Google Maps and Genocide (and Trainspotting)

Google Maps (the satellite view) is both a great boon to the armchair traveller and a tremendous time waster - I remember using it when it first came out to trace the long-vanished railway lines from the Clydach Gorge to Abergavenny, and then followed the line at small scale all the way through Hereford to Colwall !

My record time-waste occurred after blogging the Skeleton Coast diamond excavations in Namibia, which can be seen on Google Maps. Bleak and inaccessible places have always appealed to my imagination, and that night I sat up for hours tracing the Skeleton Coast all the way from Oranjemund to Walvis Bay, with frequent stops to zoom in on some remote diamond working. And that's still only half way up the Namibian coast !

Why genocide ? Well, I was reading the wiki for Walvis Bay, as one does.

Fishing

In Walvis Bay there are different fishing companies like Hangana Seafood,Caroline Fishing, Benguella Fishing Company, Genocide of Namibia, Etale Fishing Company... WHAT ?

Genocide of Namibia ? I bet their produce just flies off the shelves ! A quick Google gave me this, on the events of 1904 when Namibia was a German colony :

On 2 October, Trotha issued an appeal to the rebellious Herero tribe:

I, the great general of the German troops, send this letter to the Herero people... All Hereros must leave this land... Any Herero found within the German borders with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall no longer receive any women or children; I will drive them back to their people or have them fired upon. This is my decision for the Herero people.

Unable to achieve a conclusive victory through battle, Trotha ordered that captured Herero males were to be executed, while women and children were to be driven into the desert. Leutwein complained to Bülow about Trotha's actions, seeing the general's orders as ruining any chance of a settlement and intruding upon the civilian colonial jurisdiction. Having no authority over the military, the chancellor could only advise the Kaiser that Trotha's actions were "contrary to Christian and humanitarian principle, economically devastating and damaging to Germany's international reputation." After a political battle in Berlin between the civilian government and the military, Wilhelm II countermanded Trotha's decree of 2 October on 8 December, but the massacres had already begun. When the order was lifted at the end of 1904, prisoners were herded into concentration camps and given as slave labourers to German businesses. Many prisoners died of overwork and malnutrition.

The whole story is not a nice one, to put it mildly. Which brings to mind something Norman Geras wrote a while back (in a review of the remarkable story of the life and death of far-left academic Malcolm Caldwell - a story worth a post all on its own) :

That Nazi ideology was pregnant with the danger of terrible consequences is true, as virulent racism always is; but it is debatable - and indeed has been intensively debated in the historiography of Nazi Germany - whether the genocide against the Jews was a matter of fixed ideological intention from the moment Hitler took power or rather something that emerged only after the war in the East (Operation Barbarossa) had begun and out of the policy-making interactions of different parts of the Nazi regime. Given Hitler's own obsessive hatred of the Jews, Nazi ideology was bound to have disastrous consequences for European Jewry after 1933; but whether Auschwitz and the Holocaust were an inevitable product of that ideology is more open to question.

I think Norm's point is that Nazism may have been a necessary but not alone a sufficient trigger of the Shoah. I tend to wonder if there's not just a Nazi dimension, but also a German one. Wee Adolf was but a sprog when Lothar von Trotha issued his orders. Obviously not everyone in Germany felt that way - von Bulow for starters - but it was only four years since Kaiser Wilhelm had addressed German troops on their way to put down the Boxer Rebellion in these stirring words:

"Just as the Huns a thousand years ago, under the leadership of Attila, gained a reputation by virtue of which they still live in historical tradition, so may the name Germany become known in such a manner in China, that no Chinese will ever again dare to look askance at a German."

Not exactly a call to moderation, I think you'll agree - in fact almost an invitation to the kind of stuff the Japanese were doing nearly forty years later.

(I would never suggest the Germans had a monopoly on attempted genocide - if not one of the human universals, it must alas come reasonably close. Think in recent years of Indonesians and Chinese, Hutu and Tutsi, Gabra and Borana, Kalejin and Kikuyu. The big difference was that a major 'civilised' state, efficient and mechanised, was doing the killing. I'm sure if the organisation and capability of 20th century Germany had existed in 11th century England, the tolls of St Brices Day and the Harrying of the North would have been higher still.)

I digress greatly from the original theme - Google Maps and armchair travelling.

