From Voyageurs National Park on FB:
From Voyageurs National Park on FB: Called “Catamaran” by locals, Bert Upton is among the strangest of historical characters on area waters. He lived in a hut built over a dug-out at Squirrel Narrows. Found frozen to death in the 1930s by Kettle Falls pioneer Oliver Knox; Upton was perched lifeless in the snow just a half-mile from his home. Shunning civilization, Upton defined the word hermit. First spotted rowing his crude log raft on Namakan, no one knows how he got there. Upton’s accent implied an English heritage but any personal inquiries brought a stony silence. Some suspected him a man fleeing the law; others saw a bizarre outcast; everyone knew he was peculiar. Just five feet tall and wildly unkempt, Catamaran wore hacked-off pants and walked barefoot with a stick. Winter demanded shoes but no socks, a cast-off Mackinaw, and a trailing cap made from the leg of old underwear. He was oddly religious, and suspicious of being poisoned. Surviving on snared rabbits and fish, he ofte...
I'm in an adequately stoned hole of destruction right now. Thanks.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benton_fireworks_disaster I knew about this one. It's pretty insane.
ReplyDeleteThis one just happened in the book I'm reading.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Almeida_(1810)
http://goo.gl/WBvRDW
ReplyDeleteThe idea of the hellburner at the siege of Antwerp gives me strange and terrible ideas.
ReplyDeleteFrom the wiki page on hellburners. Apparently they were set off with a clockwork flintlock mechanism designed by a clever watchmaker. The use of tombstones is deliciously Gothic.
ReplyDelete"To ensure destruction, very large charges were used. To intensify and channel the explosion an oblong "fire chamber" was constructed on each ship, a metre in diameter. The bay was fitted with a brick floor, a foot thick and five metres wide; the walls of the chamber were five feet thick; the roof consisted of old tombstones, stacked vertically and sealed with lead. The chambers with a length of twelve metres were each filled with a charge of about 7000 pounds of high quality corned gunpowder. On top of the chambers a mixture of rocks and iron shards and other objects was placed, again covered in slabs; the spaces next to the chambers were likewise filled. The whole was covered with a conventional wooden deck."