia, rare Chinese antiques, gold jewelry, sex with male or female prostitutes, heroin ... Drugs were everywhere, and cheap. Girls could be bought for five dollars, for twenty dollars all night. Or they could be bought for C rations ... no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop the flow of drugs and prostitutes.74

American attitudes about women and their roles, led many U.S. soldiers to believe that

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Asian women were submissive and not capable of complex acts like espionage.75 Playing to such stereotypes, South Vietnam bar girls and prostitutes, recruited by the VC flirted and seduced U.S., allied and ARVN soldiers to glean and smuggle military secrets to North Vietnamese intelligence officers.76 The NVA and VC viewed the incidental infections of gonorrhoea and syphilis and spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among U.S. and allied forces, as an effective, if indirect type of collateral damage.77 During the Vietnam War era, military health researchers reported a “concerning rise of gonococcal resistance to penicillin therapy” requiring “ever-increasing doses of penicillin” to achieve remission.78 Subsequently, apocryphal myths of untreatable strains of STDs circulated among the troops. Dan Evans, a U.S. Army medic stated that “venereal diseases, especially gonorrhoea, were almost as common as jungle rot among enlisted men.”79 Evans noted that the treatment of soldiers infected with STDs included: ... an injection of five to seven million units of penicillin in the gluteus maximus, while Sergeant Williamson informed the victim-patient of the black syph, a potent form of incurable syphilis that VC agents supposedly spread among the ladies of the night in order to infect American GIs.80

Such semi-mythical fears are reflected in novelist Ahn Jung-Hyo’s White Badge (2003). Han, a South Korean soldier fighting on the American side in Vietnam, confesses to his sergeant that he “was afraid of venereal diseases and Vietcong assassins rampant at the brothels maintained for American or Daihan soldiers.”81 Han’s fears are rooted in a “dreadful rumors about the latest venereal disease called ‘the Vietnamese shower VD,’ that was known to be widespread among the Vietnamese prostitutes in big cities.”82 Thinking about his last visit to a Vietnamese “con-gai” girl, Han imagines the worst: I could not shed my vivid sense of those creepy, darting millions of VD germs spreading through my whole body from the groin to the thighs, spreading out in all directions to the abdomen, to the chest, into the stomach, to the neck, into the brain, into every part of my anatomy.83

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Despite these myths, exceptionally high rates of STDs were reported in American servicemen during the war. Monthly U.S. military health reports listed venereal disease as the number one medical diagnosis.84 Between 1963 and 1972, annual STD rates averaged 260 infections per 1000 persons, with gonorrhoea in 90% of cases, being the leading diagnosis among all U.S. military personnel treated in Southeast Asia.85 Orphaned Amerasians, scorned as “children of the dust” by the Vietnamese, comprised another sad legacy of the U.S.’s sexual entanglements in Vietnam.86 Broyles recalled that when he landed, the first lecture he received before being shipped to the front: ... was on the dangers of sex with Vietnamese women; how odd that the offspring of such liaisons were all we left behind, as if the fundamental power of sexuality had proved stronger than all our armies, all our weapons, all our technology.87

Sanctioned and unsanctioned drug use was common among U.S. troops in Vietnam. Medics often gave U.S. infantrymen going into combat the stimulant Dexedrine, which left soldiers with “breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar.”88 In the screenplay for Oliver Stone’s film Platoon, a U.S. army bunker is commandeered by troops “like a private cabaret for the ‘heads,’” who enjoy smoking cannabis while listening to Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Go Ask Alice,’” a song about dropping the hallucinogenic L.S.D. (lysergic acid diethylamide). Rhah the “resident head” of the bunker is filmed sitting in “all his finery” puffing pot from “a huge red burning bowl of a three-foot long Montagnard pipe.”89 While back in the barracks, Bunny, an 18-year-old redneck enlistee, drinks Colt-45, listens to Country and Western star Merle Haggard singing “We don’t smoke marijuana” from Okie from Muskogee (1969) and worries about the heads’ drug use: Y’hear that story the gooks is putting chemicals in the grass so’s we become “pacifists” so’s we don’ fight ... where the hell’s everybody, theyse getting high that’s—bunch of hopheads, they think they special.90

In one conservative study, 23% of soldiers claimed they had smoken marijuana, 10%

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admitted using amphetamines, 7% dropping L.S. D. and 1.6% injecting or smoking heroin.91 By June 1971, drug abuse had reached such epidemic proportions, that the U.S. Department of Defense ordered the urine of all servicemen returning to the U.S. to be screened for substances. Overall, 5% of the samples submitted by returning soldiers were estimated to show positive indications of drug use.92

8.2.5 The ITZC Military-Ecological Complex Vietnam’s jungles exist in the equatorial Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a region where convection cells circulating from the north and south poles meet and produce copious amounts of rain, maintaining yearly precipitation levels that exceed annual evaporation rates. Aside from the monsoon season, perpetual sunlight causes the highest tropical temperature variations to occur between night and day.93 Abundant rains fall twelve months of the year, cultivating a perpetual growing season for a variety of tropical flora that flourish in triple canopies of leaves and vines that produce shade, but stunt the growth of plant species closer to the ground. The unacclimatized American soldier, “sapped by the heat and constantly threatened by body-attacking organisms” soon found “that coping with the elements [was] every bit as challenging as meeting the opponent on the battlefield,” in Vietnam.94 However, in Vietnam, aside from the Battle of Ap Bac Bien in the Mekong Delta in 1963, the Tet Offensive, and the Central Highlands Siege of Khe Sanh near the DMZ in 1968, U.S. advisors and soldiers did not face or fight the VC and NVA in a conventional theatre of war. Because of the lack of a geographically visible frontline in Vietnam, American military commanders employed abstract metrics to gauge victories and the overall progress of the war. One, called the “kill ratio,” determined that a military engagement was successful if U.S. forces counted 2 or more enemy combatants dead on field, for every

8.2 North Vietnam’s Military-Ecological Complex, 1959–1975

American soldier killed. Another was the “crossover point”—the moment in the war when U.S. and ARNV forces were estimated to have killed more VC and NVA troops than North Vietnam could replace.95 These metrics were both arbitrary and prone to political manipulation. Their compilations and false listings of American troop numbers and enemy deaths, led military analyst Daniel Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to the Washington Post and New York Times to report the misrepresentation of the war’s figures and progress during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.96 Unable to win the ground war, President Nixon secretly bombed VC bases on the Cambodian border in 1969, and then invaded the country. In 1970, Nixon began the process of “Vietnamization” by withdrawing U.S. forces. A major North Vietnamese offensive in 1972, was countered by the ARVN only with the support of American air power. In 1973, the massive U.S. bombing of Hanoi returned North Vietnam’s Politburo to the negotiating table in Paris. In exchange for all the American prisoners of war held by the North, the U.S. fully withdrew all its troops from the South. Without military or air support, the ARVN started to collapse under the onslaught of the NVA and VC. In 1975, NVA tanks and the VC breached the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon. Raising the North Vietnamese flag, the city was renamed for Ho Chi Minh, in fulfilment of their deceased leader’s thirty-year dream of geographically, if not socially, uniting his country.97 To Northern Vietnamese fighters from an agrarian society, Saigon, transformed by the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex, symbolized the decadent “Western Culture” of “bars, brothels, black markets, and xa hoi van minh—bewildering machines—most of them destructive.” In her novel When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1986) Le Ly, a phu nu can bo (member of a VC women’s cadre) outlined the North Vietnamese battle code: “When the enemy attacks, we withdraw. When he stands, we harass. When he is tired and disorganized, we attack. When he withdraws, we pursue.”98 While the tropical forests served as allies and weapons to the North

