The Struggle for California’s “White Gold”: The Making of LA’s Modern Metropolis

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Environmental, Natural Environment, Popular Culture, Regional History


In 1900 the population of Los Angeles was 102,479, the 36th largest city in the USAⓐ. A couple of years into the new century the name Hollywood resonated only as a hotel, Hollywood’s legendary preeminence as the epicentre of the world’s film industry was still over a decade away. Nonetheless the city’s growing numbers were already putting pressure on the water supplies. LA’s location on a water-poor, semi-arid plane magnified those pressures. A lack of rainfall and groundwater and droughts was making the situation worse (‘The Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Owens and Mono Lakes’ (MONO Case), Case No 379, (TED Case Studies), www.web.archive.org).

Mulholland in the valley (Photo: LA Times)

A couple of ambitious engineers in the city’s water company (later the LA Board of Water and Power)—Fred Eaton (also the LA mayor) and William Mulholland—cast their eyes round for a more reliable source of water to accommodate Los Angeles’ continued growth and development. The solution lay to the northeast, in the Owens River Valley which backs on to the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. If Los Angeles owned the land here the water could be diverted to the city. The obstacle was that this was farming land with hundreds and hundreds of farmers legally ensconced on small plot-holders. The farmers’ land-holdings also gave them water rights and they had their own agenda regarding the Owens valley, they were backing a national valley reclamation project to irrigate the valley farmlands.

Mulholland (pointing), with members of his syndicate (Photo credit: www.latimes.com)

It was former mayor Eaton who started the ball rolling, at the same time setting the ethical standard for Mulholland, by securing options on riparian lands under the pretense of establishing cattle ranches (Marian L Ryan, ‘Los Angeles Newspapers Fight the Water War, 1924-1927’, Southern California Quarterly, 50(2) (June 1968)). Soon Mulholland was driving the scheme and the Los Angeles water authority set about buying up as much of the land around the Owens River as they could. Mulholland, Eaton and other local business notables including Harrison Gray Otis and Henry Huntingdon formed a business cabal which became known as the San Fernando Syndicate. The syndicate allegedly used inside knowledge (the plan to build a aqueduct connecting the valley to the city) to buy up land that would become highly profitable (‘William Mulholland’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

Cottonwood Creek diversion conduct and Owens Lake in background (wwww.owensvalleyhistory.com)

Mulholland’s vision for LA’s prosperity was dependent on the monopolisation of the valley’s water, but he was completely unscrupulous in the way he went about it, “employ(ing) chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies” to secure the water LA needed (‘Reading Los Angeles.: Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert’, (Christopher Hawthorne), LA Times, 29-Jun-2011,  www.latimesblogs.latimes.com). The cagey, Belfast-born Mulholland deceived Owens Valley farmers and also misled the Angelenos as well by grossly understating the quantity of water that would be taken for LA.

Route of the LA aqueduct (Image: www.owensvalleyhistory.com)

The syndicate, from 1905 on, bought up strategic parcels of land piecemeal in the valley (by 1928 90% of the water rights were in Mulholland’s hands). The City of Los Angeles meanwhile built a 375km-long aqueduct (completed in 1913) to siphon off the water from the Owens River. Some of the water was diverted to irrigate the San Fernando Valley but most went via the aquifer to service the needs of the LA metropolis. (‘The Water Fight That Inspired “Chinatown”’, Felicity Barringer, 25-Apr-2012, (Green),  www.green.blogs.nytimes.com).

