The mysterious Mr. Zedzed, the wickedest man in the world

Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, better known as Sir Basil Zaharoff: arsonist, bigamist and pimp, arms dealer, honorary knight of the British Empire, confidant of kings, and all-round international man of mystery.

Late in November 1927, an elderly Greek man sat in his mansion in Paris and tended a fire. Every time it flickered and threatened to die, he reached to one side and tossed another bundle of papers or a leather-bound book into the grate. For two days the old man fed the flames, at one point creating such a violent conflagration that his servants worried he would burn the whole house down. By the time he had finished, a vast pile of confidential papers, including 50 years’ worth of diaries that recorded every detail of a most scandalous career, had been turned to ash. Thus the shadowy figure whom the press dubbed “the Mystery Man of Europe” ensured that his long life would remain, for the most part, an impenetrable enigma.

Few men have acquired so scandalous a reputation as did Basil Zaharoff, alias Count Zacharoff, alias Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, known to his intimates as “Zedzed.” Born in Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps in 1849, Zaharoff was a brothel tout, bigamist and arsonist, a benefactor of great universities and an intimate of royalty who reached his peak of infamy as an international arms dealer—a “merchant of death,” as his many enemies preferred it.

In his prime, Zaharoff was more than a match for the notorious Aleister Crowley in any contest to be dubbed the Wickedest Man in the World.  Still remembered as the inventor of the Systeme Zaharoff—a morally bankrupt sales technique that involved a single unscrupulous arms dealer selling to both parties in a conflict he has helped to provoke—he made a fortune working as a super-salesman for Vickers, the greatest of all British private arms firms, whom he served for 30 years as “or General Representative abroad.” He expressed no objection to, and indeed seemed rather to enjoy, being referred to as “the Armaments King”…

This week’s essay for Past Imperfect is more original than most. I’ve been fascinated by Zaharoff ever since taking Clive Trebilcock’s compelling special subject course, “Government, industry and the arms race: Britain 1890-1914″ at college in 1983-4, and would occasionally come across tantalising references to him – invariably in extraordinary circumstances – while researching my PhD thesis on British submarine policy in the years 1853-1918.

It’s only now, however, with the advent of readily searchable digital archives, that it begins to be possible to track the sensational career he took such great trouble to obscure. And with good reason, it transpires. I’d dearly love to be able to plunge into the Russian, Greek, Ottoman, Spanish and indeed Paraguayan and Argentinian archives in search of traces of him there, but here, in the meantime, are the first real details of Zedzed’s murky career as an arsonist-cum-bigamist-cum-confidence man in the 1870s and 1880s. Oh, and the fruits of fresh research into his exploitation of beautiful Russian prima ballerinas with bedroom access to Grand Dukes – not to mention his astonishing activities during World War I. The latter explains one mystery, at least: how by 1920 the merchant of death and one time brothel tout could (and invariably did) introduce himself as “Sir Basil.”

The Monster of Glamis

Glamis Castle in the 18th century, shortly before its "mystery" began.

“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.”

That awful secret was once the talk of Europe. From perhaps the 1840s until 1905, the Earl’s ancestral seat at Glamis Castle, in the Scottish lowlands, was home to a “mystery of mysteries”—an enigma that involved a hidden room, a secret passage, solemn initiations, scandal, and shadowy figures glimpsed by night on castle battlements.

The conundrum engaged two generations of high society until, soon after 1900, the secret itself was lost. One version of the story holds that it was so terrible that the 13th Earl’s heir flatly refused to have it revealed to him. Yet the mystery of Glamis (pronounced “Glams”) remains, kept alive by its association with royalty (the heir was grandfather to Elizabeth II) and by the fact that at least some members of the Bowes-Lyon family insisted it was real.

This celebrated historical mystery seems to be largely forgotten now, but as late as the 1970s it was chilling new generations as a staple of numerous ghost books. Come to think of it, paperback compilations of old ghost stories seem to have gone the way of the dodo as well, but those crumbly Armada books used to frighten me when I was young. Anyway, you can read the unexpurgated story over at Past Imperfect.

[This is a fully revised, expanded and updated account of a mystery first discussed here, featuring the fruits of much subsequent research.]

Nice things to say about Attila the Hun

An 1894 engraving of Attila from Horne's Great Men and Famous Women, adapted from an antique medal. In depicting Attila with horns and goatish physiognomy, the engraver stressed the diabolical aspects of his character.