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Vietnamese, they also held their own terrors for its soldiers. After the destruction of the NVA’s 27th Battalion in a napalm and gunship battle, the Vietnamese writer Bao Ninh recalled that: ... numerous souls of ghosts and devils were born in that deadly defeat. They were still loose, wandering in every corner and bush in the jungle, drifting along the stream, refusing to depart for the Other World. From then on, it was called the Jungle of Screaming Souls ... the howls carried on the wind. Perhaps they really were the voices of the wandering souls of dead soldiers.99

During the war and after, U.S. Army Ranger and Marine officers praised the discipline and tenacity of NVA and VC men and women cadres. Some troops came to call their elusive foe “Charlie,” with grudging respect, while others perceiving that “nature, the elements, literally everything took on the form of the enemy,”100 in Vietnam, deemed the enemy subhuman “Gooks”—dangerous creatures of an exotic and bestial environment.101 The NVA and VC had been, with a few exceptions, largely unsuccessful in traditional Western full-frontal and arial military assaults against the combined forces of the U.S. and ARVN. Instead, the North Vietnamese spent more than a quarter of a century cultivating and transforming the jungle, trails and tunnels of the Indochina Peninsula into a MilitaryEcological Complex. Supplemented by arms from China and the Soviet Union, the North’s “battle code” and subterranean Military-Ecological Complex stymied the technology of the American MilitaryIndustrial Complex, causing the U.S. to withdraw in 1973. The fall of Saigon and evacuation of the American Embassy in 1975, left U.S. navy sailors pushing Huey helicopters and troop transport choppers off the overcrowded decks of aircraft carriers in the South China Sea. With the aid of an agrarian peasantry, the NVA and VC’s guerrilla insurgency deployed tropical terrain, geology and flora. In doing so, they were able to effectively counter a seemingly “omniscient American war machine” which Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, a systems analysis expert, and former President of the Ford Motor

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Company, claimed had been “bearing down on a transparent, knowable,” and “compliant battlefield.”102 Notes 1. Diner, D. 2007. Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge. Trans., William Templer and Joel Golb. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Ref. 27–29. 2. Ibid. 3. Gladwell, M. 2021. The Bomber Mafia, New York: Little, Brown and Co., Hachette Book Group. 4. O’Sullivan, P. and Miller, J.W. 2015. The Geography of Warfare, New York: Routledge. 5. Johnston, R. J., Gregory, D. and Smith, D. M. 1984. The Dictionary of Human Geography 3rd Ed. Cambridge: Blackwell. Ref. 329. 6. Heidegger, quoted in Elden, S. 2001. Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. London: Continuum. Ref. 35. 7. Elden, S. 1999. Heidegger’s Hölderlin and the Importance of Place. Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology. 30(3): 258–275. Ref. 266. 8. Ibid., 263. Parsed by Author. 9. Travis, C. 2001–2002. Heart of Darkness Redux, Journal of Postgraduate Research, Dublin: Trinity College Graduate Student Union, pp 1–15. 10. Mackinder, H.J., 1942 [1919]. Democratic ideals and reality: A study in the politics of reconstruction. Reprint of London: Constable, by Washington, D.C.: NDU Press. Ref. 106. 11. Mackinder, H.J. 1904. The Geographical Pivot of History, The Geographical Journal, 23(4): 421–437. Ref. 434. 12. Diner, Cataclysms, Ref. 201. 13. Ibid., 202. 14. Westing, A.H., 2022 [1980]. Warfare in a Fragile World: The Military Impact on the Human Environment, London: Routledge.

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15. Dutch, S. I. 2009. The largest act of environmental warfare in history. Environmental and Engineering Geoscience 15(4): 287–297. 16. Westing, A. H. 1985. Environmental warfare. Environmental Law, 15(4): 645–666. Ref. 651–652. 17. Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Dildy, D.C., 2012. Dambusters: Operation Chastise 1943. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 21. Westing, Environmental warfare. Ref. 651– 652. 22. Ross, S.H., 2015. Strategic bombing by the United States in World War II: The myths and the facts. Jefferson: McFarland. 23. Graham, S. 2004. Postmortem city, City, 8(2): 165–196, Ref. 171–172. 24. Vonnegut, K. 1952. Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children’s Crusade, A Duty-dance with Death. Internet Archive. Ref. 91. 25. Ibid. 26. Dickey, J. 1964. The Firebombing, Poetry, 104(2): 63–72. 27. Dickey, J. 1993. To the White Sea, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ref. 43–44. 28. Travis, C. 2009. Literary Landscapes of Ireland: Geographies of Irish Stories, 1929–1946. Lewiston: Mellen Press. Ref. 200–2001. 29. Beckett, S. 1986 [1946] ‘Capital of Ruins,’ in Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country: Sam Beckett’s Ireland. Dublin: The Black Cat Press. Ref. 337. 30. Beckett, S. 2002. Saint-Lô, in The Irish Times, 24 June 1946. 31. Beckett, S. 2000 [1946]. First Love and Other Novellas. London: Penguin. Ref. 22. 32. Ibid., 18. 33. Ibid., 31. 34. Ibid., 12–27. 35. Misselwitz, P. and Weizman, E. 2003. Military operations as urban planning, in Ed., A. Franke, Territories, pp. 272–275. Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Ref. 272.

