William Bligh, whatever else you might say about him, had three inarguable qualities. First, he had the strength of his convictions, and second, of course, he had appalling interpersonal skills. The latter wasn’t necessarily a problem to a ranking officer in the British Navy of the late 18th Century, or so you might think. (You might also think it wouldn’t be a huge impediment to a Governor of New South Wales in the early 19th Century, for that matter).
As it turns out, Bligh is one of the few men in the history of the British Empire to have been both the cause and loser of two rebellions against his authority. The first of these was the infamous mutiny on the HMS Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, in which 18 mutineers defeated Bligh and 22 of his loyal men, setting all but 4 of them adrift in a single longboat. (2 other men stayed neutral through the mutiny, and remained on board the Bounty.)
It was at this point that Bligh showed his other skill: superb seamanship. Over the course of the next 47 days, Bligh steered his longboat fro Tofua to Timor. Christian and the men on board the Bounty went to Tahiti and eventually fetched up on the Pitcairn Islands.
Referenced in:
(Sometimes I Feel Like) Fletcher Christian — The Mekons
Robespierre and Louis Saint-Just were among the leading lights of the French Revolution. Both of them were active participants in the Revolution, and the Reign of Terror that followed it. Robespierre in particular was a major architect of the Terror.
A couple of years into the revolutionary calendar, and about nine months into the Terror, on 9 Thermidor – July 27 – a reaction to the excesses of the Terror occurred. Robespierre, who had become increasingly isolated politically, while at the same time concentrating power in his own hands. For a number of reasons – political, practical and personal – many of the other revolutionaries turned against him. He was arrested, and executed the following day along with Saint-Just and twenty other supporters.
In August 1831, guided by visions sent from God (or so he claimed), black slave Nat Turner led a rebellion of slaves in Virginia. Turner and his fellow rebels killed between 55 and 65 white men, women and children (accounts vary as the exact number). But the rebellion was put down quickly, and most of the rebels were slain or captured (and then, for the most part, executed).
Nat Turner eluded capture for many weeks after the end of the slave rebellion he had led. It was not until October 30 – more than two months later – that he was captured. He was tried in Jerusalem, Virginia, and defended by white lawyer Thomas Gray. The trial did not take long – on a single day, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Turner was hung on November 11, 1831. Controversy regarding his goals and methods continues to this day.
Referenced in:
David Rose — Clutch
Nat Turner — Reef the Lost Cauze
The Broad Street Riot was an outbreak of violence occasioned by racial tensions between Irish immigrants and native Bostonians. Fire Engine Company 20 was returning from a fire when they encountered an Irish funeral procession at the corner of Milk Street and Broad Street in Boston.
The initial groups weren’t particularly large, but both sides were reinforced by their respective countrymen as the afternoon drew on. All in all, about a thousand people were involved in the riot, and the army had to be called out to quell the disturbance. Incredibly, no one was killed in the riot.
Joaquin Murrieta was a Mexican bandit who is widely considered the be the inspiration for Zorro. Between 1850 and 1853, he led a bandit group called the Five Joaquins (the other four members were Joaquin Botellier, Joaquin Carrillo, Joaquin Ocomorenia, and Joaquin Valenzuela).
In the four years or so that they were active, they stole more than $100,000 in gold, more than 100 horses, and killed 19 people, including three lawmen. Much like Robin Hood and his men, they were helped and sheltered by the locals, who regarded them as revolutionaries.
By 1853, they weren’t the only ones.
On May 11, the Governor of California John Bigler created the “California State Rangers,” with the mission of capturing the “Five Joaquins”. On July 25, 1853, a group of Rangers encountered a band of armed Mexican men, and two of the Mexicans were killed. One was claimed to be Murrieta, and the other was thought to be Three-Fingered Jack. The Rangers severed Garcia’s hand and the alleged Murrieta’s head as proof of their deaths and preserved them in a jar of brandy.
Referenced in:
The Bandit Joaquin – Dave Stamey
Archangel, the Murderer – Fortune & Spirits
Joaquin Murrieta, 1853 – Bob Frank & John Murry
Time-sick Son of a Grizzly Bear – The Mother Hips
The Ballad of Joaquin Murrieta – The Sons of the San Joaquin
The Sand Creek Massacre (which is also known variously as the Chivington Massacre, the Battle of Sand Creek and the Massacre of Cheyenne Indians) took place when 700 men of the Colorado Territory militia attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho encamped in southeastern Colorado Territory near Sand Creek.
133 Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children at Sand Creek were killed, while 24 of the attackers were killed (and 52 more wounded). The event intensified the bloodshed of the Indian Wars, as the Arapho, and particularly the Cheyenne, sought vengeance over the next few years.