Mick Hartley has taken a break from attacking the Catholic Church to point out the photographs taken by Jan Smith of the many abandoned vessels around the peninsula of Nouadhibou, at the very top end of Mauretania (NW Africa). The place is a massive ships graveyard, though I'm not sure why. This site says it's cheaper to dump than scrap :

For years, Mauritanian harbour officers were so corrupt, that they let ships be discarded in the harbour in exchange of some cash. Discarding a ship is quite expensive for a company, so during the decades, lots of unwanted ships ended up in the Harbour of Nouadibou. A few years ago, the situation was so out of control, that even Mauritanians started to worry. Nowadays there’s a project from the European Union to refloat all these junk and take them away, or destroy in situ (with explosions) the remaining wrecks.

While Jan Smith says its something to do with insurance - "they are most vestiges of the rampant insurance fraud (where boats are simply abandoned) that takes place in those waters" - how dumping a ship in plain sight makes fraud possible I don't know - wouldn't it be better to sink it ?


Either way, one can waste much time in scanning Google Maps for boats. But what's this on Wikipedia ?

"...the largest industry is processing iron ore transported by train from the interior mining towns of Zouérat and Fdérik. These freight trains can be as much as 3 km long, reputedly the longest in the world. The railway also carries passengers and calls at Choum. "

Another line to follow ! The railway company has a neat zoomable map of the line here. It's easy to find the iron ore terminal on Google maps, and there are railway maintenance sheds just to the north, but tracing the line across the desert is tricky. It can be done, however, and the line eventually ends up in the scarred, nightmare umber open mines at Zouerat and (especially) Fderik. You can spot a few trains en route, but none 3km long - more like 1.5. In Arizona a couple of years back we stopped to film a container train which took 15 minutes to pass.




(For more armchair travelling, samples from John Marsh's The Skeleton Coast, and a little further south and a lot colder(their discoverer, Marion du Fresne, christened them "Iles des Froides"), the full text of No Pathway Here, the story of South Africa's annexation of the remote Prince Edward and Marion Islands, lying in the Southern Ocean halfway between South Africa and the Antarctic. Lots of stories of shipwreck and (sometimes) survival.

Those South Africans call a spade a spade. "Human waste flows into the sea at Shit Creek")

Bob White 1924-2010

“He was the eternally correct and reserved Air Force pilot. He didn’t drink. He exercised like a college athlete in training. He was religious. He was an usher in the Roman Catholic chapel of the base and never, but never, missed Mass. He was slender, black-haired, handsome, intelligent — even cultivated, if the truth were known. And he was terribly serious. He was not a beer-call fighter jock.” - Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff.



Bob White, the 5th American in space but the first in the world to get up there in a winged craft - and more importantly, to fly it back down through the atmosphere and land on a runway, has died aged 85. He was also the first pilot to exceed Mach 4, Mach 5 and Mach 6.

Telegraph


NYT :

Robert Michael White was born in New York City on July 6, 1924, and entered military service in 1942. He flew more than 50 fighter missions during World War II before he was shot down over Germany in February 1945 and taken prisoner.

After leaving military service in December 1945, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from New York University. Re-called during the Korean War, he served with a fighter squadron based in Japan, and in the mid-1950s he was assigned to Edwards.

Returning to combat in the Vietnam War, he flew 70 missions over North Vietnam and received the Air Force Cross, the service’s highest award for valor after the Medal of Honor, for leading an August 1967 attack on an important railway and highway bridge in the Hanoi area. He retired from military service in 1981 as a major general.

Al Hallonquist's tribute site with good links :

As Allavie rolls the B-52 onto the heading of 222 degrees, at the launch speed of 0.82 Mach, I start the first-stage ignition. Think of this as a pilot light on a gas stove; there is no real power yet because it’s "idling." Joe Walker calls the countdown: "Four…three…two…one…LAUNCH!"

I flick the "Drop" toggle switch. The X-15 falls away and I shove the throttle forward. The acceleration is tremendous, and as I pitch up in a 40-degree climb, the G-forces build. X-15 pilot Bill Dana was fond of saying that because of the 4 Gs against the chest endured during powered flight, the X-15 is the only aircraft in which he was glad when the engine quit.

The plan called for an 80-second burn to reach 282,000 feet and Mach 5.15. But this engine performed very well, and by topping off the LOX, I was able to burn the engine for an extra two seconds, which allowed me to accelerate to Mach 5.45 and peak at 314,750 feet, becoming the first person to fly an aircraft above 300,000 feet and also the first pilot to fly a winged vehicle into space.

The X-15 now starts to decelerate... at this (airless - LT) altitude my standard controls are ineffective, so the aircraft is now using jets of hydrogen peroxide to control yaw, pitch, and roll, keeping the nose on the proper heading.

