The 1619 Project

by William H. Benson

August 22, 2019

     A staff writer for The New York Times named Nikole Hannah-Jones came up with an idea for a series of essays that appeared in last Sunday’s edition of The New York Times Magazine. She called it the 1619 Project. The year 1619 is not a date well known among Americans, and yet slavery in North America began 400 years ago this month, on an unknown day in August of 1619.

     In that month, between 20 and 30 African slaves stepped off an English pirate’s ship in chains and shuffled into Jamestown, in Virginia, where English land owners purchased them to work their tobacco fields. African slaves would toil for free on North American soil for the next 250 years.

     Jamestown was then only 12 years old. The Pilgrims would not land at Plymouth Rock for another year, and the first Puritans would not land at what became Boston for another 11 years, in 1630. At that moment, in 1619, America incorporated slavery into its history, into its very DNA. 

     A Portuguese slave trader had stolen these 20+ slaves from their homes in what is today Angola, in southwestern Africa, weeks before, but English pirates had attacked the Portuguese slave ship on the high seas, confiscated the Africans, and then brought them to Point Comfort, near Jamestown.

     The Spanish and Portuguese were the first Europeans to initiate the capture and transport of African slaves to the Americas. Because landowners needed laborers to work their sugar fields in South and Central America, in the Caribbean Islands, and in Florida, they kidnapped millions of Africans.

     Now the stage was set for the English to carry forward and expand the global slave trade, because Virginia tobacco farmers now needed laborers, hundreds and then thousands of laborers.

     In the first essay, The Idea of America, Nikole Hannah-Jones provides a sobering series of statistics, first that Europeans captured some 12.5 million Africans and transported them to America, “the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War,” that millions failed to survive the gruesome journey, and that of the millions who did survive, some 400,000 arrived in North America.

     She mentions that slavery, as it adapted in North America, was commercial, but in addition, it was “racial, heritable, and permanent, not temporary.” Children born to slaves did not belong to their parents, but to their parents’ masters, who could sell them to other masters, splitting up families.

     “Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift, and disposed of violently.”   

     She points out that the British in England noted the hypocrisy among the British in the American colonies, at the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. Samuel Johnson in London, asked a question, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

     Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia in early December of 1775 from England and gaped in astonishment at the slave market going on just outside his door. He asked, “With what consistency, or decency, they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more?”  

     Nikole Hannah-Jones then jumps to the Civil War, to the year 1862, when Union forces were struggling to subdue the Southern Confederacy. On August 14, 1862, “President Abraham Lincoln called a group of five esteemed free black men to the White House for a meeting.”

     The men walked in with some hope, but Lincoln dashed that little hope when he informed them that “he had convinced Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.”

     The President’s next words chilled them. “You and we are different races. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

     Nikole Hannah-Jones writes, “You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the president said stole the breath of these five black men.” Edward Thomas, the delegation’s leaders, promised the president that “they would consult on his proposition.”

     Lincoln said, “Take your full time. No hurry at all.”

     After the Civil War ended, when “four million black Americans were suddenly free,” a group of black leaders submitted a resolution against black colonization to Africa or to Haiti or to Panama. They said, “This is our home, and this is our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers. Here we were born, and here we will die.” They rejected Lincoln’s colonization proposal.

     Next time in these pages, we will consider the second essay in the 1619 Project, Matthew Desmond’s thoughts on Capitalism, and how King Cotton solidified slavery in the Southern states

Charles Manson and Sharon Tate

by William H. Benson

August 8, 2019

     On occasion, a brief sentence captures a facet of human wisdom better than does a lengthy essay or a philosophical tome of hundreds of pages.

     For example, “Pride goes before a fall,” and “Disaster follows achievement,” are two aphorisms that describe how human life can move, how it ebbs and flows.

     The ancient Chinese of the third century B.C. noted this phenomenon and arrived at the philosophy of “yin and yang,” that “all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites, including male-female, dark-light, and old-young.”

     Fifty years ago this summer, “flower power” captured the nation’s attention. Hippies and flower girls in California and elsewhere were dropping out of middle-class America, with its pursuit of jobs, homes, and children, and were choosing to live in communes.

    There, the drug of choice was LSD. Guys wore jeans, sandals, and psychedelic-colored t-shirts, refused to cut their hair, shave, bathe, or work. Instead, they strummed their guitars, sang of free love, and accepted every idea that jumped out.

     Girls wore granny-styled dresses, and rimless glasses. The “Mamas and the Papas” sang, “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

     Yet, flower power, for all its ideals, in the hands of the wrong person, can go awry.

