How 'the crimps' took over Saint John's sailing labour force

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Ship Spotting: Toronto Harbour, July 2026 - Global Maritime History

So lately there has been a kerfuffle about the Toronto Island Airport, with the Ontario Provincial Government seizing control of the entirety of the Island, and booting the City of Toronto out of the agreement with the Federal Government and the Toronto Port Authority for control of the airport. A few days ago, the Federal Government decided it was not going to support destroying the Island in order to have jets landing at the Island Airport. However, these are not the only developments going on with the Island Airport, as the Toronto Port Authority has this past week started construction on the Runway End Safety Areas, a required feature that it didn’t previously have.  This is fortunate, because it’s allowed us to have a very interesting sighting deep in Toronto Harbour, one that hasn’t happened for many years- a laker/bulk freighter, very close to the City, and in the Western Half of the harbour. In fact, the freighter – the Whitefish Bay– has been backing directly into the eastern Exclusion Area after the airport shuts down for the night to offload gravel to create the new area as described at the link above.  Since the Whitefish Bay is working with the Amy Lynn D, owned by Doornekamp, and seems to be loading gravel at Picton Terminal, it seems pretty clear that Dornekamp (which owns Picton Terminal) is very deeply involved in this project. Whitefish Bay Stats: Year Built 2013 Horsepower BHP: 11,734 | kW: 8,750 Deadweight 34,400 tonnes Gross tonnage 24,430 tonnes Net tonnage 8,116 tonnes Length Overall 225.50 metres Breadth moulded 23.76 metres Length B.P. (Lpp) 222.60 metres I will admit, when I saw the Port Authority’s animation I didn’t believe it for a second, but I can now report that I have seen it with my own eyes and it’s true.

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No fitful rest for the ordinary sailor - Global Maritime History

