I came away from the project with a great admiration for William Bligh, who is surely one of the more grievously wronged-by-history men in the history of the British Empire.

Here’s the introduction and about half of the (very long) first chapter of The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie.

And, of course, a link to where you can buy it on Amazon!

***

Introduction

Boom!

The single cannon shot from HMS Duke rang out over the choppy gray water of England’s Portsmouth Harbor. It was 8 A.M. on Wednesday, September 12, 1792, and the Duke had just hoisted a flag indicating that a court martial was in process.

Thirty minutes later, ten prisoners were led from the gun room of HMS Hector and loaded aboard one of the Hector’s boats. British Marines in bright red uniform jackets stood at attention as the boat’s crew dipped their oars and began the journey to the Duke, moored in the outer harbor.

More than an hour later, with the Marines still standing at attention, the boat reached the Duke. The prisoners were formally taken aboard, and then led into the captain’s great cabin at the very stern of the ship to face the twelve captains who would serve as their judges and the Judge Advocate who would run the court. Also present were the prisoners’ counselors, and various witnesses.

The Judge Advocate, Moses Greetham, began reading from the “Circumstantial letter” which laid out the details of the case: the ten men were accused of mutiny, a crime punishable by death.

Specifically, they were accused of the most famous mutiny of all time: the mutiny on His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty, the ship once commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh.

For more than two centuries now, that mutiny has captured the imagination of the world, inspiring histories, plays, novels, at least one stage musical, and five motion pictures.

Oddly enough, it all started with breadfruit.

Chapter 1: The Voyage of the Bounty

In 1688, while sailing around the world, a naturalist (and occasional pirate) named William Dampier noted an interesting new fruit from the island of Guam:

“The bread-fruit (as we call it) grows on a large tree…The fruit…is of a round shape and has a thick tough rind. When the fruit is ripe it is yellow and soft; and the taste is sweet and pleasant. The natives of this island use it for bread: they gather it when full grown while it is green and hard; then they bake it in an oven…the inside is soft, tender, and white.”[i]

Later explorers, including Captain Cook (the first European to visit Hawaii and Australia) also extolled the virtues of the breadfruit. The fruit was so much like bread that sailors actually preferred it to their own bread. (That’s not surprising, since the bread served in the middle of a long voyage was a kind of cracker made of flour, water, and salt known as “hardtack” or “ship’s biscuit.” Ship’s biscuit was so hard it often had to be soaked before it could be eaten. It was also occasionally infested by the worm-like larvae of beetles.)

As early as 1775, the Society for West India Merchants saw the potential in breadfruit as a source of food for slave on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The Society offered a hundred pounds to the first person who could bring living breadfruit trees to England.

A Passion for Botany

Among those with businesses interests in the West Indies was Joseph Banks. Born in 1743, Banks was independently wealthy and passionately interested in natural history—particularly botany, the study of plants. When he was twenty-one he collected numerous never-before-seen specimens of plants along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, England’s top scientific society, when he was just twenty-three.

He next joined Captain James Cook aboard the Endeavour when he set sail in August 1768 to carry British astronomers to Tahiti to observe the planet Venus crossing the disk of the sun.

The ship’s visit to Tahiti seized the public’s imagination upon the Endeavour’s return to England in 1771, even though the island had first been reached by an English ship four years earlier. Banks had a lot to do with the public’s sudden interest. He returned with thousands of specimens, drawings and paintings.

In 1778, after a final voyage to Iceland, Banks was elected president of the Royal Society. For decades, very few expeditions of science or exploration were undertaken without his consultation.

Banks wrote and received tens of thousands of letters from all over the world, full of questions and scientific observations. More than a few urged that the breadfruit tree be imported as a new food source for the West Indies.

Banks could see the fruit’s potential. He convinced the British government to mount an official expedition, announced in February 1787, to bring back specimens of the plant.

A former merchant ship called the Bethia, approved by Banks, was purchased and renamed His Majesty’s Armed Vessel (HMAV) Bounty. (The Bounty was too small to qualify for the designation His Majesty’s Ship [HMS]).

Command of The Bounty was awarded to Lieutenant William Bligh.

Enter William Bligh

William Bligh, born September 9, 1754, was the son of Francis Bligh, customs officer at Plymouth, and Jane Pearce, a widow Francis had married just ten months earlier.