When re-entry begins, the "eyeballs out" negative G forces start to build. I place my helmet against the reverse headrest, which allows my helmet to settle forward slightly and stay in place as the aircraft decelerates and the pressures on my body increase. Without this headrest, the negative G forces would push my head so far forward I could lose sight of the control panel.

The X-15 soon encounters enough atmosphere to regain the use of the aerodynamic control surfaces. Coming out almost directly over Edwards Air Force Base, we are still at Mach 3-plus and around 75,000 feet, much faster and higher than previous X-15 flights. Overflying the landing site, I make one circle and roll out on heading, having lost enough altitude to be right on target for the lakebed runway. The Gs are so great that after the flight I find a huge patch of burst capillaries all over my right shoulder and chest .

Fate Is The Hunter - Ice II

Ernest K Gann is co-piloting a DC2 passenger flight from Nashville to New York. The plane is icing up and our heroes are in trouble :

"We're getting out of this!

Hughen pounds his feet on the rudder pedals. They are immovable. The rudder, far back on the tail of the ship, is frozen. There is, of course, absolutely nothing we can do about it. Yet by constant movement Hughen has kept the ailerons free, so a turn is still possible. He must execute the turn very slowly, taking great care not to bank more than a few degrees at a time, for at this speed and with the efficiency of the wings so damaged, a turn can be the introduction to a spin from which, under the circumstances, there can be no possible recovery.

I watch Hughen start into a slow left turn. At once the air speed slips to an agonizing one hundred and five. The ship has abandoned the easier porpoising and is bucking viciously.

Hughen is a man tiptoeing along a very tenuous wire. The wire is swaying crazily in the wind, he is being bombarded with stones, and if he loses balance for one second, we are done for. How can this all have happened so suddenly? Fifteen minutes ago all was as it should be.

"Call Nashville. Get emergency clearance at five thousand. Tell them we are returning on account of heavy ice. Accumulation fast ... clear ice."

I repeat the message into my microphone, trying to control the tendency of my voice to become a quavering falsetto. One hundred miles per hour. Altitude four thousand eight hundred feet. Still sinking. Maybe if I refuse to look the readings will go away....

There is no reassuring reply from Nashville. I can only assume they received our message and will clear all other planes from our altitude.

A sudden, terrible shudder seizes the entire aeroplane. At once Hughen shoves the throttles wide open and the nose down. The shuddering ceases. Hughen wipes the sweat from his eyes.

"She almost got away from me ! "

The incipient stall has stolen an additional three hundred feet from our altitude. We must not risk a repetition, and yet the engines cannot remain at full power for ever. But Hughen leaves the throttles where they are.

I crank the loop desperately although the hope of hearing anything is dissolved in noise. I abandon Knoxville and again experiment with Columbus, which is so much farther away. Then quite clearly I hear a new whine, distorted yet unmistakably genuine. It is interrupted by the code letters C.O. - Columbus!
At once I tune to Charleston and find it also readable.

"I have Charleston and Columbus! Fix in a minute!"

I don't know why it seems so terribly important to know where we are. What is important is our altitude, a factor we can do nothing about. If it continues to diminish, our position is of little consequence. Both Hughen and myself would be indifferent as to which of the Blue Ridge Mountains we actually hit.

I manage to take two good bearings when Hughen at last completes his turn. I plot them at once on the chart. Hughen glances at the two intersecting lines I have drawn. They show us to be approximately fifty miles to the north of Knoxville—directly over a long hump in the mountains. There is a peak somewhere in this area. Its summit is marked as four thousand one hundred and fifty feet. We are now at four thousand five hundred feet and still sinking. Even as we study the chart we are approaching or leaving the vicinity of the peak. Which it is, we cannot know until I plot another fix. There is no way to make an aeroplane wait.

"Take another shot in two minutes."

In two minutes the effort might be entirely superfluous.

Both engines suddenly begin cutting out—first one and then the other. For one awful moment they both subside together. And there is a silence which is not really a silence but a chilling diminuendo of all sound. This is the way you die. At three minutes past two in the morning.

Fate Is The Hunter - Ice I

The Poisoned Wells of Bangladesh

I've been aware of this dreadful story for a few years now - how aid projects dug (literally) millions of deep wells for Bangladeshi villagers - protecting them from the diseases associated with surface water, but exposing them to deadly levels of arsenic in what the World Health Organisation called "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history". (They went on to say "... the scale of this environmental disaster is greater than any seen before ...beyond the accidents at Bhopal ...and Chernobyl").