At the Australian National Maritime Museum, our exhibits include two replica ships that played major roles in Australia’s European history. The Dutch East India Company’s Duyfken made the first recorded European landing on Australian soil in 1606. Our second replica vessel is a faithful copy of HMB Endeavour, commanded by James Cook (1728–1779) on his first voyage to the Pacific (1768–1771). Although these vessels represent distinct periods in the history of maritime exploration, one quickly realizes how cramped the “fo’c’sle”—the forecastle, the crew quarters between decks in the bow, usually on the gun deck—must have been. As a case in point, Admiral Nelson’s (1758–1805) HMS Victory featured a gun deck that measured 56 meters (length) by 15.6 meters (beam; width). She was crewed by a complement of 821. There was only enough space for half the crew to sleep at any time. In the early modern era, sailors slept wherever they found a suitable place on deck, if the weather allowed, or below deck in the bow, on cargo, or—as a last resort—on chests. In ancient times, Roman, Greek, or Norse ships did not have interior decks, so sailors would wrap themselves in woollen blankets, furs, clothes, or primitive sleeping bags, if possible sheltering from the elements under makeshift tarps. They would have slept on bare plank decks, sacks filled with fresh leaves, piles of straw, or—if they were lucky—mattresses stuffed with horsehair. Sleeping on the bare deck came with considerable drawbacks, however, even in calm weather or in port. Straw bedding attracted fleas, cockroaches, and other disease carriers. In wet weather, any bedding quickly became soaked, which often led to outbreaks of influenza and pneumonia. Conditions deteriorated when beds started to rot, generating foul odors and consequently becoming breeding grounds of germs and infectious diseases. On the gun decks, sailors shared their sleeping quarters with the cannons, provisions, chests, and other cargo. On heavy seas, sailors might roll off their boards, graze and injury their bodies on the chests, and hit the feces-soiled, rat-infested decks. Loose cannonballs, guns, barrels, or chests might impact their bodies and cause serious injuries or even death. There was little opportunity to avoid such projectiles since the space between decks was usually no more than four or five feet. Christopher Columbus’ (1451–1506) voyage of 1492 led to a breakthrough for ordinary sailors on long-haul voyages. That year on October 17, he noted in his journal on arrival in the New World: “Their beds and covers are like nets made of cotton … The beds on which these people slept were ordinary wicker nets suspended from trees.” He also wrote down “Hamaca” for these “floating beds,” a word taken from “hamaka – stretch of cloth,” in the Taíno-Arawakan language of the Greater Antilles and Haiti. This eventually became “hammock” in English. Columbus, and soon afterwards Amerigo Vespucci (1454?–1512), were sufficiently intrigued by their discovery that they introduced the hammock to the Old World’s gentry. Although most European nobles did not appreciate the novelty device, hammocks gained some traction in nautical circles. Nevertheless, it would take another 100 years before they were widely introduced on ships. The Royal Navy officially adopted “Brazilian beds” for regular crew only in 1597, although many sailors had already pre-emptively adopted hammocks for their comfort and health earlier in the sixteenth century. Hammocks were