He called himself flagellum Dei, the scourge of God, and even today, 1,500 years after his blood-drenched death, his name remains a byword for brutality. Ancient artists placed great stress on his inhumanity, depicting him with goatish beard and devil’s horns. Then as now, he seemed the epitome of an Asian steppe nomad: ugly, squat and fearsome, lethal with a bow, interested chiefly in looting and in rape.

His real name was Attila, King of the Huns, and even today the mention of it jangles some atavistic panic bell deep within civilized hearts…

Is that enough, though, for us to damn the Huns and their leader as nothing but barbarians? And, if it is, how can we explain why the terrible Attila command such loyalty—and why, in death, was he so mourned?

This week’s Smithsonian essay takes a fresh look at the barbarian’s barbarian, and, while not exactly recommending that time travellers head for the Hun capital, finds at least a few things to say in Attila’s favour.

Alone against Antarctica

The last photo of Mawson's Far Eastern Party, taken when they left the Australasian Antarctic Party's base camp on November 10, 1912. By January 10, 1913, two of the three men would be dead, and expedition leader Douglas Mawson would find himself exhausted, ill and still more than 160 miles from the nearest human being.

For some it is the wind; for some, the terrible cold. For others, it is the endless, howling blankness of the landscape that drains resolve, or the blinding glare of sun on fresh-laid snow, or the week-long blizzards that pin intruders inside tents that groan under the weight of drifts of snow. Not even the strongest, fittest, hardiest groups– intensively trained, exhaustively equipped and painstakingly acclimatized–can be certain of escaping with their lives from a journey through the hostile wilderness of Antarctica. Even today, with advanced foods, and radios, and insulated clothing, a journey on foot across these freezing wastes is the harshest of all tests that a human being can be asked to endure. A hundred years ago, it was far, far worse. Then, wool clothing absorbed snow and damp. High energy food came in an unappetizing mix of rendered fats called pemmican. Worst of all, extremes of cold pervaded everything; Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who sailed with Captain Scott’s doomed South Pole expedition of 1910-13, recalled that all his teeth, “the nerves of which had been killed, split to pieces” in temperatures that plunged as low as -77 degrees Fahrenheit. Cherry-Garrard survived to write an account of his adventures, a book he called The Worst Journey in the World. But even his appalling Antarctic trek–made in total darkness in the depths of the Southern winter–was not quite so horrifying as the desperate journey faced one year later by the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson, an epic that has gone down in the annals of polar exploration as perhaps the most terrible ever undertaken in Antarctica…

It seems a fitting moment  to revisit Mawson’s story – a century on and mere hours before Siberian winds are scheduled to sweep in and turn London into a mini-Antarctica, for a few days at least. So settle in for an astounding tale of endurance at Past Imperfect now, but be warned: post features horrible deaths in bottomless crevasses and the hideous effects of Vitamin A overdoses on the scrotum.

The most terrible tunnel

Laborers working at the face of the Thames Tunnel were protected by Marc Brunel's newly-invented "Shield"; behind them, other gangs hurried to roof the tunnel before the river could burst in. Nineteenth century lithograph.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the port of London was the busiest in the world. Cargoes that had traveled thousands of miles, and survived all the hazards of the sea, piled up on the wharves of Rotherhithe—only for their owners to discover that the slowest, most frustrating portion of their journey often lay ahead of them. Consignments intended for the southern (and most heavily populated) parts of Britain had to be heaved onto creaking ox carts and hauled through the docklands and across London Bridge, which had been built in the 12th century and was as cramped and impractical as its early date implied. By 1820, it had become the center of the world’s largest traffic jam.

It was a situation intolerable to a city with London’s pride, and it was clear that if private enterprise could build another crossing closer to the docks, there would be a tidy profit to be made in tolls. Another bridge was out of the question—it would deny sailing ships access to the Pool of London—and ambitious men turned their thoughts to driving a tunnel beneath the Thames instead. This was not such an obvious idea as it might appear. Although demand for coal was growing fast as the industrial revolution hit high gear, working methods remained primitive. Tunnels were dug by men wielding picks in sputtering candlelight.

The epic struggle to claw out the first tunnel ever dug beneath a major river takes in the brilliance of Brunel pere, bone-rot and the bends, high-pressure quicksand, death by drowning in raw sewage, and one of the most important technological innovations of the early nineteenth century. You can read the full and filthy details in this week’s Smithsonian essay.

