Monthly Archives: July 2012

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Singer No. 99 Sewing Machine Manual

I found this at the flea-market, together with a box of about a hundred Singer machine-needles, for $5. It is an original 1930s SINGER No. 99 sewing-machine instruction-manual, which I automatically snapped up to add to my grandmother’s machine.

Here is the manual:

It’s all complete and in great condition. There’s no rips, tears, stains, missing pages or loose bits about to fall off. I know you can get scanned reprint copies off the internet for free, but they’re never as nice as having the real thing. You print those out and you have no idea how to get them bound, the pictures are horrible, the size is SO inconvenient and they’re not always *precisely* what you want, but you gotta take it because you can’t find anything else!

This little manual is conveniently sized so that it fits comfortably in your hand, and you can store it easily in the compartment underneath the machine-bed, along with the electric-motor installation manual that I bought previously:

I also bought this neat little box of machine-needles:

This box is REALLY small! It’s about 2/3 to 1/2 the size of a regular 50-a-box matchbox. But it holds something like 90 or more needles! I’ll never need to buy any more for the rest of my life!…Okay maybe a few more…

Still on the lookout for more stuff.

 
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Not for All The Tea in China: A History of the Opium Wars

If you’re like most people, the only thing you know about the Opium Wars is that they destroyed China, and that they were mentioned briefly in the film “Shanghai Knights”. These pivotal and world-changing conflicts are largely forgotten today, but they were crucial to shaping the China that we have in the 21st Century. This posting will explore what the Opium Wars were, and what their affect was on the Chinese country and its people.

China Before the Opium Wars

China before the Opium Wars was a land steeped in mystery, mythology, tradition, and a strict class-society, clinging to its traditions, its customs and its ideals which it had held for centuries before. China was for the Chinese. And no-one else.

In Chinese, the country of China is called ‘Zhongguo‘ (‘Zhong-g’awe’). Translated to English, it literally means “Central Country” or “Central Kingdom”. And herein lies the root of what led up to the Opium Wars. Here is the very reason why the opium wars got started in the first place.

To understand why the opium wars started, you need to understand Chinese foreign policy during the late Imperial period. In the 18th and 19th centuries, China was an INTENSELY isolationist country, which was inward-looking, arrogant, conceited and which believed firmly that the world almost literally revolved around it. It was, in every sense of the words, the Central Kingdom. Or so it believed.

British-Chinese Relations

Western contact with China was few and far between. Westerners were not allowed to visit China. They could try, if they wished, but they were rarely allowed in. Marco Polo was one of the few people from the Western World who ever managed to get so much as a shoe-in.

In the 1700s, the British tried to set up diplomatic relations with Imperial China. England was a proud and ancient nation with a growing empire…and so was China. It probably made sense to the British that these two great powers on opposite sides of the world should become friends.

To this end, the British sent forth a man named George Macartney. Macartney was an influential and famous man. How famous? Surely some of you may have heard the saying that the British “controlled an empire upon which the sun never sets”?

It was Macartney who coined that phrase.

Macartney and his chums arrived in the Chinese capital…then called Peking…in 1792. Here, they were admitted to the Forbidden City (a VERY rare privilege, even to the Chinese!) and granted an audience with the Emperor of China.

This historic meeting between East and West was ultimately unsuccessful. The British wanted to establish an embassy in China, so that the British and Chinese governments could be diplomatic partners. They also wanted China to open more of its ports to foreign trade. The emperor of China, the Qianlong Emperor (“Chee’yan-Long“) explained to Lord Macartney that such a relationship between China and England was not possible due to conflicting views and aims from both parties. The Emperor even wrote a letter to King George III to explain why such a relationship was impossible…although by now, George III was barking mad…so he probably never read it. But you can. Here is the letter.

It’s often believed that the emperor refused trade and diplomatic relations with England because Macartney had offended him by refusing to kowtow to him, instead stating that he would bow, or salute him as his own king, but would not execute actions which would suggest that the King of England was of lower status to that of the Emperor of China!

This is not true. But it sure makes for a hell of a story.

The Chinese Government firmly believed that it had no need for foreign goods, foreign inventions, foreign anything! It was Zhongguo! The Central Kingdom! And damn anyone else who thought otherwise! Foreigners were not even called ‘foreigners’! In most court, and government documents from the period, they are actually referred to as “barbarians”! And so, for another half-a-century, China kept itself largely locked away from the West.

For roughly 80 years, between the 1750s to the 1830s, the Chinese would only allow the British access to ONE port. This was known as the “Canton System”. So-called, because the one port that was open to foreign ships was the Port of Canton, in Canton Province. Where is Canton? It’s in southern China. You won’t find it on any map printed today, but you will find it if you search for Canton’s modern name…Guangzhou.

The Leadup to the Opium Wars

The British wanted things from China. And they were sure that the Chinese wanted things from England. The British were desperate for things like silk, spices, porcelain, and of course…its national beverage…TEA! And they could GET IT…if the Chinese agreed to trade with them, and would open up more ports to Western ships…but they refused! And they said that they wanted none of whatever the British had to offer! Western inventions and technology were of no use to the Chinese whatsoever!

This bickering between two proud and ancient countries had been going on for decades. Centuries, even. Then, the British discovered that the Chinese WERE interested in something that they could offer them!…Opium!

You have to understand that there was HIGH demand for Chinese goods in Europe. Europeans wanted porcelain, silk, spices and tea, but the Chinese didn’t want suits, top hats or flintlock muskets, watches, neckties or shoelaces, so the British had to find something else to trade with the Chinese. Something that the British could lay their hands on with ease, and which the Chinese attached some sort of value to.

The issue here was that the only thing that the Chinese would accept in return for all the goods that they were exporting to Europe was silver coinage. Or to be precise, silver tael. A tael is not a dollar or a pound, or any other type of currency. It is an Asian unit of measurement, the Chinese equivalent of the Troy Ounce. One tael of silver weighed just under 40 grams. The silver, measured by weight in tael, was paid in sycees. The ‘sycee’ (‘sigh-see’) is the traditional, boat-shaped Chinese ingot, the shape into which gold and silver were cast. These things:

A 10 tael (roughly 380g) Chinese silver sycee

Since Britain and the majority of Europe traded in GOLD, silver was hard to come by, and this caused even MORE problems. It was in trying to find a solution to this silver-drain, that the British hit on the answer…

…Opium.

Starting in the 1700s, the British began importing opium into China. Small quantities at first, but when the British gained more and more control of the Indian Subcontinent, the opium-trade boomed!

Opium was very popular in Europe. It was used for everything, from toothaches to fevers, back-aches to muscle-cramps. This drowsy, pain-killing drug was the aspirin of its day. Although effective as a painkiller, opium is also highly addictive. And it was this addictive quality that the British were counting on.

The Chinese jumped on the opium at once! Before very long, opium addiction was a huge problem in China. It was so bad that the Chinese emperor of the time ordered a nationwide ban on all but the smallest uses of opium, for medicinal purposes.

