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 ONE HUNDRED FAMOUS VIEWS OF EDO (TOKYO) NUMBER THIRTY-THREE |
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| TOWBOATS ALONG THE YOTSUGI-DORI CANAL |
| Moving north through a grandly curving course and receding into the distance is the Towboat Canal, running through the rice paddies of what is now Katsushika Ward, beyond the northeastern limits of Edo.
The canal began as the Kameari Aqueduct, completed in 1659 to supply drinking water to the Fukagawa area as part of the shogunate's project to develop the east bank of the Sunida. Drawing water from a storage pond fed by the Nakagawa River in what is now Koshigaya City, the water-supply operation proved unnecessary in the end and was terminated in 1722. The canal itself remained in operation throughout its 14-mile course; it was used chiefly for irrigation and the transport of fertilizer and crops by local farmers In time a regular passenger-boat service emerged as a pleasant short-cut for Edo travelers heading northeast toward Mito. (The canal in fact followed an absolutely straight line. Hiroshige's curves are a case of artistic license.) |
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| FORT WARREN (BOSTON HARBOR), a Civil War-era fort known for its graceful granite archways and reputed ghost, the Lady in Black (SEE BELOW). Fort Warren has more memories of the Civil War days than any other place in New England.
Fort Warren was also utilized as a prison for Confederate military and political prisoners. The fort continued to serve as an important US Army harbor defense facility from the Civil War throughout World Wars I and II. |
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| FORT WARREN INTERIOR |
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| The pentagonal-shaped granite fort, started in 1833, is situated on Georges Island, a 28-acre island in Boston Harbor, where it protected the main shipping channels at that time.
The fort was named for Dr. Joseph Warren, a patriot leader, who sent Paul Revere and William Dawes to alert Lexington and Concord on the night before the Revolution. Dr. Warren was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Fort Warren was finished some time toward the end of the Civil War, and it later became a mine control center and continued to protect Boston Harbor. Although the fort was designed for harbor defense, it never fired on any enemy ships. |
| THE LEGEND OF THE GHOST OF THE LADY IN BLACK | |
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| The scarp gallery (or Corridor of Dungeons) where the Confederate woman was supposedly captured. | |
| During the War between the States, hundreds of prisoners were captured by General Burnside at Roanoke Island.
Among the group incarcerated at Fort Warren in the Corridor of Dungeons was a young lieutenant who had been married only a few weeks before. He succeeded in getting a message to his young wife by the underground railroad, giving complete directions as to where he was and how she could reach him. |  |
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Being very much in love, she obtained passage on a small sloop, and landed in Hull a few weeks later.
She quickly located the home of a Southerner in that town and was fitted out with a pistol and dressed in men's clothing. Choosing a dark, rainy night, the lady rowed across Nantasket Road and finally landed on the beach at Georges Island. Slipping noiselessly by the sentries, she reached the ditch under the Corridor of Dungeons. After giving a prearranged signal, she was hoisted up to the carronade embrasure and pulled through the opening. As soon as husband and wife had exchanged greetings, they made plans for the future. The prisoners decided to dig their way out of the dungeon into the parade ground and set to work. Unfortunately for their plans, a slight miscalculation brought their tunnel with hearing of Northern soldiers stationed on the other side of the wall. The commanding officer, Colonel Dimick, was notified and the whole scheme was quickly exposed. The brave little woman, when cornered, attempted to fire at the Colonel, but the gun was of the old-fashioned pepper box type and exploded, killing her husband. Colonel Dimick had no alternative but to sentence her to hang as a spy. She made one last request: that she be hanged in women's clothing. After a search of the fort, some robes were found which had been worn by one of the soldiers during an entertainment, and the plucky girl went to her death wearing these robes. At various times through the years, the Ghost of the Lady in Black has returned to haunt the men quartered at the fort. Once, three soldiers were walking under the great arched sallyport at the entrance to the fort, and there before them, in the fresh snow, were five impressions of a girl's shoe leading nowhere and coming from nowhere. Ten years before World War II, a certain sergeant from Fort Banks was climbing to the top of the ladder which leads to the Corridor of Dungeons when he heard a voice warning him, saying: "Don't come in here!" Needless to say, he did not venture further. There actually are on record court-martial cases of men who have shot at ghost-like figures while on sentry duty, and one poor man deserted his post, claiming he had been chased by the lady of the black robes. For many years the traditional poker game was enjoyed in the old ordnance storeroom, and at ten o'clock one night a stone was rolled the entire length of the storeroom. As all the men on the island were playing poker, no explanation could be found. When the same thing happened the next time that the men played poker in the evening, the group at the card table decreased appreciably. By the end of the month the ordnance storeroom was deserted, and since that time, if any of the enlisted men wished to indulge in that pastime, they chose another part of the island. The ghost of the "Lady in Black" was, of course, blamed for the trouble. --Excerpted from "The Romance of Boston Bay" | |
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| Inside the Corridor of Dungeons where the Ghost of the Lady in Black has appeared over the years. | |
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| TOM CRUISE (Caricature) |
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| CIRRUS CLOUDS AND YUCCA |
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| CLOUDS AND LIMESTONE HILLS |
| The koala is a small bear-like, tree-dwelling, herbivorous marsupial which averages about 9kg (20 pounds) in weight. Its fur is thick and usually ash gray with a tinge of brown in places.
