A First Draft of History: Week of Feb. 13 – 20

here are a few important events from this week in history:

1779 - Captain James Cook, the great English explorer and navigator, was murdered by natives of Hawaii during his third visit to the Pacific archipelago.

In 1768, Cook, a surveyor in the Royal Navy, was put in command of the HMS Endeavor and led an expedition that took scientists to Tahiti to chart the course of the planet Venus. Apparently there was a particularly good view from Tahiti, or else the scientists just really wanted to go to a beautiful island in the South Pacific and made up all that astronomy stuff as an excuse. 

In 1771, Cook returned to England, having explored the coast of New Zealand and Australia and circumnavigated the globe. Beginning in 1772, he commanded a major mission to the South Pacific and during the next three years explored the Antarctic region, charted the New Hebrides, and discovered New Caledonia. In 1776, Cook sailed from England again as commander of the HMS Resolution and Discovery, and in January 1778 he made his first visit to the Hawaiian Islands. He may have been the first European to visit the island group, which he named the Sandwich Islands in honor of his favorite food. In fact, he was going to name them the “Pastrami on Rye” islands, but he decided that was too wordy. Actually, the name “Sandwich” came from one of his patrons, John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich.

Cook and his crew were welcomed by the Hawaiians, who were fascinated by the Europeans' ships and their use of iron. Cook provisioned his ships then headed north to look for the western end of a northwest passage from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Almost one year later, Cook's two ships returned to the Hawaiian Islands and found a safe harbor in Hawaii's Kealakekua Bay 

It is suspected that the Hawaiians attached religious significance to the first stay of the Europeans on their islands. (There are interesting parallels here between Cook’s visit to Hawaii and other “first encounters” between indigenous people and Europeans, perhaps most notably the Aztec and the Spanish conquistadors.) During Cook's second visit, there was no question of this phenomenon. Kealakekua Bay was considered the sacred harbor of the fertility god of the Hawaiians, and at the time of Cook's arrival the locals were engaged in a festival dedicated to that god. Cook and his compatriots were welcomed as gods, and for the next month they were all too happy to exploit that misunderstanding. Eventually though, one of the English sailors died, exposing the Europeans as mere mortals. From that point, relations with the Hawaiians became strained. On February 4, 1779, the British ships sailed from Kealakekua Bay, but rough seas damaged the foremast of the Resolution, and after only a week at sea the expedition was forced to return to Hawaii.

The Hawaiians greeted Cook and his men by hurling rocks; they then stole a small cutter vessel from the Discovery. Negotiations with the Hawaiian King for the return of the cutter collapsed after a lesser Hawaiian chief was shot to death and a mob of Hawaiians descended on Cook's party. The captain and his men fired on the angry Hawaiians, but they were soon overwhelmed, and only a few managed to escape to the safety of the ship. Captain Cook himself was killed by the mob. A few days later, the Englishmen retaliated by firing their cannons and muskets at the shore, killing some 30 Hawaiians. The Resolution and Discovery eventually returned to England. Although the Englishmen departed, they left diseases in their wake, and over the next century the population of the islands declined by as much as 90%. In 1810, the Hawaiian islands were united under a single king, a system that lasted until the final ruler was deposed in 1893 by a coalition of European and American settlers, and US Marines.

1929 - Sir Alexander Fleming, a young bacteriologist, discovered penicillin. This discovery, one of the greatest in medical history,  happened accidentally. Fleming had inadvertently left a plate of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered, and he noticed that a mold that had fallen on the culture had killed many of the bacteria. He identified the mold as penicillium notatum, similar to the kind found on bread. Fleming promptly introduced his mold by-product called penicillin to cure bacterial infections. Today, penicillin is one of the most famous and widely-used antibiotics in the world, an antibiotic simply being a natural substances that is released by bacteria and fungi into their environment,  as a means of inhibiting others.

