San Juan de Pasajes

Bayou Renaissance Man has a good post up about 16th century Basque sailors. Seems their beverage of choice was hard apple cider. The advantage it had over rum, which is what the British used, was you didn't need to add Vitamin-C, apple cider already has Vitamin-C. The Brits, you will recall, used limes.

A diver inspects the San Juan wreck, connected to a hose supplying hot water to endure in the cold water of Red Bay.
I'd never heard of piping in hot water to keep a diver warm. Makes sense though.

Back in 1978, the wreck of the 16th century San Juan de Pasajes was found off the coast of Canada and they started an archaeological exploration of the site. The wreck was in such good shape it inspired some people in Pasaia, Spain to build a replica.

Laying out the template for an angle piece on a natural fork

Lower section of the hull

Pasaia and Irun, Spain

I'm looking at a map of this place, and I think 'wait a minute', we've been here before. Yes, with Captain Coignet and the Storks. Irun is Captain Coignet's town. Both Irun and Pasaia are on the north coast of Spain very near the border with France.

St Bernard Pass

Massively famous painting of Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David, 1801

I'm reading The Note-Books of Captain Coignet by Captain Jean-Roch Coignet. In Chapter One he is orphaned, finds work on a farm and trains horses for the army. In Chapter Two he gets drafted into Napoleon's army. He's there when Napoleon stages a coupe and then marches to Italy via the Great St. Bernard Pass. (It's called 'great' to distinguish it from Little St. Bernard Pass.)

Napoleon crossing the Alps at the Great St Bernard Pass by Thomas-Charles Naudet

They had quite a time of it as they were dragging cannons along with them. The path over the pass was just that, a path, not a road, so they had to disassemble the cannons and carry all the pieces. You can see a horse loaded with wheels in the lower center of the above picture. It sounds like they put the cannon barrels on sledges and dragged them.

Map of St. Bernard Pass

I've been plotting the locations mentioned in the book on a Google Map (above). The blue markers indicate places mentioned in the book. The one in the lower right is Fort Bard, which was kind of a sticking point.


The Italian Job, intro, "On Days Like These" (Matt Monro) Remastered HD
Paul Middleton
Looking for more stuff about this pass, I came across this video which shows some of the terrain in the in the nearby Nivolet Pass. It's the intro to The Italian Job.

Update July 2022 replaced missing video with the intro to the original movie.

Storks

Storks nesting on a rooftop in Puente La Reina

I'm reading The Note-Books of Captain Coignet. Chapter 3 finds him traveling. He crosses the border from France into Spain near the west coast:

We started for Bayonne; the distance was great; we suffered from the heat, but at last we reached the bridge of Irun, Our comrades found a stork's nest and took the two young ones. The authorities came to the colonel to reclaim them; the alcalde requested him to restore them, because these birds were necessary in that climate for the destruction of serpents and lizards; he said that the galleys was the penalty for those who killed storks in that country. Consequently they are seen there everywhere; the plains are covered with them, and they walk about in the streets of the towns. Old wheels are put up for them on the top of high posts, and they make their nests in the gable-ends of the buildings.

Reminds me of a story I read when I was a kid. I can almost see the pictures in my mind's eye. I thought it was set in Holland though, not in Spain. Rooting around I find that Hans Christian Anderson wrote a story about storks. I wonder if that could have been it. Problem is the story doesn't mention wagon wheels and I remember that bit very distinctly.

Puente La Reina (site of photo above) is about 50 miles south of Irun.

Torrazzo of Cremona

Cremona Cathedral

I'm reading The Note-Books of Captain Coignet. Chapter 3 finds him in northern Italy. When he visits Cremona he is impressed by the clock on the cathedral:

The town is considerable; there is a handsome cathedral with an immense dial; an arrow-hand makes the circuit of it once in a hundred years.

Cremona Cathedral Clock Face

It looks like this clock has 5 hands and one or two rotating dials. The face has six scales, from the outside in:

• the hour in Roman Numerals, from 1 to 24, clockwise starting at the bottom
• the names of the constellations of the zodiac
• a line of approximately 100 black dashes
• icons of the constellations
• the 12 months of the year
• another line of 100 dashes, this time in red
• numbers indicating day of the month or something.

The innermost black faced dial might be showing the phase of the moon, currently showing it as 'full'.
The numbered scale around it shows the day of the month and goes from 1 to 29 and a plus sign.