The Christmas Truce

Riflemen Andrew and Grigg (center)—British troops from London—during the Christmas Truce with Saxons of the 104th and 106th Regiments of the Imperial German Army.

Even at the distance of a century, no war seems more terrible than World War I. In the four years between 1914 and 1918, it killed or wounded more than 25 million people–peculiarly horribly, and (in popular opinion, at least) for less apparent purpose than did any other war before or since. Yet there were still odd moments of joy and hope in the trenches of Flanders and France, and one of the most remarkable came during the first Christmas of the war, a few brief hours during which men from both sides on the Western Front laid down their arms, emerged from their trenches, and shared food, carols, games and comradeship.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 may be one of the best-known – indeed fondly-remembered – events of the Great War, but it still has its mysteries. Why was it almost entirely confined to British and German troops, for instance? And, most compelling of all, what exactly was the score when teams from the two sides met to play football in Nomansland?

The answers to these and other questions can be found in this week’s essay at the Smithsonian’s site.

The great tea race

Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926.

Captain John Keay, master of the crack new British clipper ship Ariel, strode across his ship’s deck and gazed with mounting frustration at the scene unfolding before him.

The evening was not turning out as he had hoped. Keay had triumphed over his fellow-captains in securing the first cargo of tea to come on the market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866 – 560 tons of first and second pickings, freighted at the high price of £7 a ton: the very finest leaves available. The cargo had been floated out to him in lighters, packed in more than 12,000 heavy tea chests, and highly-skilled stevedores had sweated to stow it all securely away below decks in just four days. As a result, Ariel had weighed anchor at 5pm on the evening of 28 May, the first tea clipper to sail for London that season. She was a brand new ship, clean-lined and comely. “A perfect beauty,” Keay recalled, “to every nautical man who saw her; in symmetrical grace and proportion of hull, spars, sails, rigging and finish she satisfied the eye and put all in love with her without exception. Very light airs gave her headway, and I could trust her like a thing alive in all evolutions. In fact she could do anything short of speaking.” There was nothing to be said at present, though – nothing polite, anyway. Ariel‘s captain had been unlucky with his tugs; the paddle steamer Island Queen, hired to take his clipper in tow, lacked the power to carry her across the bar of the Min River against a falling tide. Stranded in the river for the night, Keay and his crack crew were forced to lie at anchor and watch as their rivals completed their own hurried loading and started in pursuit.

Ariel was the fleetest vessel of her time; flying the astounding total of more than 26,000 square feet of canvas, she was capable of reaching speeds of 16 knots, far faster than contemporary steamers. But the advantage that she held over the other clippers crowded in the port was only minimal, and that evening her rival Fiery Cross came down the river towed by a more powerful tug, edged her way into clear water, and set a course east across the China Sea. Keay was still negotiating the bar next morning with the help of the lackadaisical Island Queen when two other fast clippers, Serica and Taeping, appeared alongside him. The tea race of 1866 – the greatest and most exciting in the history of the China trade ­– was under way.

This week’s essay over at Past Imperfect takes a look at the most romantic years of the sailing ship era, the pinnacle of sailing ship design – and the closest fought race between two great ships and two driven captains that there has ever been. It was a race won by 10 minutes after 97 days at sea, a margin of victory that works out at 7/1000ths of one percent…

China’s socialist emperor

Wang Mang, first and last emperor of China's Xin Dynasty, went down fighting amid his harem girls as his palace fell in 23 A.D.

When the rebels broke into his palace, Wang was in the imperial harem, surrounded by his three Harmonious Ladies, nine official wives, 27 handpicked “beauties” and their 81 attendants. He had dyed his white hair in order to look calm and youthful. Desperate officials persuaded him to retire with them to a high tower surrounded by water in the center of the capital. There, a thousand loyalists made a last stand before the armies of the revived Han, retreating step by step up twisting stairs until the emperor was cornered on the highest floor. Wang was slain late in the afternoon, his head severed, his body torn to pieces by soldiers seeking mementos, his tongue cut out and eaten by an enemy. Did he wonder, as he died, how it had come to this—how his attempts at reform had inflamed a whole nation? And did it strike him as ironic that the peasants he had tried to help—with a program so seemingly radical that some scholars describe it as socialist, even “communistic”—had been the first to turn against him?