The British just ignored the Chinese government and continued sending in opium. And the Chinese commoners kept smoking it. At the turn of the 19th century, the emperor put ANOTHER ban on opium! In 1810, the Chinese Empire issued the following decree:

“Opium has a harm. Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality. Its use is prohibited by law. Now the commoner, Yang, dares to bring it into the Forbidden City. Indeed, he flouts the law! However, recently the purchasers, eaters, and consumers of opium have become numerous. Deceitful merchants buy and sell it to gain profit. The customs house at the Ch’ung-wen Gate was originally set up to supervise the collection of imports. If we confine our search for opium to the seaports, we fear the search will not be sufficiently thorough. We should also order the general commandant of the police and police- censors at the five gates to prohibit opium and to search for it at all gates. If they capture any violators, they should immediately punish them and should destroy the opium at once. As to Kwangtung and Fukien, the provinces from which opium comes, we order their viceroys, governors, and superintendents of the maritime customs to conduct a thorough search for opium, and cut off its supply. They should in no ways consider this order a dead letter and allow opium to be smuggled out!”

Strong words! And you can bet that the world sat up and took notice!

…or not.

The opium trade went right on ahead, as if NOTHING had happened!

The First Opium War (1839-1842)

In the end, everything came to a head! By the 1830s, tensions had been simmering for a century, and now, they finally exploded! The British wanted Chinese trade, and the Chinese didn’t want British opium! The Chinese wanted the British to stop importing opium, and the Chinese wanted the British to leave them alone! In 1839, the First Opium War started.

The Chinese easily outnumbered the British forces during the First Opium War, but the British had the benefit of modern, Victorian-era technology. And they had military bases very close to China: They had colonies in India, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore! The British systematically slaughtered the Chinese with their weaker, and older army, poorly-equipped to fight a modern war.

The First Opium War ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking.

The treaty took its name from the ancient Chinese city of Nanking. It was on a ship anchored in the river, the HMS Cornwallis, that the treaty was signed.

The treaty forced China to pay reparations to the British for the cost of the war, it forced the Chinese to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain indefinitely. In 1898, the island was granted to Britain on a 99-year lease, which famously ended in 1997.

The most famous condition of the Treaty of Nanking, however, was the British forcing the Chinese to open five of its ports to British and other foreign ships! The ports were the cities of Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and most famously…Shanghai.

The British forced the Chinese to sign the Treaty of Nanking. One of the conditions to which the Chinese were forced to consent to, was that foreigners living in China were subject to the laws of their own countries, and not to the laws of the Chinese Government. This led to the establishment of the Shanghai International Settlement in 1942.

The ending of the Opium War was a huge boost to the British. The opium-trade continued, and trade flourished between China and the West. This caused British-controlled Shanghai, soon to be the International Settlement, to flourish, turning what was once a small, riverside town, into what is today, one of China’s largest and prosperous cities. British Christian missionaries pushed deep into China to spread the word of God and British influence in the Pacific increased significantly.

The end of the First Opium War brought modern technology to China, it brought prosperity, trade, new inventions and exposure to new people. But it also brought more opium, more troubles, and it greatly weakened the public perception of the Qing Dynasty. The Qing Dynasty was never very popular. It was rife with corruption and was not generally supported by the Chinese people. Its humiliating defeat at the hands of the British caused it to slip even further in the opinions of the Chinese people.

The Second Opium War (1856-1860)

The Second Opium War was a British (’56-’60) and French (’57-’60) conflict against China. The British wanted more access to China, and they wanted to continue the opium-trade…both conditions which the Chinese Government refused to grant.

Just as with the first Opium War, the British won, and just like the first one, the conflict was over in four years. The war ended with the Convention of Peking, in 1860. Signing of the convention would result in more Chinese port-cities being opened to foreign traders; most notably, the ports of Hankou, Danshui, and Nanking). On top of this, foreign countries (France, Britain, Russia and the United States) were able to send diplomats to live and work in the Chinese capital of Peking (previously a closed city, forbidden to foreigners). This led to the establishment of the Legation Quarter in Peking, which would play a key role in the Boxer Rebellion, forty years later.

On top of this, foreigners were now allowed to travel deeper and deeper into the Chinese interior (not something previously allowed) and foreign ships were able to sail freely up and down the length of the Yangtze River.

The Impact of the Opium Wars

The two Opium Wars were short, largely one-sided regional conflicts, but their impact on the history of China was great, both positive, and negative. On the negative side, it forever established the Chinese as a bunch of opium-huffing, slitty-eyed and ignorant Asian foreigners, a stereotype that lasted well into the 20th century. Over the next half a century, the other European powers would start carving up China, staking out concessions for themselves. As this famous cartoon from the late 1800s shows, China was fair game for foreign powers:

This cartoon appeared in a French magazine. Here, we have the country of China (the pie on the table) being divided up by the Foreign Powers, represented by ENGLAND (Queen Victoria, LEFT), GERMANY (the Kaiser, next to her), RUSSIA (Tsar Nicholas II), FRANCE (peering over the tsar’s shoulder) and JAPAN (represented by by the character on the right), while the Chinese Government (the pig-tailed Oriental in the background) watches on in horror as its nation is divided up.

For all the negative effects and results of the Opium Wars, they did have positive outcomes as well. Although it was dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age, China benefited from Western exposure, new technologies, better communications and trade, and entered the 20th Century increasingly casting off its old and dusty superstitions and traditions, its illogical and irrational isolationism and embraced modernity and more forward ways of government and handling its affairs. Without the Opium Wars, China would probably still be an Imperial country, with an emperor, a Forbidden City, and struggling to keep up with the rest of the world.

The changes wrought by the Western Powers on China caused the final collapse of the much-hated and increasingly weak, and corrupt Qing Dynasty, and the birth of a modern, republican China in the early 20th century, and all the things that would come with it, such as the Nationalist Era, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Civil War, and the establishment of modern China.

Want to Know More?

The Emergence of Modern China – The First Opium War

Victorianweb – The Opium Wars

 
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Cleaning a Singer Model 15 Treadle Sewing Machine

Last week, I paid a visit to a family friend. She was a retired tailor who had been sewing ever since she was a little girl. She learnt how to sew on her mother’s old Singer treadle-machine…which has since been sold out of her family.

Her friends had an old Singer treadle-machine that had been in their family for a while and which they had absolutely no use for. Not sure what else to do with it, they gave the old sewing-machine to her as a birthday present, and it now sits on a scrap piece of carpet/rug in her living-room, as a display-piece.

The machine had been through a rough old time. According to my friend, it had sat in her friend’s garage for years, untouched. It’d been rained on and dripped on and neglected and left to rot. She cleaned it up some when she had it moved into her house, just so that it wouldn’t track grime everywhere, but other than that, she’d never touched it.

When I told her I was interested in having a look at the machine, she tried to show me how it worked, but found out that she couldn’t, because the presser-foot lever was jammed in place! I told her that if she wanted, I’d be happy to fix it for her. For a really simple ‘non-functional-to-operational-condition’ quick fixer-upper, I would need pliers, machine-oil, a rag, a box of tissues, tweezers, a screwdriver, and a powerful torch. She found these things for me, and I set to work.

The handwheel spun around really nicely and the needle-bar and takeup lever and the oscillating hook and the feed-dogs were all moving perfectly; I oiled them anyway, just in case, but the foot-lever, and the foot-tension screw were completely jammed from years of neglect. Neglect and possibly, rust. It took a lot of tissue-wiping to remove all the dust, gunk, grime and crap that had built up inside the machine, and a lot of oil, and quite a bit of force with the pliers, to get the tension-knob moving up and down like it should. I kept turning it all the way one way, and then all the way the other way, up and down, to clean off the gunk inside the threads of the foot-bar, and replace the grime with oil, to make it screw up and down more smoothly.