     An example of that is Charles Manson, who in the late 1960’s gather about him in Los Angeles a gaggle of young and impressionable girls and guys, who listened to his crazed lectures, and followed his instructions to murder people.

     In July of 1969, all of America was enthralled with its new heroes, astronauts who dared to walk on the moon. That same month, Charles Manson instructed Mary Brunner, Susan Atkins, and Bobby Beausoleil to murder a musician named Gary Hinman.

     Then, on the night of August 8-9, 1969, Manson ordered Susan Atkins, Charles “Tex” Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian to drive to 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, California and commit murder again. Five people lost their lives.

     They were: the actress Susan Tate, then 26 years old, and 8 ½ months pregnant; Steven Parent, then 18; Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hairdresser, then 35; Abigail Folger, then 25, and heir to the Folger’s coffee fortune, and Voytek Frykowski, then 32, and friend of Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate’s husband.

     The next night Leno LaBianca, 44, a supermarket executive, and his wife Rosemary, 38, lost their lives, but this time Manson himself participated. Also, in August of 1969, the Manson Family ended Donald Shea’s life.

     When the truth came out, all of America was appalled. Nine people were dead. “Flower power” had gone to seed. Freedom to live was transformed into freedom to kill. Instead of heroes whom we could admire, we now had anti-heroes who disgusted us, shocked us.

     The essayist Joan Didion said, “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended exactly the moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community.”

     The movie director Quentin taratino just released his newest movie, “Once upon a Time . . . in Hollywood,” a spoof that uses the Tate murders as backdrop to Taratino’s own fictional rewriting of the factual history.

     Yet, it is true that Charles Manson died in prison on November 19, 2017, but Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Charles “Tex” Watson are still there. Krenwinkel is now California’s longest-serving woman prisoner.

Apollo 11

by William H. Benson

July 25, 2019

     Apollo 11’s Saturn V rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, on Merritt Island, Florida, on Wednesday, July 16, 1969, at 9:32 a.m. EDT. At that moment a clock began running. Hence, NASA officials set liftoff at zero hours Mission Time.

     The Saturn V rocket contained almost a million gallons of kerosene, liquid oxygen, and liquid hydrogen. Michael Neufeld, a Smithsonian curator, said, “If the Saturn V had blown up on or near the launch pad, it would have had the force of a small nuclear weapon.”

     After one complete orbit around Planet Earth, the three astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins—set a trajectory for a rendezvous with the Moon, 240,000 miles distant. Three days later, on Saturday, July 19, at 75:49 hours, the three entered into the first of numerous lunar orbits.

     On Sunday, July 20, at 100:0:12 hours, the Command Space Module, CSM, and the Lunar Module, LEM, undocked from each other. Armstrong and Aldrin commanded the LEM, code-named “Eagle,” while Collins remained alone to pilot the CSM, code-named “Columbia.”

     At 102:33:05 hours, when 50,000 +/- feet above the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin flipped the switches that ignited the “powered descent engine.” Less than thirteen minutes later, at 102:45:39 hours, Armstrong landed the LEM on the Moon’s surface.

     He reported, “Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

     NASA officials, historians, and journalists have dissected and rehashed those thirteen minutes often. The BBC even built a podcast around those tense, nail-biting, thirteen minutes.

     First, the computer called out a series of “1202” computer malfunctions that alarmed Armstrong and Aldrin, plus Collins and Houston.

     Later, NASA officials determined that they were asking the computer to complete too many tasks, that it felt overloaded, forced to drop certain tasks and stick with others. NASA officials chose to set aside the “1202” warnings, deal with them later, but let Armstrong land the Eagle, rather than abort.

     Then, when Armstrong neared the Moon’s surface, he noticed that the computer wanted to land the Eagle in a crater filled with boulders, some as big as cars. Armstrong took over the landing, keeping the Eagle airborne long enough to pass over that crater until he saw a level plain, and there he landed.

     One NASA official estimated that the Eagle had seventeen seconds of fuel remaining.

     Six and a half hours later, at 109:24 hours, or 9:56 p.m. EDT, Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder and planted a footprint onto the Moon’s surface. Buzz Aldrin followed at 109:43.

     Together they planted the Stars and Stripes, set up a video camera, unveiled a plaque with their  signatures engraved, collected dirt samples, snapped photos, heard President Nixon offer his congratulations from the Oval Office, and ambled about the Moon.

     Buzz Aldrin looked about him, and called the scene, “Magnificent Desolation.”

     After two hours outside, at 111:37, the two were back inside the Eagle. There they spent the night. Altogether, the two astronauts spent 21 hours and 36 minutes on the Moon’s surface.

