cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 47

Oh, neat, a Voltaire write-up! :D

So I've been reading Too Like the Lightning (which I'll post about when I'm done -- it is a book that is interesting to read having gone through salon, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it to salon).

I tried it, because it sounds interesting on paper, I like the author's blog, and I even read the non-fiction book she turned her dissertation into (dry but informative). And a few pages into the Kindle sample, I just Could Not, and I doubt I'll ever try again. (Never say never, but...)

Wikipedia seems to think that the date of publication is indeed 1752, though potentially as early as 1739.

Chronology note: 1752, Voltaire is living with Fritz, 1739, Voltaire has met Fritz a couple years ago. Either way, Prussians captains of the guards appearing in his fic don't surprise me!

a very small lapdog following a captain of the guards of the Prussian king. (I laughed! I assume he's making a dig at the Potsdam Giants there, even though obviously the timing's wrong, as he did in Candide, iirc.)

Maybe, but the small lapdog makes me think of Fritz. Fritz had tall soldiers and height requirements in his army too! He just didn't keep a regiment specifically to concentrate all the tallest men in Europe. But yeah, Voltaire likes to make his digs at FW (who doesn't?) (Besides Stratemann.)

Why was Voltaire against that one and for Catherine beating up the Greeks later? It appears from the conversation in the text because he thought the former was about land, while you told me in salon that he thought Catherine's sally would be about human rights?

You're asking for consistency? :P I think he was getting romantic about his enlightened protege Catherine freeing the Greeks, the way maaaany Europeans would get romantic about the Greek revolution when it finally happened. [Selena will no doubt insert an aside about Byron here.]

I mean, he was Islamophobic, but if you ask me, he was thinking emotionally about the thought of "liberating" Athens, and then rationalizing backwards from there.

He also designed a war chariot to help fight Fritz in the Seven Years' War; he saw the folly and evil of war, but he was by no means a pacifist.

I can't find anything about the Maupertuis expedition running aground on the coast of Bothnia specifically, but a cursory Google search brings upthis source saying "the ship turned out to have a leak, and it had to be stranded on the Swedish coast after a few days";

Well, most of the coast of Sweden is on the coast of Bothnia, especially in our period when Finland is part of Sweden. So if they ran aground on the coast of Sweden, there's probably at least a 50% chance it was off the coast of Bothnia. (Measuring coastlines notoriously gets into fractals, so I'm not going to attempt it. :P I kid, I could google it, but eh.)

there is also this source, which says De Maupertuis first planned to carry out the measurements in the archipelago of the Gulf of Bothnia. He found out, however, that the islands were too low for triangular measurement.

This is in Terrall's (drrryyyy!) bio of Maupertuis::

Only after journeying from Stockholm to Torneå, at the very north ofthe gulf,did they see that the islands along the western shore, although numerous,were too low to be visible at a distance, and hence useless as triangulation points. After exploring the islands near the eastern shore and finding things no better there, they considered the alternatives.

Terrall continues:

Celsius, the only Scandinavian among them, favored waiting for winter and measuring the wholelength of thedegree directly on the frozen suiface ofthe gulf, without bothering with a chain of triangles. (One degree of latitude corresponds to about sixty miles.) This would have meant a much longer and more physically demanding baseline measurement,but would have avoided the inevitable complications of measuring and reducing a whole series of angles. It would also have meant waiting for winter for the dark night sky necessary for the stellar observations that would define the endpoints. The French did not want to put off their operations, however; nor did they trust the ice in the gulf.

Personally, I'm always suspicious when Europeans go to polar regions and don't listen to the locals. :P It's an endemic problem, and part of the reason Amundsen is my fave is that he managed to actually the Inuit seriously and listen to them!

the islands along the western shore, although numerous,were too low to be visible at a distance, and hence useless as triangulation points
I have been on those islands and I can well believe it. The islands are VERY low and the sea between them is VERY shallow. They are also newly risen from the sea, since Sweden is still rebounding from the Ice Age.

part of the reason Amundsen is my fave is that he managed to actually the Inuit seriously and listen to them!
I had a polar explorer phase and I too like Amundsen! But Nansen is my favorite. Like, he not only crossed Greenland on skis and was on the Fram expedition, he ALSO did a groundbreaking Ph D i neuroscience, did research in oceanography, was part of the peaceful dissolution of the union between Sweden and Norway, and worked for the rights of war refugees after WWI. Also, just look at him, he was such a badass.

Er, sorry for the tangent, but you started it!

So this is where I admit I know all these things *about* Nansen, but I haven't read an actual book dedicated to him and his exploits. I have one on my Kindle, but it post-dates my polar obsession, so I haven't yet read it. He may well supersede Amundsen* if I ever get around to it.

In general, I went through a South Pole expedition obsession, but am very weak on the North Pole. For the same reason I'm all "1764-1772 foreign policy in excruciating detail!" and "17th century Stuarts are not my period." My brain likes to go very deep in particular areas and ignore adjacent areas.