Reality vs. the Movie: A Cabin Boy at Age Seven?

Throughout this book, we’ll be comparing real-life events to the way they were described or depicted in the 1984 movie The Bounty, produced by Dino de Laurentiis. In that movie, Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) tells Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) that he has been at sea since he was twelve.

In fact, William Bligh first appears in naval records as a ship’s servant on the Monmouth at the age of seven—but it’s unlikely he actually went to sea at that age.

In the 1700s, Royal Navy captains would often enter youngsters from well-connected families onto the books, providing them with valuable “sea time.” Sea time was important because, to become a lieutenant, a young man had to appear on a ship’s roster for six years, and serve as a midshipman or master’s mate for at least two years of the six.[ii] Appearing on a ship’s roster at a young age allowed the boy to step straight into a midshipman’s position and take his lieutenant’s exam sooner.

Bligh probably first went to sea for real at age sixteen, shortly after his mother died.

In 1770 Bligh signed on to the Hunter as an able seaman. This was a typical classification for potential officers on ships where all the positions for midshipmen—officers in training—were filled. Six months later a midshipman’s position opened up, and Bligh was promoted.

From ages seventeen to twenty Bligh served as a midshipman on the Crescent, sailing to Tenerife and the West Indies. In 1774 he joined the Ranger, temporarily reduced to able seaman again, as she hunted smugglers in the Irish Sea.

At age twenty-one, Bligh learned that Captain Cook had selected him as sailing master of the Resolution for Cook’s third expedition. Cook must have heard a good report of Bligh’s navigational capabilities. He may also have known of Bligh’s talent for drawing. Cook wanted all his officers to be able to construct charts and accurately sketch the various places in which the ship might anchor.[iii]

Sailing with Captain Cook

With Cook, Bligh sailed to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), New Zealand, Tahiti, and various Pacific islands. Cook also sailed up the west coast of North America in a failed search for the Northwest Passage (a more direct route from Europe to the Pacific that would avoid the stormy seas around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America).

Bligh must have paid close attention to Cook’s methods for keeping his crew healthy on long voyages, because he later implemented some of those methods on the Bounty. Second to Cook himself, he was responsible for creating charts and surveys, and also drew accurate sketches of birds, animals, and landscapes.

On February 14, 1779, at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, Bligh witnessed the murder of Captain Cook by natives. In Bligh’s view, the murder happened because the Marines guarding Cook did not do their duty.[iv] The tragedy affected Bligh not only personally but professionally. Bligh’s family connections were just good enough to get him into the Navy as a midshipman, but he had been counting on Cook’s influence to help further his career. (In the Royal Navy in that era, who you knew was often more important than what you knew.)

In February 1781, Bligh married Elizabeth Betham on the Isle of Man. After serving on a variety of ships for a few months near the end of the American Revolution, Bligh ended up on the Isle of Man with his wife and new daughter. In the scaled-back peacetime Navy, no officer’s berths were available.

The peacetime Navy paid only two shillings a day, so Bligh had to find work. The Navy granted his request for permission to sail on merchant ships. From mid-1783 until he was appointed commander of the Bounty, he commanded ships belonging to his wife’s wealthy uncle, Duncan Campbell, carrying goods from England to the West Indies and returning with rum and sugar.

His careful drawings and proven navigational skills probably recommended him to the Admiralty as commander of Sir Joseph Banks’s breadfruit expedition. Navigational skills were important because, once he’d retrieved breadfruit from Tahiti, the Admiralty wanted him to chart the Endeavour Straits, a narrow, dangerous passage separating Australia (then called New Holland) and New Guinea).[v] Cook had run aground there. The Admiralty hoped Cook’s sailing master might do better.

There’s no evidence Banks ever met Bligh. But Bligh, knowing the career value of a powerful patron, thanked Banks profusely for command of the Bounty, and wrote: “I can only assure you I shall endeavour, and I hope succeed, in deserving such a trust…”[vi]

HMAV Bounty

The Bounty was a three-masted merchant vessel, built just 2 1/2 years earlier. She was 85 feet, 1 1/2 inches long on the upper deck and 24 feet 4 inches wide. At just 220 tons, she was much smaller than any of Cook’s ships had been.

