Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century


Weary Aristocrats and Bottomless Poverty



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Weary Aristocrats and Bottomless Poverty

Meat, cakes, fruit and fist-sized balls of chalk-white mozzarella, all stuck together with minced sardines, tripe and olives to form a conical mountain of food – like a Vesuvius in miniature – that glitters juicily in the afternoon sun on the cobblestones in front of the castle in Naples. A cannon salute gives the ravenous mob its signal. A salvo of limp applause comes from the long-since overfed aristocrats on the balconies. The enormously fat king, Ferdinand I – far more eager than the rest – drums his fingers nervously on the parapet.4
In 1759 the king had ascended to the throne at the tender age of eight. Now in his early twenties, his main interest in life was hatching spectacular ideas for the next gran galla. This was one of the vanishingly few occasions on which he let his wealth trickle down to the common people too.
The kingdoms of Naples and Sicily had already been ruled jointly, as the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, on several previous occasions by the time Ferdinand I’s father, Charles III of Spain, reinstated the system in 1735, with Naples as the capital. The country, which stretched as far north as the Papal States, was large by European standards.

Napoleon put a stop to the excesses in 1799 when he captured the Naples part of the kingdom. Ferdinand fled to Sicily, where he was protected by a strong British naval force.
He returned to power following the peace congress in Vienna in 1816, although only after promising the British social reforms consistent with what had become the norm elsewhere in Europe by then. But he quickly forgot the agreement and carried on as before, heading a thoroughly aristocratic administration that had no interest whatsoever in anything but the wellbeing of the upper classes.

Dissatisfaction took root among the urban population and revolts broke out in both Sicily and Naples. Ferdinand responded with a reign of terror that involved spies, informers and random punishments. This pattern was steadfastly maintained by his descendants, especially Ferdinand II, who earned the nickname Re’Bomba – King Bomb – after putting down an 1849 revolt in Palermo by bombarding it with massive, poorly targeted cannon fire from his own man-of-war.
The British author Julia Kavanagh travelled the length and breadth of the country in the 1850s. Her ambition was to fulfil a childhood dream of climbing the volcanoes, Etna and Vesuvius, strolling in Mediterranean landscapes in airy muslin dresses, and visiting the churches and countless ruins left behind by previous conquerors. But the romance dwindled fast, and her travel journal is a litany of constant encounters with injustice, poverty, illiteracy and decline.

Before the ship that is due to take her over to Sicily sets out from Naples, some of the passengers gather on the aft deck to watch a boy who is rowing from boat to boat. He is perhaps nine years old, dressed in rags, but with ‘a quick face’, according to the journal. Balancing on the mid-thwart he performs a short play that opens with a tarantella. Then he acts the clown, sings a short aria and, finally, allows himself to be stabbed in the breast by an invisible enemy before falling on the deck, turning up the whites of his eyes. There he lies for a moment before leaping up again, this time with cap in hand. A few copper coins are thrown down to him.

Julia Kavanagh heaves a sigh of relief when at last the ship steams out of the Bay of Naples. ‘Naples receded, and looked infinitely better for a little distance.’5
The desperation was most clearly reflected in the cities; out in the provinces, people were less liable to go to bed hungry. Here, life carried on as before, following a strictly feudal pattern that had been in place for hundreds of years.

In the district of Cilento just south of Naples, the landscape rose up from the cliffy coast with its wild olive trees, rubber trees and myrtle, through forests of oak and hawthorn, then beyond the treeline to the occasional, eternally snow-capped mountain. The surrounding villages were compact and yellowish-brown with red-tiled roofs. They clung fast to the mountainsides and hilltops, usually surrounded by precipitous fortified walls. Along with the church tower and the occasional dovecote, the nobleman’s palace always held sway above the whole scene. Because the deeper one descended into the crooked structure of alleyways and narrow cobbled streets, the more intense was the stink of the open sewers and the cellars where the domestic animals were kept at night.