* Or not. I understand that he's a superior human being, but, uh, well, look at who my favorite historical figure of all time is (Fritz). Sometimes "superior human being" is not the criterion by which I judge. :P

Er, sorry for the tangent, but you started it!

Lol, tangents are what we do here!

I have not in fact read a single book about polar explorers (except one, see below), but just their own journals and books. They make for very good audiobook-listening experiences to me, for some reason. But it's been years since I had that phase.

The exception is the Swedish book Expeditionen: en kärlekshistoria by Bea Uusma (in English as The Expedition. I'll C&P from an old DW entry of mine...

Bea Uusma is a fandom-of-one for the Andrée polar expedition. She becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of how the expedition members died, going through various theories and doing original research. The book is also enjoyable for showing her own fannish reactions--from what I remember, she became a physician partly because she wanted to solve this mystery!

So, this expedition is pretty ridiculous. Compared to capable polar explorers like Amundsen and Nansen, Andrée is an engineer with no previous polar experience. He takes along two other engineers and plans to fly across the Arctic in a balloon at a time when no balloon has been in the air more than 24 hours. Andrée calculates that their balloon will be able to fly for 30 days. They do not even test-fly it. It lasts for 65 hours before it goes down on the ice. The three men travel across the ice on sleds that they brought along as reserve equipment. The sleds are very heavy, as they bring along ridiculous things like encyclopedias. Their bodies and the sleds are found on a tiny Arctic island in 1930, and theories about their deaths range from trichinosis to lead-poisoning to freezing to death. Uusma finds none of these believable and constructs her own theory.

Her theory, based on how/where the skeletons were lying and information from their clothes, was that a polar bear attacked them and killed one of them (he was later buried by the others) and wounded another. The wounded man was put in his sleeping bag in the tent, where he later died. The third man died sitting outside the tent with a morphine bottle within reach, and Uusma thinks he committed suicide.

The book is also enjoyable for showing her own fannish reactions--from what I remember, she became a physician partly because she wanted to solve this mystery!

Wow! I can see why, it seems fascinating.

Compared to capable polar explorers like Amundsen and Nansen

Unfortunately, none of this sounds much worse than Amundsen discovering he needs a plane to take him over the North Pole NOW, before anyone else beats him there. All his attention to detail goes out the window and he's like, "Plane experts? We don't need no stinkin' plane experts!" The whole expedition was so mismanaged it's a miracle he survived it, and not a surprise he didn't survive a subsequent attempt to fly over the Arctic in a plane (admittedly, search-and-rescue missions are by their nature rushed, but nothing about his previous cavalier attitude toward planes is inconsistent with him finally dying in a plane).

It's a bit like Fritz and the War of the Bavarian Succession: times move on, old man does not live up to previous standard. :P

Also, this conversation is reminding me of the 17th century Swedish Vasa ship, which sank after sailing just 1300 meters and is now in a museum that was built just to house this ship (I assume you've been there?). I learned about it at *work*, of all places, because it was used in a conference talk, I think, illustrating the dangers of poor engineering design and how if you're a software developer, you really need to learn the lessons that that failure has to teach.

Well, this shows my own spotty knowledge, since I've only read two of Amundsen's own books (the Northwest Passage one, and the South Pole one)!

It's a bit like Fritz and the War of the Bavarian Succession: times move on, old man does not live up to previous standard. :P
Heh, seems like it.

I have been to the Vasa museum, yes, but it was before my current fannish period, or I would no doubt have paid much more attention! Perhaps I'll visit it again some time. I did visit the Götheborg III this summer, though.

Well, this shows my own spotty knowledge, since I've only read two of Amundsen's own books (the Northwest Passage one, and the South Pole one)!

Yeah, those were much greater accomplishments on his part, but you still have to watch out, because he's a great spin doctor and skips right over his most major mistakes, at least on the South Pole expedition (I know less about the Northwest Passage one).

Good to know, if I ever venture into reading about polar exploration again!

(By the way, it's obvious that there is somewhere a polar exploration fandom which has pet names for pairings, and who fill each other's requests for Yuletide etc. It's kind of weird to see those fics from outside, because they've obviously developed a lot of fanon around it.)

Oh, interesting. I see these fics come up in Yuletide and occasionally browse one of them, but due to my difficulty reading fiction (see also Too Like the Lightning), I haven't really read them, so I didn't realize they had a fandom with lots of fanon. Good for them!

I have very fond memories of the Vasa Museum, particularly the moment when the tour guide attempted to argue that it sank due to the maths not being invented yet. (It was in fact due to a combination of several people dying, and the King knowing what he wanted, despite minor details of it being possible.)

Haha, yes, never apologize for tangents -- that's how I learn things! :)

Fritz had tall soldiers and height requirements in his army too!

Oh right, we had this discussion with Candide too! I had only forgotten what you said and just remembered that there were tall soldiers in Candide :) (But I did mean to say he was taking a jibe at Fritz, just was thinking it might be by way of FW as well, why not get two Hohenzollern for the price of one!)

Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 47

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