Michael Davitt was born in County Mayo, Ireland, in the year 1846, during the worst of the Great Famine (known outside of Ireland as Irish Potato Famine). He grew up passionately devoted to the cause of Irish freedom, which led him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
It was as a member of the latter that he was arrested while waiting to collect an arms shipment in Paddington Station, London. He was charged with treason and convicted to 14 years imprisonment with hard labour. Davitt, not unreasonably, claimed that he had never received a fair trial or an adequate defence. In prison, he kept busy writing his political allies, and these letters became a part of their ammunition in demanding an end to the unjust imprisonment and cruel treatement of Irish political prisoners in the United Kingdom. He was released on December 19, 1877, after serving seven and a half years of his sentence, and given a hero’s welcome in his return to Ireland.
The Brooklyn Theater Fire was one of the worst theatre fires in the history of the United States, with at least 278 people, and possibly more than 300 people, killed. 103 of the victims were so badly burnt that they could not be identified, and were buried in a common grave in Green-Wood Cemetery. Continue reading 1876 – Brooklyn Theater fire
Michael Davitt was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a revolutionary movement that espoused armed uprising as the only way to rid Ireland of British rule. He mostly participated in arms smuggling operations, and it was on one of these that he was arrested in 1870.
He was sentenced to 15 years hard labour in Dartmoor Prison, where he was subjected to casual brutality and solitary confinement. The letters he sent, describing his treatment, were read aloud in the British House of Commons by sympathetic politicians, and a public outcry against the treatement of Davitt and other Irish prisoners led to his early release. He received a hero’s welcome on his return to Ireland, and returned at once to the struggle, albeit now concentrating on non-violent political actions.
In 1877, Franklin B. Gowen was the wealthiest coal mine owner in the world. He was the President of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, a mining concern, and also of the related Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. But it wasn’t enough.
Why, in some of his coal mine, the men who worked there had the unmitigated gall to complain about his safety standards (after 110 men died in a mine fire in 1869) and even to unionise (as if Gowen’s hired thugs hadn’t killed 10 people while busting a strike on his railroad that same year).
Nevertheless, Gowen’s business ineptitude (he managed to bring the railroad the brink of bankruptcy twice in the 16 years he ran it) and corruption (he was the prime mover behind one of the great price-fixing deals of the 18th century, which helped to maintain his coal fortune) knew virtually no bounds. In 1877, he hired the Pinkertons to infiltrate a supposed secret society called the Molly Maguires, which he claimed existed inside the union at his mines and committed assorted crimes at the behest of its members.
Evidence of a sort was produced, and men were accused, tried and convicted – in the newspapers. The actual legal proceedings were mere formalities. Ten men were hung on June 21, 1877 for assorted crimes, some of which may even have existed (let alone been committed by the men in question). Another ten would be executed by the state – and several more killed by vigilantes – before Gowen’s bloodlust was sated.
Today, some historians question whether the Molly Maguires even existed, while others insist that they did, but were mischaracterised. The is a general consensus that Gowen was a murderous buffoon, however.
Referenced in:
Molly — Molly Maguire
Molly Maguires — The Dubliners
The Sons of Molly — The Irish Balladeers
Lament for the Molly Maguires — The Irish Rovers
Billy the Kid – better known to history as William H. Bonney, although his real name was actually Henry McCarty – was actually something of a non-entity in his lifetime. Although he claimed to have killed 21 people, one for each year he was alive, it’s likely he killed less than half that number.
He was betrayed and killed by Pat Garrett under circumstances which are still a matter of debate. In fact, Billy wasn’t even famous until a year after his death, when his killer Pat Garrett published a sensationalistic biography titled The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid. This was what made Billy famous. He became a legend of the Old West, later fighting Dracula and traveling through time.
Referenced in:
Billy the Kid – Marty Robbins
Return of the Gunfighter – Marty Robbins
The Skies of Lincoln County – Dave Starney
Okay, so he didn’t really travel through time or fight Dracula. The movies where he did are not that much more historically inaccurate that Pat Garrett’s book (which was, admittedly, ghostwritten).
The Congo Free State was founded by King Leopold II, basically transforming the entirety of this territory (encompassing all the land now claimed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo) into one huge raw material extraction area.
This being the 1880′s in colonial Africa, the extraction was performed by native slave labour under the aegis of the Association internationale africaine – a company of which Leopold was both the chairman and the sole shareholder. For 23 years, it was a private fief of the King, and the site of terrifying cruelties and deaths so numerous that they could reasonably be considered a genocide.
With the end of Leopold’s rule in 1908, the territory became known as Belgian Congo, a colonial territory held by the Belgian government until 1960. Humanitarian policies gradually gained in importance over the five decades of Belgian rule, although the rule of the Belgians remained exploitative and frequently brutal.
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