     The next day, July 21, at 12:54 p.m. EDT, or at 124:22 hours, the two flipped switches to ignite the Lunar module’s liftoff from the Moon’s surface. The rocket scientists had not built redundant machinery for a liftoff. If Armstrong and Aldrin were to leave the Moon, and return to Earth, that single liftoff system had to work, and it did. One newspaper though had a headline prepared if it failed, “Marooned.”

     At 128:03 hours, three hours and forty-one minutes after liftoff, Armstrong and Aldrin docked their  module with Columbia. They then joined Michael Collins inside the Command Module.

     Three days later, on July 24, at 195:07 hours, the Command Module entered the Earth’s orbit, and at 195:18, it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, some 800 miles southwest of Hawaii, some 12 miles from the USS Hornet.

     After 8 days, 3 hours, 18 minutes, and 35 seconds, the three called their mission completed.

     A helicopter carried the three to a quarantine trailer, where they remained until August 10. NASA officials feared that the astronauts would bring back a germ that would unleash an epidemic on Earth.

     Soon, they were reunited with their families, and a New York City ticker tape parade awaited them.

     Fifty years have passed since those moments in 1969, but the three astronauts’ story and adventure, their unimaginable achievement, continues to astonish and surprise everyone. They expected their mission to succeed, and it did.

Moon’s Geography

by William H. Benson

July 11, 2019

     The Earth revolves around the Sun every 365 ¼ days, and rotates on its axis every 24 hours. The Moon revolves around the Earth every 27 days, and it rotates on its axis the same time, every 27 days. Because the two are synchronized, people on Earth look up at one surface of the Moon, the near side.

     Each side of the Moon though, near or far, receives sunlight for two weeks.

     The near or visible side of the Earth, seen at night, is composed of flat plains called seas, of highlands called mountains, and of craters, but the Moon’s far side is littered with a bewildering numbers of craters, each given a name, but no seas.

     Earth’s Moon is the fifth largest of all the Solar System’s moons, but it is the largest relative to its planet, about 27 ½% the size of Earth. Earth and Moon coordinate with each other during their annual elliptical path around the Sun.

     NASA has deployed at least three series of probes to the Moon: Ranger, Surveyor, and Apollo.

     Of the nine Ranger probes, in the early 1960’s, three succeeded in sending back a total of 17,439 pictures of the Moon, minutes before each hard-crashed into the Moon’s surface.

     Of the seven Surveyor probes, in the mid-1960’s, two crash-landed, but five soft-landed on the Moon’s surface, and then sent back pictures of the Moon’s surface. All seven still remain on the Moon.

     Of the fifteen Apollo missions in the late 1960’s, six soft-landed on the Moon’s surface: 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. The twelve Americans who walked on the Moon’s surface plus the other six who remained inside the Command Modules in lunar orbit returned to Earth.

     The Moon’s near side is defined by x / y coordinates, with a center point at 0 degrees latitude, 0 degrees longitude.

     On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, landed their Lunar Module, the Eagle, onto the Sea of Tranquility’s southern edge, about five hundred miles due east of the center point, close to where Ranger 8 and Surveyor 5 had landed earlier.

     On November 15, 1969, Apollo 12’s astronauts, Charles Conrad, Jr., and Alan L. Bean, landed their Lunar Module, about five hundred miles due west of that center point, on the eastern edge of Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms, but only 600 feet from Surveyor 3.

     Conrad and Bean walked to that previous Moon probe, that had soft-landed on April 20, 1967, nineteen months before, and investigated it, even snapping a photograph of it and themselves.

     Apollo 14 landed about four hundred miles west of the center point. Apollo 15 landed about 700 miles due north of the center point, about forty percent of the distance to the Moon’s north pole. Apollo 16 landed about five hundred miles south and east of the center point. Apollo 17 landed about eight hundred miles north east of the center point.

     One can see that NASA’s moon landings in the 1960’s and 1970’s clustered about that center point. Only one of its moon landings—from either Ranger, Surveyor, or Apollo—touched down on the Moon’s far side, Ranger 4, on April 26, 1962, and that was due to a malfunction.

     Other countries have sent probes to the Moon, including: the Soviet Union and / or Russia, Japan, China, the European Space Agency, India, and now Israel.

     On January 3, 2019, China’s National Space Administration Agency soft-landed “Chang’e 4” on the Moon’s far side, inside the Van Karman crater, almost one thousand miles due south of that side’s center point, sixty percent of the distance to the Moon’s south pole.

     The Van Karman crater lies within a vast basin, a depressed area on the Moon’s far side, called the South Pole-Aitken Basin, one of the largest impact basin’s in the Solar System, 1600 miles in diameter and 8 miles deep.

