Wachusett: Thoreau, Bahia and the “Phantom Reef”

“The American West,” my brother once told me, “is like a Doors song. It’s vast and empty and mawkish and awe-inspiring.” The West’s huge open skies, towering mountains and sheer, jaw-dropping bigness are not only beautiful but an integral part of the American identity and the core of American mythmaking. So its no surprise that all the wonder and glory of the American West can make the eastern U.S. seem rather humble.

Such is the case in my home state of Massachusetts, a tiny state of modest geography and cramped, labyrinthine cities that would look not unlike a model maker’s exercise when places next to the sprawling cities of the Great Plains and the towering summits of the Rockies. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of natural beauty to observe in the woods of New England where a century of agricultural decline and urbanization have allowed the Northeast’s once clearcut forests to reclaim the fields and pastures that dominated the landscape. Here, great multitudes of cautious white-tailed deer and flocks of brazen turkeys are commonplace, as are porcupines, opossums, beavers and foxes. Coyotes, themselves transplants from the West, have moved to New England and ably replaced the gray wolves sadly driven out by farmers centuries ago; even black bears, moose, lynx and fishers prowl the woods. The chickadee, our state bird sings its songs from every treetop and in the summer the forest comes alive with the sounds of titmice, nuthatches, cardinals, goldfinches, bluejays and clever grackles, mourning doves and the ubiquitous dialect of the American Crow. The forests are full of life, tranquil and tremendously beautiful.

Photo by Cyndi Lavin – source: http://www.why-not-art.com/digital-pathways.html

It was these forests that inspired the transcendentalists, a group of writers and philosophers concerned with nature, spirituality and a dabbling of phrenology, some of whom you were likely forced to read in high school. The most famous is Thoreau, who spent his considerable leisure time traveling the wild and semi-wild places of early 19th century New England. The best known of these works is Walden, the account of his two years spent on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts but more interesting to me (and hopefully you, considering its the subject of this post) is his 1843 essay, A Walk to Wachusett.

Mt. Wachusett

Mount Wachusett, where Thoreau walked to from Concord in 1842 is a mountain in central Massachusetts (lying on the border between Princeton and Westminster, MA) and the most prominent physical landmark near my home. Rising just over 2000 feet above sea level with a prominence of about 1000 feet, Wachusett is about 1/7th the height of Pike’s Peak in Colorado and about 1/5th its prominence; bluntly, it isn’t much of a mountain. Still, it is taller than any of the rolling hills that lie between it and the coastal marshland of Boston, 40 some miles to the east; in fact, it is the tallest mountain in the state to the east of the Connecticut river, being surmounted only by a few peaks in the far western Berkshire range (actually the southern end of Vermont’s Green Mountains) and Taconic range, most notably Mt. Greylock in the state’s far northwestern corner. Thoreau called Wachusett “the observatory of the state,” and the title is deserved: from its summit one can see New Hampshire’s Mt. Monadnock, distant Mt. Greylock, the skyscrapers of Boston (you know, the four of them) and the hills and towns of five states. Today Wachusett is best known for its ski area but its long been a tourist destination. Beginning in the 1870s, rail traffic from Boston and New York brought visitors looking to escape the city and enjoy the (relative) Arcadian bliss of Worcester county’s rural farms and woodlands. A hotel survived at the summit for nearly a century before burning down in 1970.

The name Wachusett comes from the Natick language of Massachusetts Indians; reports on its meaning are conflicted, but amount to something like “place near the mountain,” or “the great hill.” It was an important landmark for Native Americans and for the earliest European settlers; during King Philip’s War it would have loomed over the proceedings during the Redemption of captive Mary Rowlandson (an important landmark for colonial historiography which I won’t be able to resist covering in further detail in a later post;) indeed, it was long painted on the rear wall of my elementary school auditorium stage for a (no doubt thrilling) dramatization of just that story.