much more comfortable to sleep in than bare boards or even primitive bunks. They sway with a ship’s motion—and hence reduce sea-sickness—while offering a cocoon-like protective cover, making it almost impossible to fall out. For added stability, many sailors used a spreader—a length of wood with a “V” cut at each end—fastened to their hammock’s second string on each side. Since the first string was much tighter than the others, it raised a protective edge. On Royal Navy vessels, acquiring bedding—narrow mattresses, sheets, blankets, and pillows—was the responsibility of each sailor individually. Bedding could be bought through the ship’s purser, either directly or through payroll deductions. Sheets and pillows were considered a luxury. By 1818, US Naval Regulations stipulated that during their first year of service, sailors were issued a 6-foot by 3-foot hammock, one mattress, and two blankets. Naval hammocks were usually made from sailcloth, which made them different from Columbus’ floating beds and more like the hanging bed supported by ropes depicted in the Old English Luttrell Psalter (ca. 1320–1340; pictured). As is often the case, the hammock’s Indigenous origins were soon forgotten. When King Henry II of France (reigned 1547–1559) noticed a hammock at a Brazilian court celebration, he exclaimed: “The hammock looks exactly like the one we have on our ships,” according to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). On warships, the master-at-arms or the first lieutenant assigned sailors a dedicated location to hang their hammock, as determined by the shipboard hierarchy. Sailors slept in long rows, arranged head to toe, with just 14–16 inches of personal space (width); petty officers were given 28 inches. Sleeping in hammocks took some getting used to: We, who weren’t accustomed to the life on board, were a bit uneasy and the first mishap happened when I was attempting to climb into my hammock at night and fell straight out again. Everything has to be learned and I am glad that I wasn’t the first person who had this happen. (Paul Roeser, 1878) Hammocks offered significant advantages over permanent bunks. They could be deployed (“piped down”) and taken down (“piped up”) quickly in confined spaces. When not in use, sailors would roll them up, wrapped tightly around their bedding, and—in fair weather —store them in nets along the gunwale. Thus, hammocks often doubled as safety rails along the main deck. Their exposure to air and sunshine helped maintain hygienic practices. In wet weather, they were stored below decks. In case of emergency, suitably packed hammocks could also be used as flotation devices. More importantly, their use allowed sailors to sleep away from any debris and vermin on the deck, thus reducing the rate of disease and deaths. For this same reason, pre-Columbian Central […]

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Matariki: How Māori navigators use the stars to keep their waka on course

Traditional Māori navigators use celestial bodies, as well as ocean currents, winds and other natural signs, to guide them across vast distances of ocean, with no GPS and no technology, not even a wat...

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Matariki: How Māori navigators use the stars to keep their waka on course

Traditional Māori navigators use celestial bodies, as well as ocean currents, winds and other natural signs, to guide them across vast distances of ocean, with no GPS and no technology, not even a wat...