The villages of Cilento still stand. If you visit them today, you’ll notice that the smell has gone. In terms of age they have the air of a no-man’s-land – no aging, no rejuvenation – like little kingdoms in a fairy-tale. And that’s what they probably were too. Although they all paid obeisance to the central power in Naples, they were eternally in conflict with one another.
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies gets its own postage stamps in 1858. All of them are orange-brown, probably printed with cheap soil pigment from the Siena region to the north dissolved in linseed oil. The motif is the king’s coat of arms, with a rearing horse and an apparently absurd figure formed of three symmetrical bent human legs: a triskelion. Just about visible on the right, beneath the seal, this symbol dates back to the time when Sicily was part of Magna Graecia (Great Greece). It is supposed to have been inspired by the triangular shape of the island. The ANNULLATO stamp tells us this was a test issue that has never been used on a letter. Consequently, some remnants of the glue remain. The taste has a hint of wheat.
The Two Sicilies survived until 1860, when the fairly new king Franz II was overthrown by rebels led by the guerrilla leader, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Supported by the Kingdom of Sardinia, he landed on Sicily’s west coast on 11 May 1860 with a thousand men. Here, he picked up reinforcements in the form of three thousand Sicilian volunteers and continued towards Palermo, then crossed the Strait of Messina to Naples.

The Italian writer, Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, had first-hand knowledge of the material through his own family. In his novel The Leopard, we follow the sometimes-ambivalent nobleman Don Fabrizio Corbera through the final days before the fall of Palermo.6 He and his family – like the rest of the town’s aristocracy – lived with their servants and private priest in their own palace, with frescoes of Roman gods on the ceilings, all of it enclosed in a spacious garden with a wrought-iron fence. And it was in this garden that he noticed a repulsive stink one day, which proved to come from the corpse of a young soldier from the Fifth Regiment of Sharp-Shooters. He had been wounded in battle at San Lorenzo and had come into the garden to die, alone, beneath a lemon tree.
[1858: National coat of arms with lilies, a triskelion and a rearing horse]
Over the nights that followed, the Corbera family watched as Garibaldi’s army lit up more and more bonfires on the mountaintops to the south and west: silent threats to the city, which was still loyal to the king. Then Don Fabrizio’s nephew Tancredi abruptly left to join the rebels, but only after going into the library where his uncle was sitting with his bulldog, Bendico. He tried to justify his position. ‘Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand?’ Don Fabrizio didn’t answer, but squeezed one of the dog’s ears so hard between his fingers that the poor creature whined, honoured doubtless but in pain. 7

Tancredi’s farewell created a stir at the dinner table that evening. Don Fabrizio tried to soothe everybody. He explained how useless the muskets of the royal army were; how the barrels of those enormous firearms had no rifling, how little force there was in the bullets they fired.

Tancredi and the rest of the family survive the tumult and live to see Italy united in a single kingdom under King Vittorio Emmanuel II of Sardinia. At once, reforms are set in motion, such as universal education, social security and health services.

Even so, southern Italy remains poorer than the north, and many people soon emigrate to America, where the Mafia is waiting with open arms for the most ferocious of them.
Julia Kavanagh (1858):

A Summer and Winter in the Two Sicilies
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (2007):

The Leopard
Susan Sontag (1995):

Volcano Lover.
Il Gattopardo (1963)

Script: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Director: Luchino Visconti
Naples receded, and looked infinitely

better for a little distance

JULIA KAVANAGH



PERIOD:




1807-1890




COUNTRY




HELIGOLAND




POPULATION

AREA

2,200

1.7 km2







NORTH SEA

HELIGOLAND

Oberland

Unterland

Düne





From beloved island realm to ravaged bombing target

The two small islands that form Heligoland (the holy land) lie 70 km off the western coast of Germany and are probably the remains of a larger archipelago. According to Germania, the ethnographic work from around ad98 by the Roman historian Tacitus, it stretched right across the mouth of the Elba, with just a narrow passage on either side.8 And legend has it that even in Christian times Heligoland had nine parishes and two monasteries.
The North Sea has perpetually gnawed away small pieces, now and then entire mouthfuls – as in 1720, when a severe storm split Heligoland in two for good. The smaller half ended up no more than a bank of sand and crushed seashells. The other half staggered on as an upright crust of sandstone facing off the breakers from the northwest: 1 km2 in area, 60m at its highest point, topped by a few sparse tufts of grass.
At first glance, Heligoland looks fairly worthless. But owing to its placement on the seaward approach to the powerful Hansa cities and several of Germany’s large rivers, the tiny archipelago has always been coveted. First it was used as a pirate base, then for piloting and fishing. And after being owned in turn by Denmark and different German coalitions for several hundred years, Heligoland was conquered without resistance by England in 1807, after Denmark allied itself with Napoleon. The important thing for the British was to maintain contact and trading links with the European continent.