The problem with the proposed Owens Valley Reclamation Project, which had it gone ahead would have stymied Mulholland’s plans, was already taken care of. Mulholland through his political connexions in Washington lobbied the US president, Theodore Roosevelt, who squashed the project (‘The Los Angeles Aqueduct’). This was viewed by the farm settlers as a public act of betrayal (‘The Valley of Broken Hearts’, C.E. Kunze, The San Francisco Call (1924), in ‘Owens Valley’s – Los Angeles Aqueduct’, (Owens Valley), www.owensvalleyhistory.com). In time the Owens Valley farmers amd ranchers realised the enormity of the threat to them…by 1926 Owens Lake was completely dry. Frustrated, angered and rebellious, they attempted to retaliate through acts of sabotage, in 1924 blowing up the aqueduct. Mulholland responded by calling in armed guards, conflicts occurred and tensions ran high over water access. A second flashpoint occurred when Owens Valley activists aided by a local scofflaw element commandeered the Alabama Gates section of the aqueduct resulting in a four-day standoff. Afterwards Mulholland hired Pinkerton private detectives to track the ‘culprits’ and ‘ringleaders’. Other incidents escalated the conflict including more dynamiting of the infrastructure in 1927ⓑ (‘The Water War that Polarized 1920s California’, (Gary Krist), Literary Hub, 17-May-2018,  www.lithub.com ; ‘New Perspectives on the West’, ‘William Mulholland (1855-1935)’, www.pbs.org).

Detectives investigating the scene (Photo: LA Times)

Mulholland eventually came out on top in the ‘war’ due to a combination of factors, “determination and deceit” on his part, but also because the Inyo County Bank folded , taking with it most of the ranchers and farmers’ savings. Personally for Mulholland though, he had just a modicum of time to savour his victory. In 1928 the collapse of St Francis Dam cost nearly 500 lives and caused widespread devastation of property and crops. As he had been project engineer, Mulholland was blamed for the disaster and forced to resign in disgrace (‘New Perspectives’, PBS). By 1930 the handful of remaining farm-owners, with unviable land having lost their irrigating water—the “white gold” as they called it—and confronted with droughts, their only one recourse was ultimately enforced migration (Kunze, ‘Owens Valley’).

Mono Basin, Cal.

The Los Angeles Water Department (even after Mulholland’s esclipse) continued the search for new sources of water, one scheme sought to extend the LA aqueduct to the Mono Basin. Local farmers after eventually realising that Mono Lake was staring down the same fate as Owens Lake, took action to save it from destruction (‘Mono Lake’)ⓒ.

The Los Angeles water authority’s and Mulholland’s diverting of the Owens River and the incorporation of the San Fernando Valley into LA’s municipal boundaries, paved the way for LA’s eventual growth into a mega-sized city by any standardsⓓ (Hawthorne). But this achievement was at devastating and irreparable cost to the Owens Valley environment which became no longer viable as a farming community… the Owens River was reduced to a trickle and the Owens Lake ecosystem destroyed (Barringer).

Endnote: Chinatown backdrop

The story of the LA water wars and the Californian “water czar” William Mulholland’s machinations inspired the 1974 cult neo-noir mystery film Chinatown. Polanski’s film uses the historic 1920s conflicts as backdrop for a fictional detective story in which the persona of the larger-than-life Mulholland is represented by two characters: the visionary and straight dealing Hollis Mulwray, and the Machiavellian über-schemer Noah Cross (Barringer).

ᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽ

ⓐ ‘Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1900’. United States Census Bureau, June 15, 1998
ⓑ prompting LA newspaper of the day The Gridiron to report that “Civil War Threatened” as “L.A. Faces Water Famine”, (11-Jun-1927)
ⓒ Mulholland and Los Angeles also looked at tapping into the Colorado River to replenish the city’s water supplies but this proved logistically too difficult even for Mulholland
ⓓ 9,000,000 people by 1994

Lisbon’s Great 1755 Earthquake, a Cataclysmic Event with Far-reaching Reverberations

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Economic history, Natural Environment, Regional History

When Lisbon experienced an earthquake on November 1, 1755 (sometimes called the Great Lisbon Earthquake), it was not an unique event for the city. Previous earthquakes had punctured Portugal’s capital in 1321 and 1531. The 1755 quake, measuring an estimated magnitude of 8.5-9.0 Mw, however was qualitatively worse because of the widespread nature of the damage and the ongoing repercussions.

