A Brief History Is December 26th the Most Wacked Date in History? So many disasters occurred we can not even include them all! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find our cracked odyssey starting in 1846 in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where the Donner Party, close to death from starvation and freezing, resorts to cannibalism to survive! At least they apparently waited for their food to die on its own and did not murder each other. In 1862, the U.S. conducted its largest mass hanging ever, when 38 Native Americans are hanged from a single scaffold! Incredibly, it could have been worse! …
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A Brief History On December 23, 1938, a commercial fisherman pulled in a “living fossil” in his net off the coast of Africa, a creature believed to be extinct since the time of the dinosaurs! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the first known discovery of the Coelacanth, a prehistoric fish believed to be a link between fish and 4 legged animals and the second oldest living species of common animals! Previously thought to exist from 360 million to perhaps 60 million years ago, the Coelacanth is a primitive looking fish, with pectoral and pelvic fins located at the ends…
A Brief History On December 18, 1912, Charles Dawson announced the discovery of the prehistoric missing link between ape and man! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Dawson, an amateur archaeologist presenting fossilized skull pieces to the Geological Society of London, claiming they were found in a quarry near Piltdown, East Sussex. The scientific community accepted the skull and jaw bones as genuine and declared a new species of ape-man, naming it Eoanthropus dawsoni. This creature was touted as the “missing link” between ape and man. As usual with new scientific discoveries, critics did not accept the discovery and conclusions as…
A Brief History In August of 1819, the Nantucket whaling ship, Essex, set sail on a two and a half year whaling voyage that on November 20, 1820 turned into eternity! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the Essex became a real life Pequod and it found the real life Moby Dick! The Essex was 87 feet long, displaced 238 tons and was equipped with 4 whale boats, 28 foot boats that pursued whales and from which the harpoons were thrown. (A spare boat was kept beneath the deck.) A whale would be killed and towed back to the ship…
A Brief History On November 9, 1913, The Great Lakes Storm of 1913, the most destructive natural disaster ever to hit the North American lakes, destroyed 19 ships and killed more than 250 people. Digging Deeper Generally, speaking when we think of cyclonic storms to cause catastrophic damage in North America, we think of hurricanes. Nevertheless, today marks the 100-year anniversary of an extratropical cyclone, i.e. a cyclonic storm that did not originate in the ocean, but rather from the convergence of two major storm fronts. Making matter worse, the Great Lakes’ warm waters helped fuel the storm to such…