At the same time, the island was a centre for espionage against Napoleon’s forces, which had gradually gained control of the whole of the coastline on the mainland. The piloting business had ground to a halt and several of the pilots started to work as guides for the English. Many of them could have navigated the coast blindfold. They were familiar with every sandbank, and knew how they constantly shifted and changed shape. Brunsbüttel, Cuxhafen or even right inside the mouth of the Elba to Gluckstadt – Geen problem!
In 1850, the daughter of an English officer publishes a book called Heligoland, based on her childhood experiences on the island in around 1820.9 She must have been a particularly retiring woman because her full name does not appear either on the cover or elsewhere.

The book mainly tells the painful story of how she and her sister lose their parents to pneumonia, and includes an especially striking description of their last couple of days. But it also describes the girls’ secure childhood on the island, where living conditions were good for the families of officers, who were given their own small house, complete with servant and cook. The mail boat brought two meals’ worth of fresh meat every week, together with more flour, oatmeal, peas, rice and rum than a ‘moderate’ family could consume. What’s more, exotic wares were available in abundance. Many of the former pilots had started to smuggle items from the British colonies into Germany, and to smuggle even more attractive German products out.

She goes on to talk about the two villages on the main island: Oberland on the higher land to the west and Unterland on the sand flats down towards the harbour in the southeast. The quays in Unterland were reserved for large ships, while the fishing boats were hauled up directly onto the beach after use. The buildings were compact: narrow, three- or four-storey houses with steep window gables that looked out onto the narrow streets. Whereas traditional Frisian buildings were made of red brick, many of the houses here were wooden. This was because there were few material resources in the area, other than somewhat dubious sandstone. Everything had to be sailed over from the mainland, and brick was heavy.
Much of the life on the island takes place on a steep stairway between the two villages, where the men laze about smoking cigarettes and chatting, while the women run up and down with bread baskets and heavy buckets of water, or go to milk the goats and sheep that are grazing on the ridge to the west. The women wear long scarlet skirts, supplemented in winter by cloaks tied so tightly over their foreheads that only their eyes and the tips of their noses are visible. ‘The men dress in very coarse cloth made so wide that their trousers look like petticoats, enormous wooden buttons, their throats much exposed, and little tight caps upon the very top of their heads.’10

When people meet on the street, they first exchange a ‘Good evening’ and then – as they pass one another – ‘Forget me not’, often in the local dialect, Halunder, which is a version of Frisian. Women’s names are also special in that they consistently end in O, as in Katherino, Anno and Mario.

One of the few events that can disturb the calm daily routine is the migration of thrushes, starlings and woodcock that stop off en route in spring and autumn. Then people drop whatever they’re carrying to go off hunting. Old and young, men and women seize yarn, pickaxes and spades, and storm off. Up to the ridge or across the sand dunes.
The Napoleonic Wars were a time of prosperity for the inhabitants of the island. But after the Treaty of Kiel was signed in 1814, smuggling came to a halt. And when the last British soldiers left the island in 1821, trading activity also stopped abruptly. The warehouses fell empty and the merchants left.

There were now 2,200 people living on the island and none of them wanted to move. That was when somebody came up with the apparently crazy idea of going in for tourism, but this wasn’t something they’d pulled out of thin air. Just a few years earlier, in fact, British doctors had declared that saltwater baths were among the most health-giving activities imaginable. And the water should be cold. If there was one thing Heligoland had in abundance it was cold saltwater, all year round. The inhabitants took a gamble on it. And by as early as 1826, the island was in full swing as a spa and bathing resort for wealthy burghers from England, Prussia, Poland and Russia.