rnz.co.nz

Part 3: "The Stone Witnesses Today: What Survives" - Global Maritime History

Thank you to Andrei for this wonderful conclusion to his series on Portugal’s Padrões. If you haven’t already, please read parts one and two. In December 1937, a young historian named Eric Axelson stepped off a ship at Port Elizabeth with only an afternoon to spare, drove out to a windswept headland on the Eastern Cape coast, and began searching the sand for a stone pillar that had been missing for four and a half centuries. He was looking for a padrão. More precisely, he was looking for the last one Bartolomeu Dias had erected on the African coast in 1488, on the return leg of the voyage that first rounded the Cape of Good Hope. No European had been able to say with certainty where it stood. Storms, iconoclasm, and burial under deep sand had erased it from the landscape, and rival theories scattered its location along hundreds of kilometres of coast. That Axelson found it at all, and that the fragments he recovered now stand reassembled in a university library in Johannesburg, is the subject of this final part of the series. In Parts 1 and 2 we asked what the padrões were and what they meant. Now we ask the questions Diogo Cão’s pillars could not answer for themselves: where are they today, who owns them, and what do they mean five centuries after they were planted? Dias and the three fates of a pillar Dias carried three padrões down the African coast on his voyage of 1487 to 1488, and their three fates together map almost the entire range of what becomes of such monuments: one reconstructed, one vanished without trace, one broken and scattered across four countries. The first, and the furthest east he reached, was the Padrão de São Gregório, raised on 12 March 1488 on a sandy promontory then called False Islet, today Kwaaihoek, about three kilometres west of the mouth of the Bushman’s River. Dias’s crew had mutinied and forced him to turn for home, and the pillar marked the limit of his advance. Because the summit was deep sand, his men carried boulders up from the rocky beach below to hold the cross upright. It stood until the sixteenth century, then dropped out of the records entirely. By the time Axelson went looking, he had spent roughly two years in the archives and libraries of Lisbon, Porto, Évora, the Vatican, Paris, and the British Museum, reading the old Portuguese sailing directions and calculating how far the sea had receded since 1488. He recognised a freshwater spring on the headland as a landmark named in the earliest accounts. His first search turned up nothing; a fortnight later, returning with his brother, his team drove pointed steel rods into the sand until they struck buried boulders and pieces of a dense, pinkish limestone foreign to the soft local rock. A large fragment recovered from a tidal pool over the edge of the cliff, where it had evidently fallen, was confirmed as part of the true cross. The University of the Witwatersrand financed the full excavation, and through patient sieving the padrão was recovered almost in its entirety, but only in pieces, several thousand of them. The stone proved to have been quarried in Portugal. The reconstructed original stands today in the foyer of the William Cullen Library at Wits, described as the oldest historical monument held in South Africa; a cement replica, cast from the original, was erected on the Kwaaihoek headland in 1941. Dias’s second padrão, dedicated to São Filipe, was placed on the Cape of Good Hope itself on 6 June 1488, St Philip’s Day. Of the three it is the one that vanished completely: no fragment of it survives in any museum, and it is known only from the chronicles. The third, the Padrão de São Tiago, he raised at what is now Dias Point near Lüderitz, on the coast of present-day Namibia, in July 1488. It stood for roughly three centuries before toppling, and by 1825 the crew of HMS Barracouta found it uprooted and broken. Seafarers and guano traders then carried off pieces, and systematic excavation in 1953 recovered a dozen large fragments and well over a hundred small ones. Today those fragments are scattered across four collections, in Windhoek, Cape Town, Lisbon, and Greenwich: a single broken pillar dispersed by a century of curio-collecting. A Namibian dolerite replica was unveiled on the original site in 1988. The pillar that stayed: Malindi If the Cape Cross pillar of Part 1, removed to Berlin in 1893, represents the padrão as plunder, the pillar at Malindi represents its opposite: the one African padrão that never left the headland where it was planted. Vasco da Gama was received with rare warmth by the Sultan of Malindi during his pioneering voyage to India, and on the Kenyan coast his men were permitted to erect a padrão of Lisbon limestone topped with a cross. Most historians place its erection on his return voyage in 1499. For five centuries it has stood on a low coral promontory above the Indian Ocean. The squat, bell-shaped form it wears today is not original: the exposed stone weathered so badly that in 1873 Captain Malcolm of HMS Briton had a supporting cone built around it, and the cross above is the one da Gama’s men set in place. The pillar was declared a national monument in 1935 and is cared for by the National Museums of Kenya. It is the only padrão erected on the African coast to survive, in place, at its original site. Who owns them: a room in Lisbon The question of ownership is answered most concretely in a single room in Lisbon. The Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa holds four original African padrões in its museum. Three are Diogo Cão’s: the Santo Agostinho pillar from Cabo de Santa Maria in Angola, brought to Lisbon in 1892 after a commemorative marker replaced it on the headland; the fragmentary São Jorge from the mouth of […]

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Ropewalks: Long and Low

An Architectural History of Forgotten Industrial Giants

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Isles of Scilly Museum to display treasure from 1680 shipwreck

Artefacts from a 17th Century vessel wrecked off the Isles of Scilly are given to a museum.