     Last month, Peters B. James, a professor of planetary geophysics at Baylor University, announced that he and his team had discovered “a mysterious large mass of material beneath the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, and that it may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and that formed the basin.” It lies at least five miles and more below the Moon’s surface.

     The Israeli’s attempted to send a recent un-crewed probe to the Moon’s surface. Called Beresheet, Israeli officials hoped to land it in the Sea of Serenitatis, just north of the Sea of Tranquility. On April 11, 2019, during its descent the spacecraft’s main engine stopped working, causing a hard-landing.

     Moon exploration, a series of failures, but also a series of stunning successes.

A Frenchman Crosses the Atlantic in a Barrel

by William H. Benson

June 13, 2019

     The Atlantic Ocean intimidates, but many have dared to cross it.

     Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator initiated Europe’s Age of Discovery, beginning about 1400. His shipbuilders developed the caravel, a light-weight ocean-going vessel, that could achieve fast speeds, was highly maneuverable, and yet could make forward progress when sailing into the wind.

     Prince Henry’s sailors sailed west to the islands of Madeira in 1419, and then to the Azores in 1427. Then, the prince encouraged them to sail south along Africa’s western coast.

     Yet, it was Queen Isabela, of the Castile and Aragon Kingdoms in Spain, who financed Christopher Columbus’s scheme to sail west across the Atlantic in 1492, in the hopes of finding a sea route to India. For the voyage, Columbus enlisted three caravels: the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

     Columbus did cross the Atlantic, but it is doubtful that he understood he had not arrived in India.

     Then, in 1499, a Portuguese sailor named Vasco de Gama discovered a sea route to India by sailing around the African continent.

     By the seventeenth-century, Europeans considered transatlantic travel commonplace. Although George Washington never crossed the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and John Adams did, multiple times. The champion for crossing the Atlantic in the eighteenth century was the Great Awakening evangelist, George Whitefield, who sailed across the Atlantic thirteen times.

     In the twentieth-century, men and women have tried various ways to cross the Atlantic. The Washington Post reported in 1987 that, “The Guinness Book of World Records lists more that thirty methods of crossing the Atlantic.” Yet, I cannot find anyone who claims that they have crossed the Atlantic by swimming, yet.

     On October 19, 1952, a Frenchman named Alain Bombard climbed onto a fifteen-foot Zodiac inflatable boat, fashioned with a sail, at an island off the African coast, and headed west, alone. He drank rainwater, but also some seawater, and he ate fish he caught with harpoon and hooks. On December 23, 1952, after sixty-seven days at sea, he disembarked on the Barbados, in the Caribbean.

     On May 17, 1970, the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his crew set sail from Morocco aboard the Ra II, a log raft, and fifty-seven days and 4,000 miles later, they too landed at Barbados.

     In 2003, a Frenchwoman named Maud Fontenoy rowed her boat across the Atlantic Ocean.

     A Polish explorer, named Aleksander Doba, then in his sixties, paddled his kayak across the Atlantic in 2010, again in 2013, and a third time in 2017.

     Late last year, on December 26, 2018, a seventy-one-year-old Frenchman, named Jean Jacques Savin, departed from a Canary Island, southwest of Portugal, inside an orange barrel, that he built out of resin-coated plywood, for $65,000.

     Flat on the ends, rounded on the sides, it measured ten feet long, 6.8 feet wide. From within, Savin stared outside at the sea through four portholes. Without engine or sail, the barrel relied upon ocean currents to carry it west. Two solar panels topside provided sufficient electricity for communications, the GPS, and a desalination machine. A weighted keel kept it upright in the sea.

     Savin built the capsule to resist the ocean’s pounding waves and potential attacks by orca whales.

     The barrel averaged two miles per hour. Inside, Savin read, took notes for an intended book of his adventure, caught fish, ate his meals in a galley, slept on a cot, and swam in the ocean. With him he took freeze-dried food, and two bottles of wine, one to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and the other to mark his seventy-second birthday in January.

     On his website Savin said that inside his barrel he “felt less as captain of a ship, but more as passenger of the ocean. The time at sea passed very quickly. I decided to do this. I had the need for solitude. It was my desire to leave and to be alone.” He had read Alain Bombard’s book five times.

     Two times he feared for his life, “once when he met an oil tanker, and another time when another large ship edged near him.”

     After 2,930 miles and 128 days, Savin’s barrel floated onto the beach at St. Eustatia, a Caribbean island near the Dominican Republic, on May 2, 2019. He said the adventure was “exhilarating, but also quite risky,” and that, “Everything has an end. Finally, here I am at the end of this adventure.”