Although Fleming made this discovery in 1929, use of penicillin did not begin until the 1940s when two other scientists isolated the active ingredient and developed a powdery form of the medicine. In fact, one of the first large-scale uses of penicillin was to treat Allied soldiers who had been wounded during D-Day. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this discovery. Prior to penicillin, death could occur from what would seem, today, to be very trivial injuries and diseases. For example, it could occur from minor wounds that became infected or from diseases such as Strep throat. Of course penicillin was not the last word in humanity’s struggle against disease – just four years after drug companies began mass-producing it, microbes began appearing that could resist it (that’s evolution for you). Still, the discovery of penicillin prompted researches to look for, and find, many more antibiotics in both fungi and bacteria.

1930 - Pluto, once believed to be the ninth planet, was discovered at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, by astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh.

The existence of an unknown ninth planet was first proposed by Percival Lowell, who theorized that wobbles in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune were caused by the gravitational pull of an unknown planetary body. Lowell calculated the approximate location of the hypothesized ninth planet and searched for more than a decade without success. However, in 1929, using the calculations of Powell and W.H. Pickering as a guide, the search for Pluto was resumed at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh discovered the tiny, distant planet by use of a new astronomic technique of photographic plates combined with a blink microscope. His finding was confirmed by several other astronomers, and on March 13, 1930--the anniversary of Lowell's birth and of William Hershel's discovery of Uranus--the discovery of Pluto was publicly announced.

With a surface temperature estimated at approximately -360 Fahrenheit,  Pluto was appropriately given the Roman name for the god of the underworld in Greek mythology. Pluto's average distance from the sun is nearly four billion miles, (in contrast, the Earth is only about 90 million miles from the sun) and it takes Pluto approximately 248 years to complete one orbit. It also has the most elliptical and tilted orbit of any planet, and at its closest point to the sun it passes inside the orbit of Neptune, the eighth planet.

After its discovery, some astronomers questioned whether Pluto had sufficient mass to affect the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. In 1978, James Christy and Robert Harrington discovered Pluto's only known moon,  Charon, which was determined to have a diameter of 737 miles to Pluto's 1,428 miles. Together, it was thought that Pluto and Charon formed a double-planet system, which was of ample enough mass to cause wobbles in Uranus's and Neptune's orbits. In August 2006, however, the International Astronomical Union announced that Pluto would no longer be considered a planet, due to new rules that said planets must "clear the neighborhood around its orbit." Since Pluto's oblong orbit overlaps that of Neptune, it was disqualified.

1942 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, initiating a controversial World War II policy of removing resident enemy aliens from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941, Roosevelt came under increasing pressure by military and political advisors to address the nation's fears of further Japanese attack or sabotage, particularly on the West Coast, where naval ports, commercial shipping and agriculture were most vulnerable. Included in the off-limits military areas referred to in the order were ill-defined areas around West Coast cities, ports and industrial and agricultural regions. While 9066 also affected Italian and German Americans, the largest numbers of detainees were by far Japanese.

On the West Coast, long-standing racism against Japanese Americans erupted after Pearl Harbor into furious demands to remove them en masse to relocation camps for the duration of the war. Japanese immigrants and their descendants, regardless of American citizenship status or length of residence, were systematically rounded up and placed in detention centers. Evacuees, as they were sometimes called, could take only as many possessions as they could carry and were housed in crude, cramped quarters. In the western states, camps on remote and barren sites housed thousands of families whose lives were interrupted and in some cases destroyed by Executive Order 9066. Many lost businesses, farms and loved ones as a result. In all, some 120,000 ethnic Japanese people were held in the camps for the duration of the war, of whom about 62% were American-born. 11,000 people of German ancestry were interned, as were 3000 people of Italian ancestry, along with some Jewish refugees.

Roosevelt delegated enforcement of 9066 to the War Department, telling Secretary of War Henry Stimson to be as reasonable as possible in executing the order. Interestingly, in her memoirs, Eleanor Roosevelt recalled being completely floored by her husband's action. A fierce proponent of civil rights, Eleanor hoped to change Roosevelt's mind, but when she brought the subject up with him, he interrupted her and told her never to mention it again.