Ruling over the Chinese empire soon after the birth of Christ, the usurper Wang Mang earned the eternal enmity of imperial historians not only by overthrowing the centuries-old Han Dynasty, but also by instituting a series of radical reforms. Wang nationalised land and divided it up into equal plots for distribution to the peasantry, abolished slavery, made loans to the traditionally uncreditworthy, and recalled and reissued the national currency, ruining China’s rich in order to enrich the poor. But did all this make Wang a revolutionary socialist – or simply a good Confucian?

Check out the historical debate in this week’s essay at the Smithsonian’s Past Imperfect blog.

On hidden history

Joseph Mitchell

David Blackbourn

The Yellow Kid Weil

Trebitsch Lincoln

Jan van Leiden

“The best stories from history lie beyond the margins of textbooks, says the historian. He tells us about five extraordinary tales from the past, from visions of the Virgin Mary to the golden age of American con artist.”

Here’s the text of a long interview that I gave to the brilliant The Browser site about ‘hidden history’ – what it is, what bits of it are most worth reading, and why we should care. I’m pretty happy with how it came out, and if you like the sort of stories featured in this blog and are looking for some recommendations for further reading, it’s not a bad place to start.

Will you start by telling me what you mean by “hidden history”?

For me, it’s the history that exists beyond the margins and the textbooks and what we normally consider to be history: George Washington, Henry VIII, Hitler. I have the capacity to be interested in pretty much all history because it’s all about us being human. But I’m most interested in stuff no one else is interested in – I really like knowing stuff that other people have missed out on. All the books I’ve recommended are about periods and episodes in history that are little known but I find peculiarly fascinating. I think that’s because they are all, ultimately, about the extremes of human experience. We can learn a lot about ourselves as human beings by seeing how we react in instances where we are confronted by extremes – whether they are economic, as in my book Tulipomania [about the 17th century tulip market in Holland], or life-threatening, as in Batavia’s Graveyard [about a Dutch East India company ship that was shipwrecked in 1629].

And all these books you’ve chosen, as well as your own, are very much about the individuals and their stories?

Yes, I’m interested in the ordinary people of history. One of the things I try to do when I write is to dignify them by showing a bit of interest in their lives and what happened to them, rather than treating them as if they’re another disposable number, which is how, quite often, they were treated in life. All these books I’ve chosen have a similar sort of approach. For example, Joseph Mitchell is renowned for taking seriously people who were very much at the margins of New York society.

And one of the things I like about Batavia’s Graveyard is that it’s really wonderful at helping you, the reader, imagine what people’s lives were like in the past – their surroundings. At the beginning, I really felt like I was in 1620s Holland.

It’s interesting that what people find memorable are not just the hideous themes of murder and mayhem on this tiny island where they end up, but also the horrible conditions on the voyage on the way out. People remember things like the ships’ bread with three different sorts of insects living in it. Because what happens is you project yourself – you wonder, “How would I have coped?” That’s one of the things I do: I try to allow people that entry into the past. Again, looking at the books I’ve chosen, they are all good at doing that, at giving you a feel of, “How on earth would I have handled incredible situations?”

Santa Claus Smith

A Depression-era hobo–one of thousands who traveled the roads and rails of the United States during the 1930s.

For six years – from 1934 until 1940 – an elderly tramp nicknamed Santa Claus Smith toured ceaselessly throughout the United States, venturing as far north as Connecticut and as far west as Los Angeles while spending the majority of his time in the south. He told the men and women he encountered that his real name was “John S. Smith of Riga, Latvia, Europe.” With his long white beard, kindly face and dignified bearing, Smith made a lasting impression on hundreds of the people he met.

How do we know so much about such a transient figure? Because Santa Claus Smith believed in paying his way. Whether he was begging a lift from a trucker, a meal from a farmer’s wife or just a nickel from a pretty girl sitting in a parked car, Smith invariably rewarded those who helped him by pulling sheaves of greasy brown paper from his pack and writing out cheques – extraordinarily generous cheques – to thank them for their kindness.

Paying as little as $90 for a “good, hot lunch” cooked by a preacher’s wife in Terre Haute, Indiana, and as much as $600,000 for a hamburger cooked for him by a waitress in New Iberia, Louisiana, Santa Claus Smith left a trail of baffled, hopeful Depression-era Americans wondering two things: was he really rich? And were the cheques he wrote them good?

Find out the answers in this week’s Smithsonian essay here.