Lisbon Pombaline Downtown street plan [Source: www.travel-in-portugal.com]

No sanctuary in the churches
The focus of the earthquake in Lisbon was on the city centre where the churches, it being All Saints Feast Day, were packed with the pious. The churches’ antiquated construction methods, leaving them incapable of withstanding violent movement of the earth, guaranteed a high death toll of the attendees. The foundations of the churches, built on soil liquefaction, only enhanced their vulnerability to violent earth movements [‘November 1, 1755: The Earthquake of Lisbon: Wrath of God or natural disaster?’, (David Bressan), Scientific American, 01-Nov-2011, www.blogs.scientificamerican.com].
Earthquake decimation of one of the city churches

Fire on the heels of five-metre wide fissures in the earth
Fires were an immediate consequence of the earthquake. Some of these were firestorms triggered by the massive earth tremor, and some were a direct result of it being a day of religious significance. Scattered through the churches were lit candles in observance of the holy day, the convulsions tipped the candles over, igniting the displays of flowers and spread the fire in all directions. Buildings that managed to escape the destruction of the earthquake often were subsequently consumed by the firestorms [‘1755 Lisbon earthquake’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Tsunami triple-whammy
Because the earthquake hit the central part of the city, many Lisboeta❅ who survived the initial three-and-a-half minute-long megashock made for the docklands and the harbour. Tragically what was thought a safe move proved a fatal one for many. Just 40 minutes after the quake hit Lisbon, it was followed by a (20 foot high) tsunami which pulverised the shoreline and engulfed the Rio Tejo (Tagus River), sending the huddled crowds on the docks scurrying for their lives. The fires and the tsunami compounded the calamity of the seismic event and sent the death toll skyrocketing◘.

‘Ripples’ of the tidal wave
The 1755 tsunami was a teletsunamic event with the generated tidal waves crossing the vast ocean. The mid-eastern Atlantic tsunami which hit Lisbon with such force, had amazingly far–flung ramifications. The tsunami was felt literally around the known world. Within an hour it had reached Cornwall on the south coast of England and Galway in Ireland.It was felt as far afield as Finland, North America, Barbados and Martinique in the West Indies and maybe even in Brazil.

Fallout in the region
The devastation caused by the earthquake, fires and tsunami was not confined to Lisbon. Other parts of southern Portugal (the Algarve) suffered. Spain too, especially Cadiz which was hit by an even more massive tsunami (65-feet high), lost as much one-third of its population. Parts of Morocco also bore the brunt of the cataclysm with possibly up to 10,000 of its population perishing as a result [Pereira, Alvaro S. “The Opportunity of a Disaster: The Economic Impact of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake.” The Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (2009): 466-99. www.jstor.org/stable/40263964].

Copper engraving, 1755

Casualty count
There have been widely diverse estimations of the human toll from the 1755 earthquake—ranging from 10,000 to anything up to 100,000. Economist AS Pereira has noted how unreliable estimates are…owing to the lack of dependable data on the Portuguese population prior to 1755 and compounded by the public authorities’ decision to swiftly bury the corpses before there was a chance of disease and plague taking root (Pereira). Pereira’s own estimate based at data from surveys in 1757 put the casualties at 30 to 40 thousand out of a possible 200,000 population at the time. Added to this is the up to 10,000 who died in Morocco from the catastrophe○.

The devastation and reconstruction It is estimated that around 85% of Lisbon’s buildings were destroyed by the earthquake and associated phenomena. Two-thirds of the city was made uninhabitable. Among the carnage, in addition to the churches already mentioned, were famous libraries and palaces. Also lost was the city’s new opera house Ópera do Tejo and many examples of distinctive 16th century Manueline architecture. The Palácio Real Ribeira was a casualty, lost were some 70,000 volumes of work including tracts on voyages of early explorers such as Vasco da Gama and art works by Titian, Corregio and Rubens, and so on.

Rua Augusta in the Baixa Pombalina [Photo: www.weheartlisbon.com]

The reconstruction was put in the hands of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later bestowed the title of Marques de Pompal by King José I (Joseph I). Pompal’s elevation to sole control of managing the reconstruction and his competence in carrying through the plan allowed him to wrest the political reins of Portugal away from the old aristocracy. Ordinary citizens were pressed into the immediate task of clearing the debris so that Pompal could commence the long and slow task of rebuilding the city largely from scratch. Erected were new, large squares, widened streets and rectilinear avenues. An entirely new lower town Baixa Pombalina (Downtown district) was created. The Pombaline buildings proved to be radically innovative, being among the earliest seismically protected constructions in Europe.