This was my first time working on what we found out later, was a Singer Model 15. This information (along with much more!) was supplied to us when we found the original, 80-year-old manual inside one of the drawers of the machine! I wasn’t entirely sure how this machine all went together, but I figured it out in the end and found out where I had to put the oil.

By the time I’d satisfied myself that the tension-screw for the presser-foot was moving about as well as it was going to, the oil that I’d let soak into the other parts of the presser-foot bar had pretty much done its job. All I had to do was to add a drop of oil at the very top of the presser-foot bar (to let it run all the way down the sides of the shaft), and then I started working the presser-foot lever up and down several times, to spread the oil around. In the beginning, I had to apply a bit of force to the foot-bar to encourage it to move, but once the oil got into everywhere, it moved freely and comfortably with no issues.

After that, I pulled apart the rest of the machine – the clutch-wheel at the back, and so-forth, and cleaned, polished and oiled all those parts of the machine as well, before putting the whole thing back together.

This was a rather rushed, spur-of-the-moment fixup which I hadn’t intended to do when I went to visit, but which I ended up doing, anyway! All up, the job took about two hours. Of course, I could’ve done a much better and more intricate job and cleaned up the ENTIRE machine to like-new condition, but I didn’t have the time to do that. I got it running at least, and that was the main thing.

We fitted in a new needle, we threaded it up and took it for a spin. It worked perfectly!

When you’re working on these old, purely mechanical machines, with solid steel parts (such as the old treadle, hand-crank, or early electric-power machines, mostly pre-1950s), you shouldn’t be afraid to use a *bit* of extra force when encouraging the mechanism to move. Don’t try and break it (if you do that, then you’ve got some serious upper-body strength, these machines are nearly indestructible!), but at the same time, if the mechanism clearly isn’t going to move…don’t try and make it. Most likely, you just need patience, to let the oil do its job. Let it soak in for a few minutes, and then try again a little bit later.

Anyway, back to the machine…

The treadle-mechanism doesn’t work, yet. The old belt was broken and my friend hadn’t had a chance to find a new one yet. But it works fine just by turning the handwheel…by hand…and I’m pretty happy with the results. She said she’d get her husband to fit on a new belt, and then she would clean up the rest of the machine in her own time, and start using it for sewing! Yay!

Another beautiful vintage machine brought back to life and saved from the scrap-heap. And all in two hours, with stuff that you can probably find around the house, or buy at your local hardware shop.

These are just some of the photographs I took of the machine. Yes, they’re a bit blurry, but that’s cause I took them in a hurry… 

And last but not least, the serial-number…

An EC-XXX-XXX serial-number dates this machine to 1939, so pre-WWII.

 
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Cleaning a Singer Model 15 Treadle Sewing Machine

Last week, I paid a visit to a family friend. She was a retired tailor who had been sewing ever since she was a little girl. She learnt how to sew on her mother’s old Singer treadle-machine…which has since been sold out of her family.

Her friends had an old Singer treadle-machine that had been in their family for a while and which they had absolutely no use for. Not sure what else to do with it, they gave the old sewing-machine to her as a birthday present, and it now sits on a scrap piece of carpet/rug in her living-room, as a display-piece.

The machine had been through a rough old time. According to my friend, it had sat in her friend’s garage for years, untouched. It’d been rained on and dripped on and neglected and left to rot. She cleaned it up some when she had it moved into her house, just so that it wouldn’t track grime everywhere, but other than that, she’d never touched it.

When I told her I was interested in having a look at the machine, she tried to show me how it worked, but found out that she couldn’t, because the presser-foot lever was jammed in place! I told her that if she wanted, I’d be happy to fix it for her. For a really simple ‘non-functional-to-operational-condition’ quick fixer-upper, I would need pliers, machine-oil, a rag, a box of tissues, tweezers, a screwdriver, and a powerful torch. She found these things for me, and I set to work.

The handwheel spun around really nicely and the needle-bar and takeup lever and the oscillating hook and the feed-dogs were all moving perfectly; I oiled them anyway, just in case, but the foot-lever, and the foot-tension screw were completely jammed from years of neglect. Neglect and possibly, rust. It took a lot of tissue-wiping to remove all the dust, gunk, grime and crap that had built up inside the machine, and a lot of oil, and quite a bit of force with the pliers, to get the tension-knob moving up and down like it should. I kept turning it all the way one way, and then all the way the other way, up and down, to clean off the gunk inside the threads of the foot-bar, and replace the grime with oil, to make it screw up and down more smoothly.

This was my first time working on what we found out later, was a Singer Model 15. This information (along with much more!) was supplied to us when we found the original, 80-year-old manual inside one of the drawers of the machine! I wasn’t entirely sure how this machine all went together, but I figured it out in the end and found out where I had to put the oil.

By the time I’d satisfied myself that the tension-screw for the presser-foot was moving about as well as it was going to, the oil that I’d let soak into the other parts of the presser-foot bar had pretty much done its job. All I had to do was to add a drop of oil at the very top of the presser-foot bar (to let it run all the way down the sides of the shaft), and then I started working the presser-foot lever up and down several times, to spread the oil around. In the beginning, I had to apply a bit of force to the foot-bar to encourage it to move, but once the oil got into everywhere, it moved freely and comfortably with no issues.

After that, I pulled apart the rest of the machine – the clutch-wheel at the back, and so-forth, and cleaned, polished and oiled all those parts of the machine as well, before putting the whole thing back together.

This was a rather rushed, spur-of-the-moment fixup which I hadn’t intended to do when I went to visit, but which I ended up doing, anyway! All up, the job took about two hours. Of course, I could’ve done a much better and more intricate job and cleaned up the ENTIRE machine to like-new condition, but I didn’t have the time to do that. I got it running at least, and that was the main thing.

We fitted in a new needle, we threaded it up and took it for a spin. It worked perfectly!

When you’re working on these old, purely mechanical machines, with solid steel parts (such as the old treadle, hand-crank, or early electric-power machines, mostly pre-1950s), you shouldn’t be afraid to use a *bit* of extra force when encouraging the mechanism to move. Don’t try and break it (if you do that, then you’ve got some serious upper-body strength, these machines are nearly indestructible!), but at the same time, if the mechanism clearly isn’t going to move…don’t try and make it. Most likely, you just need patience, to let the oil do its job. Let it soak in for a few minutes, and then try again a little bit later.

Anyway, back to the machine…

The treadle-mechanism doesn’t work, yet. The old belt was broken and my friend hadn’t had a chance to find a new one yet. But it works fine just by turning the handwheel…by hand…and I’m pretty happy with the results. She said she’d get her husband to fit on a new belt, and then she would clean up the rest of the machine in her own time, and start using it for sewing! Yay!

Another beautiful vintage machine brought back to life and saved from the scrap-heap. And all in two hours, with stuff that you can probably find around the house, or buy at your local hardware shop.

These are just some of the photographs I took of the machine. Yes, they’re a bit blurry, but that’s cause I took them in a hurry… 

And last but not least, the serial-number…

An EC-XXX-XXX serial-number dates this machine to 1939, so pre-WWII.

 
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A Sprinkling of History – Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice

Head into your kitchen and take a look around. If it’s anything like mine, or like any other average kitchen, it’s full of stuff like salt, pepper, cinnamon, cumin, powdered gelatin, sugar, mint, basil, onion, garlic, pork, beef, chicken, eggs, bread, butter, coffee, tea…all things we see, use, and eat on a regular, daily basis.