8.2 North Vietnam’s Military-Ecological Complex, 1959–1975

36. Sudilovsky, D.L. 2022. The Saturated Jungle and the New York Time: Nature, culture, and the Vietnam War, Princeton Historical Review. https://history.princeton. edu/academics/undergraduate/princetonhistorical-review/saturated-jungle-and-newyork-times. 37. Greene, G. 2002 [1955]. The Quiet American, London: Vantage. Ref. 83–84; 89. 38. Sulzberger, C. L., 1965. Foreign Affairs: New Phase in an Endless War,’ New York Times, 19 March. Ref. 34. 39. Herr, M. 1987 [1968], “Hell Sucks” Ed., Harold Hayes. Smiling through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties. 1st Ed. New York: Crown Publishers. Ref. 439–440. 40. Herr, Hell Sucks; Herr, M. 1977. Dispatches. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Ref. 3. 41. Ibid. 42. Delezen, J. E. 2003. Eye of the Tiger: Memoir of a United States Marine, Third Force Recon Company, Vietnam. Jefferson: McFarland. Ref. 142. 43. Caputo, P.J., 1996. A Rumor of War. New York: Henry Holt and Co., Ref. 111. 44. Ibid. 45. Tonsetic, R. 2004, Warriors: An Infantryman’s Memoir of Vietnam. New York: Random House, Ref. 103. 46. Caputo, A Rumor of War. 47. Tonsenic, Warriors, 173. 48. Delezen, Eye of the Tiger, 37. 49. Caputo, A Rumor of War, 288. 50. Ibid. 51. Jacobs, R. 2013. Stained With the Mud of Khe Sanh: A Marine’s Letters From Vietnam,1966–1967. Jefferson: McFarland. Ref. 72–161. 52. Downs, The Killing Zone, 149. 53. Broyles, W. 1996. Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ref. xi. 54. Estes, J. 1987. A Field of Innocence. New York: Breitenbush. Ref. 79. 55. Tripp, N. 2010 [1996]. Father, Soldier, Son: Memoir of a Platoon Leader in Vietnam. South Royalton: Steerforth. Ref. 32.

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56. Delezen, Eye of the Tiger, 85. 57. Ronnau, C., 2006. Blood Trails: The Combat Diary of a Foot Soldier in Vietnam. New York: Presidio. Ref. 71. 58. Johnson, D. 2007. Tree of Smoke: A Novel. New York: Macmillan. Ref. 27. 59. Ibid., 58. 60. Zierler, D. 2011. The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment, Athens: University of Georgia Press. 61. Wright, S. 1984. Meditations in Green. New York: Bantam. Ref. 277. 62. Thompson, R. 2009. Everything Happened in Vietnam: The Year of the Rat. Apple Valley: Blue Moon Publishing. Kindle Edition. Refs. 49; 1195–1196. 63. Tripp, Father, Soldier, Son, 65. 64. Thompson, R. 1969. No exit from Vietnam. London: Chatto & Windus. Ref. 9. 65. Ninh, B. 1987. The Sorrow of War. Trans., Phan Thanh Mao. New York: Pantheon Books. Ref. 5. 66. Delezen, Eye of the Tiger, 130. 67. Tripp, Father, Soldier, Son, 65. 68. Downs, The Killing Zone, 114. 69. Broyles, Brothers in Arms, 247. 70. Hayslip, L.L. 1989. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. New York: Doubleday. Ref. 99. 71. Sulzberger, New York Times, 19 March 1965. 72. Cox, F. 2014. Lullabies for Lieutenants: Memoir of a Marine Forward Observer in Vietnam, 1965–1966. Jefferson: McFarland. Ref. 31. 73. Burns, K. and Novick, L., 2017. The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Washington D.C.: Public Broadcasting System. 74. Broyles, Brothers in Arms, Ref. 216; 249. 75. Cowger, A. 2019. Not Just a Pretty Face: The Exploitation and Disregard of Vietnamese Women during the Vietnam War. York College of Pennsylvania. Creative Commons. http://ycphistpolisci.com/not-justa-pretty-face-the-exploitation-and-disregard-

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76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

87. 88. 89.

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of-vietnamese-women-during-the-vietnam- 90. Ibid., 35. 91. Tucker, S.C. ed., 2011. The Encyclopedia of war/#footnote-59. the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Ibid.; Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Military History, [4 Volumes]: A Political, Changed Places, 82. Social, and Military History. Santa BarIbid. bara: ABC-CLIO. Ref. 732. Rasnake, M.S., Conger, N.G., McAllister, K., et al. 2005. History of U.S. military 92. Robins, L.N., Davis, D.H. and Goodwin, D. W., 1974. Drug use by US army enlisted contributions to the study of sexually men in Vietnam: A follow-up on their transmitted diseases. Military Medicine return home. American Journal of Epi170(4): 61–65. Ref. 62. demiology, 99(4): 235–249. Ref. 235. Evans, D.E. and Sasser, C.W. 2002. Doc: Platoon Medic. New York: Writer’s Club 93. Winters, H. A. 2001. Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of Press. Ref. 134. War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Ibid. Press. Ref. 233–234. Jung-hyo, A. 2003. White Badge: A Novel of Korea. New York: Soho Press. Ref 181. 94. Ibid. 95. Burns, K. and Novick, The Vietnam War. Ibid., 183. 96. Ibid. Ibid., 184. Korzeniewski, K., Juszczak, D. and Paul, 97. Ibid. P., 2020. Sexually transmitted infections in 98. Ibid., 66. the military environment. International 99. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 6. 100. Greiner, B. 2009. War Without Fronts: Maritime Health, 71(3): 207–212. The USA in Vietnam. London: Bodley Ibid. Head. Ref. 132. Lamb, D. 2009. Children of the Vietnam War, Smithsonian Magazine. https://www. 101. Ibid. smithsonianmag.com/travel/children-of-the- 102. Clayton, D. 2013. Militant Tropicality, Transactions of the Institute of British vietnam-war-131207347/. Geographers, 38: 180–192. Ref. 186. Broyles, Brothers in Arms, 178. Hess, Dispatches, Ref. 4. Stone, O. 1985, THE PLATOON, Original Screenplay by Oliver Stone Ref. Los Angeles: Ixtlan Inc. Ref. 27.

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Epilogue: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail

War has been one of the greatest geographers.1 George Taubman Goldie, Geographical Ideals, 1907 It is not that one general is more brilliant or experienced than the other; it is a question of which general has a better appreciation of the battlefield. Erwin Rommel, Second World War German Field Marshal, nom de guerre, ‘Desert Fox.’ (attributed)

9.1

The Earth Is Bleeding

One million years ago, homo-sapiens first learned to harness fire. In 800 BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod explained this very human feat, by crafting the geomyth of Prometheus, a Titan who stole fire from the gods and gifted it to mankind, thus setting into motion the geophysical process of combustion that has transformed much of the earth’s terrestrial surface. The atmospheric engine that unleashed the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the internal combustion engine, sustained by the coal and oil industries, the discovery of fission and implosion of uranium, leading to the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have from the eighteenth to the twentyfirst century laid their sedimentary traces in the thin crust of the planet, signalling that the Earth’s systems may be entering into a new geological epoch.2 While not yet formally acknowledged as a time period distinct from the Holocene by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) —despite the recommendation of the Anthropocene Working Group of the Sub-Committee on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS)—the name

“Anthropocene” nevertheless emphasizes the cumulative impact of humans on the Earth’s physical processes. Signalled by the unprecedented amount of carbon dioxide currently in the planet’s atmosphere, the mass consumption and burning of fossil fuels which still lubricate the world economy in the twenty-first century is a resource that like Helen of Troy, possesses the power to launch a thousand ships (Fig. 9.1). The origins of the American Persian Gulf Wars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be traced back to the 1930s, when Standard Oil of California geologists discovered industrial scale reserves of oil under the eastern shores of Saudi Arabia. For most of the twentieth century, preserving the flow of petroleum and the security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States remained as one of the highest U.S. geo-political priorities. In 1990, a dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over slant-drilling in the giant Rumaila oil field, precipitated Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein’s incursion inaugurated the first Persian Gulf War (1991–1992), when in response, President George H. W. Bush, a former Texas oilman, led the U.S. Coalition’s Operation