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Step aboard the only replica of a 16th century Spanish galleon, thanks to an 'extraordinary gift' from Canada | CBC News

The San Juan is almost ready to recreate a centuries-old journey to Canada.

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A Stitch in the Side - Global Maritime History

Despite the preponderance of headline diseases such as scurvy, the Age of Sail witnessed a multitude of much more common afflictions. This month’s post in our series of Health at Sea in the Age of Sail focuses on one such problem, pleurisy, which was predominantly caused by the often highly variable weather conditions at sea. Some illnesses at sea announced themselves with spectacle—the spotted rash of typhus, the swollen gums of scurvy, the violent purging of dysentery. Others began much simpler: a breath drawn too deeply, followed by sudden pain. Before dawn, a sailor might come below from his watch clutching his side. Only hours earlier he had stood on deck in driving spray, his clothes soaked through by wind and rain. Now each inhalation sent a sharp stab beneath the ribs. He could breathe only in short, guarded gasps. Fever followed quickly. His pulse ran hard and fast. To the ship’s surgeon, the pattern was familiar. This was pleurisy, an inflammation of the membrane lining the chest and surrounding the lungs. Few disorders better reveal the intimate relationship between environment and disease in the Age of Sail. Ships exposed men to cold winds, wet clothing, foul air, sudden climatic change, physical exhaustion, and crowded sleeping quarters. Under such conditions, chest complaints were common. Some proved mild. Others killed swiftly. Pleurisy occupied an uneasy place in early modern medicine. It was recognizable in symptoms, yet uncertain in boundaries. Surgeons could identify the stabbing pain, the fever, and the difficulty of breathing, but they could not always distinguish inflammation of the pleura from pneumonia, tuberculosis, or other diseases of the chest. What they knew for certain was that when breathing itself became painful, danger was close. What was Pleurisy? The term pleurisy derived from the pleura, the membrane enveloping the lungs and lining the inner chest wall. In classical and early modern medicine, pleurisy referred to inflammation in this part of the body, usually marked by acute pain in one side of the chest, fever, cough, and difficulty drawing breath. The pain often worsened when the patient inhaled deeply, coughed, or changed position. To eighteenth-century physicians, pleurisy was generally classified among the inflammatory diseases. Blood was thought to become overheated, thickened, or driven into the vessels of the chest, producing pain and fever. Exposure to cold after exertion was a common explanation, as was the sudden suppression of perspiration. A sailor who sweated heavily while hauling ropes, then stood chilled in wet clothes on an exposed deck, seemed a textbook candidate. Yet pleurisy was not always a distinct condition. Medical writers often discussed it alongside peripneumony—inflammation of the lungs—or treated the two as overlapping complaints. Without stethoscopes, X-rays, or laboratory tests, diagnosis depended on the patient’s account, the surgeon’s eye, and the progress of symptoms over time. Still, pleurisy had one advantage as a diagnosis: it hurt in a very particular way. Even when the underlying cause remained obscure, the knife-like pain in the side was difficult to mistake. Cold Winds, Wet Hammocks: Why Sailors were Vulnerable Life at sea generated ideal conditions for chest disease. Sailors worked in an environment of constant exposure. Watches were stood in darkness, rain, and freezing spray. Men climbed the rigging high above the deck in winter winds or labored shirtless under tropical suns, only to be drenched moments later by sudden squalls. Clothing, once wet, often remained wet for days. Below decks, conditions were little better. Hammocks hung close together in crowded spaces where ventilation was poor and air thick with tar, sweat, damp canvas, and smoke from the galley. Men recovering from fever slept mixed with the healthy. Coughs echoed through the berth deck at night. In such quarters, respiratory illness spread easily. Fatigue further weakened resistance. Sailors frequently worked interrupted sleep schedules, long watches, and bursts of exhausting labor during storms or battle. Nutrition was uneven, and many men reached their positions at sea already vulnerable from poverty or prior illness. In these circumstances, the chest became one more site where maritime strain registered itself. Naval physicians repeatedly linked disease to climate. Cold and moisture were especially feared as causes of inflammatory complaints. Warm climates brought their own dangers, but a wet North Atlantic crossing or winter blockade could be just as punishing. The Age of Sail was global, but the body carried every latitude within it. Diagnosis, Bleeding, and the Surgeon’s Dilemma Diagnosis at sea depended on observation rather than instruments. The ship’s surgeon listened to his patient’s complaints, watched the movement of the chest, felt the pulse, and judged the heat of his skin. Where exactly was the pain? Did it worsen on inhaling? Was there cough? Could the patient lie flat? Had fever appeared suddenly or gradually? Such questions guided treatment, but certainty was elusive. A sharp pain in the side might indeed suggest pleurisy, yet other disorders could present similarly. Pneumonia, then commonly termed peripneumony, often brought fever, cough, and difficulty breathing. Tuberculosis might begin with chest discomfort before progressing to wasting and chronic cough. Rheumatic pain in the muscles between the ribs could mimic inflammation within the chest. Even digestive complaints sometimes produced pain that patients described as “in the side.” Without the means to see inside the body, diagnosis remained provisional. Because delay was considered dangerous, surgeons often treated first and refined their judgment later. Pleurisy belonged to the family of inflammatory diseases, and inflammation demanded prompt reduction. The standard remedy was bloodletting. If the patient was young and robust, the lancet might be applied immediately, often to remove a substantial quantity of blood. Physicians believed that this reduced vascular tension, relieved congestion in the chest, and prevented more serious complications. If pain persisted, bleeding could be repeated. Blistering agents were then commonly applied to the side or chest, raising painful vesicles on the skin in hopes of drawing inflammation out from deeper tissues. Warm poultices or fomentations might also be used. Mild purgatives cleared the bowels; they were thought to lessen internal fullness and restore […]