The koala gets its name from an ancient Aboriginal word meaning "no drink" because it receives over 90 percent of its hydration from the eucalyptus leaves (also known as gum leaves) it eats and only drinks when ill or at times when there is not enough moisture in the leaves, such as during droughts. The koala is the only mammal, other than the Greater Glider and Ringtail Possum, which can survive on a diet of eucalyptus leaves. |
 | Koalas live in societies, just like humans, so they need to be able to come into contact with other koalas. It is because of this that they need to have areas of suitable eucalypt forest which are large enough to support a healthy koala population and to allow for expansion by maturing young koalas. Koalas are highly territorial and in stable breeding groups, individual members of koala society maintain their own "home range" areas.
A "home range" consists of a number of "home range trees" and "food trees" which comprise the long-term territory of the individual koala. These trees provide the koala with food, shelter and places for social contact which will support it for the term of its natural life (assuming there is no habitat clearing). |
| Koala populations only occur if suitable habitat is available and because koalas are very fussy eaters and have strong preferences for different types of gumleaves, then the most important factor which make habitats suitable is the presence of tree species preferred by koalas (usually eucalypts, but also some non-eucalypts) growing in particular associations on suitable soils with adequate rainfall.
In Australia there are over 600 types of eucalypts, but koalas will not eat a large proportion of these. Within a particular area, as few as one, and generally no more than two or three species of eucalypt will be regularly browsed while a variety of other species, including some non-eucalypts, appear to be browsed occasionally or used for just sitting or sleeping in. Different species of eucalypts grow in different parts of Australia, so a koala in Victoria would have a very different diet from one in Queensland. Koalas like a change, too, and sometimes they will eat from other trees such as wattle or tea tree. Eucalyptus leaves are very fibrous and low in nutrition, and to most animals are extremely poisonous. To cope with such a diet, nature has equipped koalas with specialized adaptations. A very slow metabolic rate allows koalas to retain food within their digestive system for a relatively long period of time, maximizing the amount of energy able to be extracted. At the same time, this slow metabolic rate minimizes energy requirements and they will sleep for up to 18 hours per day in order to conserve energy. |
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| AWAITING THE CAPTAIN Michael Haynes http://www.mhaynesart.com |
| (CONTINUED...)