What today are common and popular condiments, foodstuffs and seasonings that we use every day, and which we can purchase at any time, were once expensive, hard-to-find luxury goods, available to only the richest and most prosperous of people. This posting  will outline the histories behind, and the significance of a selection of the flavorings, spices, foodstuffs and condiments found in almost every kitchen in the world today.

The History of Salt and Pepper

Any kitchen, any restaurant, any dining-table in the world, any fast-food eatery, cafe, diner and mobile food-wagon is going to have these two most important of all seasonings. Salt and pepper.

While we take these two staples for granted today; white, crunchy, tangy, musky, woody and spicy, they were once luxury goods available to only the most privileged of peoples, and available in only very small amounts. This is their history.

Salt

The importance of salt can hardly be exaggerated. It doesn’t just make food taste nice, but throughout history, salt has held a place of great significance. It was used for everything from flavoring meat, preserving food, and even as currency! A lot of expressions in the English language relate to salt and its one-time status as a rare and valuable commodity.

Today, you can buy salt from any supermarket in any number of forms. But in older times, salt was hard to come by, and incredibly expensive. Salt is acquired by one of two means, depending on which is the most effective:

The first is the simple evaporation of seawater. Gathering seawater into large, open troughs or pans and letting the water evaporate, is one of the most common ways of getting salt, even today. Once the seawater was evaporated by the sun, the salt-crystals would remain behind. Then, it was simply a matter of gathering the salt-crystals, washing them, purifying them, and repeatedly evaporating them until they were clean, clear, white and ready to use.

The second method of procuring salt was salt-mining. When vast inland lakes and seas dried up, they left large deposits of salt on the earth’s crust. Today, we know them as salt-flats. Salt in this form is known as ‘rock salt’ because it’s clumped up into large crystals. Accessing this salt is as simple as shoveling it out of the ground, mining for it, and purifying it, much like with the seawater.

But doing all this by hand, without the aid of modern mass-production, meant that for thousands of years, salt was a relative luxury. Industrial quantities of salt were used for preserving meat and fish. Food such as pork, beef, ham, bacon, and any number of sea-creatures were packed in salt to keep it fresh. The large chunks or chips of salt used in this curing and preserving process were called ‘corns’ of salt. Hence the term ‘corned beef’; literally, beef preserved by being packed in with large flakes and chips of salt.

Salt was so valuable and relatively hard to come by that as far back as the Ancient Romans, salt was used a currency. Soldiers were paid in salt, and only a man…”worth his salt“…would be allowed his allotted ration. When soldiers weren’t paid in salt, they were paid in coinage that would allow them to buy the salt which the money represented. This form of payment was known as a salarium. Working people are still paid their regular ‘salaries‘ to this day.

The relative scarcity of salt meant that it was a massive status symbol. These days, salt is sold and presented at-table in any number of ways: In cheap plastic salt-grinders or shakers, in plastic zip-lock bags and in shrink-wrapped packets inside pretty cardboard boxes. But it wasn’t always like this.

Salt was so important that once it was presented at the table, it was housed in a specially-manufactured piece of tableware: The salt-cellar.

You can still buy salt-cellars today, but antique cellars, made of glass and sterling silver were prized pieces of the household’s table-setting. The number of salt-cellars on the table showed off how wealthy the homeowner was, and the position of the cellars on the table determined and indicated a diner’s relationship to the homeowner!

A king, lord, or wealthy merchant would have closest access to the salt-cellar. The people in his immediate vicinity, and who were able to reach the salt-cellar, did so at the king’s invitation, and were said to be ‘above the salt‘. People who were less deserving, and therefore, who couldn’t gain access to the coveted salt-cellar on the table, were seated further down the table, and therefore ‘below the salt‘.

Salt was so important and prized that whole wars were fought over this simple, white crystal. Taxes were levied against salt, and restriction of prohibition of its passage through a country was even hoped to affect the outcomes of wars and battles. During the American Revolution, the British and loyalist colonials hijacked, stole or hid valuable cargoes of salt bound for the Patriots. While this may seem funny today…don’t forget that salt was required to preserve food! Without the salt, meat and fish could not be kept fresh for long journeys and big battles, which, the British hoped, would turn the tide of the war in their favour.

So important was salt that government mishandling of this precious flavouring could cause the population to turn against it in a hurry! In 1648, the Russian Government unwisely put a heavy tax on salt. Taxation in Russia was easily circumvented, and many people of relative means were able to get away with not paying their taxes.

In the early 1600s, Russia was in a transitional stage. The last tsar of the Rurik Dynasty had died and there was a fierce power-struggle, which ended in the 1610s and 1620s, with the establishment of the Romanov Dynasty, which would rule Russia until the Revolution of 1917.

The fighting caused by this power-struggle had left the Russian Treasury empty. To get much needed money for the government, and to stop the widespread tax-evasion of the time, the Russian Government decided that the fastest way to get money was to tax the one thing that everyone relied on…salt.

Salt was essential to the Russian diet. It was required by everyone to salt and preserve the fish and meat which was at the time, a staple to the Russian people. The salt tax infuriated the Russian citizens and in 1648, everything came to a head with the Moscow Salt Riot.

You wouldn’t think that much would happen. A bunch of peasants and serfs, middling sorts and shopkeepers rioting over a lack of salt couldn’t be that big, could it?

By the end of roughly ten days of rioting, half of Moscow lay in ruins, burned to the ground by people who refused to pay taxes on such an essential component of Russian life.

Such is the importance and significance, rarity and necessity of salt.

Pepper

There are several varieties of pepper. It holds the world record as being the most commonly used spice in the world. The most common pepper that people are familiar with is Piper Nigrum…’Black Pepper’.

Pepper was once a prized and rare spice. It’s native to the Asian regions of the world, around India, and the South Pacific countries. Access to this desirable but faraway spice caused the opening of the Spice Trade. The Spice Trade had existed for centuries. It started in the Mediterranean, and spread east from there, to countries such as Persia, Afghanistan, Siam, China, India, Korea, Malaya, and Indochina. The Spice Trade was done by sea, with routes running through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The Trade was also run through overland routes, such as the famous “Silk Road” through China. A lot more than pepper was traded, however. Popular spices included cinnamon, cumin, ginger and turmeric. Along with spices, silks, exotic woods, ivory, cloth and other exotic items were also traded. Pepper remained the backbone of the Spice Trade, however, because it was heavily used, much like salt, to flavour food, and/or to disguise the taste of less-than-fresh meat or fish.

Sugar and Spice, and Everything Nice

Aaah, sugar. Sweet, sweet, wonderful sugar. Brown, white, crunchy and sweet. The bane of dentists, dietitians and purveyors of health-food. This legendary substance has been used in everything from candy to chocolate, sauces, cakes, pies, muffins, cookies, and even meat! But, like salt before it, sugar was once a valuable commodity used only by the very rich.

Sugar is native to India. There, it is grown in the sugarcane plant. The juice or water extracted from the cane-reeds is a sweet liquid (…which is incredible to drink, by the way…) which for many years, remained untapped. For most of the world, the main sweetener was still honey, extracted from beehives. But when Indians learnt how to refine the sugar-water, and extract pure sugar-crystals from it, the sugar-trade exploded!…or not.

The issue was that sugar produced from sugar-cane was expensive and had a relatively low yield. As a result, sugar was incredibly expensive, and remained a luxury item and status-symbol throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. If you could afford sugar, you were rich!

