After being delayed for several months because of COVID, the new Will Rees will be released in the United States on January 5.
The Great Dismal Swamp, the setting for the ninth Will Rees, is my favorite so far. Will and Lydia are asked by a friend, born free but sold down south and now escaped, to accompany him to the swamp to rescue his wife. Of course they agree, and several murders occur.
Yes, the swamp still exists. It is much smaller, though, than it was when George Washington first explored it (and first saw the potential for development.) But it still feels like a trackless wilderness. Bears and bobcats still live within the swamp as well as many species of birds and aquatic life. And insects, lots and lots of insects.
This is a peat bog and in some places the peat is fourteen feet deep. A man could be swallowed up with no one the wiser.
Many slaves escaped to the swamp. Estimates range from a few thousand to one hundred thousand. Many were caught but quite a few managed to make a life for themselves inside the swamp. These fugitives were called maroons.
When the escaped slaves fled to the swamp, they bedded down first under the pines. They grow only on the drier islands. Daniel Sayers, an archaeologist has been excavating these drier patches and has found evidence of small communities.
Most of the swamp resembles an impassible green curtain.
Now the swamp is passable via boardwalks. This one leads to a memorial honoring the maroons.
I realized – and I’m not sure why it took me so long – that although I have blogged about many many topics, I have not discussed Maine. My detective, Will Rees, is a Mainer and many of my books are set in this state.
At the time the books are set, Maine is not yet a state of its own. Originally populated by tribes of the Algonquin Nation, whose names remain in names like Androscoggin, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and more, Maine was considered part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was officially called the District of Maine. Maine was brought into statehood as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. (Maine came in as a ‘free’ state. The following year, Missouri came in as a slave holding state, thereby keeping the balance between free and slave.)
Maine is called The Pine Tree State for obvious reasons.
Maine has a long, and rocky coastline.
Although part of the temperate climate, and frequently warm and humid in the summers, it also has a long cold and snowy winter. I have seen it snow the last week of April, and not a dusting either but several inches.
Since the rebirth of the circus in Great Britain was begun as an equestrian show, it is no surprise than many animal species have long been the stars of the animal world. At first, the horse was supreme. Horse acts continued right through to the modern age.
But, along with clowns and acrobats, animals acts were added to entertain the audience between equestrian feats. And, before the exotic animals became a feature of the circus (the elephant was first brought to the United States in 1794), dogs, pigs and bears were pressed into service as acts. Again, similar to the horse, these animals have continued to mainstays of the circus.
Almost from the first, less common animals were featured. In 1779, Philip Astley (a Serjeant-Major who set up the first circus in Great Britain after a century), put a zebra on display. Other exotics, elephants, camels, monkeys, and eventually the big cats were added to the exhibitions.
With the expansion of the European powers into Africa, the types of animals employed expanded. Wild animals, especially the big cats, became a profitable business. It was not a big jump from exhibiting the animals to including them to performances. To the acrobats, jugglers and ropedancers was now added a menagerie of animals, many of them dangerous. Of course, with the animals, came animal trainers.
Some of these animal performers became big stars. In the 1940’s Jumbo, the elephant became so popular that jumbo, meaning colossal, became part of the language.
The heyday of the American Circus occurred in the early 1900s. Hundreds of circuses, both small and large, toured the United States, performing for audiences of a few hundred or several thousands. Trains took the circuses all over the country and by then the circus was the circus we think of. Canvas tents had been invented and adopted in the mid-nineteenth century and exotic animal acts became a feature of the performances. The trapeze, invented in France, was added to the line-up.
But in 1800, if the circus came to Durham, Maine, it would be far different. As discussed in previous blogs, there were no tents; the circus constructed a small roofless amphitheater. Instead of elephant and lion acts, the animals were dogs and pigs. The trapeze, adapted from the tightrope, had not been invented. And trains did not carry the circus across the country,
Horse drawn wagons would have been the vehicle used.
As my model for the wagons used in A Circle of Dead Girls,
I used the Burton wagon. It is the oldest example of a wagon used as a home in Great Britain.
The history of the wagon, however, is older. By the late 17th century, most of the roads in Europe were paved. It is thought that the first wagons used as living quarters appeared in France and were designed for the actors of the circus. They were large, horse drawn caravans. By the middle of the 18th centuries, the carriages became smaller and only needed one or two horses to pull them.
The Burton wagons had small wheels placed under the body of the carriage itself and were undecorated. These wagons evolved into the elaborately embellished wagons, with large wheels necessary for going off-road, used by the Romani. According to Wikipedia and other sources, they began using such wagons about 1850 called a vardo.
Since John Asher, the circus owner, is from England and has traveled through Europe, I imagined that he would have seen such living wagons in France and other places and used them for the models of his own horse-drawn circus wagons. These living wagons would be a practical solution to traveling from town to town.