Today, Wachusett is still visited by throngs of people every summer. Like Walden, its status as a protected natural place and its proximity to Greater Boston give people who would otherwise not have access to natural places the opportunity to experience the quiet joy of New England summer in the heart of the woods. But historically, Wachusett had an outsized influence relative to its size, especially in the realm of seafaring.

Historically New England was the beating heart of the United States for fishing, whaling, shipbuilding and maritime trade. Codfishing and rum distillation from triangle trade Caribbean sugar where the most important industries for Colonial Massachusetts, whose indented coastline includes well protected deep-water harbors where ports such as Gloucester, Newburyport and New Bedford could thrive. New Bedford in particular would become the heart of the whaling industry; its from there that Melville’s ill-fated Pequod sails in Moby-Dick. Massachusetts was also a center for shipbuilding and in 1861 the USS Wachusett was launched from the Boston Navy Yard. It would go on to serve in one of the strangest theaters of the American Civil War.

USS Wachusett

The USS Wachusett was a Union sloop outfitted for war and it spent its first campaigns off the coast of Virginia, first participating in the blockade of the Southern states and then in several maritime battles and sieges. In late 1862 the ship would be made part of a task force assigned to hunt down Confederate “commerce raiders,” privateer warships largely built in British shipyards and sold to the Confederacy to sink and capture United States merchant ships and whalers. The USS Wachusett was tasked with capturing two commerce raiders operating in the Caribbean, the CSS Alabama and the CSS Florida. After two years of fruitless searching, the Wachusett tracked the Florida to Bahia, Brazil. The Confederate ship had taken shelter in Bahia harbor; neutral Brazil warned the two ships that if a confrontation were to occur the Brazilian Navy would retaliate against whoever fired the first shot. After several rounds of terse negotiations between the two American vessels, the Wachusett launched a night attack within the Brazilian harbor and captured the Florida and quickly escaped with its prize before the Brazilians could substantively retaliate. A diplomatic row between the Union and Brazilian governments ensued which ended in little more than the Wachusett‘s captain being temporarily removed from duty. Following the conclusion of the Civil War, the ship was sent to the China to hunt the infamous commerce raider CSS Shenandoah which was still operating in the Pacific. The two ships never met; the Shenandoah eventually surrendering in its de facto home port of Liverpool where, in a bizarre twist, it was sold to the Sultan of Zanzibar. The Wachusett would end its career guarding American economic interests in South America during the 1879-1883 War Of The Pacific between Chile, Peru and Bolivia.

CSS Florida captured by USS Wachusett

The final maritime anecdote I’ll leave you with involves a curious object indeed: a nautical landmark which appears on maps printed to this day and that has never existed. This is “Wachusett Shoal,” named for the New Bedford Whaler that recorded its location in the south Pacific, thousands of miles from land in 1899. The captain recorded its location and wrote that it was a coral reef or shoal, 500 feet wide and 5 fathoms deep but no return voyage has ever found evidence that such an object exists. Wachusett Shoal is only one of several “phantom reefs” recorded in this area, including “Maria-Theresa reef,” “Jupiter reef,” and “Ernest Legouve reef.” There is no compelling evidence that any of them ever existed. One has to wonder what inspired this rash-this epidemic-of bogus reef discoveries. One thing for certain is that once something is put on a map you can expect every other map to keep it there too, even if its location was misplaced or debunked decades before, a cartographic habit which led to California being drawn as an island on maps for a century longer than contemporary navigational expertise would warrant. Thus, Wachusett Reef and its ilk still appear in this atlas published in the 1980s and internet reports suggest it appearing on maps as late as 2004.

As a final note, I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to tie this whole darn blog together and talk about comestibles. And so while Mount Wachusett has given its name to many local landmarks (and a few maritime oddities), it has, in the tradition of hinky craft brewers everywhere, given its name to a local beer. Wachusett Brewing, based out of Westminster, MA, makes several fine varieties of beer. They’re famous for their Blueberry Ale, though my favorites are the Green Monsta (a mild IPA or Bitter Pale Ale), the Summer Ale (a citrusy wheat beer) and the Octoberfest (a truly delightful red Marzen that blows local beer-king Sam Adams’s Octoberfest offering out of the water.)

