When I’m taking the series of high-level executive decisions about what to include in Happened and what to relegate to, and let’s be blunt, the dustbin of history, I find that I’m forced to weigh the relative importance of very different values. Let me give you an example. I could decide that whimsy and recreation are paramount. In that case, I would certainly lead off with the story of Walter Frederick Morrison, who was born on January 23 and grew up to bring to the world the Frisbee.
Morrison had the idea in the 1940s for selling a disk-shaped thing to toss around for fun. Originally it was the lid of a popcorn tin, then it was metal cake pans. Then he acquired a partner who paid to have some molds made to create plastic versions — Morrison called them “Pluto Platters,” and as you can see from the photo, he went all out trying to sell them. He sold the rights to the Wham-O company in 1957, and they kept the name Pluto Platter until they found out that in New England, college students were calling the things “Frisbees” after the tins from a local pie bakery. They changed the name, and apparently that was the last missing magic ingredient, because before too long, there were Frisbees in every toy box.
But remember, that was an example. And I might decide differently, thinking that after all, a fascinating story from the high seas in the days of sailing ships, and the echoes of that story down through the years is a much more valuable piece of information. If that’s what I were to decide, I’d tell you about January 23 being “Bounty Day” on Pitcairn Island. The story, of course, is Mutiny on the Bounty, about Fletcher Christian and the mutineers on the HMS Bounty in 1789. They put the infamous Captain Bligh and his loyalists off the ship into an open lifeboat, and sailed the Bounty away, landing (and settling) on the almost incredibly remote Pitcairn Island. On January 23, 1790, they set fire to the Bounty. And that date is celebrated today by their descendants on Pitcairn.
The ship never came anywhere near Norfolk Island.
But there’s more. There’s also a Bounty Day celebrated on Norfolk Island, which is not quite as remote as Pitcairn, but is still pretty far from nearly everywhere, about 900 open-sea miles from the east coast of Australia. Bounty Day is celebrated on Norfolk Island too, but on a different day: the eighth of June. An addendum to the story of the Bounty and the mutineers is that Pitcairn Island was eventually rediscovered and placed properly on charts (the original discoverer was off by hundreds of miles in estimating its location). The descendants of the mutineers had multiplied, and by the mid-1800s there were getting to be too many of them to fit on Pitcairn. So the British government offered to relocate some of them to Norfolk Island, which had been a penal colony but at the time was deserted. They arrived on June 8, 1856, and that’s the date of the Bounty Day celebration there. The actual ship HMS Bounty, of course, never came anywhere near Norfolk Island, but why let details get in the way of a perfectly good celebration, right?
Now, if happened to be in the mood to delve into fascinating tales involving sailing ships, another story I’d add to Happened would definitely be the strange events of January 23, 1795. It was the time of the War of the First Coalition, which set several European nations against France. They apparently objected to the (successful) French Revolution and the changes it entailed, from a written constitution to the idea of a republic replacing a good old traditional monarchy. Don’t forget that the various monarchs ruling Europe at the time were pretty much all closely related (sometimes a little too closely), so ruling Europe was something of a family business. Anyway, there was a war on, and the French and the Dutch were on opposite sides. For more background, it was a very cold winter, and the Dutch war fleet was anchored a few miles north of Amsterdam. The fleet was completely stuck in the ice. So those particular things aren’t all that strange — European countries have been constantly fighting each other for centuries, and look, some winters are just colder than others. But this time, having that combination of events led to another one. French General of Brigade Jan Willem de Winter led his “hussars” (cavalry) north. They wrapped their horses’ hooves in cloth to keep them quiet, and each cavalry rider carried an infantry soldier on his horse. They rode quietly (okay they “sneaked) across the ice toward the ships, dismounted, climbed into the ships, and to the utter surprise of the Dutch navy, said something to the effect of “give us the keys to the ships or we’ll start shooting.”
They got the keys, captured the entire flotilla of ships without a single casualty on either side, and marked the first and only time in history that a navy was captured by a bunch of guys on horses.
This whole thing is just speculation.
But maybe, as I pondered these available events for inclusion, I’d decide that yes, it would be good to include a seagoing story, but military affairs and mutineering crews aren’t really the most important things to feature. How about some science? If that turned out to be the most important value of the day, then I’d talk about the January 23 in 1960 when the Trieste, an innovative research submersible called a bathyscaphe, set a world record by diving nearly 36,000 feet deep. There were two people on board: Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh. Piccard was the son of the designer of the Trieste, and Walsh was a US Navy lieutenant, and the whole thing was part of Project Nekton, a Navy venture that was partly just to see if they could do it. At the time nobody had been anywhere near the bottom of the Challenger Deep, which is where the Trieste went.
So maybe those stories would amount to a pretty good showing for January 23, and I’d feel good about putting my John Hancock at the bottom of the latest Happened scandal sheet. But then, I might have to pause for just a moment to point out something about John Hancock. He’s the signer of the US Declaration of Independence whose signature was so bold and clear that it’s become synonymous with signatures themselves, as you know. And his birthday is today, January 23. I mean, I might add that. But then this whole thing is just speculation, and to be completely honest I’m still not sure what’s more or less important to say about a given date. So with my apologies, that’s why the January 23 edition of Happened is completely blank. I think…