Sugar started becoming cheaper when, in the 1700s, it was discovered that another plant, the sugar beet, was also high in natural sugar. Sugar-beets were easier to grow and more plentiful. The discovery of the beet and it’s link to sugar was made in the mid-1700s, but it wasn’t until the 1810s that sugar-beet production and harvesting really took off! By the Victorian-era, sugar was becoming much cheaper, and the candy industry, with boiled sweets, chocolate-bars, cookies, cakes, pies and puddings really began to take off. Sugar-consumption shot up significantly during the 1800s.

Honey

Honey is something that everyone is likely to have in their house. It’s sweet, sticky and delicious. And it’s also healthy and good for you! Among other things…

Honey has been known to mankind for centuries. And before the rise of sugar in the early 19th century, it was the main sweetening agent used in cooking. Honey was used for a lot more than making things sweet, though. Just like salt, honey is a natural preservative. Food could be sealed in honey to keep it fresh for weeks and months at a time. Fruit and nuts were often stored in jars of honey to keep them fresh and sweet, during the summer months, so that they could still be eaten during the winter months, when fruits were less plentiful. Honey is such a good preservative that jars of ancient honey found by archaeologists are still good to eat today, thousands of years later. In some countries, honey was even used to preserve dead bodies.

Honey is also an antiseptic, and was used to treat and clean wounds on the battlefield in ancient times. English monarch, King Henry V, was shot in the face with an arrow during the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, while fighting under his father’s command. The battlefield surgeon cleaned the wound with honey, removed the arrowhead and bandaged the then-prince’s face. Prince Henry survived his injury, and the battle, and succeeded his father, Henry IV, in 1413.

From those reading this who suffer from bowel-issues, you might be relieved to know that honey is also a laxative. Raw honey, in as pure, and as unprocessed a state as it’s possible to buy, has a lubricating effect on the body, which helps relieve digestive issues such as constipation. Feeling a bit blocked up? Make yourself a couple of pots of tea with a good dose of raw honey mixed in. Not only is it delicious, but you’ll feel much better after a couple of hours…

Butter and Margarine

Anyone who’s ever done the schoolboy experiment of dropping two marbles into a jar of cream, sealing the lid and shaking the jar until your arms drop off, will know how butter is created (and yes, that is how butter is created…constant agitation of cream).

Butter is one of the most essential ingredients in the world. For cakes, for pies, for cookies, for sandwiches, for hot toast on cold nights, for greasing up the toastie-maker before making a grilled-cheese sandwich.

Butter has been around for centuries. Commercial exporting of butter is traced back to the 1100s in Northern Europe. For a long time, butter was considered a peasant’s food, fit to be consumed only by farmers and peasants. Eventually, however, butter became accepted as food for all classes, from kings and emperors downwards.

Because it’s a dairy product, storing butter was a problem. It had to be kept in such a way that it didn’t melt or spoil. Where possible, it was kept cold, underground, or in ice-houses or ice-boxes. Where the ground-conditions allowed it, butter was stored in barrels and buried in peat-bogs! This method of preservation was common in Ireland up until the end of the 1700s.

Butter became wildly popular in the 1800s. Sauces and dressings for salads and a variety of savory dishes were made using butter. In France in the 1860s, butter became so widely used that there was a severe butter-shortage! Emperor Napoleon III famously set up a nationwide competition! A prize, to anyone who could mass produce a cheap, effective and worthy substitute for butter, that would feed the poor and provide sustenance to the French Army! The prize was finally claimed in 1869, by French chemist Hippolyte Mege-Mouries. Mege-Mouries built on research done by other chemists, and developed the wonder-spread that would save France from a butter-drought! He named it..Oleomargarine…or just ‘margarine’ for short.

Margarine, made from vegetable fats and oils, instead of milk-fat, as butter is, has  always had a bit of a stigma. It’s seen as the poor-man’s butter. The cheap substitute that it was back in the 1860s is a stigma that is yet to be removed from its character. In fact, margarine was seen as so offensive, that it was actually prohibited in certain countries!

Because manufacturing cheap margarine would harm the local dairy industries, in the United States and Canada, the production and sale of margarine was made illegal! And…just like in the U.S.A. in the 1920s…it led to bootleg margarine. Hard to imagine, but it did! In the end, margarine-bans were ended (Canada, in 1948, America, during the late 1960s), but taxes and ‘margarine licenses’ meant that it wasn’t quite as cheap as probably it should’ve been. In the United States, there was a Margarine Tax (2c/lb). 2 cents a pound doesn’t sound like much, but back then, 2 cents was the price of a newspaper!

Potatoes

…Yes. Potatoes.

The humble spud has some pretty interesting stories to tell. It was once considered inedible and filthy. It came from the ground, covered in crud that you had to scrape off, after all…who wants to eat that!?

The potato comes from South America. It was introduced to Europe by the Spanish in the Early Modern Period. But acceptance was slow and grudging. It was considered cheap, peasanty food, not worth for anything but pig-feed. In fact, in the 1780s and 90s, when France was undergoing a record famine due to crop-failures, the French would rather starve to death than eat potatoes!

The potato-promoter extraordinaire was a Frenchman. His name was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.  It was he who suggested that the potato, a versatile and adaptable food, would be the savior of the French people during their time of need! He was so convinced of this that he hosted dinners at which NOTHING was served…but potatoes…in one way, or another. For every single course. He even did this to the French king, Louis XVI! In the 1770s, the French medical society finally agreed that the potato was not the filthy, poisonous, and dangerous thing that came out of the ground, but, grudgingly, accepted that it could be eaten…this still didn’t stop the French from avoiding it like the plague, though…

The potato was the staple food of the Irish people for much of the 1800s. When the potato crops failed in the 1840s and 50s, thousands of desperate Irish men, women and children immigrated to the United States to save themselves from starvation.

But the most famous story about the potato is not how it became accepted into polite society, or how it affected patterns of immigration, but rather, how it became the popular potato-chip.

If you dug deep enough, you could (and some people have) found proof that this happened before this date, but the generally accepted story is that the crunchy, salted potato chip was invented in the following manner:

Moon’s Lake House, Saratoga Springs, New York, U.S.A. 1853. Moon’s Lake House is a popular eatery and holiday resort in the town of Saratoga Springs. The resident chef is an African-American, a young (by then, in his early 30s) man named George Crum. The fashion of the time was to slice potatoes into thick chunks, sort of like wedges, and fry them, so that they could be eaten with a knife and fork. A customer repeatedly sent back his fried potatoes to the kitchen, insisting that the slices were too thick, and so soggy that they kept breaking apart on his fork!

Insulted by this, Crum shaved the next order of potatoes until they were paper-thin! He flash-fried them in oil until they were crunchy and hard, and then showered them all over with a huge amount of salt! He sent the potatoes back out…

To his surprise, his new invention was a hit! Potato-chips made Crum rich! In a restaurant that he opened himself, after the American Civil War, Crum served potato chips in baskets on all the tables, as a snack-food for his diners before their meals.

Did Crum invent potato chips? There are some who believe so. There are some who believe that they existed before then, but were not named as such. However they arrived on the scene, they have remained popular for over a hundred and fifty years…

 
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The Land of the Free: America’s Immigrant History

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Ever since it was colonised by the master of colonial powers back in the Stuart era, the United States has been a land of immigration, innovation and industry. Those immortal words, part of a poem by writer Emma Lazarus, have adorned the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor for over a century, since they were first put there in 1903. They poetically remind us of America’s great immigrant past.