Detail of inner portion of clock face

I am not sure what the five hands are for. The one that reaches the central pivot is the time in hours. The other four have so sort of icon attached near the base. One is the sun, another is the moon, and seems to be attached to the moon phase disk. I have no idea what the other two symbols are, or how you would interpret what they are pointing to.

And I still don't know which hand indicates the passing of the years.

Google Maps 3D view of Cremona Cathedral

I would have provided links to the source of the images, but Google can't find them today even though it served them up just yesterday.

Big Cannons

Big Guns. Sophia Loren with the giant cannon from The Pride and the Passion.

Reading The Note-Books of Gaptain Coignet leads me to reading about the Siege of Fort Bard where I find this line:

The siege until May 29, where a 12-inch cannon named "cannone di Andreossi" (Andreossi's cannon in Italian) is positioned in the church behind the fort, where it can't be seen by the enemy.

A "12-inch cannon" is friggin' huge. I can't imagine them being able to bring such a large cannon up the trail and over the pass to get here. I do remember an old movie where a bunch of people were trying to move a huge cannon over a hill so they could attack the enemy. I think that was in Spain. Root around for a bit and I uncover The Pride and the Passion from 1957. The movie is based on the book The Gun by C. S. Forester, which I read a long time ago. So I've got two pieces of fiction reinforcing this idea. The only problem is there seems to be no evidence that Napoleon ever had a 12 inch cannon. 12 pound cannons he had in abundance, that is, guns that shot a 12 pound cannonball.

The cannon in the movie was a fiberglass fake, and the one in the book was an 18 pounder which is big for a portable cannon, but the bore is only three inches, not twelve. There were some big cannons around at the time, but they were mostly older and far away.

The Mighty Jaivana Cannon

The Mighty Jaivana Cannon is the closest one to the fictional movie cannon. It's from India, weighs more than a fully loaded semi-truck, and was only fired once.

Sheepfarmer's Daughter by Elizabeth Moon

Sheepfarmer's Daughter by Elizabeth Moon

I've exhausted all of the books in Elizabeth Moon's Serrano series, so I thought I would try some of her earlier 'sword and sorcery' stuff. It's not bad, not great, but not bad. The story has a young woman running away from her father (and a future as a farmer's wife) to join the army where she learns to wield a sword and becomes a proficient killing machine, aka, a warrior. Sounds a bit improbable, but it's fiction, and she's a big girl, so we'll cut her come slack.

Much of the story is the day to day life of a foot soldier, and it's not much different from Captain Coignet's experience as a soldier in Napoleon Bonaparte's army. A lot of marching, training, standing guard and doing camp chores. I'm reading along and it suddenly struck me that we (people) have always been fighting wars. History lessons in school seem to emphasize big battles and the effect they supposedly had, and I somehow got the impression that otherwise life was peaceful. That wasn't the case. War has been a constant fixture of life since forever. Only a small percentage of people were actually soldiers, but wars and armies and weapons were always there, and for thousands of years it was basically unchanged. Only since the invention of firearms has there been a need to revise our strategies and tactics.

Because war has been a fixture of life for so long, I wouldn't doubt that it is part of our DNA. I suspect that throughout history, warriors, especially the leaders, were among the best educated people. Nothing focuses the mind like someone trying to kill you.

But then along came firearms and all of a sudden, a hundred thousand years of tradition got pushed aside. I suspect that's part of the reason the American Civil War and World Wars of the 20th Century were so devastating. Our tactics had not evolved beyond what worked before firearms came along.

I imagine that none of this is surprising to anyone who has studied history, but it's completely different from the peaceful existence I was taught to believe was the natural order of things. Peace is not the natural order of things. Peace is simply the interlude between wars. If you are smart, you use peacetime to sharpen your swords. You can't have peace without having a war. It's in our DNA.

Old Soldier

Grenadier Burg, 24th Regiment of the Guard, 1815

From page 92 of the THIRD NOTE-BOOK of Captain Coignet:

We set out for Tours following the appointed halting- places, and on arriving there we were received by General Beauchou, who presented to us an old soldier who had served eighty-four years as a private in our half-brigade. The Consul had given him, on retiring, the privilege of eating at the general's table; he was one hundred and two years old, and his son was in command of a battalion. A chair was brought for him; he wore the uniform of an officer, but without epaulets. There was still in the corps a sergeant of his time, who had served thirty-three years. 

Photo of this veteran of Napoleon's army was taken around 1857, which would make him old, not 102, but old. Like me. Original black & white images can be found here.