During the war, the U.S. Supreme Court heard two cases challenging the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, upholding it both times. Finally, on February 19, 1976, decades after the war, Gerald Ford signed an order prohibiting the executive branch from reinstituting the order. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued a public apology on behalf of the government and authorized reparations for former Japanese internees or their descendants.

International News:

There have been few major developments in the international stories we’ve been talking about the last few weeks. The Syrian government continues to massacre protestors and other civilians while China and Russia keep blocking any meaningful action by the UN. The Greek economy continues to stagger towards bankruptcy, with the Greek people continuing to protest the austerity measures demanded in exchange for yet another bailout. And the Iranians continue to work towards the development of their first nuclear weapon…maybe…we think. On that last point, I saw a great headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion this week: “Iran worried US might be building 8500th nuclear weapon.” Like most satire it raises a useful point: I understand why it’s undesirable from our perspective for the Iranians to develop nuclear weapons, but philosophically or legally I don’t quite understand our grounds for opposing them.

There was one story from the past few weeks on which I wanted to follow-up. You may recall I mentioned several weeks ago that Europe is suffering from an unusual cold spell that at that point had killed over 200 people. Well,  the cold has persisted, and the death toll has now climbed to more than 650 people. Authorities in Russia said 205 people have died this year in the frigid cold, while Ukraine has had 112 cold fatalities and Poland had 107. Deaths have also been reported in Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Slovenia.

Since the end of January, much of Central and Eastern Europe has been pummeled by a deep freeze, which has brought the heaviest blizzards in recent memory. Tens of thousands have been trapped in often-freezing homes and villages by walls of snow and impassable roads, and officials have struggled to reach out to the vulnerable with emergency food airlifts.

As you can imagine, the weather is making travel very difficult. In the Czech Republic, for example, about 100 damaged cars blocked a major highway connecting the capital, Prague, with the eastern part of the country after a horrific wreck blamed on the weather conditions. In Romania, some 23,000 people remain isolated by the snow in 225 eastern communities.

So, although the weather’s been a bit unpleasant here the past few days, remember, it could be much, much worse.

There was also one new international story from the past week that I wanted to mention. Late Tuesday, over 300 inmates died in a fire in a prison in central Honduras.  Unfortunately, tragedies like this take place every week somewhere in the world – there’s always something like a stampede at a soccer game or a ferry that sinks or an earthquake and so on. Of course these things matter, but often they are isolated tragedies with few broader implications or repercussions. This disaster at the Honduran prison does demonstrate a number of important things, though.

First, in case you hadn’t guessed, it reveals that Honduran prisons are really, really horrible places, as one would expect in a desperately poor country. The prison where the fire broke out was built to house 250 inmates, but 852 inmates were behind bars there at the time of the fire, according to the Honduran National Human Rights Commission. A Honduran news site reported that the official capacity of the prison was 400 prisoners, but that about 900 were actually being held there. The site also reported that only 12 guards were on watch when the fire broke.

The make-up of the prison population is also telling. According to an internal government report, most of the prisoners at the jail had not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. It seems that many were there on suspicion of belonging to a gang. According to strict Honduran anti-gang laws, a person can be imprisoned simply for having the wrong kind of tattoo. That may seem terribly draconian to us, but it demonstrates the severity of the gang problem in many Latin American countries. We’re used to hearing about drug-related violence in Mexico, but in fact countries like Guatemala and Honduras have much higher murder rates. Gangs in those countries have become so powerful that they represent threats to the stability of the state, hence the severity of the anti-gang laws. And, of course there’s a connection to the US – some of these gangs had their origins in the US, or established bases in the US, and then were exported to Latin America when the gang members were deported. So, this is a very big problem in many Latin American countries, but unfortunately we’re not aware of it until there’s a terrible tragedy like this one.