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Travis, Environment as a Weapon, Historical Geography and Geosciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50856-1_9

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Fig. 9.1 Kuwaiti Oilfields on Fire. Jonas Jordan, United States Army Corps of Engineers. Source Wikimedia Commons

Desert Shield to oust the Iraqi army. In retreat, Hussein ordered Iraqi troops to set Kuwait’s oil refineries and fields ablaze. Jarhead (2005), a film directed by Sam Mendes, depicts U.S. Marines wandering the toxic, apocalyptic landscape under a rain of crude oil, spewing from burning Kuwaiti wellheads. The following dialogue from retired Marine commander and Vietnam Veteran William Broyle’s screenplay paints a picture of the environmental disaster that befell Kuwait: Private Chris Kruger: They lit up the oil wells. It’s raining oil. It’s raining oil, fellas. You ever see that movie Giant? You’ve seen the movie Giant. James Dean, man. “My well came in, Bick. I’m rich, Bick. Richer than you.” Corporal Alan Troy: Come on, shut your trap. That shit’s poison. Come on. Private Anthony Swofford: The earth is bleeding. Staff Sgt. Sykes: Well, you’d better get used to it, ‘cause we’re gonna be living in it.3

The burning of an estimated four to six million barrels of crude oil illustrates how military agencies in the Anthropocene, from the Civil War, onwards have unleashed themselves as natural, landscape altering, if not destructive, geological forces.4

9.2

Trinity’s New Species

Returning to the Greek myth of Prometheus, Hesiod’s story is symbolic of both a rebellion against the powers that be and a quest for knowledge. By stealing fire from the gods, the Titan defied Zeus’ decision to deny humans its gifts. But Prometheus paid a painful price for his heroic act, by being chained to Mount Tartarus and having his liver eaten by an eagle, only for it to regenerate at night, so he would have to endure the excruciating cycle of pain again the next day. The myth addresses providential anger, the backlash of greater divine and natural forces, and the ethical dimensions of experimenting with the perceived natural order of things. Representations of Prometheus from the fourteenth century onwards, have emerged in three broad symbolic tropes: first, as the creator and bringer of fire; second, as a bound figure in chains; and third, unbound and freed by Heracles to steal the golden apples of Hesperides, by tricking Ledon, a dragon with one hundred heads.5 In turn, it was physicists with the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project in the 1940s who described their efforts to create a

9.2 Trinity’s New Species

nuclear chain reaction as “tickling the dragon’s tail.” And it was at 5.29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, with a brilliant flash and shockwave, followed by a polychromic mushroom cloud, that rose like a biblical pillar of fire over the Jornada del Muerto Desert of New Mexico, when the Los Alamos physicists detonated the world's first uranium bomb, with a tremendous, flaming dragon’s roar (Fig. 9.2). The plutonium implosion device tested at Trinity generated the explosive force of ten tons of dynamite. It is well publicized that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “American Prometheus” and theoretical physicist chosen by U.S. Army General Leslie R. Groves, to lead the Manhattan Project gazed at the nuclear spectacle that evaporated the steel derrick tower housing the “gadget’s” bristly sphere, murmured the verses “Now

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I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds” from the Bhagavad-Gita.6 Less known are the lines of Hindu scripture that rose in Oppenheimer’s mind as the tremendous flash of light of the uranium implosion device passed in waves and particles through the dark lenses of the his welder’s goggles, and imprinted themselves upon his retinas: If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One-.7

The idea of such a powerful energy source featured prominently in H. G. Wells’ 1914 science-fiction novel The World Set Free.8 Depicting atomic bombs and engines powered by Carolinum, a synthetic (and fictional) element, the novel anticipated the Manhattan Project’s

Fig. 9.2 Trinity Test Base Camp, edge of Jornada del Muerto Desert, New Mexico, May 1945. Source Wikimedia Commons

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plutonium manufacturing facility at Oak Ridge Tennessee, and the proliferation of nuclear power plants later in the twentieth century. The scientists at Los Alamos, the like the ones in The World Set Free, were confronted by a Janus faced-dilemma. On the one hand, by devising formulae and techniques to release and control atomic energy, the pioneers on a high New Mexico mesa produced a horrendous weapon; on the other hand, like the principals in Wells’ novel they single-handedly made coal, a greenhouse gas-producing fuel, obsolete which in The World Set Free, leads to a nuclear war, and subsequent formation of a global government.9 The discovery of radiation by Marie and Pierre Curie and breakthroughs in chemistry and physics during the European fin de siècle led to the Trinity test, and the nuclear horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Between 1890 and 1932, the concept of the atom emerged, with its its nucleus (composed of protons and neutrons) pictured as the “sun,” around which charged particles, named electrons revolved as its “orbiting bodies.” Within this solar system model, the respective positive and negative charges of protons and electrons attracted and held the largely empty space of the atom's structure together. In the 1930s, Albert Einstein’s 1905 formula— E = mc2 (energy equals mass, times the velocity of light squared), positing that if the mass composing the structure of an atom was torn apart, a considerable amount of energy would be released, became relevant to the field of applied physics.10 The atom was first split in 1932 by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory. The pair showered lithium’s nucleus with protons, creating two distinct nuclei. Then, in 1934, Enrico Fermi showered uranium atoms with neutrons, reasoning that the uncharged particles would be less likely repelled by their nuclei’s positive charges. Fermi became puzzled when his experiment produced a mysterious element, that was lighter than uranium itself. Leo Szilard, a Jewish, Hungarian physicist who fled Germany after Hitler’s election as chancellor in 1933, was in London musing on Einstein’s theory and reading Well’s World Set Free when he was struck with an insight:

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Epilogue: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail

… it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction.11

Then, nuclear fission was accidentally discovered in 1938, when German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium (atomic number 92) with neutrons, inadvertently creating a barium (atomic number 56). Uranium’s loss of 36 protons released a proportionally large amount of energy, as positively charged particles in its nucleus were pulled apart by the neutron shower.12 Consulting with Austrian theoretical physicist Lise Meitner, who had escaped to Sweden from Nazi Germany, the trio christened their technique “fission,” borrowing the term from biology, that described the process of cell mitosis and reproduction. Oppenheimer, the physicists, mathematicians, and engineers of the Manhattan Project, subsequently employed fission and deployed the atomic and subatomic environments of quantum mechanics, to design and construct a weapon with no precedents in human history. Quantum mechanics can be imagined as a grand, swirling galaxy of ephemeral, shimmering cathedrals buttressed by waves and particles of light, made up of atomic flocks of starlings, that attract and repel each other according to the unpredictable murmuration of their protons, neutrons, and electrons. Fission involves spraying and scattering such flocks with neutrons, which releases energy, as the sub-atomic birds fly apart and organize into new and smaller atomic flocks. Albert Einstein, bothered by the implications of quantum mechanic’s inherent randomness, and uncertainty, described its workings as “spooky action at a distance.” Arguing that “God did not play dice with the universe,” Einstein attempted and failed to create a Unified Field Theory model to illustrate that gravity and electromagnetism were two sides of the same atomic coin. Despite Einstein’s misgivings, quantum mechanics provided the environment for Oppenheimer and his team to construct and test the first fission implosion device, a bomb code-named the “Gadget” by the U.S. Army.