America. The United States. The U.S. The Arsenal of Democracy. The global policeman who Theodore Roosevelt said should: “Speak softly and carry a big stick”.

Empires and their influences rise and fall, whether or not they be empires in the truest sense of the word, or not. The Chinese Empire. The Russian Empire. The Soviet Empire. The Greek Empire. The Roman Empire. The Japanese Empire. The French Empire. The Byzantine Empire…the list is almost endless. But right now, one could argue that we are in the midst of an American Empire.

At the time of the British Empire, British influence and culture spread throughout the world…much like how today, American influence and culture does the same. The British brought us language, culture, food, government, schools and tray after tray of delicately-sliced, daintily-prepared cucumber sandwiches. The Americans gave us trash-talk TV shows, Oprah, supermodels, shamelessly expensive designer consumer-goods and a plethora of cheap, fattening, greasy fast foods the likes of which have never been seen or tasted before.

One could say a lot of bad things about America. But then one could say a lot of bad things about almost any country on earth. But America’s history is one of constant hardship, struggle, invention, innovation, creativity, renewal and grudging acceptance.

So. Where do we begin?

Finding the New World

People have been aware of the American continent for centuries. Ever since the late 15th century. Everyone knows that in 1492, an Italian man named Christopher Columbus sailed across the Pond. He reached the other bank and he found a great, vast, untouched country. He called it!…

…India.

Columbus was looking for a passage to India and the Middle East. He hadn’t counted on bumping into a huge landmass halfway through his journey. But he did. And since he was looking for India, he assumed that this was India! For that reason, he named the natives who came to greet him…Indians.

They’re not, of course. But today, the term “American Indian” still survives. All because of a simple geographical error.

Eventually, the American continent became known as the “New World”, to differentiate it from the “Old World” (ie: Europe).

Knowledge of this “New World” had been around for a while. In 1583, a fellow named Humphrey Gilbert, from England, found a new landmass off the coast of the American continent. He claimed it for Queen and Country (‘Queen’ being Elizabeth I) and gave it a name which we still have today. His newfound landmass would be named…um…

Newfoundland.

Yeah, they weren’t very big on fancy, inventive, creative names back in Tudor times.

Attempts to colonise America had been around for a while. A lot of countries wanted to go to America. France, Spain and England particularly, were all fighting for their own slices of this new action. The first successful British colony was established in 1607 during the reign of King James the First.

Jamestowne, Virginia: A Shaky Start

In the early 1600s, a group of daring colonists set sail across the Atlantic. Backing them up was the Virginia Company of London. This company was established purely for the purposes of setting up a British colony, or set of colonies, on the American continent. Many people had tried in the past, but all of them had been failures for one reason or another. But in 1607, they succeeded! Yay!

They named their new settlement Jamestown. And the land around them they named ‘Virginia’, after the company that sponsored their little adventure. They built huts, set up palisades, grew crops, sold discount DVDs…everything was cool!

…or not.

The colonists needed to choose the site of their new settlement very carefully. Somewhere with wood for building and for fuel, somewhere close to water for drinking, and water-transport, somewhere clean and comfortable, and somewhere free from the savage natives!

To this end, they selected a spot in the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia, near the mouth of the aptly-named James River. It was perfect! The peninsula was created by the convergence of two waterways. The James River on the south, the North River on the…um…north…lots of lovely land to the west, and to the east, Chesapeake Bay!

But, best of all these things…there were no savage natives around! wonderful! Perfect! Fantastic!

They thought this was so fantastic that they completely forgot to take into account…WHY…there were no savage natives around.

What at first seemed like the perfect place to set up shop soon became a nightmare. The reason there were no natives here was because it was a terrible place to be. And when the locals don’t go there, it’s best that you don’t, either.

The area had a lot of stagnant, still water all over the place, because of the huge amounts of water from the two rivers that emptied into the bay. This stagnant, stale water was impossible to drink. And it bred mosquitoes that buzzed around all over the place! The ground was so wet and soggy from the nearby waterways that it was impossible to grow anything there. The crops would become waterlogged and just rot in the ground. And what land that there was actually available for settlement was so small that it was considered a waste of time to even try starting!

Just about everything was against them. Too late to go out finding somewhere else to sleep for the night, the colonists had to make do with whatever their poor choice had given them to do whatever they needed to do, with. And that wasn’t much.

To set up a colony, the menfolk would have to chop down trees, de-branch logs, cut planks or beams, or cut notches in tree-trunks to create logs and somehow build simple wooden or log-cabins. They also had to clear land, plow fields and grow crops!

Can you do that?

Neither could they!

The problem was that they’d arrived in America too late in the year. By the time they’d managed to get their settlement together, such as it was, it was already the middle of May, 1607, and rapidly approaching June. The issue here was that there wouldn’t be enough time to plant crops and get them to grow to a sufficient size to harvest for food, before winter came and killed everything!

On top of that, there was not a single farmer amongst them. They were all merchants, tradesmen, gentlemen of means, ladies of leisure, children, and household domestic servants. Even those who were used to hard work could chop wood or cook food or wash clothes. But farming?

They didn’t have a clue.

Conditions got so bad that soon they were all starving. During the 1600s, the world goes through what is called the “Mini Ice Age”, which doesn’t end until the early 1800s. Temperatures get so cold that in England, it’s not uncommon for the River Thames in the very heart of London to freeze over! You could skate from one bank of the river to the other! Or even take a sleigh and horses, because the ice is that thick!

What does this mean for the colonists?

Well, with harsh winter weather, little food and less firewood, they begin dropping like flies. Of the original five hundred colonists, by the end of 1607, there are only 449 left! And by the end of 1610, there’s only 61 left!

The colonists were in really bad shape. Even if they wanted to start farming, they couldn’t, because they didn’t have the skills necessary to do it. The local natives did try to help them out, but local assistance only goes so far. Soon, the colonists were fighting with the Indians. Not a good idea. Mostly because the Indians are armed with bows and arrows, and the colonists with unreliable matchlock muskets. What’s the issue here?

Well, while the bow and arrow is an older technology, it operates at a much, much faster rate of fire than the muskets of the time. In the end, the colonists capture the daughter of the local chieftain and hold her to ransom. The war ends and they sign a peace treaty. But the Indian girl is kinda cute, so one of the colonists marries her and takes her back to England as a sort of walking advertisement for exotic life in the New World. Her name becomes famous all over London.

Pocahontas.

Her husband was John Rolfe, one of the first successful tobacco farmers in colonial America. They sailed for England in 1616. They would’ve sailed back home to America in 1619 at the end of their tour of England, but Pocahontas died before they could make the journey.

Jamestown struggled on for several more decades. But it was finally abandoned at the close of the 17th century, in 1699.

The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony

The other famous group of settlers in early American history were a group of persecuted religious types. Known today as the Pilgrim Fathers, or simply, the Pilgrims, these English men, women and children followed the Christian puritan religion.

And they weren’t exactly popular for doing so.

Just as the name suggests, the puritans believed in leading…pure lives. This meant that religion was central to their way of acting, living and thinking. Puritans believed that many of the things that we take for granted today, were sinful in the eyes of the Lord, and should be illegal. Things like: Christmas, gambling, games, sport, presents and theater! No wonder they weren’t exactly popular…

So persecuted were they that the puritans decided to leave England and sail for the New World. And they did so on one of the most famous ships in history.

The Mayflower.

Fed up of the trouble and persecution caused by King Charles the First in England, the puritans decided that they had to escape. To this end, they boarded a ship at the English port town of Plymouth, and set sail due west, for the American continent.