Because she was so small, she was rated as a cutter. That mattered because a cutter did not rate a captain or a commander as a commanding officer, but only a lieutenant. That, in turn, meant Bligh would not be getting a promotion, as he had hoped.

On a voyage expected to last at least two years, the difference between a lieutenant’s and commander’s pay was considerable. Bligh would earn just £70 a year. (As a merchant captain under Duncan Campbell, he’d been earning £500.) All the Navy offered was the assurance that that he would be promoted upon his return.[vii]

The Bounty was unusual in other ways, thanks to modifications Joseph Banks had insisted upon. All that mattered to Banks was the return of breadfruit, and, he wrote, “…the Master & Crew of her must not think it a grievance to give up the best part of her accommodations for that purpose.”[viii]

The most notable modification from Bligh’s point of view must have been the loss of the great cabin, the commanding officer’s private quarters. Normally the great cabin was as wide as the ship and extended from the stern almost to the main mast, with windows on three sides providing plenty of light. But on the Bounty, the great cabin had been turned into a breadfruit nursery. It was filled with shelves, cut with holes to receive 629 pots. It had special ventilation, a stove for warmth, a drainage system that caught and recycled excess water, and more. Bligh had to make do with a windowless cabin, eight by seven feet. He would eat in a small, cramped pantry.

The Bounty’s small size meant a smallish crew. Bligh would be the only commissioned officer. Warrant officers would include a master, boatswain, carpenter, gunner and surgeon. Bligh decided not to hire a purser, who normally bought provisions from the Navy Board, tracked them and doled them out on the voyage, and sold back unused ones at the end. Instead, Bligh would look after the disbursement of stores himself.

Most fatefully, the ship would not carry any Marines, who on most Navy ships served as the captain’s security and police force.

For this week’s Saturday special, the introduction (complete with footnotes!) to Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky. Which you can purchase here, if you’re interested!

**

Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky

By Edward Willett

Introduction

Shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday, September 24, 1966, a young black man stepped off a Pan American Airlines airplane at London’s Heathrow Airport. All he had with him was $40 in borrowed cash, a small bag containing a change of clothes, pink plastic hair curlers and a jar of Valderma face cream…and his guitar.[i]

But a guitar was all he really needed. Within an extraordinarily short time, that young man would be famous around the world. Decades later, he’s still famous: “King Jimi,” a “guitar god,” the “master of electric-guitar sound and style.”[ii]

Later that same evening, Jimi Hendrix was onstage at The Scotch of St. James, a club that attracted people in the music industry. As he started to play, the club fell silent.

“He was just amazing,” Kathy Etchingham, then just twenty-four and soon to be Jimi’s girlfriend (one of many), recalled. “People had never seen anything like it.”[iii]

Among the musicians in the crowd was Eric Burdon of the Animals. His take: “It was haunting how good he was. You just stopped and watched.”[iv]

Burdon was the first famous guitarist to be awed by Hendrix’s ability. He wouldn’t be the last. On January 11, 1967, Hendrix and his new band, The Experience, played at a basement club called the Bag O’Nails in the Soho district of London.

Hendrix had been in England just three and a half months (and had spent several weeks touring France and Germany with the Experience), but that night his show was attended by rock greats Pete Townshend and John Entwhistle of the Who, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr of the Beatles (plus their manager, Brian Epstein), Mick Jagger and Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck…and many others.[v]

People all over the world stopped and watched when Jimi Hendrix played…but it all ended on September 18, 1970, when he died in London at the age of twenty-seven.

Jimi Hendrix crammed a lot into his short life. The consummate rebel, he somehow fought his way past every barrier that rose between him and his lifelong dream of stardom. He rebelled against his father, who thought his music was a waste of time. He rebelled against the strict regimentation of the bands in which he played as a back-up guitarist. He rebelled against the expectation that he would limit himself to playing for black audiences. He rebelled against conventional notions of how the electric guitar should be played. He rebelled against conventional ideas of sexual morality. And, tragically and fatally, he rebelled against restrictions on his use of drugs.