If you’re ever in Massachusetts, go ahead and visit Mount Wachusett to enjoy the humble grandeur of New England’s forests and rolling hills. You won’t be disappointed.

The German Beer Purity Law of 1516

Photo credit – http://bythepint.com/features/german-beer-drinkers

German beer is highly regarded throughout the imbibing world for its flavor and its august traditions. Today its hard to separate beermaking from Germany and most international brewers, from states as far-flung as Mexico, China, Japan and the United States were either founded by German immigrants or brew beer derived from German recipes. But what makes German beer so beloved? Could it be that a five hundred year old price-control law is responsible for the greatness of German brewing? In all likelihood, no; history is rarely that simple. But what this ancient law can tell us about history, economics and beermaking is fascinating enough.

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Anyone who’s had a bottle of German beer has probably seen an unusual phrase on its label:
“brewed in accordance with the German Beer Purity Law of 1516,” (or something to that effect.) The law in question is today known as the Reinheitsgebot (pronounced something like Rhine-heights-ge-boat, and literally meaning “purity-order”) which was passed in 1516 in the German Duchy of Bavaria. The law originated in a 1487 decree by Duke Albrecht IV which stipulated that beer was only to be sold under controlled prices and it was only to be brewed using three ingredients: water, malted barley and hops.

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As far as brewing goes, this list is somewhat restrictive. Many beers are brewed using other grains (chiefly wheat and rye), fruits for flavoring, adjunct sugars to alter the specific gravity of the brew or low cost filler like rice and maize. In pre-modern brewing, the list was even longer. Hops are a relative newcomer to brewing, only becoming widely adopted in the 1200s. They have many beneficial qualities including a pleasant aroma and bitterness that balances the sweetness of beer’s malt but most importantly in early brewing hops have antibacterial qualities that kept beer safe to drink even where local water was not. Before the adoption of hops beer was flavored using local herbs that were combined to form a bitter flavoring called a “gruit.” All this variety in beer ingredients made for a diverse spectrum of local beer styles but it also could-and did- lead to brewers cutting corners by adding cheap and potentially dangerous substances to their beers.

Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria – Posthumous portrait by Barthel Beham

Though we remember it today for being a “purity law,” that probably wasn’t Duke Albrecht’s chief concern. More important where the prices of bread and beer. Beer was considered a staple of the German diet and in an era before modern sanitation beer was often much safer to drink than water. And while the section of the decree on brewing ingredients might not appear as such at first glance it too is a price control measure. Wheat and rye are both used in certain styles of beers but Albrecht feared that brewers would drive up prices for these higher-status grains which would thereby drive up the price of bread. This was an extremely tumultuous time in European history, where the rising power of the bourgeoisie had thrown the feudal social order in chaos and where waves of plagues, most notably the Black Death had killed untold millions and upset the traditional economies that had existed since the fall of Rome (with the added irony of decreasing sanitation and cleanliness throughout Europe as contemporary science believed that cleanliness lead to disease). With all this (and the coming religious anarchy that would be unleashed by the Protestant Reformation) causing upheaval among the lower classes, the last thing Albrecht needed was a peasantry who couldn’t afford to buy beer and bread. (As a sidenote, peasant rebellions would come to Bavaria shortly thereafter, first in localized protests during the Bundschuh movement from 1493-1517 and then in the largest revolt to ever seize Europe up to this point, the German Peasant’s War of 1524)

Albrecht Durer’s “Monument To The Peasant’s Revolt”

Albrecht IV’s decree would become Bavarian law thirty years later at a Meeting Of The Estates in the city of Ingolstadt in 1516 called by Duke Wilhelm IV and Duke Ludwig X, Albrecht’s sons and reluctant co-rulers of his duchy due to the foibles of feudal inheritance. While it wasn’t the first law among the German states to stipulate the use of certain ingredients, it was the longest lasting; it existed first as Bavarian law and later as law throughout Germany for nearly 500 years.