Owing to the political conditions that prevailed in Europe over the 1800s, the island gradually lost its strategic significance for the British. Nonetheless, it eventually launched its own stamps. As usual in British possessions, the then queen, Victoria, provided the motif. The stamps’ most notable feature is that they use two colours (necessitating extra steps in the production process as well as exceptional precision): always red and green on white paper. ‘Green is the land. Red are the cliffs. White is the sand. These are the colours of Heligoland.’11 In addition, Victoria’s white head is embossed. This is achieved by placing the paper on a leather mat while pressing down extra heavily on the printing plate. My specimen is torn and greasy from a great deal of finger contact. I can just about detect a rancid odour when I warm it between my hands and gently scrape the surface. This is one of the first issues from 1867 with the postage given in English shillings. After 1875, this will be changed to the German pfennig, reflecting a gradual rapprochement with the German mainland.
[1869-71: Relief of Queen Victoria of England]
And in 1890, as if in a game of Monopoly, the English decided to offer Heligoland to Germany in exchange for the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa. The Germans agreed and immediately simplified the name to Helgoland, without the ‘i’. Eventually they set up a naval base, which would have great significance in both the First and Second World Wars. At the same time, tourism continued to thrive. It is said that the nuclear researcher, Werner Heisenberg, who was terribly troubled by pollen allergies and hay fever, only managed to formulate his quantum theory after a long health cure at this island with its sparse vegetation.12
In the final phase of the Second World War, the island is bombed to oblivion in British air raids. And after the war, the British take it over again. By then, Helgoland looks pretty much like a lunar landscape, greenish-yellow and totally lifeless, useful at most as a practice target for planes and warships.

In 1952, the islands are handed back to Germany again. By that time, they are utterly lacking in any traces of history other than the occasional bomb crater. And it seems to me that the smell from my stamp – be it from fish entrails or rancid massage oil – must be one of the last concrete traces of the civilization that was once to be found there.
M. L’Estrange & Anna Maria Wells (1850)

Heligoland or Reminiscences of Childhood: A Genuine Narrative of Facts
Alex Ritsema (2007)

Helgoland, Past and Present
‘The men dress in very coarse cloth made so wide that their trousers look like petticoats, enormous wooden buttons, their throats much exposed, and little tight caps upon the very top of their heads.’

M. L’ESTRANGE


PERIOD:




1784-1867





COUNTRY:




NEW BRUNSWICK





POPULATION:

AREA:

193,800

72,908 km2

USA

QUEBEC (FR)

Miramichi

NEW BRUNSWICK

Saint John

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND (GB)

NOVA SCOTIA (GB)

ATLANTIC OCEAN







Immigrants with the Wool Pulled over Their Eyes

One of the eleven postage stamps that were issued in the British colony of New Brunswick bears the image of a steamship, for the first time ever in the history of stamps. The stamp was issued in 1860 and the ship appears to be the SS Hungarian, a transatlantic passenger ship owned by Britain’s Allan Line. It had been launched the year before and immediately started to transport immigrants across the Atlantic Ocean from the British Isles. This kind of travel picked up after Ireland’s potato harvest was repeatedly blighted by a parasitic disease. The trip usually took 36 days, but the ships were required to have food and water rations for double that time in case of storms. The journey generally took place in late spring, which was thought to be a favourable time to travel.
So the SS Hungarian is out pretty early in the year when it approaches the coast one stormy evening in mid-February 1860 after crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Visibility is poor and, like so many other ships before it, it runs aground on the treacherous sandbanks of Cape Sable Island, south of Nova Scotia. The survivors of the shipwreck are visible from land, clinging onto the capsized hull, but strong winds and high waves prevent any rescue attempts. All 205 people on board die.13

For immigrants who had previously arrived in calmer waters, the first impression offered meagre consolation. The arms of the fjord were generally cloaked in thick sea mist and the tidal range could be as much as 16m. The shoreline had a barren, brutal look, not unlike the western coast of Norway, according to M. H. Perley. He describes the despair an immigrant might well feel.
The naked cliffs or shelving shores, of granite or other hardened rocks, and the unvarying pine forests, awaken in his mind ideas of hopeless desolation, and poverty and barrenness appear necessarily to dwell within the iron-bound shores.14
But in the next breath, Perley – who was, in fact, a propagandist for the British immigration authorities – draws the sting from this terror. Because just a short distance from the coast, with its Atlantic Ocean climate, a transformation takes place. He cites a report Major R. E. Robinson had prepared for the British parliament: ‘Of the climate, soil, and capabilities of New-Brunswick it is impossible to speak too highly. There is not a country in the world so beautifully wooded and watered.’15