9.2 Trinity’s New Species

With the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, the bomb’s target was switched by President Harry Truman to the Pacific Theatre. Even after the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed over 100,000 people, the Imperial Army of Japan continued to fight a war of attrition that would require an Allied invasion of its islands to end the war. On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped a Uranium Gun-Bomb named “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. The city was chosen because it sat in the bowl of valley whose mountain ranges caused the bomb’s shockwaves to reverberate across its target. Viewing the atomic fireball rising over Hiroshima, the crew’s navigator recalled, “where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could now no longer see the city. We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of the mountains.”13 Another crew member said the nuclear explosion “tasted like lead”14 (Fig. 9.3). However, Japan did not surrender. On August 9, “Fat Man” a plutonium implosion device, like the “Gadget” tested at Trinity, was dropped on the city of Nagasaki by a B-29 bomber named Bockscar. As the bomb detonated, a crew member recalled, “Suddenly, the light of a thousand suns illuminated the cockpit. Even with my dark welder’s goggles, I winced and shut my eyes for a couple of seconds.”15 William Laurence, a New York Times journalist accompanying the mission, described the explosion as the parturition of a new, living creature: By the time our ship had made another turn in the direction of the atomic explosion the pillar of

147 purple fire had reached the level of our altitude. Only about forty-five seconds had passed. Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.16

In 1954, William Golding published the Lord of the Flies, a novel that tells the story of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island in the fall out of an atomic war. The boys are thrust into a technological environment, similar to one experienced by the prehistoric Magdalenians discussed in Chap. 1: “In many ways it is a terrifying parable about what happens when civilizations crumble and all moral directions are lost.”17 In the cinematic rendition of Lord of the Flies, the boys elect a leader, set a division of labour, and form an expedition to map the island’s topography. Soon a struggle emerges between Ralph, who symbolizes civilization, and Jack, chief of the “hunters” who engage in recrudescent violence and nihilism. A meeting between the two camps (which can be read contemporarily as the political clash between proponents on either side off the global warming divide) is called: Ralph—Things are beginning to break up. I don’t know why. It all began well. Then people started forgetting what really matters. The most important thing for all of us is getting rescued. So now let’s discuss who does what, and when we have decided, we can start again … and be careful about things like the fire.

Fig. 9.3 Nagasaki 1945. Before and After “Fat Man”. Picture Collage by Charles Travis. Source Wikimedia Commons

148 Jack—[Cheers from the choir/hunters.] All right, so the fire went out. But hunters. We got you meat. And if there is a beast, it’s my hunters who protect you from it.18

The Promethean trope of fire again emerges, and the schoolboys soon descend into barbarity, voting on a “belief in ghosts,” worshiping the severed head of a boar stuck on a post (“the Lord of the Flies”), engaging in tribalism, bloodletting and hunting their own before being ironically rescued by a warship, itself a technology involved in savage warfare. The myth of Prometheus is employed as a central theme in the Lord of the Flies and manifests in the character of “Piggy, the chubby, asthmatic, myopic friend of the protagonist Ralph.”19 It is with the lens of Piggy’s spectacles that the boys are able to light a fire to provide comfort, security, and signal their rescuers. Like Prometheus, Piggy suffers a terrible fate; he is killed by Jack's hunting party, and hurled down a cliff, his body is washed out to sea. In spite of the technological progress exhibited by the construction of the atomic bomb, Golding concluded that “We are today essentially what we were in the past, heroic and sick though we have inherited the earth we remain hunters, using our weapons with the same seriousness and blind conceit that possessed the first of our kind.”20 In 1958, Golding published a drama titled the Brass Butterfly, a historical fantasy set in imperial Rome, where Caesar is fancifully offered modern inventions such as a pressure cooker, a steamship, and an exploding missile by Phanocles, a Greek inventor who believes the universe is a giant machine which can be harnessed. However, Caesar is wary of such gifted progress. He advises the inventor: A steam ship, or anything powerful, in the hands of a man, Phanocles, is like a sharp knife in the hands of a child. There is nothing wrong with the knife. There is nothing wrong with the steamship. There is nothing wrong with man’s intelligence. The trouble is his nature.21

The drama “satirizes the naive rationalism of science and the unquestioned faith of true believers.”22 Like Golding’s characterization of Caesar’s scepticism, Oppenheimer emerged at the height of the Cold War as an opponent to the development

9

Epilogue: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail

of the hydrogen bomb. Pleading for more “candor” from the U.S. government, he argued for officials to share information on the nature of the weapon with the American people and the Soviet Union in an attempt to stop the nuclear arms race.23 The Manhattan Project’s creation of a strange “new species” can be “directly tied to the start and rise of the digital age. The prominent nuclear signal in the novel strata appears also as a material effect of computational power.”24

9.3

Towards Digital War, The Battle of 73 Eastings

Inscription and computational systems can be traced back to the pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican Olmec tablets, Aztecan and Mayan Codices and South American Incan Khipus. The Cascajal Block, a stone writing slab etched with Olmec hieroglyphs discovered in Mexico, is dated to 900 BCE and represents one the earliest writing systems discovered in the Americas. The Mayan Popol Vu and the Aztec Yoalli Ehēcatl are examples of sophisticated Mesoamerican Codices. The latter depicts the Tlalocs—the four corners of the universe—watering maize fields with different types of rains. Codices were integrated with astronomical, surveying and time keeping systems. Indeed, by the “sixth century A.D. the Maya solar calendar was more accurate than the Gregorian calendar now in use in the western world.”25 Although the Incas “had no written or visual language like the indigenous peoples of Central America” the Andean civilization consolidated “a vast empire, Tawantinsuyu or ‘The Empire of Four Directions’ between 1438 and 1533,” by employing natural fibre computing systems known as Khipus.26 As recording devices spun from different coloured cords and knot “codes” the patterns created by Khipu weavers aided the administration and tallying of annual censuses, calculated food and agricultural inventories, mapped the locations of villages and other population centres, and kept calendars, archives, and assembled genealogies. At first thought to function as mnemonic aids, recent studies of the intricate pattern of cords and