Embryonic signs of the science of seismology
There is one important factor which separates the 1755 quake from those preceding it. In its aftermath Pompal coordinated systematic surveys in the nature and course of the earthquake. The preservation of data collected and archived at the time has allowed modern seismologists to better analyse the natural event and its genesis. Thus, in a very rudimentary but pioneering way, this has contributed to the development of what has become the science of seismology and the practice of earthquake engineering (‘Lisbon earthquake’, Wiki).

The phenomena, a boost to scientific enquiry, also caused religious rumblings at the time. Many in staunchly Catholic Portugal wondered if the degree of devastation was a manifestation of divine judgement, God’s wrath on flawed mortals. Discussions of theodicy and other philosophical questions abounded (Bressan).

The earthquake‘s effects on the Portuguese economy
The catastrophic 1755 event presented Pompal with the opportunity to reform the country’s economy and to some extent reorganise society. Pereira‘s work has looked at the cost of the devastation to Lisbon. As he has pointed out, Lisbon at the time was “staggeringly rich” courtesy of the plunder of its colonies in Africa and the New World. The city was awash with huge stores of gold bullion, jewels and expensive merchandise✧. The economist estimated the direct cost of the earthquake at between 32 and 48% of Portugal’s GDP. Another consequence was prices and wages volatility, albeit this was only temporary (Pereira).

Pompal’s reforms
To counter the deterioration in the country’s public finances✬, the Marques introduced several economic reforms and institutional changes. The state bureaucracy was streamlined and the treasury was reformed with the advent of a new tax system. Pompal’s mercantilist policies revamped the Portuguese economy. Pompal’s policies long-term had the effect of enhancing the centralist orientation of the economy and reduced Portugal’s dependence on its main trading partner Britain (Pereira).Seismologists have speculated as to whether the Lisbon Earthquake remotely triggered two other earthquakes—in Cape Ann (near Boston, Mass) and Meknes, Morocco—which followed it by just 17 and 26 days respectively [‘1755 Cape Ann earthquake’, Wikimili, The Free Encyclopedia, http://wikimili.com].

Cape Ann Earthquake (Woodcut illustration)

Endnote: The “first modern disaster”Endnote:The “first modern disaster”
The cataclysm event in 1755, so redolent of apocalyptic imagery, prompted theologians, scientists and philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau to conjecture—was causation natural or divine? It’s “modern-ness” lying in several innovative aspects of the phenomena: a concerted and systematic attempt at “crisis management”; among the “first provisions for urban disaster mitigation and earthquake resistant building design“; an attempt to “investigate and record the effects of the earthquake throughout the affected areas”, anticipating the science of modern seismology [‘From 1755 to Today—Reassessing Lisbon‘s Earthquake Risk’, (Drs Guillermo Franco & Bingming Shen-Tu), AIR Currents, (15-Jul-2009), www.air-worldwide.com; Bressan].

═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═
❅ as residents of Lisbon are sometimes called
◘ given that the earthquake’s epicentre was in the Atlantic Ocean some 350-400 km from Lisbon, it is plausible that the fires and tsunami caused the greatest havoc and devastation (Franco & Shen-Tu)
○ possibly the death toll cited for Morocco on the 1st of November has been conflated with the Meknes earthquake on 27th November 1755 which also was reported as having had 10,000 victims
✧ in India House alone the holdings in diamonds amounted to 11-12 million cruzados
✬ in the wake of the earthquake Portugal’s colonial ambitions were stalled, which would have added to the economic decline

‘Capability’ Brown, the Quiet Revolutionary of Eighteenth Century English Landscape Gardening

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Biographical, Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Leisure activities, Natural Environment, Regional History


I first happened upon the name of ‘Capability’ Brown several years ago when I was researching the Kirkbride buildings complex in Sydney✼. I guess it was the jokey sounding name that first got my interest. I found his name historically associated with the popularising of Ha-Ha Walls (another hard-to-take-serious concept when you first encounter it without context) which is an architectural feature of Kirkbride. Brown acquired his nickname from his habit of telling clients that their land had capability for improvement [‘Highclere Castle: The real-life Downton Abbey’, (Steve McKenna), SMH, 17-Apr-2016, www.traveller.com.au].

