James Castagnera: Lessons from the British Empire About Keeping Cool
If the summer of 2006 is typical of times to come, we need to learn more about maintaining our cool.
Summertime 2006 will be remembered as a season of record-setting heat waves. In the U.S., Nevada broke an 81-year record high; South Dakota tied its 70-year-old record; New Hampshire surpassed the record set in 1968, and in California one community recorded an all-time 122 degrees. Europe was sweltering in the same steamy boat. The Czech Republic reported topping its 141-year-old zenith, Britain logged the hottest July in a century, and Germans suffered through the hottest summer since they started maintaining weather stats… and since they’re Germans, you can just imagine how long that might be.
Meanwhile violence is sizzling this summer, too. The endless sectarian fighting in Iraq has been somewhat obscured by the blinding white heat of Israel’s war in Lebanon. The Middle East, however, holds no monopoly on bloodshed. On the home front, Philadelphia --- City of Brotherly Love --- is well on its way to setting a new record of its own, this being its annual murder rate. God willing, terrorism and urban violence might not be with us as long as global warming, which seems here to stay. Still for the time being at least, we had best get better at coping with both.
What better place to look for role models than the late, great British Empire? You think this summer has been a scorcher? Were they reincarnated, England’s African explorers of the 19th century would laugh in your face. John Hanning Speke, who discovered the source of the Nile in the mid-19th century, wore his hunting flannels in 128 degrees of equatorial sunshine. Henry Morton Stanley, the Welshman/American journalist who famously found Missionary/Explorer David Livingston, sometimes hunted wild game in his pajamas. Perhaps Groucho stole his famous remark from Stanley: “This morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How it got there, I’ll never know.”
Nothing stopped Speke, Stanley, Livingston and their like for long… not malaria, dysentery, or imminent starvation. When necessary, they ate rats, hobnobbed with cannibals, and threw in with slave caravans. Thanks to maximum sunshine, maximum exertion, and often maximum diarrhea, they stayed slim without really trying. Most importantly, they gloried in it.
“No one can truly appreciate the charm of repose, unless he has undergone severe exertion,” the good Doctor Livingston once wrote in his journal. He was at the time mid-way through a five-year expedition, suffering from ulcers on his feet and the loss of nearly all his teeth.
Livingston actually wasn’t all that tough, compared, let’s say, with Captain Alfred Shout, a WWI Australian whose Victoria Cross recently sold at auction for $1.2 million. Shout served in Britain’s ill-fated 1915 Gallipoli campaign, where he raised “stiff upper lip” to a whole new level. In May 1915 he won his first medal, the Military Cross, for carrying a dozen men out of the line of fire, while taking a bullet himself.
By August, Captain Shout was back in the front line. On the 9th day of that month, he took it upon himself to charge the Turkish lines, armed with several primitive predecessors of the hand-grenade. History has it that Shout became overly ambitious, attempting to light and toss three of the bombs at once… presumably setting another sort of record. Writes Australian historian Lesley Carlyon, “He managed to throw one. Either the second or the third exploded as it left his hand. Both hands were blown to pulp; he appears to have lost his right hand entirely. His left eye was blown out, his cheek gashed and his chest and one leg burnt.”
No matter… once carried clear of the field of combat, Captain Shout is said to have cheerily sipped tea and reassured his comrades he would soon be on the road to recovery. Three days later he died onboard a hospital ship and was buried at sea.
Speke… Livingston… Shout… those guys knew how to maintain their cool. They laughed in adversity’s face. They took a licking and kept on ticking. They sucked it up. Cool for these dudes was a state of mind.
Hmm… were they maybe just a little bit nuts? I’d best ponder that question over an ice-cold brew.