The Mayflower might be famous, but it wouldn’t be my first choice for a transatlantic crossing.

The ship was tiny. About 30m long by 7.5m wide (110 x 25ft), with four decks. The space between the decks was about five feet high! Crammed into this bathtub with sails were about 130 passengers and crew. About 105 passengers, and about 25 to 30 sailors. If that sounds crowded, then be glad the ship didn’t leave with it’s original, full complement of 150 passengers and crew! About twenty passengers got off the ship when it docked at Plymouth, and refused to get back on. On top of this, the ship was not designed to transport people! It was a merchant vessel. A cargo-ship designed to transport barrels of wine!

The Mayflower left England on the 16th of September, 1620. And they were probably glad to be on their way! Two previous attempts to leave, with another ship along for the ride (the ‘Speedwell‘) had been marred by misfortune. The Speedwell sprung a leak on both previous attempts, and the ships had to keep turning back to England. Originally supposed to leave with two ships from the famous English port of Southampton, the pilgrims now left with one ship, from the port city of Plymouth, England. But finally, they were on their way.

The voyage took sixty-six days across the Atlantic. They arrived along the Eastern coast of the American continent in what is modern day Massachusetts. It is the 9th of November, 1620. They dropped anchor, lowered the ship’s boats and rowed ashore. Landfall was made on a large, smooth grey rock on the Massachusetts shoreline. Today, this unassuming chunk of stone is called Plymouth Rock.

Or is it?

The traditional story is that the Mayflower left England, beat a path across the sea, dropped anchor off the American coast, lowered its boats, the passengers and crew rowed ashore and the first of their feet hit American soil, standing on a large rock on the beach. But is it true? Nobody really knows. No accounts written by the pilgrims back in the 1620s make any mention of a rock of any kind. The first written record of it ever existing didn’t show up until the mid-18th century, ca. 1741.

The man responsible for this was Thomas Faunce. Faunce, by then nearly a hundred years old (to be precise, the incredible age of 94!), had been town record-keeper of Plymouth, Massachusetts, for most of his life. It was he who identified the rock which, so his father had told him, was the actual ‘Plymouth Rock’ which the Pilgrims first touched when they arrived in America.

Whether or not it’s 100% true is up for debate. But in America today, you can still go to Massachusetts and see Plymouth Rock. It’s still there, housed in its own special little protective structure by the sea.

Just like the settlers at Jamestown, the Pilgrims had to fight to survive. To try and make this easier, they wrote and signed the first proper legal document in American history. The Mayflower Compact.

The details of the compact listed the laws, rules and regulations which were expected within the colony, and which all signers were sworn to follow and obey, in order for the colony to have the best chance of survival.

The actual Compact is long gone. But copies of what it probably looked like have survived to this day, preserved in the texts of books written and printed shortly after the arrival of the pilgrims. The text of the Compact, as recorded in various contemporary papers and books from the period, read as follows. (The spelling and grammar is modern, but the text is unchanged from the original document):

The Text of the Mayflower Compact (1620)

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620

Despite this nice piece of paper and all that it entails (it takes a while to cut through the incredibly convoluted nature of 17th century English, but it’s not that hard to read and understand!), life for the Pilgrims in Massachusetts was no easier than that for the settlers at Jamestown. Disease and starvation killed several people before the end of the year.

By 1621, the colony of New Plymouth begins to take shape properly. Local native Americans make friends with the pilgrims. They show them where to fish, how to fertilise the local soil so that their crops of corn will grow. The pilgrims hunt for turkeys with their muskets.

In November, 1621, one year after their arrival, the pilgrims hold a feast to show their thanks for God’s mercy, and to show their appreciation to the local natives who had helped them survive their first twelve months in this new and alien world. Today, it is the American holiday of Thanksgiving.

The pilgrims and the Jamestown settlers become America’s first permanent English-speaking settlers.

Other Colonists

Early America wasn’t just colonised by the British. Great swathes of the country were colonised by the French, the Dutch and the Spanish, to the south, north and west respectively. You can still see their influences in the place-names today: Louisiana – named for King Louis of France, Vermont – French for ‘Green Mountains’ and the original name of the New York Borough of Manhattan: New Amsterdam.

The Great Migrations

In the period before and after the American Civil War (1861-1865), there were periods of mass migration. The first migration came from within: African-Americans held in slavery in the South fled North. Racism existed everywhere, but in the North, people were generally more tolerant, open, respectful and less prejudiced.

One of the greatest numbers of migrants to the United States were the Chinese.

Fleeing famine and unrest in China, thousands of them swarmed across the Pacific Ocean to American port-cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. In the 1860s, America is attempting the world’s first transcontinental railroad. Irish railroad workers refuse to do the backbreaking and incredibly dangerous work of boring, blasting, shoveling, tunneling, laying sleepers, gravel, tracks and driving in millions of rivets and spikes. The Railroad is made in an age where old-fashioned gunpowder (‘black powder’) is still the main explosive. Of only moderate effectiveness, the only other alternative is the highly unstable nitroglycerin. It’s so dangerous that it can explode at the drop of a hat. Transporting it is made illegal, and even under controlled circumstances, accidents are common.

The Chinese, lured to the United States by stories of work, money and a stable life, flock to California. Some have already been there since the 1850s when the California Gold Rush spread gold-fever around the world. To this day, San Francisco boasts the biggest Chinatown in the entire United States. One of the most famous Chinese foodstuffs which isn’t Chinese at all, is created there – The fortune-cookie.

The other great migration came from the 1840s onwards. Driven from their homeland by constant crop-failures, the Irish people are starving to death because their staple food is almost nonexistent. During this time, the diet of the Irish poor is made up mostly of beer, bread, cheese and that wonder-crop…the potato.

Yes. The Irish are the world’s biggest per-capita consumer of french fries.

When the Potato Blights started in the 1840s, Irish families starved. Farmers were unable to farm and with no potatoes to sell at market, they were unable to pay rent. And this got them in trouble with the absentee landlords – Wealthy Englishmen who owned estates in Ireland. Called ‘absentee landlords’ because they never bothered to visit their Irish estates. They only paid attention to them when the money stopped flowing, which happened more and more as the 1800s progressed. Poor Irish families were evicted, and landlords would even burn down their houses to stop them from coming back.

The Irish fled to the United States in their thousands. They settled in the big cities and in small towns, blending in with American society.

As the 1800s progressed, more and more people poured into the United States, the oft-toted ‘Land of the Free’. The majority of people living in America today can boast some degree of European immigrant history.

Immigration in America grew from a trickle, to the occasional rush, to a steady flow, into a torrent of humanity, forcing their way in. To regulate the flow of immigrants, the American Government established the world’s most famous immigration check-point in history. This place:

Ellis Island Immigration Center, New York, U.S.A.

As far back as 1855, the United States had been processing immigrants through official arrival-centers. On the Eastern Seaboard, the main one was the Castle Garden Immigration Center.

Previously a defensive fort built on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, Castle Garden (today Castle Clinton) Immigration Center was America’s first immigration-center. The castle or fort had existed since 1808, it became an immigration-center in 1855. It remained one for nearly forty years.

But Castle Garden was not fully-equipped to be an immigration-center. It didn’t have all the proper facilities and it was located on the increasingly crowded Manhattan Island. It was decided that there had to be a PROPER immigration-center, purpose-built for the processing of immigrants.

