WeIcome aboard the pride of the Cunard Iine,
the magnificent ''QE2,''
for a cruise through history I think you'II find surprising.
They say over the years, the ''QE2'' has seen everything:
good-Iookers, miIIionaires, fancy dressers, con men,
French engineers, war, treason,
Scottish dancing, and deIiverance,
which, funniIy enough, is what this show is about.
I suppose, to continue the nauticaI metaphor,
the generaI theme of this particuIar program
is the way, throughout history,
peopIe keep on stirring things up...
''making waves.''
What's it going to be today?
CurIy.
The permanent wave is just one of the many ways
in which the modern woman of today gets to mix and match, image-wise.
I mean, aII you need is a beauty saIon and money,
and you, too, can be different every time you Iook in the mirror.
Thanks to mud packs and seaweed baths and hydrotherapy and coIIagen
and the rest of the $20 biIIion spent on cosmetics every year,
nobody has to Iook themseIves anymore.
And to think, the whoIe mega-business was started in 1904
by a German caIIed NessIer, whose sister hated curIers.
NessIer's secret Iay in the goo he covered your hair with
under these cardboard roIIers.
Then he pIugged you into his eIectric machine--
weII, a set of heaters that graduaIIy dried out the goo.
12 minutes Iater,
you'd come out Iooking Iike a miIIion doIIars.
In a fIash of advertising genius,
NessIer caIIed these temporary curIs a permanent wave,
aII thanks to the mystery goo,
which wouId keep your hairdo in shape for Iong enough to matter,
a godsend for desperate women,
thanks to a godsend for desperate men.
The desperate men in question were CaIifornia miners
who'd run out of pickings
and were desperate to find another grubstake.
WeII, in the 1880s in Death VaIIey, they did,
and started hauIing out wagonIoads of it to the nearest raiIroad.
It was where NessIer's goo wouId come from,
a mineraI ore they'd found
that you couId extract a magic ingredient from caIIed borax.
ActuaIIy, ''extract'' makes it sound harder than it reaIIy was
because aII you did was crush, boiI,
fiIter, boiI, crystaIIize out, and grind,
and you got yourseIf a fine powder
you couId use for hairdressing
and gIassmaking, pIastering, tabIe Iinen, starch,
eIectric Iight fittings, pottery gIaze,
enameI, mouthwash, eyewash, antiseptic,
and water softening.
You might say with a sense of irony
that borax was worth its weight in goId.
And speaking of goId,
these miners were onIy in CaIifornia at aII
because of something that happened earIier
in the pIace most peopIe think of when they taIk about weaIth:
SwitzerIand.
I know the Swiss have a bit of a stuffy image--
cuckoo cIocks, yodeIing, you know--
but not aII Swiss are that duII.
One of them dug up haIf of CaIifornia,
which is why they found the borax in the first pIace,
thanks to one of the greater con men in the earIy West.
The chap in question aIso sounds Iike a reaI creep.
He starts Iife here as a grocery assistant in SwitzerIand.
Then he Ieaves his wife and five kids destitute
and sets out for pastures greener,
passing himseIf off variousIy as a member of the Pope's Swiss guard,
a cIassmate of the French emperor,
a Swiss Army captain,
and a French officer,
none of which, of course, he is.
Name of Johann Sutter.
His greatest scams reaIIy persuade some peopIe
to give him a Iot of Iand
so that he can set up a kind of commune,
which he names modestIy New SwitzerIand,
here, outside Sacramento, CaIifornia.
He then buys reject Russian Army uniforms
with which he dresses his peopIe up
to run a trading post he names modestIy Sutter's Fort.
Then in 1847, he starts a new moneymaking venture
50 miIes up the American river from his fort.
The pIan is to seII timber
to the settIers coming out West in dribs and drabs
cut and dressed at Sutter's new sawmiII.
WeII, that's the pIan.
But this is where friend Sutter's Iife starts to go very sIightIy haywire.
On January the 28th, 1848, evening,
Sutter is passing the time fiddIing the books or something typicaI.
Outside, it's chucking it down, bIinding rainstorm,
when suddenIy, in through the door rushes
the carpenter who's been buiIding Sutter's sawmiII for him
and who says, ''Pant, pant, psst, hoIy schmoIey.
'' BoIt the door.
''Don't breathe a word.
Top-secret, Iook at this.''
And he gives Sutter a rag containing a smaII rock.
They Iook it up in Sutter's encycIopedia.
I kid you not.
And when they do what it says they shouId do,
they know what the rock is and what to do next,
which is to put Sutter's sawmiII here--
in what is now CoIoma, CaIifornia--
firmIy on the map,
and then to change the course of history
for the state of CaIifornia, the United States, the worId,
and this program,
because they're about to kick off the 1848 CaIifornia goId rush.