Highclere ⇓


Capability (Christian name Lancelot) Brown’s career as a landscape gardener and designer in the 18th century was a wildly successful one. Lofty accolades cast in his direction describe him as “England’s greatest gardener” and “the Shakespeare of Gardening”. He rose from humble origins to become master gardener to George III at Hampton Court Palace, receiving over 250 commissions in his lifetime and designing in excess of 170 parks (the majority of which survive) [‘Capability Brown’, Wikipedia, http:/:en.m.wikipedia.org]. His vast oeuvre stretches over 30 counties in England and Wales, greater London and even one garden project in Germany. As artistic creators of grand physical structures go, the fecund Brown was the landscaping and gardening equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright of his day – minus the ego!

LCB

And like that prolific and seminal 20th century American architect he was very well remunerated for his efforts. From the 1760s Brown was earning £6,000 per annum (equivalent to £806,000 in 2018 money!) and £500 for a single commission [ibid.].

Classical v Romantic

As Brown was starting to learn the trade in the late 1730s, there was a fundamental change going on with landscape gardens England. The formally patterned garden with its strict geometrical order and adherence to the classical style (the embodiment of the Palladian ideal) was giving way to a new, more informal type of garden landscape✥…romantic, irregular, not conforming to order, the appearance of a natural landform [Bassin, Joan. “The English Landscape Garden in the Eighteenth Century: The Cultural Importance of an English Institution.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1979, pp. 15–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4048315].

William Kent ⇓

The new style

In the forefront of this movement towards the natural and informal was William Kent (Brown’s mentor), Charles Bridgeman and others, as well as prominent literary figures of the day like Alexander Pope. What Kent et al started, Capability Brown would go on to elevate to a higher plane.

Typical features of the Brown garden

(see also “Ha-Ha Wall” in end-note) Brown honed his landscaping style while working under Kent at Stowe (Bucks). Trademark features: smooth, undulating grass running straight to the house; the grand sweeping drive (eg, Ashridge Estate, Berrington Hall, Wimpole Estate); the woodland belt (eg, Basildon Park, Dinefwr, Ickworth); clumps and scatterings of trees (eg, Petworth Park, Stowe, Croome); the picturesque stone bridge (eg, Prior Park, Wallington, Stowe): and serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers (eg, Hatfield Forest, Stowe, Wimpole Estate); decorative garden buildings (monuments, temples, rotundas and follies◙) (eg, Clandon Park, Petworth Park, Stowe, Wallington); cedars of Lebanon🌲 (eg, Croome, Charlecote Park) [National Trust (#1) , www.nationaltrust.org.uk; ‘Brown’, Wiki, op.cit.]

Era of the picturesque

The picturesque was a 18th century movement in art and architecture which was a reaction to Neo–classicism with its fixation on order, proportion and exactitude. In Georgian England the picturesque influenced landscape designers like Brown (and his successor Humphry Repton) who sought to replicate the romanticised country scenes of Italian paintings in their garden projects. The features in Brown’s ‘natural’✪ garden landscapes – long vistas to lakes, bridges, lawns, ruins, groves of trees and Ha-Ha walls – were a case of real life imitating (sublime) art [‘Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphrey Repton and the Picturesque’, (Janice Mills Fine Artist), (Jan-Dec 2016), http://janicemillsfineartist.wordpress.com]◇.

Social purpose

The new informal gardens in 18th century England, as typified in Brown’s landscapes, were created to underscore the growing affluence of the landowning class…showing England through their properties as they wished it to be seen, “a wealthy, educated and fertile centre of the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment”. Thus Brown’s beautiful, idyllic estate gardens were intended to resemble a romantic painted scene through the “use of local natural elements and English architecture” [ibid.].