Ellis Island Immigration Center started operation in 1892. It finally closed in 1954. By the time it ceased to be a functioning immigration-center, it had processed 12,000,000 people.

Today, over 100,000,000 Americans can trace their family history back to someone who passed through the gates at Ellis Island.

Who Came to Ellis Island?

The majority of people who came to the United States through the immigration-center at Ellis island were Europeans. Swiss, Swedes, Spanish, Germans, Poles, French, and as the 20th century dawned, a large number of Eastern European, mostly Russian, Jews. The pogroms (race riots) in the Russian Empire at the time forced many Jews to flee Eastern Europe for their own safety. Some merely moved to other countries within Europe, such as Poland, or Germany, or France. Some moved to the United Kingdom. But more and more were willing to risk everything on a third-class ticket to the New World.

To sail across ‘The Pond’ on a total guess was a big step. Most of these people were going to a totally new country. A country they probably only read about in newspapers, in books, or heard about from friends, or read about in letters. This legendary country called ‘America’, where the streets were paved with gold and where anybody could make it big!

The Immigration Process at Ellis Island

In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, great steamship companies such as Cunard, White Star, French Line, the Hamburg-America Line and so-forth, the big, transatlantic companies, got a lot of their money, not from the wealthy first-class passengers who swanned across the Pond in lavish style and luxury, but rather from the hundreds and thousands of poor European immigrants who fled their homelands to try their luck in the New World, this land of the free, the home of the brave.

To get from Europe to America was a voyage of at least a week. Even the fastest ships could only manage it in about six or seven days (even today, modern ocean-liners will take up to four days). But what happened when the ship reached New York?

The ship would sail into New York Harbor, past the great Statue of Liberty, the first sight of America that any of these immigrants was ever likely to see. Passing the Statue, they would sail past the Five Boroughs to New Jersey. Here, they were offloaded, and they and their luggage were dumped onto ferries. Ferries ran shuttle-services to and from Ellis Island, off the southwest coast of Manhattan.

Once you reached the island, you were shepherded off and sent to the main immigration-hall. Here, your luggage was stacked, and then you headed upstairs to the Great Hall. The hall was broken up by steel and wooden barriers, long benches and barricades. You selected the appropriate line, got into it, and worked your way down towards the desks at the far end. Here, your papers would be examined and cross-checked, such as passports, tickets, visas and so-forth. Interpreters speaking the main European languages were on-hand to assist with any language-barriers.

If everything checked out, you went onto other lines and categories. You would be medically examined, your intelligence checked, and starting in 1919, your literacy as well. This process could take hours…or it could take months! In the end, one of three things would eventually happen:

1. You were passed fit for immigration. You could gather up your luggage from the luggage-room downstairs, and then head to the “Kissing Post”. 

The ‘Kissing Post’ was given its current name because this was the exit-passageway from the main immigration-hall. It was where friends, family-members or sponsors waited for their newly-arrived companions or additional family-members. Couples, families and friends would meet here in the passageway, head outside and board a ferry for New York, ready to start their new lives in their new home.

2. You were put into Quarantine.

Not everyone who came to Ellis Island could leave right away. If you were found to be ill, or lacking in any physical or mental capacity, you might be refused entry to the United States, or you might be put into quarantine. Medical officers, nurses, orderlies and doctors prowled the floors of the immigration-center, examining new arrivals. Every single immigrant was given a quick (and I mean QUICK! Less than a minute!) checkup by a doctor to assess their condition. If there were no issues, the person could pass through. If there were, a chalk-mark would be pressed into their clothes. The marks that the medical-officers on Ellis Island employed included:

B – Back (Potential back-problems, spinal problems, etc).
C- Conjunctivitis (Pink-eye. An infection of the eye).
T – Trachoma (another type of eye-infection)
E – Eyes (for potential vision-issues).
F – Face (for potential facial issues).
FT – Feet (for issues with feet, walking, mobility, etc).
G – Goiter.
H – Heart.
K – Hernia (ouch!)
L – Lameness.
N – Neck.
P – Physical (general medical issues).
PG – Pregnancy.
S – Senility or Alzheimer’s Disease.
SC – Scalp and hair issues.
SI – ‘Special Inquiry’.
X – Suspected Mental Illness.
(X) – Certified mental illness.

Depending on the mark made on your clothes, you could be held in quarantine for days, or even weeks at a time, until you were cured. Ellis Island had playgrounds for children, dining-halls, a hospital and dormitories for all its quarantined immigrants. Once you were cured, you would be allowed to leave the island.

3. You were sent back to your home country.

This was the last and worst category that an immigrant could find himself in. You could be sent back to Europe for any number of reasons, from criminal records, not having enough money, or a sponsor (the immigration officials didn’t want people surviving on handouts!) or an unsatisfactory medical report. For many immigrants, being sent back was devastating. Many of them had sunk their life-savings into packing everything up and shipping their family across the Atlantic to the United States to start a new life. The only good thing to come out of this was the fact that the passage back home was free!

Returning immigrants didn’t have to pay for their passage home. It was provided by the steamship company that brought them there in the first place. Because the big liner companies didn’t like giving free passages to immigrants, the immigration process was very strict. Before you even got on the ship departing from Cherbourg, Naples or Southampton, Hamburg or Gdansk, you went through strict immigration processes, as tightly controlled, if not more so, than the one you would get at Ellis Island. This was to ensure that only the best candidates for worthwhile immigration ever made it through, saving everyone time and money.

Of course, some people wanted to get to America at any cost. If their medical examination was unsatisfactory, it wasn’t uncommon for people to wipe off the chalk-marks made on their clothes…or simply take off their clothes, or turn them inside out…and sneak off to the departure area, grab their luggage and board the next ferry leading to the mainland. They’d come this far and sunk all their money into this once-in-a-lifetime chance. They weren’t about to let a stupid white mark on their coat hold them back!

The End of Ellis Island

For sixty two years, Ellis Island was in operation. From 1892, until 1954. Business was steady for about half that time, and over twelve million people entered America through this most famous of all the immigration centers. Ellis Island was busiest between the 1890s up to the period after the First World War. In 1920, immigration restriction acts in many countries saw the end of the transatlantic immigrant trade, and ships from big companies like Cunard, the French Line and the White Star Line, stopped offering cheap berths to immigrants. The ‘steerage’ class on ocean-liners practically disappeared and was converted into a more respectable-sounding “Tourist Class” instead.

Despite the decline of the transatlantic immigrant-passages, Ellis Island remained open until well into the postwar years. It finally shut down in 1954.

Famous Ellis Island Immigrants

A lot of America’s most famous celebrities came to the United States by passing through the gates of Ellis Island. Among them were…

Irving Berlin – The famous songwriter.
Isaac Asimov – The novelist.
Chef Boiardi.
Frank Carpa – The film-director.
Cary Grant and Bob Hope (The famous actor and comedian, both from England).
Al Jolson – ‘The Greatest Entertainer of the 20th Century’.
Gus Kahn – The famous songwriter (from Germany).
Bela Lugosi – The horror actor.
Sgt. Michael Strank – WWII soldier. Raised the flag on Iwo Jima, 1945.
The Family Von Trapp – Made famous in ‘The Sound of Music‘.

America’s Immigrant History

America’s history is one of immigration. One of travel, escape, renewal, of multiculturalism and mingling. Without hundreds of millions of people daring to take the trip across the oceans to the New World, America as we know it today would never have existed.

A happy Independence Day to all the Americans reading this blog 😀