NAVY CATS

Felines of the US fleet and the sailors who loved them. Photos and captions from the United States Naval Institute.
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Crew of USS Nahant with their two cats, ca 1898. Nahant was an ironclad monitor that joined the fleet of Rear Admiral Samual Francis du Pont in the attack on Charleston Harbor in 1863.     

Crewmen on the deck of USS Olympia using a mirror to play with their cats in 1898. Olympia served as Admiral George Dewey's flagship at the Battle of Manila during the Spanish American War. Olympia, currently docked in Philadelphia, is the world's oldest floating steel warship.

   

Crewman of USS Texas pose with mascot dog and cat on the muzzle of one of the ship's guns, ca 1900. Built in 1892, Texas was the first US battleship and gained a reputation for being jinxed because of a series of accidents.

 

The cats of USS Mississippi climb ladders to enter their hammock, ca 1925. Mississippi was involved in several fierce battles in the Pacific during World War II and was hit by kamikazes twice. It survived to be among the ships in Tokyo Bay that witnessed Japan's surrender.

   

Pilots on an aircraft carrier relax by playing with the ship's mascot. Probably USS Ranger, July 1944.

The new mascot 'Saipan' of USS New Mexico. New Mexico provided support during the US Marine invasion of Saipan in 1944, so it's likely the cat was rescued after the battle.

'Bilgewater' the mascot of the Coast Guard Academy, circa 1944.

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A CENTURY IN THE NORTH

Fourteen extraordinary minutes detailing a hundred years in the Arctic of climate change, war, science, politics, energy, unrealistic optimism, business, and beauty.
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North from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

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COWRY POWER

Via.

  
My mother always told me to carry a cowry shell in my wallet for good luck. Since she comes from India, I began to wonder about the roots of this belief.
  
We know that cowry shells are the longest-lived and most widely-spread currency of our species—in use perhaps as early as 4,000 years ago, and important to cultures ranging from Oceania to West Africa and most everything in between.

  

Credit: Bin im Garten via Wikimedia Commons.

  
They've been found in association with coins from sites in India dating to the first century AD according to the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
  
But they seem to have been used even earlier in ancient China. Here's an excerpt from an interesting paper by Colin Narbeth:
  

The use of cowry shells as a medium of exchange goes back to the dawn of Chinese civilization. One of the earliest written references is that of an historian, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, of c. 145-86 BC. He mentions cowries as being used as money in the Shang and Chou periods. In the Shang Dynasty [1766-112BC] the character PEI was part of the Chinese language. The earliest form, the archaic script which developed into Seal Script, was merely a rough picture of the ventral side of a cowry [貝]. It was so important that PEI was adopted as one of the 214 radicals—the foundations characters of the language. Today 84 Chinese characters have PEI as the main foundation. Finds of cowry shells, sometimes in very large quantities, have come to light in tomb excavations and the opinion of most Chinese archaeologists today is that they were there as money.

There were times the Chinese couldn't get enough shells and manufactured them from wood, stone, bone, bronze, gold, silver, jade, and other semi-precious stones. 
  
The first metal currency was actually imitation cowry shells.

  

Copper/bronze imitation cowry shell money. Via.

Stone imitation cowry shell money. Via.

Pottery imitation cowry shell money. Via.

The species most commonly used as currency—the money cowry—was named by the father of modern taxonomy Carl Linnaeus as Cypraea moneta in 1758. 
  
Today's scientific name is Monetaria moneta.
  

Live money cowry. Via.

They were collected in vast numbers from the waters around the Maldives Islands off southern India. More from Colin Narbeth:

From the Arab merchant Sulayman (851 AD) we learn that at one time, in the 9th century, the Maldives had a very beautiful and wealthy Queen. Having used up her Treasury of cowries she resorted to sending the Maldive maidens to collect large palm leaves from the coconut trees. These were then laid in the shallow water. Soon thousands of cowries would crawl onto the leaves—to be suddenly pulled out of the water and left high and dry to die before being sent to replenish the Queen’s Treasury. This account was confirmed by Masudi of Baghdad, famous Arab historian of the 10th century.