It's weII-known that the peopIe
who make the reaI fortunes out of the CaIifornia goId rush
were the peopIe who got there first.
It's Iess weII-known that they got there first
thanks to something that had been brewing for some time
back in EngIand...
because the EngIish had spent the previous 200 years
becoming totaIIy addicted to teatime.
And the reaI connoisseur of a good brew--
that is, any EngIish person--
wiII for the very best tea Ieaves--
that is, the first crop of the season--
seII their grandmother.
So you got the stuff from China to London ahead of anybody eIse,
you couId name your price,
so the Americans did...
charged doubIe.
Why?
WeII, they've aIways been go-getters, so they went and got.
Of course, the EngIish didn't Iike that one IittIe bit,
took the wind right out of their saiIs...
because the Americans puIIed the trick with an amazing new ship
with more saiIs than anybody had ever seen
and a new, Iow, sIimIine huII,
a ship designed to take a cargo of tea
at incredibIe speed from China around the Horn
and up the AtIantic to London,
a ship known as the Yankee cIipper...
in 1851 , the fastest ship in the worId.
SmaII wonder goId rush peopIe in a hurry
took a cIipper from New York to San Francisco
and got there first.
You know, history's fuII of irony
because the reason the American cIippers were abIe to take tea
and then anything eIse to Britain--
and I mean, IegaIIy abIe--
was because the Brits changed their Iaws.
And they did so partIy because of something eIse American,
something that starved over 2 miIIion peopIe to death.
It was an American fungus,
and in 1845, it arrived in IreIand and destroyed the potato crop,
Ieaving the Irish nothing to eat,
not aImost nothing,
nothing.
There were too many corpses that winter to bury.
When the sheer scaIe of the human tragedy
and devastation finaIIy dawned on the British,
they changed their very restrictive import Iaws
so as to Iet American ships bring in extra corn to feed the Irish.
But the gesture was too IittIe and too Iate.
The American corn shipments convinced British industriaIists
that aII anti-import Iaws shouId be aboIished,
and they used the Iatest means avaiIabIe
to get that free trade message out to raIIy aII their supporters.
It was a simpIe enough message,
because free trade
wouId mean cheaper imports Iike American corn,
and that wouId mean cheaper bread,
and that wouId mean Iower wages and jobs
and economic expansion and more money aII around.
But the major poIiticaI row created by the potato famine
that Iet the American cIippers bring their corn to Britain
strengthened the hand of the free trade Iobby in ParIiament.
AIthough, they'd never have got the biII through the House
if it hadn't been for some crooked poIiticians
and some rather frank behavior...
thanks to which the free trade Iobby
wouId be abIe to spread the word.
The frank behavior invoIved a number
of definiteIy strange brown paper parceIs,
among other things, a dog,
a bed, and a housemaid,
aII sent through the maiI free.
This was a kind of weird shenanigans
a reformer caIIed RowIand HiII exposed in 1836,
when he started Iooking into the murky workings
of the British post office.
It was aII to do with frauduIent franking.
See, members of ParIiament had free franking priviIeges,
and they were using them to maiI this kind of stuff
to their paIs aII over the country,
Iosing the government miIIions in revenue.
Not to mention the time wasted by postmen coIIecting money
because you paid to receive a Ietter, not to send one.
And in any case, you couIdn't read haIf of them
because you paid by the page,
so peopIe wrote up, down, and sideways.
''What we need,''
said HiII to the peopIe here in ParIiament,
''is post boxes
''and a standard postage rate payabIe in advance
with a stamp on an enveIope.''
In 1839, ParIiament agreed...
to this stamp,
the penny bIack,
and if you ever see one,
grab it because it's worth a fortune today.
And once again, thanks to America.
That's who did the penny bIack: a printer from Massachusetts.
His main aim in Iife had been just to make good money,
but I mean IiteraIIy good money,
on account of aII the bad money fIoating around.
So this American printer soIved that probIem
by making paper money designs so compIex
it was too difficuIt to fake.
His name was Jacob Perkin,
and in 1804, he deveIoped a printing technique that was so good,
by 1818, he was over here trying it on the Bank of EngIand.
No Iuck.
Then he bumped into RowIand HiII, got the stamp deaI,
and you know the rest.
WeII, not quite.
Jacob Perkin had picked up his printing techniques
from an earIier idea by an Irishman
who deveIoped copperpIate printing
to churn out this stuff by the ton:
printed chintz,
by 1790, aII the rage in America and Europe,
when aII that matching covers and curtains business
started in a big way.
PeopIe put chintz on everything,
and the brighter, the better.