And Perley’s colleague, surveyor Alexander Monro, follows up with:
… a healthy climate; an excellent soil for agricultural purposes; inexhaustible forests of valuable timber, accessible by an extensive sea-board and by navigable rivers; immense mineral resources, and oft-unparalleled coast and river fishery.16
The idea that life in the colony might nonetheless have its downside can be glimpsed when, to keep the record straight, Monro mentions that snowstorms rarely occur more than four times a year. He adds the cold comfort that the low temperature has the advantage of making the snow only half as heavy as at home in England. He also touches upon the dangers posed by wolves and bears. And in passing he mentions the Micmacs – the indigenous population. Although they have been subdued, they are still embittered and disillusioned after their crushing military defeat at the hands of the French in the 1700s.

The Micmacs were nomads. They spent the summer by the sea, where they fished, collected eggs and trapped geese. In the winter, they hunted for moose inland. The moose meat was dried and the skins used to make clothes and tools, and as underlay for their tents, known as wigwams. Wigwams were conical constructions built from fir poles the thickness of an arm and thatched with flakes of birch bark sewn together with thin root suckers. To cope with the harsh winters, they were further insulated with an inner layer of grass matting.

This is how most of the Micmacs are living as boatload after boatload of immigrants arrives in the area. They keep their distance, but can’t help being affected by the presence of the newcomers. Their hunting areas shrink and alcohol – firewater – becomes all too readily available.

The immigrant ships arrive in the harbour at Saint John, an improvised settlement of smallish wooden houses that has rapidly become the most important town in the area. The passengers must remain on the ships for at least forty-eight hours after their arrival to prevent the introduction of infectious diseases. Those who still have symptoms after that are detained at the town’s quarantine station.

If any ‘lunatic, idiot, maimed, blind, or infirm person not belonging to an emigrant family’ is found, the captain must pay a fine of seventy-five pounds. This is intended to cover the expenses of the person concerned for the first three years. The other immigrants go through quickly and look for lodgings.

On their first evenings, people step-dance at the hall up by the church. Some of them get jobs in the shipyards at Saint John and Miramichi, while others decide to wait for the wagon trains heading further inland. And then they jump on any old one that comes along – to Northumberland, Gloucester or Kent. Everywhere, land is being sold off in monthly auctions. The going price is three shillings an acre, which can be paid for with labour on the public roads.17
Leif Eriksson’s Vinland expedition almost certainly made it to this area in the 1000s, but the French explorer Jacques Cartier stands as the official discoverer of Canada, on France’s behalf, in 1534. While the French were expending their energy on subduing the Indians in the interior of the continent, the British occupied parts of the outer archipelago, establishing the colony of Nova Scotia – New Scotland. This was gradually extended towards the mainland in the west and in 1784 it became a separate colony. It was named New Brunswick after the Duchy of Braunschweig in northern Germany, the childhood home of the British king, George I. The border with the American state of Maine in the south was a long time coming, and was not defined until some way into the 1800s, during the so-called Aroostook War – which, despite its awe-inspiring name, was a purely legal conflict.
[1860: Transatlantic steamer, probably the SS Hungarian, of the British Allan Line.]
New Brunswick was incorporated as a Canadian province in 1867. Many people protested and, initially at least, proved justified in thinking this would cause it to be assigned lesser priority in relation to central Canada. But the situation changed towards the turn of the century, when forestry took off as the supplier of raw material for an ever-hungrier paper industry.

New Brunswick is now Canada’s only bilingual province, with both English and French mother-tongue teaching in the schools. Forestry-related businesses remain important. In the sea to the east, the ecological cycle has broken down and the fish have vanished. Only a couple of thousand Micmac people remain.
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