9.4 Gaia at War

knots in surviving Khipus reveal the existence of complex mathematical and semantic systems. It has been conjectured that Incan Andean civilization “encoded language in a similar way to the binary code employed by today’s computer.”27 Khipu keepers “could choose between a number of yes/no conditions to be met, such as using cotton or wool, a spin or a ply direction” to create data strings from over 24 colours and a variety of distinct knotting styles. By employing such methods, 1536 data permutations could be “coded” on a Khipu by the early Incan “knowledge weavers.”28 Paper and transferrable type first emerged in ancient China, but the mechanization of printing finds its origins in Johannes Guttenberg’s press. A hybrid invention modelled on medieval and Mediterranean wine and oliveoil presses, device utilizing moveable type published the first “printed” edition of the Bible in 1455.29 Guttenberg’s “hardware” operationalized “software” applications developed previously by Medieval clergy such as “the alphabetization of biblical extracts in Peter of Capua’s eleventh century Distinctiones Theologicae,” which, as an innovation, … paved the way for the first concordance to the scriptures, compiled under the supervision of the Dominican Hugh of St Cher between 1235 and 1249 […] with these new alphabetical tools, the cultivation of memory became less important and it was the ability to manipulate these new knowledge systems which counted.30

Like the Guttenberg Press, similarities emerged in the march towards modernity, between systems to process organic materials such as cotton and grapes into substances for human use and consumption, such as linen and wine, and the development of early computing machines. As the Industrial Revolution was gathering steam in the eighteenth century, the Jacquard “silk-weaving loom,” introduced in Lyon, France, used binary coding to weave intricately patterned cloths.31 In 1822, Charles Babbage built a computing device in Britain called the Difference Engine, for which in 1843, Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron, scripted a Bernoulli algorithm. Babbage’s second computing device, the Analytical Engine, was

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described as a machine that wove “algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”32 The demonstration of Samuel Morse’s coded electrical pulses in 1838, George Boole’s The Laws of Thought (1854), and Herman Hollerith’s electronic tabulator, a punch card machine that tallied the results of the Eleventh U.S. Census of 1890, preceded the development in the 1940s of the U.S. Army’s ENIAC programmable electronic computer, and Alan Turing’s Enigma cypher-breaking calculating machine. In the 1980s and 1990s the U.S. Department of Defense computer war game simulations contributed to planning Operation Desert Storm against the Iraqi Army in the First Persian Gulf War (1990–1991). After the war, the U.S. Army’s Engineer Topographical Laboratory and Institute for Defense Analyses Simulation Center reconstructed a victorious U.S. tank battle that took place in a swirling sandstorm. Networked simulation technology factored in digital data from battle site surveys, logs, radio transmissions, soldier's diaries, reconnaissance photographs, and laser surveyed maps of the terrain to create a gaming scenario called The Battle of 73 Eastings (named after a military map grid reference). By using history to prepare for war, the digital reconstruction set the standard for creating the virtual simulations of combat theatres, and anticipated the emergence of twentyfirst-century Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated environments and methods of warfare.33

9.4

Gaia at War

In 1972, the scientist, James Lovelock, utilizing computational systems created a model that illustrated that the Earth and its systems acted like a self-regulating “organism”: “a biological cybernetic system able to homeostat the planet for an optimum physical and chemical state appropriate to its current biosphere.”34 William Golding, author of the Lord of the Flies, suggested the mythical name of Gaia—the “earth goddess” to Lovelock as the name for the new planetary model that he and biologist Lynn

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Margulis created, which in turn would launch the Earth-systems sciences. Ironically, Lovelock’s concept of Gaia was derived from research he conducted under the sponsorship of the multinational oil and gas company Royal Dutch Shell “to identify organisms whose biological activities might double as climate-stabilizing mechanisms.”35 As a literary-scientific heuristic Gaia, which when it was announced was contested in more than a few quarters of scientific thought, now provides the blueprint for Earth’s battle strategy against global warming. In many ways, Lovelock’s Gaia model constitutes an environmental Rorschach test that is seen as “equally appealing to free-market evangelists, Earth-systems scientists, ecofeminists, and science-studies scholars alike,” and the model’s “displacement of human exceptionalism can be leveraged equally for a doctrine of neoliberal environmental governance or for an embrace of radical biological alterity.”36 Donna Haraway draws on Isabelle Stenger’s notion of Gaia as an “intrusive force” that is slowly eroding the “tales and refrains of modern history.” Haraway notes that “this intrusion threatens not life on Earth itself microbes will adapt, to put it mildly,” but instead “threatens vast kinds, species, assemblages, and individuals in an ‘event’ already under way called the Sixth Great Extinction.” She states that “Gaia does not and could not care about human or other biological beings’ intentions or desires or needs,” and the earth’s response to global warming will not provide “a list of questions waiting for rational policies.”37 In Haraway’s reading, Prometheus (homo-sapiens) is being chained again by the gods (Gaia) to Mount Tartarus for our anthropomorphic transgressions. In the 2010s, the American military (one of the largest fossil fuel burning organizations on the face of the Earth) concluded that global warming poses a significant strategic challenge to the United States and classified climate change as a national security risk.38 It is estimated that between 2020 and 2050, extreme weather events will raise the need for U.S. and other nations’ military interventions to deal with humanitarian crises due to violent storms,

9

Epilogue: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail

flooding, drought, ;famine and ensuing mass migrations. In the U.S., the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, security analysts, and war game modellers speculate that such crises have the potential to depose governments, nourish terrorist organizations, destabilize world regions—particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, due to catastrophic climate related events and resulting political and economic conflict over water, food, and energy resources.39 One effect of the U.S. military’s framing in the American political sphere is that conservatives individuals and groups are more likely to express concern about climate change, when it is framed as a national security risk and communicated by members of the armed services, than by scientists or members of the professorate.40 And so, it is best perhaps to turn again to the literary perspectives, and specifically those of science fiction, as exemplified by David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (2004) to reflect on how nuclear and AI environments become entangled in “timescales of environmental damage—geological time, human species time, lifetimes, and organic time,” rendering “humanity as an active force in natural history”.41

9.5

Cloud Atlas (2004)

It is on an island in the tropical South Pacific Ocean in the 1850s, that the first of Cloud Atlas’ five episodes inaugurate the novel’s time and space travel to Belgium in the 1930s; the west coast of America in the 1970s; Britain in the early 2000s; the speculative future of the Nea So Copros on the Korean Peninsula; and finally, the post-apocalyptic Big Island of Hawai’i. It is from this location that the novel’s core story Shoosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin After, narrated by the “Valley Man” Zach’ry takes place, before Cloud Atlas’ narrative circles back in time and space through the codas of the five episodes to its close in the nineteenth century South Pacific. The time-space confluences of past, present, and future in Cloud Atlas call to mind Albert Einstein’s remarks in his lecture On the Theory of Relativity delivered at King’s College London in