The decorated wagons did not disappear when the circus began touring via train. They evolved into parade wagons, the brightly painted and gilded wagons that paraded through town to advertise the circus. The circus museum in Sarasota, Florida has some fine examples of these wagons.
Although there was no canvas tent (not invented for another twenty+ years), no exotic animals (the first circuses used pigs, horses and dogs) or trapeze artists, there were clowns.
The ancient Greeks used figures of fun, which were rustic fools. The English word for clown also meant rustic fool originally. These characters are plentiful in Shakespeare’s plays.
At the same time, the Italian Commedia del’arte used a number of stock characters that includes clown-like figures: Pierot and Harlequin.
Clowns have certain evolved since then.
The clown in the American circus is a direct outgrowth of Philip Astley, who restarted the circus in England in 1768. His circus was originally an equestrian show and clowns were used as the breaks between the trick riding.
Although there was no canvas tent (not invented for another twenty+ years), no exotic animals (the first circuses used pigs, horses and dogs) or trapeze artists, there were clowns.
The ancient Greeks used figures of fun, which were rustic fools. The English word for clown also meant rustic fool originally. These characters are plentiful in Shakespeare’s plays.
At the same time, the Italian Commedia del’arte used a number of stock characters that includes clown-like figures: Pierot and Harlequin.
Clowns have certain evolved since then.
The clown in the American circus is a direct outgrowth of Philip Astley, who restarted the circus in England in 1768. His circus was originally an equestrian show and clowns were used as the breaks between the trick riding.
In almost every Will Rees mystery, I include at least one profession and one illness. In Simply Dead, for example, I studied hoop making (for barrels) and lumbering. One of the characters is severely ill with diabetes.
In A Circle of Dead Girls, tuberculosis was the disease of choice. Because the story is set against the early days of the circus, I included details about wagons and early magic tricks.
In Will Rees Number 10, A Murder of Principle, I am including smallpox. Like Covid-19, smallpox was a viral disease and greatly feared.
The initial symptoms were similar to the flu, Covid-19 and many other viral diseases: fever, muscle pain, fatigue and headache. Before the distinctive rash erupted, small reddish spots appeared on mucous membranes of the mouth, tongue, and throat.
The characteristic skin rash form within two days after the reddish spots on the mucous membranes. The rash was formed of pustules with a dot (that became filled with fluid) in the center. These spots scabbed over and then the scabs fell off, usually resulting in scarring.
The origin of smallpox is unknown although the theory says the virus developed in certain African rodents 60,000 or so years ago. The earliest evidence of human illness dates to the third century BCE with Egyptian mummies It is a lethal disease with a fatality rate for the ordinary kind of about 30 percent. Higher among babies. The Malignant and Hemorrhagic forms are over ninety percent fatal. Occurring in outbreaks, it killed hundreds of thousands, including at least six monarchs in Europe. In the twentieth century it is estimated to have killed 300 million alone. As recently as 1967, 15 million cases occurred worldwide.
In 1796, Edward Jenner discovered that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, a much less serious disease, did not come down with smallpox. He began a trial and proved that inoculation with cowpox prevented smallpox. Inoculation with the live virus had already begun but, although the disease tended to be less severe and less fatal, some people still died. The cowpox was safer.
Later, the vaccine was made of the killed virus. In Great Britain, Russia, the United States vaccination was practiced. However. My father contracted small pox as a toddler and lived to tell the tale. I am old enough to remember my smallpox vaccination and still bear the scar on my upper arm.
A concerted global effort a to eradicate smallpox succeeded with the last naturally occurring case in 1977. (The last death was in 1978. A researcher contracted the disease from a research sample.) WHO officially certified the eradication of smallpox in 1980.
In The Circle of Dead Girls, my latest Will Rees mystery, the circus comes to this small Maine town. It is hard to believe, but the American circus was still in its infancy in 1799.
Although the circus has a long history – the Egyptians are commonly credited with inventing acrobatics – all forms of entertainment including the jugglers and the acrobats were banned during the Puritan era. It was not recreated in England until Sergeant-Major Philip Astley began exhibiting his equestrian prowess on the outskirts of London in 1768. He performed in a circle (a ‘circus’ in Latin).
In 1770 he decided to expand the appeal of his show by adding acrobats, ropedancers (or wire walkers) and jugglers. (The trapeze, which evolved from the high wire acts, had not yet been invented.) He finished the production with a pantomime, a farcical play that included characters from the Commedia del Arte: Harlequin, Columbine and Clown. His new circus was a huge success.
Like many parts of American culture, this new version of the circus came to the United States from England. As Europe prepared for war, one of the many between England and France, a pupil of the English equestrian tradition, John Bill Ricketts, brought the circus across the Atlantic. He set up a riding school in Philadelphia in 1792 and established the first circus the following year. It was not a traveling circus but was, like the Astley entertainment, housed in a wooden amphitheater.