Tony Palmer, a friend of Hendrix’s who today is a renowned director of music documentaries, wrote in The Observer newspaper on September 20, 1970, “Whatever Mozart and Tchaikovsky have come to mean to lovers of classical music, Hendrix meant the same if not more to a whole generation.”[vi] He added, “Jimi Hendrix was born Jimi Hendrix. Great musicians are not created; they are born. Jimi was meant for music.”[vii]

Looking back, it seems as if Jimi Hendrix was always meant to be a star. Certainly he always thought so. But for most of his life, stardom seemed a very long way away…

*

One other fun note: the scientists quoted are real scientists, and the quotes are real, too. They all graciously agreed to provide expert commentary for this obviously fictional “science” article.

Bob Rubman didn’t expect to make an earth-shaking when he plunged into the warm waters of the Adriatic on August 14, 1986. The young American skin-diver only expected to see the wreck of a Roman trading ship, a few amphorae, nothing spectacular.

Instead he found a skull, a very odd skull: a skull, astonished archaeologists eventually had to admit, that had belonged to…a merman.

When the incontrovertible evidence appeared in respected scientific journals, hundreds of similar discoveries came to light, bones and artifacts that had been hidden away for years by scientists and non-scientists fearful of ridicule. Now, almost a decade after Rubman’s dive, a picture is emerging of life in the Dark Ages that bears little resemblance to that drawn by history and science before now.

The key to this new version of history is the Karlsberg Bestiary, discovered just last year deep beneath a German castle. The pictures and descriptions of animals it contains correspond in startling fashion to the new archaeological findings.

The first few pages of the bestiary are badly damaged, so that only fragments of text can be deciphered. They read, “In the Year of Our Lord…strange creatures from a far land descended upon us. Dragons and giants stalked the heights, and the forests filled with…Baron Karlsberg spoke with…name of the Land from which these monsters came: Dominia.”

Scientists have thus dubbed the arrival of these strange creatures The Dominian Influx. The information in the bestiary, archaeological findings and current understanding of ecology and physiology indicate the Dark Ages were even darker than we thought.

The Dominian Influx must have initially created a huge imbalance in the ratio of predators to prey, for most of the creatures described in the Karlsberg Bestiary are predatory. Dr. Mark Brigham, a biologist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, says that there is usually only one predator for every 10 animals of roughly the same size. The Influx upset that ratio.

With huge predators suddenly unleashed on a relatively small area of Earth, it was not a good time to be a deer, a boar, a rabbit, a sheep–or a shepherd. We know that Europe’s population crashed at various time throughout the Dark Ages; although the Black Death is usually blamed, it may well be that death actually came in a variety of colors, shapes and sizes.

Which is not to say that the Black Death did not claim its share: the Karlsberg Bestiary lists among the new arrivals giant Plague Rats, which must have immediately taken their time-honored place in the squalid cities, spreading pestilence.

With prey vanishing, the arriving creatures could either starve, eat each other, or relocate. (It’s no coincidence that the Perled Unicorn, a beautiful creature which arrived with the others, quickly disappeared; to the large predators it was just horsemeat with a built-in toothpick.)

So the creatures of the Influx spread across Europe, seeking out their ideal habitats.

To the cool, rocky peaks of Europe’s mountains migrated such creatures as the Hill Giants and the Gray Ogres, intelligent, man-shaped beings of incredible height and strength; the Roc of Kher Ridges, a bird of such enormous height it could lift a war-horse in each talon; the War Mammoth, a creature long extinct on Earth; and the rarely seen Serra Angel, which spent most of its time gazing longingly at the sky as though homesick.

The Alps became the home of the Hurloon Minotaurs, bull-headed men with a love of battle and, according to the bestiary, remarkable singing voices that echoed up and down the valleys of the Alps, drastically increasing the frequency of avalanches.

The giants, ogres and rocs had good reason to head for cooler climates; their huge size made them vulnerable to overheating. Dr. Neal Smatresk, Professor and Chair of the Department of Biology at the University of Texas at Arlington, noted that ordinarily, giants should have no more trouble than a normal-sized human maintaining their body temperature, because larger creatures have slower metabolic rates than small ones. “However,” he added, “if they got real energetic, which I don’t think they could do for a real long period of time, they could employ the traditional methods of sweating or taking a plunge in a nice cold lake. The sensible thing to do would be to live in a somewhat colder climate, or a place where there were nice, deep, cold lakes.”