Dinefwr Castle (Carmarthenshire) – in this Welsh estate LCB was engaged as a visiting consultant, making recommendations to the landowners

(Photo: National Trust) ⇓

Multitasker extraordinaire

Capability Brown was able to complete a vast sum of landscape projects in this career. On average, at any one time he had six projects going simultaneously, this testifies to Brown being able to work fast…an accomplished horseback rider, he could ride from site to site, survey it and knock up a rough design, all within a couple of hours. Of course even with his exceptional capacity he could only spread himself so far, when he couldn’t personally oversee projects, he would delegate to his hand-picked team of foremen, assistant surveyors and landscapers to be “hands-on” on-site and ensure that his designs were implemented properly [‘Our great ‘Capability’ Brown landscapes’, National Trust, (#2), www.nationaltrust.org.uk; ‘Brown’, Wiki, op.cit.].

Brown’s success as a landscape architect owed a lot to different factors…one of his virtues was his ability to choose assistants for his projects – he had a knack of picking the right people to work with, such as William Donn, John Hobcroft and Nathaniel Richmond. Brown also kept himself informed of the latest technologies. His awareness of hydraulic devices led him to utilise steam pumps employed in mining for the water features of his landscapes [Shields, Steffie. “’Mr Brown Engineer’: Lancelot Brown’s Early Work at Grimsthorpe Castle and Stowe.” Garden History, vol. 34, no. 2, 2006, pp. 174–191. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25472339].

Dissenting voices – ‘Culpability’ Brown

Despite the popularity Brown attracted for his landscape work, the Northumberland garden designer had his detractors… both from contemporaries and from critics after his time. Typical among these was Uvedale Price who criticised Brown for sweeping away all of the older trees and formal garden features in wholesale fashion (destroying the aesthetic of the classical of earlier landscapes). Similarly, architect William Chambers thought the “new manner of gardens” (code for Brown’s work) as little improvement on “common fields and vulgar nature” [‘Brown’, Wiki, op.cit.]. Certainly for these critics, the subject of their censure may have better been labelled ‘Culpability’ Brown!

Some of the invective aimed on Brown’s direction however would have derived from a more base source. Class snobbery would have been a motive for some given Brown’s modest origins – the language often used was a giveaway, detractors like architect Reginald Blomfield disparaged him as “a peasant slave from the melon ground” and having once been (allegedly) a “kitchen gardener” [Shields, loc.cit.]. Some of the opprobrium also was no doubt born out of sheer jealousy at Brown’s immense fame and financial success.

In 2016 a collection of Royal Mail stamps were issued to mark the tercentenary of LCB’s birth ⇓

A “single shaping hand”

For the many true believers though, no praise for the man known as ‘Capability’ seems high enough…one observer noted of his Highclere Castle (Hants) gardens: the location has been a designed landscape for over 1,200 years, yet Brown’s stamp is so much on the place. The remarkable result of one person imposing “his vision with sufficient force for it to have endured indefinitely” [Phipp, loc.cit.].

So successful was Capability Brown in popularising the informal garden, and so imitated was he, that he played a revolutionary role in changing the face and character of English gardens forever. In creating naturalistic landscapes he ‘copied’ nature so skilfully that “his work is often mistaken for natural landscapes” [‘How to spot a Capability Brown landscape’, [National Trust, (#1), loc.cit.].

The English Ha-Ha ⇓

End-note: The Ha-Ha: “Invisible boundaries”

The Ha-Ha Wall (AKA the sunken wall) was a defining features of a typical Capability Brown landscape garden. The Ha-Ha (French in origin) was devised to keep grazing animals out of the more formal areas of a garden, doing away with the need for a fence while creating the illusion of openness. Brown et al used it to provide unbroken vista views – from the house and garden to the parkland or countryside beyond (eg, Petworth Park, Charlecote Park, Stowe) [‘Garden Features: What are Ha-Has?’, The English Garden, 29-Oct-2014, www.theenglishgarden.co.uk].