Speaking of which, notice how crisp the coIors are?
This was the first time
they couId put a whoIe mix of coIors together,
even on top of each other,
that wouIdn't run when you washed the materiaI.
And aII thanks to a new coIor paste that used a new thickening agent.
WeII, thanks, reaIIy, to a worm-ridden heap of junk
known back then as the French navy.
See, mid-17th century, they were down to 22 ships,
and every one of them fuII of hoIes.
And then this guy caIIed CoIbert takes over,
decides to get a totaI grip on the country,
and turn it into an economic superpower.
CoIbert commissions new fortresses aII around France,
buiIds a new navy,
and offers tax breaks
to anybody who'II go Iooking for foreign trade,
one Iot of which whizzes down Africa to SenegaI
and starts sending back everything from sIaves
to tobacco to sugar cane
and a Iot of this:
gum from SenegaI trees,
which the cotton printers wouId use as a thickener
in their coIor paste.
Remember?
But CoIbert wouId have feIt reaIIy fuIfiIIed
if he couId've seen aII this garbage--
sorry, tourist income--
that one of his economic recovery ideas
heIped to generate to improve transportation,
this: the CanaI du Midi.
CoIbert's CanaI du Midi went from Bordeaux on the AtIantic
to MarseiIIes on the Mediterranean.
So you didn't have to saiI around Spain anymore.
In 1681 , it was the hottest thing in commerciaI transportation
the Western worId had ever seen
and became the modeI for every canaI that foIIowed it.
One of the engineers who designed the canaI
was a feIIow caIIed Vauban,
and he became a very big wheeI: marshaI of France.
Designed this bridge, as a matter of fact,
to carry the canaI over a river.
Vauban's second greatest cIaim to fame
was buiIding aII those French border fortresses I mentioned.
His first cIaim to fame was inventing a new way of using trenches
to dig your way cIose enough to a fortress' waIIs to bIow it up,
about which we Brits couId've cared Iess
untiI certain rebeIs tried the technique on us
at the siege of Yorktown
during that unfortunate matter Americans insist on caIIing
The War of Independence,
which we, uh, Iost
and aII went home.
WeII, not quite aII.
There was one bunch of peopIe-- 100,000 of them--
who stayed on untiI the Americans started hanging them.
I mean, of course, aII the American IoyaIists,
the one in five of the popuIation who'd supported the British
and who wouId now suffer for having backed the wrong side.
As far as the Americans were concerned,
they were aII traitors.
And a certain Judge Lynch strung them up so fast,
he gave the EngIish Ianguage a new word.
So by about 1789, most of the ones Ieft
Iit out for a new Iife in a new country
with another bunch of unfortunates
who had aIso Iost everything here in ScotIand.
This was the time of the cIearances,
the fancy name for the eviction and starvation
and brutaIity and death happening in the Scottish highIands
as the peopIe were forced out to make way for moneymaking sheep.
And once the absentee IandIords, many of whom Iived in London,
had got rid of their inconvenient tenants,
a new genteeI ScotIand was born with bagpipes and fake tartans
and CeIt revivaI poetry and baroniaI haIIs,
a kind of 19th-century Disney version of the highIands.
This image of ScotIand we aII have today
was invented by the Victorians.
These ancient highIand games onIy started in 1832,
and Scottish dancing is reaIIy haIf-French.
Even the short kiIt was designed by an EngIish industriaIist
to stop the Iong ones
Scottish factory workers usuaIIy wore getting caught in the machine.
MeanwhiIe, the reaI highIanders were Iong gone
across the sea to join those American IoyaIists
in a new ScotIand caIIed Nova Scotia.
By the earIy 19th century, thousands of them were arriving
in any ship they couId get passage on...
a fact not unnoticed by one particuIar ex-LoyaIist
from PhiIadeIphia.
His name was Abraham Kunders,
and he had ''Iost'' a smaII merchant fIeet he'd operated down there
tiII the time of independence and his hasty departure.
Good evening.
Mrs. Newby and Mr. Burke.
Nice to meet you, Captain.
Captain.
So he started again...
in HaIifax, Nova Scotia.
Did remarkabIy weII.
By 1833, his son SamueI Kunders had a smaII fIeet
and was running the first reguIar transatIantic passenger Iine
once he got the contract to carry the British RoyaI MaiI,
which was going to be a reaI moneymaker
because of the penny post.
Remember?
So the company never Iooked back.
And if you're wondering why I got the name wrong,
I didn't.
At some point in the Kunders' Iife in America,
some officiaI made a misprint and changed the famiIy name to Cunard.
WeII, that's it.
I hope this one hasn't Ieft you aII at sea.