A roc would have preferred the heights not only for the cool climate, but also as a jumping-off place for flight–a means of conserving energy. Until the existence of the Roc and some of the other flying creatures pictured in the bestiary came to light, scientists put the upper limit to flight at 12 kilograms. “Some pterosaurs (flying dinosaurs) were considerably bigger than that,” Dr. Brigham noted, “but they soared, they didn’t actually flap to fly. They couldn’t take off from the ground; they had to jump off a cliff.”

The roc’s ability to fly despite its large size is one example of the apparent ability of many of the creatures of the Dominian Influx to perform seemingly impossible feats. The most current theory in the on-going debate as to how they did this holds that they were able to tap a mysterious source of energy unavailable to ordinary Earth animals.

The Shivan Dragons apparently sought out high launching-points for the same reason as the rocs, but they congregated on lower, warmer ridges and desert mesas.

The reason is simple, according to Dr. Betty Juergensmeyer, Professor of Biology at Judson College in Elgin, Illinois. “Reptiles are cold-blooded: they have to sit out in the sun and warm up before they can do much,” she said. Desert heights are ideal for sunbathing.

This habit undoubtedly brought dragons into conflict with two other creatures who liked the same habitat: the Mesa Pegasus and the astounding Granite Gargoyles.

“A dragon would probably think a pegasus would be fairly tasty,” Dr. Juergensmeyer noted. Only by forming flying herds to defend themselves did the flying horses avoid the fate of the Perled Unicorn.

Granite Gargoyles were apparently a silicon-based life-form. Unlike carbon-based life-forms (everything else on Earth), a silicon-based creature would not have to eat; instead, Dr. Juergensmeyer said, it would probably be solar-powered, soaking up heat to meet its energy needs. Unfortunately, the best places for soaking up heat were often already taken by a sunning dragon, which must have led to some epic battles…usually won, no doubt, by the larger, stronger dragon, which must have then been frustrated by its inability to eat its fallen foe.

The gargoyles weren’t the only silicon-based life-forms to appear in the Dominian Influx. On the desert floor, and elsewhere, dwelt Earth Elementals, massive, slow-moving creatures made of stone, and highly territorial. However, they and the other Elementals the Bestiary describes–Air Elementals, Time Elementals, Water Elementals–played a role in the ecosystem more akin to that of weather, which may wreak havoc but then goes away again, then to that of an ordinary predator or prey species. Drawing on the same unknown source of energy that enabled rocs to fly, elementals existed outside the food chain–as did the Djinn, usually also found in the desert.

In the desert, few humans came in contact with the Dominian creatures. The mountains, too, were sparsely inhabited, and the few people that lived there must have fled when the rocs and giants and ogres arrived, and especially when the minotaurs started singing.

But they weren’t much safer in the wooded valleys, where the Craw Worm lurked, sometimes quietly sunning itself in forest glades, but crashing through the trees with incredible speed (and deafening sound) when in pursuit of prey, which was basically anything that moved. The Craw Worm ruled whatever forest it invaded, quickly driving humans and most other creatures into other valleys or, in the case of humans, into walled cities and stout castles.

Other perils also lurked in the forest. The Thicket Basilisk could turn its enemies into stone…a purely defensive ploy, Dr. Brigham said, “unless you can eat rock. I don’t know anything that can.”

Dr. Smatresk noted that the ability of the basilisk is reminiscent of that of the fire salamander, which sprays a highly potent neurotoxin up to two metres, into the eyes or mouth of its attacker. Its strong defensive ability probably also explains why the basilisk evolved extra legs, which might be good for climbing but would actually slow the creature down. “Most really fast animals minimize ground contact,” Dr. Smatresk pointed out–but the basilisk’s defensive capabilities meant it had no need for speed.

In the forest you could also be unlucky enough to run into Giant Spiders, massive arachnids that might have devastated entire countries if not for the fact that “the muscle mass to move something like that is enormous, so they’d be very, very slow,” as Dr. Smetresk pointed out. “They wouldn’t have the same ferocity and energetic movement that (ordinary spiders) have.” Instead, they probably contented themselves with spinning vast webs, creating fairly permanent areas of danger that intelligent creatures, at least, could avoid.