In the 17th century Pyrard de Laval was wrecked on the Maldive Islands and stayed there for two years. He wrote: "They called them (cowries) Boly and export to all parts an infinite quantity, in such wise that in one year I have seen 30 or 40 whole ships loaded with them without other cargo. All go to Bengal for there only is there a demand for a large quantity at high prices. The people of Bengal use them for ordinary money although they have gold and silver and plenty of other metals; and what is more strange, kings and great lords have houses built expressly to store these shells and treat them as part of their treasure."    

   

Modern Maldives currency with cowry shell design. Via Wikimedia Commons.

As you might imagine, with so much pressure on the stocks, Monetaria moneta eventually became scarce in Maldivian waters. Attention switched to a similar species, Monetaria annulus. From Narbeth:

These could be found in huge quantities off the Zanzibar coast... By 1851 inflation was undermining the trade. Cowries were so plentiful and so cheap that counting them became a very time consuming matter. Town governors packed them in sacks—20,000 to the sack. But when used between private individuals they had to be counted, in fives. Barth wrote: "The general custom is to count them in fives, in which operation some are very expert, and then to form heaps of 200 or 1000 each. The counting of 500,000 shells is a really heroic work."

Credit: Sarah Starkweather via Flickr. 

   
My mother and her kin came from Bengal. So perhaps the habit of carrying a cowry shell in your wallet as good luck—specifically, as monetary good luck—is left over from the time when cowry shells were real money.
  
Interestingly, Narbeth writes about periods of transition in China when rulers tried to abolish cowry currency in favor of a metal currency, only to have the next ruler abolish the upstart metal in favor of cowry currency. 
  

Cowry eggs. Via.

In times of such uncertainty, it might have been a good idea to keep some cowry power in your wallet. Just in case it got valuable again. 
  
I'm still doing it.

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OLDEST HUMAN PAINTING OF SEALS MADE BY NEANDERTHALS?

Ancient paintings of seals from the Caves of Nerja, Spain. Via.

     
New research suggests that six seals painted on the walls of the Caves of Nerja in Málaga, Spain, are more than 42,000 years old. 

Which not only makes them the oldest human art on record, it also infers they were painted by Neanderthals (Home sapiens neanderthalensis)—who lived in the area at that time and ate seals. 

The Homo sapiens sapiens who followed and also painted on cave walls left no images of seals. Their oldest known art is in the 30,000-year-old cave at Chauvet, France.

Map modified from Wikimedia Commons.

The area around Nerja Cave at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula is believed to be last place inhabited by Neanderthals before they were overrun or interbred into obscurity by Homo sapiens sapiens about 37,000 years ago. 

Neanderthals have long been thought incapable of creating artistic works. (*Sigh* Why?)

But the provenance of recently-discovered decorated stone and shell objects is now attributed to Neanderthals.

    

Mediterranean monk seal in cave. Credit: Giovanni Dall'Orto via Wikimedia Commons.

    
What's interesting to me is that the seals in the painting would have been Mediterranean monk seals—now one of the rarest pinnipeds on Earth.

Monk seals are believed to have shifted in modern times from beach-dwelling seals to cave-dwellers in order to escape human encroachment.

But maybe—hunted by Neanderthals—they spent time in caves 42,000 years ago too? Could the Neanderthal art have been more biologically accurate than Homo sapiens sapiens' fanciful horses at Chauvet? 

I wrote more about monk seals in an earlier post here.

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CIGARETTE CARD ARCTIC

These views of the Arctic are from cigarette cards issued by the Hassan Oriental Cigarette Company between 1900-1917—during the golden age of  polar exploration. 

The artist is Albert Operti, an Italian who accompanied Robert Peary on his 1896 Greenland expedition. 

Operti also painted many scenes of expeditions he was not a part of. As best I can deduce, the ship in this picture, Hansa, is the same supply vessel that came to an untimely end off Greenland during the 1869-1870 Second German North Polar Expedition. From Wikipedia:

As the supply ship, the Hansa followed the Germania [exploration ship] until July 19, when [Captain Paul Friedrich August] Hegemann misread a flag signal by [captain of the Germania, Carl] Koldeway and went ahead; the ship disappeared in the fog and got separated. The agreement was to meet in such a situation at Sabine Island. After unsuccessful attempts to get there, Hansa was inescapably stuck in the pack ice by mid-September 1869. During the next month, the ship was slowly milled by the ice and finally sank on October 22 at a position 70°32’N, 21°W approximately 10 km from the East Greenland coast. The crew managed to survive the winter in a shelter built of coal dust briquettes, while drifting on the sea ice southward along the eastern coast of Greenland. In June 1870, the crew got to the coast by boat and reached the Moravian Herrnhut mission at Narsaq Kujalleq (then Frederiksdal/Friedrichsthal) near Cape Farewell, from where they got back to Germany on a Danish ship.