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As centuries passed the Reinheitsgebot exemplified regional conflicts throughout the German states. Northern Germany, with its greater number of merchants and craftsmen had its own regulations on beermaking which often began in local guilds. Northern brewers, who cultivated regional styles using wheat, fruit and other non-Reinheitsgebot ingredients balked at the restrictive Bavarian law. Nevertheless it saw greater and greater adoption throughout German Europe until 1871. Bavaria, now a powerful German kingdom, found itself caught between Austria, which had been chief among the German states for centuries and the rising northern powerhouse of Prussia. Prussia, under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, had consolidated control over all of Northern Germany and had waged a successful war with Denmark over contested areas of the Jutland peninsula. Diplomatic disputes concerning this war provided Austria and Prussia casus belli to go to war and settle the question of who would take the helm of German rulership. Ludwig II, king of Bavaria (a fascinating figure who deserves an entry all his own) did not bow under Prussian pressure and maintained his alliance with Austria, who was soundly defeated by Prussia’s much more modern army. In the years following, Prussian-Bavarian relations warmed so that by the time of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, a mere four years following their defeat in the Austrian-Prussian War, Bavarian troops fought under the Prussian flag. France’s defeat in 1871 was a stinging embarrassment to French national pride made worse by the German army forcing the French to sign their surrender in the mirrored halls of Versailles. It was there, with the support of Ludwig II, that King Wilhelm I of Prussia was crowned Kaiser of the new German Empire. The French would not forget this humiliation and their resentment towards Germany would come to a head 40 years later at the beginning of World War I. But for the story of the Reinheitsgebot, the most important facet of German unification was Bavarian insistence that their beer purity law become the law for all of Germany.

Radeberger, a German Pilsner – Photo credit: http://alcoholandaphorisms.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/tasting-notes-radeberger-pilsner/

German nationalism and beer went hand in hand for much of the world as German immigrants traveled to all corners of the world, bringing with them German brewing techniques informed by the Reinheitsgebot. In the United States where cider and corn whiskey had long been the most popular beverages (and the cause of Europeans’s perception of Americans as backwards drunks) German immigrants changed the landscape of drinking by popularizing the pale lager or pilsner, a style of beer invented in Pilsen, Bohemia (today Plzen, Czech Republic; while the Czechs are not Germans their history and brewing are intimately tied to Germany). Indeed, “Budweiser” originally referred to a beer brewed in such a style in the nearby city of Budweis. Today, all major international beers (excepting a few founded following the craft beer revolution of the 1990s) are pale lagers, and most international breweries from the USA to Mexico to China were founded by Germans.

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The Reinheitsgebot survived in Germany through World War I, the Third Reich and Germany’s division during the Cold War. But in 1987, five hundred years after its original ducal decree, the law was struck down by the high court of the European Union. In 1980 under relentless (and often ruthless) economic liberalizers such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet and Deng Xiaoping, the philosophy of Economic Neoliberalism emerged from obscurity to become the international consensus of best economic practice (where, for better or for worse, it remains today). The German Beer Purity Law, which forbid the importation or manufacture of beers which did not follow its specifications was deemed a form of protectionism and abolished.

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In 1993 Germany passed a new, slightly more lenient brewing regulation. Yeast, not discovered until the 19th century by Louis Pasteur, may now be used in German lagers (which, considering yeast is by far the most important ingredient in beer, is a good thing) and German ales may now be brewed using a wider range of adjuncts and grains. Thus while German beers may still claim to be brewed under the Reinheitsgebot they do so only as a matter of pride and tradition. Still, as the longest standing food safety  regulation in history, this strange little law has changed the world.