Most spiders, of course, eat insects, but at least one species of insect mentioned in the bestiary would have been smart enough to avoid any spider’s web The Killer Bees, which the bestiary claims devastated whole villages of humans in a crusade to free their enslaved kinfolk from the honey hives, are said to have carried swords and shields during their attacks, although, as Dr. Juergensmeyer commented, “With their tails, they need those? I would think bees would have enough weapons without swords!”

The bees weren’t the only intelligent denizens of the forest. Others, which probably drove out the giant spiders whenever they could, were the Ironroot Treefolk: intelligent, mobile trees. It’s not as strange as it sounds, according to Dr. Smatresk. “There are plant communication systems that work via electrical conduction,” he said. With the right kind of cells, those communication systems could develop into something analogous to our nervous system.

The Ironroot Treefolk were probably no more taken with tree-chopping humans than the Killer Bees were with the honey-sucking ones–and so humans were also driven from the forests, no doubt with the additional help of the Scryb Sprites, tiny, winged humanoids for whom some country folks still leave an overnight bowl of milk.

Humans fleeing the forests had to hope their path did not take them through the swamps, for here lurked some of the nastiest of the strange new creatures, including the Fungusaur, a bizarre creature that became stronger every time it was injured. Naturally, that made it highly aggressive; getting injured was its best offense.

This is another creature that drew on an unknown source of energy. In fact, regenerating and growing stronger at the same time would require an “infinite energy source,” Dr. Smatresk said, because losing tissue means losing an enormous amount of energy, too. That’s one reason why regenerated tails and limbs on Earth amphibians are usually “not-very-good copies of what was there before.”

In the swamps, too, lurked two more of those strange creatures that lie outside the ordinary realm of ecology: the Nightmare, described as a terrifying horse with fiery mane and hooves, and the Bog Wraith, a ghostlike figure that, the bestiary says, murdered many an unfortunate traveler.

There are other ghostlike creatures in the bestiary that also lie outside the bounds of normal biological science. What are we to make, for instance, of the Drudge Skeletons, dead bones that knitted themselves together and took up arms? Or the Phantom Monster, whose appearance spelled doom for whole villages, according to the Bestiary, but which apparently had no physical substance at all?

For the Sengir Vampire, perhaps, more can be said scientifically, for of course there are already creatures on Earth that make a meal of blood: vampire bats. Vampires were in an enviable position among the creatures of the Influx: all the other creatures were their prey. Although mammalian blood was preferred (it probably tastes better; as Dr. Juergensmeyer pointed out, whereas mammalian red blood cells don’t have nuclei, the red blood cells of other types of creatures do), they could feed on any creature.

Dr. Brigham, whose specialty is bats, noted that two of three known vampire bat species actually spend more time feeding on birds than on mammals, and they have been seen to feed on reptiles. And, he noted, “in terms of the fat and the carbohydrates and all that (the vampire) needs, I think blood is an excellent meal.”

Even walled cities were no protection from these dread creatures. Indeed, it was a difficult time to be a human. Trade almost stopped; few people dared travel the roads. Agriculture became a dangerous activity. And Plague Rats were a constant threat.

It was, however, a good time to be a Carrion Ant.

Coastal cities had an advantage in that they had access to fish–but even the seas had been infested with the creatures of the Influx, as Bob Rubman proved when he picked up that mermaid skull.

Merfolk managed to extract the oxygen they needed from water–an impressive feat, because water, Dr. Smetresk pointed out, holds 20 to 30 times less oxygen per volume than air. He believes the merfolk had no lungs at all, but huge amounts of gill tissue in their extra-large chests, through which they rammed vast quantities of water. In addition, he said, their blood must have been particularly good at capturing oxygen and releasing it to the tissues.

Tales of mermaids exist the world over, so it may well be that these creatures still roam our oceans. If so, Dr. Juergensmeyer and Dr. Smetrask both speculated, their days may be numbered: they must be very sensitive to pollution.

“You’ve got to bring in water, parasites and all kinds of gunk from outside into this very delicate area,” Dr. Smetresk said. “It would have to be their Achilles heel.”