Could the devoted canine have refused to leave Lewis, remaining with him even in death? There's evidence to suggest so. In 1814, the same year that the long-delayed official history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was published, a Congregational clergyman and educator named Timothy Alden published A Collection of American Epitaphs and Inscriptions with Occasional Notes. Alden had been collecting epitaphs and inscriptions for years. For each listing he provided the source of the epitaph or inscription, stating the city and whether it was from a monument, a headstone, or something else. He collected so many that their publication spanned five volumes. Alden was a respected man of letters. He was a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New York Historical Society, and the American Antiquarian Society, three of the country's oldest and most prestigious historical organizations. From 1808 to 1810 he worked on a catalog of the New York Historical Society's library. He published various histories and magazines and in 1817 founded Allegheny College. His background suggests that he would have been scrupulous about accurately recording the information he found. "This must be distinctly understood," as Charles Dickens tells us, "or nothing ... can come of the story I am going to relate." Entry 916 in his American Epitaphs and Inscriptions lists an interesting inscription on a dog collar in an Alexandria, Virginia, museum. It reads, "The greatest traveller of my species. My name is SEAMAN, the dog of captain Meriwether Lewis, whom I accompanied to the Pacifick ocean through the interior of the continent of North America." Seaman's collar in an Alexandria museum in 1814--proof that he survived the expedition! But the entry gets better. Alden includes a note about the collar and its owner. It reads: The foregoing was copied from the collar, in the Alexandria Museum, which the late gov. Lewis's dog wore after his return from the western coast of America. The fidelity and attachment of this animal were remarkable. After the melancholy exit of gov. Lewis, his dog would not depart for a moment from his lifeless remains; and when they were deposited in the earth no gentle means could draw him from the spot of interment. He refused to take every kind of food, which was offered him, and actually pined away and died with grief upon his master's grave! Here is the whole story of Seaman's fate. He was indeed Lewis's faithful companion to the end; refusing to leave his dead master even though it meant dying himself: the archetypal example of man's best friend. There is no reason to doubt Alden's entry concerning Seaman. This information would have been collected no more than five years after Lewis's death. There were people contemporary with Alden, including William Clark and Nicholas Biddle, the first editor of the Lewis and Clark journals, whom he could have contacted about the accuracy of both the collar and Seaman's fate. It's unlikely that the collar was a hoax, for it was probably given to the museum two years before the publication, in 1814, of the Biddle edition of the journals, when the expedition was fading from public consciousness. Apparently there was enough faith in the account that newspapers were repeating it some twenty years after the publication of American Epitaphs and Inscriptions! (to be continued. . .) |
| Photographer, conservationist; born in San Francisco. A commercial photographer for 30 years, he made visionary photos of western landscapes that were inspired by a boyhood trip to Yosemite. He won three Guggenheim grants to photograph the national parks (1944--58). Founding the f/64 group with Edward Weston in 1932, he developed zone exposure to get maximum tonal range from black-and-white film. He served on the Sierra Club Board (1934--71). |  |
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| MOON AND HALF DOME IN YOSEMITE |
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| THE BLANKET SIGNAL Frederic Remington |
| Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 – December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry. |  |
| PART THREE |
| Remington attended the art school at Yale University, the only male in the freshman year. However, he found that football and boxing were more interesting than the formal art training, particularly drawing from casts and still life objects.
He preferred action drawing and his first published illustration was a cartoon of a "bandaged football player" for the student newspaper Yale Courant. Though he was not a star player, his participation on the strong Yale football team was a great source of pride for Remington and his family. He left Yale in 1879 to tend to his ailing father who had tuberculosis. His father died a year later, at age forty-six, receiving respectful recognition from the citizens of Ogdensburg. Remington's Uncle Mart secured a good paying clerical job for his nephew in Albany, New York and Remington would return home on weekends to see his girlfriend Eva Caten. After the rejection of his engagement proposal to Eva by her father, Remington became a reporter for his Uncle Mart's newspaper, then went on to other short-lived jobs. Living off his inheritance and modest work income, Remington refused to go back to art school and instead spent time camping and enjoying himself. At nineteen, he made his first trip west, going to Montana, at first to buy a cattle operation then a mining interest but realized he did not have sufficient capital for either. In the Ol’ West of 1881, he saw the vast prairies, the quickly shrinking buffalo herds, the still unfenced cattle, and the last major confrontations of U.S. Cavalry and native American tribes, scenes he had imagined since his childhood. He also hunted grizzly bears with Montague Stevens in New Mexico in 1895 . Though the trip was undertaken as a lark, it gave Remington a more authentic view of the West than some of the later artists and writers who followed in his footsteps, such as N. C. Wyeth and Zane Grey, who arrived twenty-five years later when the Ol’ West had slipped into history. From that first trip, Harper's Weekly published Remington's first published commercial effort, a re-drawing of a quick sketch on wrapping paper that he had mailed back East. In 1883, Remington went to rural Peabody, Kansas, to try his hand at the booming sheep ranching and wool trade, as one of the “holiday stockmen,” rich young Easterners out to make a quick killing as ranch owners. He invested his entire inheritance but Remington found ranching to be a rough, boring, isolated occupation which deprived him of the finer things of Eastern life, and the real ranchers thought of him as lazy. |
| DISCLAIMER: Material used in Bitts and Bytes is gathered from various sources--mainly the World Wide Web.
Authorship cannot always be credited nor the source defined. Authenticity of material is assumed to be correct, but is not guaranteed. |  |