National News:

There was just one story I wanted to mention this week. With the race for the Republican presidential nomination dragging on and on, it can be very difficult to tell who’s the front-runner. For awhile it was Bachman, then Perry, then Cain, then Gingrich, then Romney…now it might be Romney, or it might be Santorum…it’s all very confusing. Well, I’ve figured out a way to tell which candidate is the front-runner for the Republican nomination – all you have to do is look to see which candidate the NY Times is denouncing on its editorial page. And by that ironclad criterion, the front-runner for the nomination this week is…Rick Santorum. So congratulations to him, and if he earns more scorn and ridicule from the Times next week we’ll know he’s really on a roll.

State News

On Wednesday North Carolina’s top poultry veterinarian pleaded guilty to tipping off officials at Butterball before a December raid on one of its turkey operations in Hoke County.

You may recall several weeks ago I mentioned that an undercover investigator for an animal rights group videotaped workers at a Butterball farm in Shannon abusing turkeys and leaving injured birds untended. That prompted a Dec. 29 raid by Hoke County deputies to determine whether animal cruelty charges were warranted.

Now it turns out that six days before the raid, Hoke County investigators contacted the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services for advice about how to proceed. Within hours, Dr. Sarah Mason, director of animal health programs in the department's Poultry Division, contacted Dr. Eric Gonder, a veterinarian for Butterball, to relay the information.

According to a search warrant, Mason first denied contacting Gonder but admitted it only after investigators told her Gonder had already identified her as the person who informed him of the raid. Gonder then passed the information to managers of the Shannon farm.

Mason met with Hoke County investigators Wednesday, and they filed misdemeanor charges of obstruction of justice and resisting, delaying or obstructing officers. She immediately pleaded guilty to the charges and received a 45-day jail sentence, which was suspended to a year on probation.

The agriculture department suspended Mason on Monday for two weeks without pay, following an internal investigation into the incident. State records show that Mason's annual salary is $85,000, so two weeks without pay would cost her $3,269. A spokesman for the agriculture department said the guilty pleas wouldn't affect Mason's employment, although she will have to attend an ethics course. So, a state employee passes on confidential information regarding a criminal investigation to the target of the investigation, and her punishment is a year probation and essentially a $3,000 fine.

The director of Mercy for Animals, the group that exposed the abuses in the first place, argued that Mason should have been fired and that the punishment constituted a mere “slap on the wrist.” In the past the NC Department of Agriculture has often been accused of being too friendly with the businesses it regulates.

For its part, Butterball said it fired four workers last month after an internal investigation into the Shannon farm's operations. Three of the workers, along with two workers who are still with the company, face animal cruelty charges. The company also said it was reviewing its animal welfare polices and planned to retrain workers on animal care and allow outside experts to audit its operations.

And in other news regarding industrial agriculture in NC: the owner of a hog farm in Columbus County has been sentenced to six months in prison for discharging hog waste into a stream that feeds directly into the Waccamaw River. I guess no one from the Department of Agriculture was able to tip him off in time.

William Freedman also was ordered Monday to serve six months of probation. His company, Freedman Farms Inc., pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay a $500,000 fine and $925,000 in restitution.

Authorities say Freedman Farms violated the Clean Water Act in December 2007 when it sent the waste into the stream instead of two lagoons on the farm. Untreated animal waste can harm sensitive aquatic species in rivers and contaminate groundwater that might be used for drinking…in addition to being just plain gross.

And one final piece of depressing state news: a report released this week by the consulting firm South By North Strategies concludes that North Carolina has fewer jobs now than in 1999.

 Even though North Carolina’s population has soared over the past 12 years, the state has 11,700 fewer jobs, the firm says.

 In 2011, North Carolina added just 19,600 jobs. The private sector created 29,400 positions, but the public sector cut 9,800 jobs, the report says.

In response to this report, Jason Jolley, a senior research director and assistant professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC predicted that North Carolina will see persistent unemployment at about 9 to 10 percent for the foreseeable future.

 Andrew Stern is, among other things, an historian, an Ocracoke resident, and a board member at Ocracoke’s community radio station, WOVV 90.1FM where you can hear his weekly broadcast of “A First Draft of History” every Monday morning at 9am.