9.5 Cloud Atlas (2004)

1921. Referencing Newton’s theory of gravitation, and Faraday, Lorentz, and Maxwell’s electro-magnetic translations of field physics, Einstein claimed his work was “no revolutionary act but the natural continuation of a line” that could be “traced through centuries.”42 He declared that the “abandonment of certain notions connected with space, time, and motion hitherto treated as fundamentals must not be regarded as arbitrary, but only conditioned by observed facts.”43 In later correspondence, Einstein reflected that “for us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future has no other meaning than that of illusion, though a tenacious one.”44 This reading of Cloud Atlas’ six inter-nested episodes, draws on the slightly varying storylines of the British and U.S. editions, in addition to the cinematic rendering of Mitchell’s novel adapted by film directors Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski brothers (him/hers/they). The film version opens with Zach’ry “narrating” Cloud Atlas in patois on a distant planet as he provides an oral history of the post-apocalyptic earth. “Yarnin” to his “babbits,” Zach’ry tells the story of Meronym who arrived on a “Great Ship” of the “Prescients” to study the Valley Folk and their enemies, the Kona, a slave-trading, warrior tribe. Meronym asks Zach’ry to guide her up to the sacred and forbidden summit of the Big Island’s volcano, where the ruin of the Mauna Kea Observatory (“where the Old Uns worshiped their Smart”) is perched, and “Old Georgie,” the devil in the Valley Folk’s mythology lurks.45 The Observatory’s transition from an Arendtian symbol of “science” to a “post-apocalyptic” sacred space, can be parsed through the lens of eighteenth-century Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico’s cyclical perspective on history. In Scienza Nuova (1725) Vico posited that civilizations developed and ascended through three distinct ages: Theocratic, Aristocratic, and Democratic, before “la barbarie della riflessione” (the barbarism of reflection) unleashes an age of demagoguery, anarchy, and chaos, prompting a Ricorso, the collapse of society, which inaugurates a new cycle of history, ruled by oracles and

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gods.46 Zach’ry’s description of the “obser’trees,” as “temples” with “white’n’silvry an’ gold’n’bronz” where the “Old Uns used to study the planets’n’moon’n’stars, an’ the space b’tween, to und’stand where ev’rythin’ begins an’ where ev’rythin ends,” renders a Viconian ontological shift to Manua Kea’s historical role: Shimm’rin floors, white walls’n’roofs, one greatchamber, round’n’sunk, filled by a mighty tube wider’n a man an’ longer’n five what Meronym named a radyo tel’scope what was, she said, the furthest-seein’ eye the Old Uns ever made.47

Zach’ry’s post-apocalyptic oral history is the centrifugal hub around which the spokes of Cloud Atlas’ other five narratives revolve: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (1850s: the colonial exploitation of South Pacific islanders); Letters from Zedelghem (1930s: composition of the Cloud Atlas symphony in Belgium); HalfLives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery (1970s: the uncovering of the malfeasance of a California nuclear power company); The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (early 2000s: the escape of a London book editor involuntarily committed to an old age “care home”) and An Orison of Sonmi*451 (a dystopian East Asian future, where a cyborg-fabricant named Omni, manufactured to labour in a gleaming Korean fast-food franchise, recounts the consciousness of her AI “being” before being decommissioned for synthetic, genetic recycling). Excepting Zach’ry, each episode’s characters share a comet shaped birth-mark located between their shoulder blades and collarbones. Each episode contains its own unique historical voice, relayed in period English vernacular (or patois in the case of Zach’ry)—all coalescing in a polyvocal, but legible Tower of Babel novel. However, the lacuna in Cloud Atlas, hanging over the five ascending and descending staircase narratives to and from the aerie of Zach’ry’s core post-apocalyptic tale, is the teleology of how his world on the Big Island of Hawaii came to be. Unlike James Lovelock’s rosy proclamation in Novacene (2019) that Gaia will evolve computer-based hyper-intelligence systems to watch over our re-assembled human condition

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9

with, as the poet Richard Brautigan phrased, “machines of loving grace,” the An Orison of Sonmi*451 episode hints at the darker dictatorial corporate outcome, with an Earth illuminated by “the Immanent Chairman’s one true sun, its molten lite, [and] petro-clouds.”48 Fascinated by the “Smart” of the “Old Uns,” who “got ev’rythin” and used to inhabit and dominate the planet, Zach’ry is told by Meronym—“Yay” but they didn’t master “a hunger for more”: … more gear, more food, faster speeds, longer lifes, easier lifes, more power, yay. Now the Hole World is big, but it weren’t big ‘nuff for that hunger what made Old Uns rip out the skies an’ boil up the seas an’ poison soil with crazed atoms an’ donkey ‘bout with rotted seeds so new plagues was borned an’ babbits was freak-birthed. Fin’ly, bit’ly then quicksharp, states busted into bar’bric tribes an’ the Civ’lize Days ended, ‘cept for a few folds’n’pockets here’n’there, where its last embers glimmer.49

9.6

A Very Brief Conclusion

In late twentieth-century “Cold War” imaginaries, the roads back to the Biblical valley of Armageddon commenced with the detonation of the respective atomic bombs “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, showcasing the full Promethean horror of the Anthropocene to the inhabitants of the Earth. The twin “unforgettable fires” lit in Japanese skies literally and figuratively, embedded indelible imprints of anthropic elements, manufactured by human-induced nuclear fission within the sedimentary layers of the earth, and perhaps within Gai’s consciousness, inadvertently seeding a mental illness in the planet’s systems. And there our nuclear spoor rests and metastasizes, waiting for the “Prescients” and their light-year Geiger-counters, like the fossilized remains of a palaeolithic, fish skeleton, or the gentle tendrils of a pre-historic flora, anticipated their discovery by Victorian antiquarians. Ironically, it might be nuclear power, if harnessed ethically and safely by homo-sapiens, that may bring our species and its civilization back from the brink of its slow, violent Anthropocenic

Epilogue: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail

war against Gaia. However, as the Earth existed well before the arrival of our species, in the end, as Carl Sandburg concludes in his poem Grass (1918), it may be the environment that gets the last word in this conflict: Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.50

Finis Notes 1. Goldie, G. T. 1907. Geographical Ideals, Geographical Journal. 29: 1–14. 2. Dalby, S. 2018. Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene, Geopolitics. 23(3): 718–742, Ref. 721. 3. Broyles, W. 2005. Jarhead (Screenplay) Los Angeles: Universal Pictures. 4. Hupy, J. P. 2008. “The environmental footprint of war.” Environment and History. 14 (3): 405–421. Ref. 408. 5. Hardwick, L. 1999. Placing Prometheus. Tony Harrison’s Poetry, Drama and Film: The Classical Dimension, 1–15; Davidson J. R. 1993. The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology and the Arts 1300–1990s, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 6. Pontin, J. 2007. Oppenheimer’s Ghost Can we control the evolution and uses of technology? MIT Technology Review, 15 October. https://www.technologyreview.com/ 2007/10/15/223531/oppenheimers-ghost-3/#: *:text=Robert%20Oppenheimer%2C%20 who%20had%20been,cried%2C%20most% 20people%20were%20silent. 7. Jungk, R. 1958. Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. Trans., James Cleugh. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Ref. 201.