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Ropewalk (U.S. National Park Service)

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Bland hantverkare i Stockholm: Repslageri (1934)

Under 1930-talet gjorde Stockholms stadsmuseum en serie filmer med titeln Bland hantverkare i Stockholm . Syftet med filmerna var att skildra traditionella

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Mapping the Ropewalk: A Vanished Building Type Online - Global Maritime History

Christy Anderson is a professor at the University of Toronto, jointly in Art History and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture. These days she works on ships as architecture, including the ropewalks that rigged the world’s fleets. Her current project, Age of Rope, follows these buildings and their workers across the early modern Atlantic and Mediterranean.   Nica Fleming (BA, University of Toronto, 2026) has a specialist degree in Art History and a minor in Geography. Her primary area of interest is architectural history. She loves discovering connections between stylistic movements and is fascinated by representations of architecture in other mediums. Nica plans to continue exploring the ties between art, architecture, geography, and cultural context.   Ropewalks — the long, narrow buildings and spaces where rope was manufactured for maritime use — were once found in every port town. Every sailing ship that crossed an ocean before the twentieth century carried miles of rope, and every length of that rope was made in a ropewalk. Today most ropewalks are lost, now only recognized in the street names where they once stood. This blog post describes the building of a digital platform for the research project Age of Rope, led by Professor Christy Anderson (University of Toronto), a study of the architecture, agriculture, and labour of ropemaking. We discuss the choice of an online mapping platform, the presentation of primary research in a public-facing and open-access format, the collaboration between faculty and student research assistants, and future plans for the larger and ongoing project. The history of rope must be pieced together from scattered sources: buildings that have mostly vanished, agricultural landscapes that have been transformed, and production knowledge that was rarely written down. A project with this many moving parts — industrial heritage, agricultural and environmental history, maritime history, the history of techniques, architectural history — is best suited for a team of researchers. Each strand opens a different point of entry for students, and each topic gives them a chance to develop research and public humanities skills they can carry into their own work. Nica Fleming, an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, began work for Christy Anderson in the summer of 2025, compiling a database of ropewalks by gathering images, bibliography, and location data for each. Nica started by researching extant and well-known naval ropewalks such as those at Chatham, Rochefort, Boston, and Venice. The challenge, however, was to reconstruct what could be known about lost or smaller scale industrial spaces. There is no single history of the ropewalk as a building type and therefore the research required initiative and creativity. Nica used a variety of dispersed primary and secondary sources, including heritage site registries, fire insurance plans, and municipal history societies to find information on lesser known sites. That information was collected in a database with categories on location, dates, materials, structural type, length, and so on. Then, Nica mapped the ropewalks found so far using ArcGIS. In order to present a story about the importance of ropemaking spaces, we uploaded our maps onto an online platform called ArcGIS StoryMaps. StoryMaps is a readily-available website-builder for creating multi-media narratives based on maps, combining geographical locations with text, pictures, videos, and more. Why did we decide to map these buildings? The argument we wanted to make was geographical before it was architectural: that rope production was not a specialist or marginal industry but one woven into the fabric of every maritime economy, present in every port town and many places beyond the coast. A list of sites, or even a set of case-study essays, could not make that argument as directly as a map. When a reader sees a multitude of points distributed across the Atlantic and Mediterranean (the focus of this first phase of research) the density and spread of the industry becomes immediately visible. The map is not an illustration of the argument; it is the argument. The form also suits the material. Ropewalks are a distributed archive, scattered across coastlines and inland fields from the Mediterranean to North America, and no single museum or monograph holds them in one place. A map can, and our map is the first one to bring these dispersed structures together. A map of many points is a starting argument, not a complete one. Knowing where ropewalks were tells you something, but it does not tell you what they looked like, who built them, who worked in them, or what happened to them. We needed a way to move between the scale of the whole and the scale of the particular — a single building, a specific labour system, a documented fire or demolition. ArcGIS StoryMaps lets us combine the map with text, images, and archival sources in one platform, offering a narrative path through our data. The StoryMap also gives us an honest way to represent what we do not yet know: the map has gaps, and the gaps are visible, which is itself a form of argument about where research still needs to go. Two principles guided the design of the StoryMap, both drawn from Telling Stories with Maps, (Esri, 2025): repetition and atmosphere. Nica writes: I wanted readers to understand the organization without having to think about it, so I used repetition to create a legible structure. Each section (broken into topics: ropemaking, naval ropewalks, ‘cottage’ ropewalks, forms of labour, urban legacies, and present states) uses the same elements — a full-screen map of our data points, a zoom into one case-study ropewalk discussed in relation to the section’s theme, and any subtopics that follow as stand-alone images and text. The rhythm helps viewers know where they are, and lets them focus on the information rather than the structure. I also worked on the visuals: a custom theme that evokes the inside of a “long and low” ropewalk — wooden, dark, dusty — with a light-blue accent and rope icons tying the look to the project’s naval context. As a public humanities project, the Ropewalks: Long and […]

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The wonderful world of PapersPast - Global Maritime History