Dalrymple as usual makes some valid points.


Let us suppose that a commercial mining company had, in the course of its operations, poisoned the water supply of 70,000,000 people in this quite specific way. Would that have been regarded as "a sad irony", an unintended consequence of its search for profit, or perhaps as something rather more sinister and indeed typical of the way such companies operate? Would there not have been large demonstrations, probably turning soon to violence, against that company by those in the developed world who habitually express their solidarity with the impoverished victims of exploitation by their own nations' multinationals? It is unlikely that we would ever hear the end of the matter - in such a case, quite rightly.

When people buy their UNICEF Christmas cards, how many of them know what the organisation, and others like it, have wrought in Bangladesh?

I have a few friends who are aid workers - brave, adventurous types - just the kind of people who would have made terrific District Officers in the days of Empire. It's an interesting irony that they're nearly all left wing.

As I quickly discovered in Tanzania and elsewhere, foreign aid offers a lucrative career in good working conditions to middle class people of the developed world who want a little adventure in their lives, and who would once have been colonial officers; and it offers tempting opportunities for malversation of funds to their bureaucratic counterparts in the Third World. This symbiosis is the natural consequence of asking precisely the wrong question: not where wealth comes from, but where poverty comes from.

Black Polar Adventurers

Boys brought up in the Fifties knew all about explorers and adventurers. Hillary and Tensing, Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, Peary, Fawcett.

But I had no idea that alongside Peary on the first trip to the North Pole was a black American, Matthew Henson.

According to this National Geographic portrait, the notoriously difficult Peary wasn't at all happy at the idea that Henson might have been first there.

On April 6, 1909, Henson arrived at Camp Jesup, 89°47', 45 minutes ahead of Peary, concluding by dead reckoning that he had reached the Pole. Henson greeted Peary, "I think I'm the first man to sit on top of the world."

I picked this story up because another Hillary, 75 year old Barbara Hillary has just become the first black woman to reach the North Pole, skiing from Norway. Admittedly, it's not like the old days. You pay about $21,000 and get a helicopter back from the Pole - not an option Scott could avail himself of.

But all the same - 18 days pulling a 100lb sled across the ice, at 75. Good going.

Death Zone

Another climber gone ...

The body of one of Latin America's best known climbers, Jose Antonio Delgado, has been found on Mount Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, rescuers say.

Delgado had been missing for some time. The rescuers said they had buried him on the mountain after consulting with his family.

Delgado was the first Venezuelan to climb Mount Everest, the world's highest peak.

I forgot to blog about this court case which finished last week.

Three men will not face trial for manslaughter over the death of a City trader on Mount Everest, a judge ruled.

In 1999 Michael Matthews, 22, was the youngest Briton to reach the summit but disappeared on the descent.

A private prosecution brought by his father against three men working for the tour company alleged their negligence contributed to his death.

But Judge Jeffrey Rivlin QC dismissed the case, saying there was no evidence anyone had acted with gross negligence.

Lawyers for the three men, Jonathan Tinker, 47, from York, Henry Todd, 61, from Edinburgh, and Michael Smith, 44, who lives in Switzerland, had applied to Southwark Crown Court to have the case thrown out.

Mr Matthews' dad wasn't happy. He thought his son had been supplied with dodgy oxygen.


Henry Todd ? That name rang a bell, taking me all the way back to the mid-70s, when alternative types consumed avidly the products created by Todd, Richard Kemp and Christine Bott, who ran the world's largest LSD production line.

Mr Todd, a hairy-bottomed buccaneering type, headed for Nepal on his release from prison - he's been there off and on ever since, running expeditions. In another age he'd probably have been a terrific Political Agent on the North-West Frontier or similar - one of the kind who was 'half a Pathan himself'.


Henry Barclay Todd — Scotsman, ex-con, entrepreneur — is in the business of solving problems. Want to climb Mount Everest but don't have the Benjamins ? Henry can solve that. Need oxygen tanks on the cheap ? Henry's your man. What's the weather forecast for 27,000 feet ? Check with Henry. Need to share a tent at Camp II ? Henry !