9.6 A Very Brief Conclusion

8. Wagar, W. W. 1989. HG Wells and the scientific imagination. The Virginia Quarterly Review, 65(3): 390–400. 9. Seed, D. 2003. HG Wells and the liberating atom. Science Fiction Studies. 30(1): 33–48. Ref. 35. 10. Porter, P. and Ogilvie, M. Eds. 2000. The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists. New York: Oxford University Press. 11. Wagar, HG Wells and the scientific imagination. 12. Serber, R. 2020. The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb, Updated with a New Introduction by Richard Rhodes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ref. xii. 13. Atomic Heritage Foundation. 2014. The Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-1945. Washington, D.C.: Atomic Heritage Foundation. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/ history/bombings-hiroshima-and-nagasaki1945/. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Laurence, W. L. 1945. Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki, New York Times, 9 September. Ref. 35. 17. Abrahamsson, C. Topoi/Graphein: Mapping the Middle in Spatial Thought. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ref. 57. 18. Ibid. 19. Manzoor, S. 2007. The Prometheus Myth in the Novels of William Golding. BRAC Univ. J. IV: 105–111. 20. Baker, J. R. 1965. William Golding: A Critical Study. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ref. 80. 21. Golding, W. 1958. The Brass Butterfly. London: Faber and Faber. Ref. 103. 22. Brouwer, W. 1988. The image of the physicist in modern drama. Am. J. Phys. 56: 611– 617. 23. Dabscheck, B. 2007. Review: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Australas J. Am. Stud. 26: 89–91. 24. Rosol, C., Steininger, B., Renn, J., and Schlögl, R. 2018. On the Age of

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Computation in the Epoch of Humankind. Nature Outlook. 563(7733): 1–5. Fuson, R. H. 1969. The Orientation of Mayan Ceremonial Centers. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59(3): 494–512; Smith, Michael E. 1984. The Aztlan Migrations of the Nahuatl Chronicles: Myth or History? Ethnohistory 31(3): 153– 186; Sherman, J. Ed., 2015. Storytelling: An Encyclopaedia of Mythology and Folklore. London: Routledge. De la Garza, A. 2016. “Aboriginal Digitalities: Indigenous Peoples and New Media.” In The Digital Arts and Humanities. Eds., Charles Travis and Alexander von Lunen. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Press. 49–62. Ref. 57. Garza, Aboriginal Digitalities, 57; Urton, Gary. 2003. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. Austin: University of Texas Press. Garza, Aboriginal Digitalities, 58. Barbier, F. 2017. Gutenberg’s Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity. Trans., Jean Birrell. Malden: Polity Press. Prescott, A. 2012. Making the digital human: Anxieties, possibilities, challenges. Paper presented at the Digital Humanities Summer School, Oxford University, Oxford, UK. http://digitalriffs.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/ making-digital-human-anxieties.html. Kim, Dorothy. 2021. “Embodying the Database: Race, Gender, and Social Justice.” In Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities. Eds., Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh. Santa Barbara: Punctum Books. 145– 202. Ref. 145; Sikarskie, A. Grace. 2016. Textile Collections: Preservation, Access, Curation, and Interpretation in the Digital Age. New York: Rowan and Littlefield. Ref. 1. Menabrea, L. F., and Lovelace. A. 1842. “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” Translation of Menabrea, L. F. 1842. “Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage.” Bibliothèque universelle de Genève. Nouvelle série. 41: 352–376.

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33. Turing, A. M. 2004. The Essential Turing. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Lenoir, T. and Lowood, H. 2005. Theaters of War: The Military Entertainment Complex. Eds., Jan Lazrdzig, Ludger Schwarte, Helemer Schramm. Collection-Laboratory-Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century. New York: Walter de Gruyter Publishing, 427–456; Crogan, P. 2011. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture. Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press; Chandra, V. 2013. Geek sublime: Writing fiction, coding software. London Faber and Faber. 34. Lovelock, J. 1972. Gaia as seen through the atmosphere. Atmospheric Environment. 6: 579–580. 35. Aronowsky, L. 2021. Gas Guzzling Gaia, or: A Prehistory of Climate Change Denialism. Critical Inquiry. 47(2): 306–327. Ref. 308. 36. Ibid. 37. Haraway, D. 2016. Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, e-Flux, Journal #75, September https:// www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacularthinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/. 38. King, N. 2021 Climate change is a risk to national security, the Pentagon says. Morning Edition, National Public Radio. 26 October https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/104922 2045/the-pentagon-says-climate-change-ishaving-a-negative-impact-on-national-securit. 39. Barnett, 2003. Security and climate change, Global Environmental Change, 13(1): 7–17; Broder, J. M., 2009. Climate Change as Threat to U.S. Security, The New York Times, 9 August https://www.shoreline.edu/ gac/documents/great-discussions-2013/nytclimate-change-as-threat.pdf; Melton, M. 2019. Climate change and national security, part II: How big a threat is the climate? Lawfare, Jan. 7 (blog) https://www. lawfareblog.com/climate-change-and-nationalsecurity-part-ii-how-big-threat-climate. 40. Motta, M., Ralston, R., and Spindel, J. 2021. A Call to Arms for Climate Change?

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How Military Service Member Concern About Climate Change Can Inform Effective Climate Communication, Environmental Communication. 15(1): 85–98, https://doi. org/10.1080/17524032.2020.1799836. Callaway, E. 2018. Seeing What’s Right in Front of Us: The Bone Clocks, Climate Change, and Human Attention. Humanities, 7(11): 2–12. Ref 12; Baucom, Ian. 2015. ‘Moving Centers’: Climate Change, Critical Method, and the Historical Novel. Modern Language Quarterly. 76: 137–157. Ref. 137. Einstein, A., and Janssen, M. 2002. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Vol. 7, The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918–1921. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ref. 246. Ibid. Einstein, Albert, quoted in Feyerband, 1999. Conquest of abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being. Ed., Bert Terpstra, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Refs. 11, 62, 188, 266, quoting, 1979. Einstein, Correspondence avec Michéle Besso. Ed., P. Speziali, Paris: Hermann. Ref. 312. Mitchell, David. 2004. Cloud Atlas. N.Y.: Random House. Ref. 275. Vico, G. 2013. New world encyclopedia [online]. Available from: http://www. newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Giambattista_ Vico. Mitchell, Cloud-Atlas, 275–276. Lovelock, J. 2019. Novacene: The coming age of hyperintelligence. UK: Penguin, Random House; Brautigan, R. 1967. All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, in American Dust, Richard Brautigan’s life and writing http://www.brautigan. net/machines.html (Accessed 8 June 2021); Mitchell, Cloud-Atlas, 202. Mitchell, Cloud-Atlas, 272–273. Sandburg, C. 2014 [1918]. Grass in The New Oxford Book of War Poetry. Ed., Jon Stallworthy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.