PostScript: The test of time Remarkable also are the number of country gardens sculpted by Brown that have remained intact (or at least partly so). Around 150 survive – including Alnwick Castle (Northumberland), Blenheim Palace (Oxfds), Basildon Park (Berks), Croome Park (Worcs), Stowe House and Stoke Park (Bucks), Berrington Hall (Hertfds), Milton Abbey and Abbas (Dorset), Clandon Park (Surrey), Charlecote Park (Warws), Chatsworth House (Derbys), Petworth Park (Sussex), Warwick Castle (Warws), Wimpole Estate (Cambs), Wallington (East Yorks), Hatfield Forrest (Essex), Harewood House (West Yorks), Ashridge Estate (Hertfds), Appuldurcombe House (Isle of Wight), Ickworth (Suffolk), Belvoir Castle (Leics), Dinefwr Castle (Wales), Kew Gardens (Lond) and of course Highclere, these days more famous for the location of the TV series “Downton Abbey”.⇑ Brown’s penchant for lakes & bridges (Photo: National Trust)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

✼ ‘Callan Park: The Kirkbride Experiment, a Microcosm of “Good Intentions” ‘, December 2015 blog

✥ this trend had a paradoxical component to it…as the born-to-rule gentry were opting for country homes which were smaller, the gardens were becoming larger [Bassin, loc.cit.] – which of course suited landscape gardeners like Brown given to broad canvasses

◙ follies are decorative, usually non-functional, buildings that enhance the planned landscape, Brown used mock Roman villas, Medieval ruins, etc

🌲 evergreen conifers

✪ Brown’s gardens were of course not natural in any organically occurring sense, but carefully and meticulously contrived to both look natural and to convey “a sense of informality” [‘Capability Brown’, Britain Express, www.britainexpress.com

◇ Brown’s vistas contained no clear delineation between house, parkland and natural environment giving the landscapes a seamless appearance [Mills, op.cit.]

Creating Crusoe: A Raft of Derivative Sources of Defoe’s Classic Tale

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Natural Environment, Popular Culture

A common retort to people purporting to be in a unique situation of any kind is the phrase, usually emphatically stated, “you’re not Robinson Crusoe!” – ie, (not) alone. The phrase references probably the best-known solitary and physically isolated character in English literature, a shipwrecked voyager stuck seemingly alone on a deserted island in some unidentified expanse of the great oceans. Daniel Defoe’s classic 18th century novel Robinson Crusoe.

A search for the genesis of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, like the story’s narrative itself, has taken scholars far and wide. Geographically, this has included both the South Pacific and the South Atlantic Oceans, the Caribbean and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The search has also led, through the work of biographers, to a study of DeFoe’s own life experiences for sources of inspiration for the work of fiction.

image

Alexander Selkirk’s adventures
For the great bulk of the (almost exactly) 300 years since Robinson Crusoe was first published, the conventional wisdom has been to attribute the book’s origin to the real life experiences of Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was a Scottish privateer who fell out with his captain and crewmates on a voyage and was voluntarily marooned on an uninhibited island for a bit over four years. When Robinson Crusoe was published less than a decade later, many made a clear link between it and the well-publicised accounts of Selkirk’s episode of being a solitary castaway. Moreover, some people thought that Defoe’s hero must have been a real person and that the book was a travelogue of actual events [‘Robinson Crusoe’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Selkirk’s Island 🔽

Some commentators today still hold that Selkirk was the true inspiration for Defoe’s most famous fictional protagonist [‘The Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Bruce Selcraig), Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005, www.smithsonianmag.com; ‘Scientists Research the Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Marco Evers), Spiegel Online, 02-VI-2009, www.spiegel.de]. A perception that was given some added credence by the Chilean government. With an eye to the tourist potential spin-off, Chile renamed Más-a-Tierra, the small island in the South Pacific which had been Selkirk’s enforced home for over four years, Robinson Crusoe Island.