When he wasn't painting the real and imaginary Arctic, Albert Operti was painting other make-believe stuff. From Visions of the North:

Like many panorama and diorama painters of the nineteenth century, when the Arctic was also a popular subject for such entertainments, Operti had a background in theatrical scene painting, and it was with this work that he was chiefly occupied in the middle years of his life, principally with the [New York] Metropolitan Opera. In the last six years of his life he returned to the [American Museum of Natural History], painting diorama backdrops, murals, and friezes for their exhibitions. During this period, he actually lived in quarters provided by the [New York] Explorers Club, and it was there that he died in 1927.

All images courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

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LIFE AND DEATH OF A SEA STACK

1890

   

Jump-off Joe was a 100-foot-/30-meter-tall sea stack near Nye Beach, Oregon—named because visitors had to jump off its steep side to get around it.

Before the 1880s it was still attached to the mainland. Around 1890 its connection fell away. From then until World War I it was a well-known tourist attraction.

These undated postcards show part of its lifecycle.

According to Historic Photo Archive:

The rock formation was subject to rapid erosion and returning visitors would make a point of checking out the changes since their last visit... The arch finally collapsed during a severe storm in late January, 1916.

Or not. The following photographs, courtesy of the USGS, suggest that Jump-off Joe survived as an arch at least until 1920, then in ever-diminishing incarnations until the 1990s. (H/T Irish Weather Online.)

1910

1920

1970

1990

  

As an interesting aside—near my home in northern California there are a few old uplifted sea stacks that now stand high and dry on coastal terrace.

Photo by tuolumne tradster via Flickr.

  

These ancient stacks bear areas of highly-polished mirrorlike rock, which have have been analyzed by archaeologists using scanning electron microscope and atomic force microscope, then compared with wave polish from cliffs below the terrace, with elephant rubs, and with just about every other form of rock polish. 

Their conclusion: woolly mammoths rubbed here. 

From the paper: 

In eastern and southern Africa, rubbing stones are relatively common in the savanna and grassland areas. They stand as monuments to ancient itches... Stack 1 in our study area is adjacent to a [freshwater] seep which has probably been active throughout the Pleistocene. The modern Asian elephants and African elephants especially like to rub on trees and rocks after wallowing in mud. Ectoparasites encased in the drying mud are removed by the rubbing action which benefits the animals. It is possible that the seep was an animal wallow which encouraged the use of the adjacent rocks, and caused their high polish over a matter of perhaps a hundred thousand years.

Mammoth rubbing rocks. Photo: © Julia Whitty.

  

The paper:

• E Breck Parkman, et al. Extremely High Polish on the Rocks of Uplifted Sea Stacks along the North Coast of Sonoma County, California, USA (pdf).  

Woolly mammoth at the Royal British Columbia Museum. Photo: WolfmanSF via Wikimedia Commons.

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HAECKEL'S OCEAN

Actiniae [sea anemones]

Prosobranchia [archaic: snails]

Acsidiae [sea squirts]

Cyrtoidea [archaic: radiolarians]

Chaetopoda [archaic: segmented worms]

Hexacoralla [corals & allies]

Gamochonia [archaic: cephalopods]

Decapoda [crustacean]

Ostraciontes [boxfishes & allies]

Diatomea [diatoms]

Discomedusae [archaic: jellyfish]

Ophiodea [brittle stars]

Cubomedusae [archaic: box jellyfish]

Excerpted from Wikipedia:

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (16 February 1834-9 August 191) was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and the kingdom Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.

The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (see: Kunstformen der Natur, "Art Forms of Nature"). As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträtsel (1895–1899, in English, The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution.

In the United States, Mount Haeckel, a 13,418 ft/4,090 m summit in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Evolution Basin, is named in his honor, as is another Mount Haeckel, a 2,941 m/9,649 ft summit in New Zealand; and the asteroid 12323 Haeckel.

All plates from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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