From the first, despite the social and cultural mores that repressed women, they performed in the circus. They were career women before the term was invented. And they were frequently the stars. In 1772 Astley’s circus featured two equestriennes. The wives of Astley and another trick rider J. Griffin were so popular and famous they were invited to perform before the royal families of England and France. Following their lead Ricketts included a woman in his circus who not only worked as an equestrienne but also doubled as actress and dancer.
Many of the women who performed in circuses were the wives and daughters of male owners or performers. In Europe there was already a culture in which the children raised by circus parents became performers in their turn. A famous ropedancer, familiarly called Bambola, was one such in Italy. I borrowed the name for a character in A Circle of Dead Girls.
The circus allowed women to exhibit their bodies and their physical strength in public. The equestriennes certainly could not do tricks on the backs of galloping horses in long trailing skirts so, horrors!, they wore knee-length skirts that clearly showed the shape of their legs. To modern eyes, this reveal would look remarkably tame. But in the eighteenth century this was titillating. Women of that time were tightly corseted and completely covered. It was not proper for them to attend the circus, which was on a par with Burlesque. Until the Civil War (1861 – 1865) the audience of the American circus was predominantly male. The female performers, like actresses, to whom they were compared, were suspect, considered little better than harlots. But unlike the actresses, who only had to be pretty and seductive, the women in the circuses had to have talent and be willing to undergo the grueling training required for the acts. They, like their male counterparts, had to be unusually healthy and fit.
The circus proved extremely popular in the United States and Ricketts expanded to include New York and Boston and even cities in Canada. To reach more people, the circuses began to travel, building and then tearing down the wooden arenas as necessary. In 1825, Joshua Purdy Brown decided to present his show under a canvas tent instead of the temporary wooden structures. The modern circus was born.
Although there is no record of traveling circuses before the 1800’s, I suspect some enterprising fellows would set up their own small companies. Outside of the few big cities at that time, (which were primarily New York, Philadelphia and Boston, most of the U.S. was rural. Picture how exciting the arrival of such entertainment would be. And how exotic the performers would appear to the farmers and small shopkeepers who came to see them. And imagine how seductive such a beautiful ropedancer would be in a tiny town in Maine . . .
In my Will Rees mysteries, he meets people who are ill with tuberculosis several times. The frequency of deaths from this disease in my fiction in not an accident. It was a pandemic that still has not been eradicated. In 2017, there were more than 10 million cases of active TB which resulted in 1.6 million deaths; it is therefore the number one cause of death from an infectious disease. Most of these deaths, and most of the new infections, occur in the developing world.
I was mostly familiar with TB as ‘consumption’, a disease that afflicted Victorian poets. Although TB was common in both the poets, the upper classes and the slum-dwellers, it was not a new disease during Victorian times. It has been around for millennia. Bison remains from 17,000 years ago display the effects of the disease. (No one is sure if TB jumped to humans from the bovine like smallpox or whether it developed independently.) TB scars have been found on Neolithic skeletons and on the spines of Egyptian mummies.
So, it has been around a very long time. Despite that, it was not identified as a single disease until 1820 and the bacillus that caused it was not discovered until 1882 (by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel prize but failed to recognize that one of the transmissions of TB was via infected milk.)
Before the advent of antibiotics, and even with the best care in the sanatoriums set up for this purpose, 50% of the patients died within five years. In 1815, one in four died of the illness in England.
Antibiotics beat back the disease, but new drug resistant strains raise the possibility of a new epidemic. Even now, in modern times, about one quarter of the world’s population is infected with TB.
Yellow fever is a viral disease spread by an infected female mosquito. It began in Africa and was transported to the New World via the slave trade. Because it was so prevalent in Africa, many Africans had some immunity to it. But so many white men died in what is now Nigeria, it was called ‘white man’s grave.’
In most cases, symptoms include the usual: fever, chills, loss of appetite, muscle pains particularly in the back, and headaches, exactly like other diseases such as the flu. Symptoms typically improve within five days. In about 15% of people, within a day of improving the fever comes back, abdominal pain occurs, and liverdamage causes jaundice. Because of this, yellow fever has been nicknamed Yellow Jack and Bronze John. Death occurs in up to half of those who get severe disease. A vaccine exists for yellow fever and some countries require it before travel.
Although yellow fever is most prevalent in tropical-like climates, major epidemics have occurred in Africa, Europe and the Americas. New York City had an outbreak in 1668 and other cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore had outbreaks in 1669. All three saw other occurrences in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1793, Philadelphia, which was then the capital of the country saw an epidemic. Several thousand people died. (The government at that time fled the city.) Dr. Benjamin Rush gained fame during this disaster. A great book to read about this episode in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793.
Since the disease traveled along steamboat routes, New Orleans suffered many major epidemics during the 19th centuries, causing 100,000 – 150,000 deaths in total. It was greatly feared and the wealthy abandoned the city to summer homes to escape the disease. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series refers to Yellow fever throughout.