Fifty-six-year-old Todd is the proprietor of Himalayan Guides, an Edinburgh-based expedition service that specializes in the highly affordable summit trip. If you want to climb Everest with legends like Ed Viesturs and Pete Athans, you'll pony up at least $50,000 to a guide service like Adventure Consultants (Guy Cotter's Wanaka, New Zealand–based outfit) or Alpine Ascents International (Todd Burleson's Seattle operation). But if you can haul your own carcass up the Hillary Step and are willing to subsist on rice and lentil soup, you can ride on Henry's ticket for the low, low price of $29,000. "Adventure Consultants and Alpine Ascents are like the Cadillacs of Everest," says John Leonard, a 26-year-old Mount Rainier wilderness ranger who made his first attempt on Everestwith Todd last spring. "Henry's the vintage Chevy Astrovan. You've got a whole bunch of people, and the ride's a little bumpy, but if you hold on you'll get there."


He's not everyone's cup of tea, to put it mildly. Even more friendly reporters have their doubts.


Meanwhile, Todd's business has continued apace. A few weeks after Nepal banned him, he announced an expedition to Pakistan's K2 in 2002. His minimum requirement: having summited two 8,000-meter peaks. The book closed on 12 clients in less than a week. Which is to say, there is one law that Henry Todd has always respected: the law of supply and demand. "I have two words to say about Henry Todd," an American Everest-expedition leader told me. "Caveat emptor."

Shackleton Shot My Cat

Chippy McNeish, the carpenter on the James Caird, the lifeboat which carried the men of Shackleton's expedition 800 miles to South Georgia, is to have a bronze sculpture of his beloved tabby cat erected on his grave. Shackleton ordered the shooting of the cat along with the sledge dogs, after their expedition ship, the Endurance, was crushed by ice and the expedition marooned with little food.



Without McNeish's skilful adaptation of the boat for its voyage, the expedition would have been lost. But for questioning Shackleton's authority after the loss of the Endurance, McNeish lost the confidence of his leader, and was not awarded the Polar Medal despite his contribution to the saving of 29 lives. McNeish died in poverty in 1930.


Another feat of exploration was announced today - the first privately owned spaceship flight. Burt Rutan, who designed the first aircraft to fly non-stop round the world, is an engineering genius.

Euro-Afghans ?

I wondered in a comments box a week or two back what had happened to the Spectator expedition to Afghanistan, which aimed to collect genetic samples in an attempt to determine whether the blond-haired, blue-eyed Afghans are the descendants of Alexander the Great's army.


Image copyright Matthew Leeming. Used without permission.

Well we don't know the results yet, but the expedition site is here. Hopefully Matthew Leeming will be updating the site soon with some results. At present he's probably crossing the Oxus on an oil-drum raft. Thanks to Hugo Willliams for the link.

JFD at Way Of The Intercepting Fisk (to be known henceforth as WOTIF) shares my fascination (and surpasses my knowledge as Sirius does Proxima Centauri) with the links between modern and ancient peoples and cultures.

I'd seen an old map of Central Asia a while back, showing the North-East of Afghanistan, above Hazara and west of Kashmir, as Kafiristan ('land of infidels'), but more modern maps showed it as Nuristan ('land of the enlightened' or 'land of light' - obviously good Muslims). I'd wondered what happend to the Kafirs (the derogatory South African word used to describe black people came from the Muslim slave traders' word for unbelievers).

Well they were all converted to Islam at end of the nineteenth century , though I imagine those who didn't were killed. The previous religions were polytheistic or animistic. But in a few remote valleys the Kafirs survived and are there to this day. You can trek there with Walji - or you could in 1996, and some of their culture was recorded in 1929 by the late Professor Georg Morgenstierne. Videos of Goat Sacrifice, anyone ?

Gone ....

Leni Riefenstahl dies at 101. She was rather gorgeous ...











... but had some very dodgy friends ....



"Alright, Leni - it IS a Heinkel" "Told you so - thats 100 Reichmarks you owe me"


Leni was probably one of the last people on earth who can remember when being on the far right rather than the far left was cool - hip - trendy - whatever. First the Futurists in Italy then the Nazis in Germany had the same appeal as, say, the hippies of 1967 or the punks of 1976 - the appeal of youth and energy, of a total disregard for bourgeois convention.

"We intend to glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strength of daring.
The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt."

"There is no more beauty except in struggle. No masterpiece without the stamp of aggressiveness. Poetry should be a violent assault against unknown forces"

The far left has been the cool place to be ever since 1945. And that today is probably a very good thing indeed. We have an increasingly ill-educated and intolerant population, inhabiting a moral and cultural wasteland - what a good thing that hatred and ignorance mostly gravitates towards the left. It would be scary indeed if it became hip to be far-right, and people with the mentality of Seattle or May Day protesters were smashing foreign-owned shops - like MacDonalds ....