Defoe’s ‘Crusoe’ cf. Selkirk
Most literary critics these days however accept that Selkirk’s epic misadventure was “just one of many survival narratives that Defoe knew about” (by no means the major one)✲. Becky Little has listed some of the key differences between Defoe’s story and the accounts of Selkirk…Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked, whereas Selkirk asked to be cast on shore; Crusoe is a plantation owner with a colonising mentality who adapts the island to his own world, while Selkirk was effectively a “glorified pirate” who “goes native”; Crusoe’s Island, as Robinson was to discover in time, was inhabited, whereas Más-a-Tierra was completely uninhabited; Crusoe was stuck on his island for 28 long years compared to a shade over four years that Selkirk had to endure [‘Debunking the Myth of the “Real” Robinson Crusoe’, (Becky Little), National Geographic, (28-Sept-2016), www.nationalgeographic.com].

imageAside from Selkirk’s story, Defoe who read widely and voraciously would have drawn on other, existing accounts of shipwreck and survival – this includes a work by 12th century Arab Andalusian writer Ibn Tufail, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, both a philosophical treatise and the first novel to depict a desert island castaway, and the story of Pedro Luis Serrano (Maestre Joan)♉, a 16th century Spanish sailor thought to have been marooned on a small Caribbean Island for seven or eight years [‘RC’, Wikipedia, loc.cit.]❇.

Robert Knox, a prototype for Crusoe?
One of the major influences on Robinson Crusoe is sea captain Robert Knox’s experience of prolonged confinement after his British East India Company ship was forced aground on the island of Ceylon (published in 1681 as An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon). Katherine Frank in her book Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, has pointed to the parallels between Defoe and Knox. Knox’s Island confinement consumes some 20 years, comparable to the 28 years Crusoe is marooned on his remote island. Both Crusoe (in the book) and Knox (in real life) are unable to secure the full patrimony (inheritence) entitled them upon their return. Both are engaged in slave-trading activities at different times [Katherine Frank, Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, (2011)].

The derivative Defoe
Frank describes Defoe as a “congenital plagiarist” who freely borrowed material  and ideas from numerous sources for Robinson Crusoe. Among the literary works mined by Defoe are Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. He also relied upon the books of voyages by contemporary explorers such as William Dampier and Woodes Rogers. And of course there was the borrowings from published accounts of real castaways and their ordeals – in addition to Serrano, Selkirk and Knox, Defoe drew upon the accounts of Fernando Lopez on St Helena in the South Atlantic and Henry Pitman’s stranding on Tortuga, et al [ibid.].

‘Robinson Crusoe’, allegory of incarceration
Frank also draws on biographical aspects of Defoe’s life that can be reflected in the famous novel. On two separate occasions Defoe was imprisoned for failure to settle his (very considerable) debts (the first saw him detained in the Fleet and the King’s Bench Prisons and on a subsequent occasion in notorious Newgate). DeFoe’s journal tells us how profoundly affected he was by imprisonment. Frank invokes the symbolism of being “shipwreck’d by land”, analogising the author’s mandatory detention with the catastrophe of being tossed about in a storm and helplessly cast adrift on a desert island, and concludes that “Robinson Crusoe clearly had its autobiographical genesis in Defoe’s bankruptcies and incarceration” [ibid.].

PostScript: a legion of imitators, the Robinsade
As plentiful as were Daniel Defoe’ sources of inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, the novel has continued to this day to capture the imagination of countless writers, film directors and TV producers. Seemingly ubiquitous, it has inspired the creation of a genre of writing, “survivalist fiction”, and even spawned a literary sub-genre known as the Robinsonade. These works include novels as disparate as Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies and JM Coetzee’s Foe, filmic representations of the novel by Luis Buñuel and modernised updates of the story such as Cast Away, plus the television series Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island. The form of the Robinsonade has also extended to a Science Fiction offshoot with Sci-Fi Robinsonades (movies: Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Martian; fiction: The Survivors (Tom Godwin), Concrete Island (JG Ballard)). Robinson Crusoe has proved to be particularly fecund in the world of reality television, inspiring a host of “real life”(sic) programs with titles like Lost! and Survivor that say it all! As Katherine Frank commented, “Crusoe hasn’t just survived, he has thrived, flourished and proliferated”.

﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎
✲ eg, the scholarly consensus tends to the view that no single, real life ‘Crusoe’ existed, the character was an amalgam of “all the buccaneer survival stories” [AD Lambert, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, (2016)]
♉ after Robinson Crusoe was published Serrano became known as the “Spanish Crusoe”
❇ Defoe got the idea for Crusoe’s familiar goatskin clothing from reading about another exile, John Segar, on St Helena