A partnership between the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa and the New Zealand Government Te Kāwanatanga o Aotearoa, PapersPast is New Zealand’s digitised newspaper repository, and also features magazines, books and official documentation. We are incredibly fortunate that this incredible resource is available to use for free. It was launched in 2001 and new material is regularly added. We are particularly fortunate here in Christchurch that coverage of The Press goes up to 1995; at the moment the majority of coverage goes up to the 1940s or 50s. The platform works in collaboration with organisations around the country, such as the NZ Defence Force and Christchurch City Libraries, who hold the original materials that get digitised. As you may suspect it is an invaluable tool for researching New Zealand Aotearoa, te ao Māori and a myriad of other subjects. I have used PapersPast  – mainly newspapers – for work and my own research for a number of years. Quite regularly I disappear down a rabbit hole, discovering many fascinating stories. One of the most bizarre was a ‘grotesquely curious lawsuit’ from 1878 involving a Captain Brandon, his quack ‘theologist’ daughter ‘Mrs’ Currie (I can find a marriage notice in a newspaper but no registration to go with it) and the Venerable Archdeacon Dudley. You can read the whole story here, but essentially Mrs Currie advertised her services in a local paper thus: Mrs Currie, theologist – The revealer of the revelations and mysteries of the Bible, will shortly again repeat the lecture on the “Birth and Death of Christ,” which explains the Holy Trinity. Mrs Currie will also explain how the knowledge was obtained, and also a speechless representation of the mystery of the “Sin of Eve.” Evening Star, 16 March 1878 Funnily enough the archdeacon wasn’t exactly keen on this lecture and spoke out against it and discouraged young people from attending. Brandon and Currie found out about this, and as only 6 people attended when they had hoped for around 300, they took legal action against Archdeacon Dudley for lost earnings.  The article about the lawsuit appeared in a number of newspapers, however I cannot find the verdict being reported on. I suspect the case would have been pretty quickly thrown out. Poking about further into this family has revealed connections to the 1857 Indian Rebellion, bigamy in Australia, and stays in mental hospital for the father and daughter. Maybe one day I’ll write up the whole bizarre saga but I would never have stumbled on the story without PapersPast. In the past indexers did incredible work to make newspapers accessible, but the serendipity of PapersPast is a whole new level. Indeed, I was poking about in the wonderful world of spiritualism when I came across Peter Trolove. In the first few decades of the twentieth century he was a prolific writer of letters to The Press, a devoted spiritualist, and keen golfer. When Arthur Conan Doyle visited Christchurch in the early 1920s Trolove hosted him. Sadly they didn’t played get to play golf together. He also made connections from beyond the grave, such as this Egyptian princess, which he wrote about enthusiastically to the paper. Sir, I don’t think Tutankhamen will be worrying much about what happens to his mummy, because he seems to have been a decent sort of chap who had the welfare of his people at heart, and he is likely to have progressed very far away from this plane of existence. Very different was the case of an Egyptian princess who came to some of us some years ago. This lady, apart from killing from a few lovers, who used to gouge out slaves’ eyes. This meant centuries of arrested development passed under decidedly unpleasant conditions. The Press, 19 February 1923, Page 7  As you can see his letters are a treasure trove of unique reactions to events of the day. His thoughts on those Anzacs who didn’t return from Gallipoli are quite singular. Sir, – all the sentiment about the above [Gallipoli graves] puts me in mind of a story a popular doctor in a northern town used to tell about himself and an old priest. “Well, father, how are you this morning?” was the cheery medical greeting. “Ah, doctor, it is not about my vile old carcase I am thinking about this morning. It is about the welfare of your immortal soul.” Whatever will it matter to the Turks do to the Gallipoli graves? When will people realise that our bodies are merely instruments? Scientists like Oliver Lodge and Sir Clement Wragge, and many others are making very definite pronouncements as to what man is. The Press, 19 February 1916, Page 2 Would this have been comforting to the bereaved? Certainly, Trolove’s sentiments were well intentioned. Spiritualism and the First World War is a very interesting topic, with Arthur Conan Doyle going there, as did Lord Trenchard, and the topic has also been examined by Pat Barker in several of her novels. If the physical body of the deceased was half a world away, or lost, the idea of getting in touch with something immutable must have been appealing to relatives. These are just a couple of the rabbit holes I have disappeared down on PapersPast, and the tip of the iceberg of what you can discover. There is so much content! Any aspect of New Zealand culture – the New Zealand Listener is a must, te ao Māori – early newspapers in te reo, Pasifika, international subjects, indigenous cultures, war – there are heaps of Second World War unit magazines on there, music – such as Rip it up magazine, and so much more. Dive in! You’ll probably find me there finding amusing international trouser stories and seeing how (relatively) low prices were in the 1980s. Both the Brandon / Currie and Trolove stories appeared in the 2025 Christchurch City Libraries’ exhibition Eccentric Christchurch.

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Knights with Laser Eyes Dance

ALT: Knights with Laser Eyes Dance

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