Tales of Sea Serpents also exist all over the world, and so this sea-going version of the Craw Worm, too, may still roam the ocean, having remained behind when almost all the rest of the Dominian creatures disappeared as mysteriously as they appeared, some three centuries after the Influx, as though in answer to a sudden summons.

Whether merfolk and sea serpents heard the call or not, one creature definitely did, and left our oceans forever–for which we can be grateful.

Leviathan was so huge it is impossible to even say what its length might have been. It could only exist in the oceans, where, Dr. Juergensmeyer noted, it didn’t face some of the same problems as land creatures, which have to be concerned about the ability of their bones to bear their own weight, if they get too big.

Leviathan, like today’s large whales (mere minnows by comparison) probably migrated through the world’s oceans, north to feed in rich waters teeming with plankton and fish; south to calve (because although Leviathan was too large to ever get cold, a baby Leviathan might not have been).

Wherever Leviathan went, it would have left behind a marine wasteland, Dr. Smatresk said. “Obviously they’d deplete an ecosystem pretty fast.”

Leviathan could have scoured whole islands clean of life just with the waves of its passing, destroyed the fisheries on which beleaguered towns depended for food, sunk entire fleets without even knowing it had hit them…and yet, like all the rest of the Dominian creatures, it vanished.

Now that scientists have finally begun to accept that the Dominian creatures really existed, and to piece together the picture of the world as it was during their brief sojourn here, one question continues to haunt them: “What happened to them?”

Perhaps the flip side of that question is even more disturbing:

“What if they come back?”

(The image: A merman from Magic: The Gathering.)

Here are the covers (and the back-cover copy) for each:

Johnny Cash: The Man in Black

When country music legend Johnny Cash took the stage at Folsom State Prison in 1968, he solidified the public’s perception of him as a rebel who followed his own path. Born in Arkansas during the Great Depression, Cash endured poverty, the death of his older brother, and a difficult relationship with his father. He turned to gospel and country music to express the pain, and after many years of struggling, his songs of hardship and hope would finally reach the ears of those waiting for an artist who represented them, ordinary people fighting to survive.

Johnny Cash’s career spanned almost fifty years, with thousands of songs, hundreds of albums, and even a telvision show to his name. Even after his death in 2003, new albums continue to be released, and the 200t bipic Walk the Line brought “the man in black” to life for a new generation. From spiritual hymns to rock ballads, his influence transcended all genres and “the voice of America” lives on.

Buy Johnny Cash: The Man in Black from Amazon.com.

Andy Warhol: Everyone Will be Famous for 15 Minutes

In the 1960s, Andy Warhol became the most famous creator of a new style of art called pop art, which transformed mass-produced items of popular culture into fine works of art. From Campbell’s Soup cans to photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol’s willingness to use anything and everything from the mass media in his work expanded the range of subject matter available to artists. His avant-garde films, artistic usage of American icons, and unconventional social life made him a controversial figure, both greatly admired and deeply reviled. A trendsetter rather than a trend-follower, a dispassionate observer of both the seamy and celebrity sides of life, Warhol was a true American rebel.

Buy Andy Warhol: Everyone Will be Famous for 15 Minutes from Amazon.com.

“Science is a verb.” that is what science teachers tell their students, and this book describes just that. I found the book to be an exciting collection of seven scientists doing their jobs, and sometimes I was jealous. As scientist, Marta Guerra, describes, “for people who like to do fairly exciting things… you feel like you are actually helping people, [disease hunting in Uganda] is a wonderful experience.” The book is scientifically accurate, and, with a bird flu expert hinting about new emerging pandemics, the book is very current. It is engaging and packed with a great deal of information. The Levels of Containment that we often read about describes measles as a level two disease, where gloves, face protection, gowns, and splash guards are used. It is a good thing that our mothers never knew that. For your information, E. coli is only level one. If you did not know what bat guano is, the explanation is seamlessly woven into the text. Zoonotic is a word I have been hearing more about, and this book teaches young readers what it means: diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans. Scientist Laurie Richardson says that “being a scientist is like being a kid all you life” because there is so much fun and learning to do. Scientist Jonathan Runstadler’s job is to track the bird flu. To do that, he swabs bird bottoms, which may not sound like fun, but, for people such as me, it beats sitting in a cubical working on spreadsheets. This is a great read. Reviewer: RevaBeth Russell