It’s one of many, many travel firms that have fallen by the wayside, in this case in 1926, when it was acquired by Matson Navigation Company of Honolulu.
However, the Oceanic Steamship Company had enjoyed a good run.
Founded in 1881 on Maui in the Kingdom of Hawaii by ambitious entrepreneur John D. Spreckels and several other members of the Spreckels family, the company operated as a subsidiary of a holding company, Wm. G. Irwin and Co. The Spreckels raised sugarcane, from which they extracted raw sugar and, using the ships of their own Oceanic Steamship Company, shipped most of it to San Francisco for refining and eventual distribution throughout the western United States. (In case you’re wondering, the Spreckels owned the city’s sugar refineries as well.) The company was apparently the first to schedule runs between the islands and San Francisco on a regular semimonthly basis.
Having replaced its original fleet of sailing ships with newer, faster steamships, Oceanic soon branched out into carrying freight, passengers, and mail, this last having long been a monopoly of a rival firm, Oceanic Pacific Mail.
In August 1898, the United States annexed the Kingdom, and, in 1906, the new territory’s second governor, G.R. Carter, had this to say in his Report of the Governor of the Territory of Hawaii to the Secretary of the Interior: “The Oceanic Steamship Company operates four steamers on the Honolulu run, i.e., the Sierra, 6,200 tons; Sonoma, 6,200 tons; Ventura, 6,200 tons, and Alameda, 3,200 tons. The first three steamers maintain a twenty-one day service between San Francisco and Sydney [Australia], stopping regularly at Honolulu, Pago Pago [Samoa], and Auckland [New Zealand]. These boats have accommodation for 200 first-class and 100 second-class passengers. The steamship Alameda of this line plies between San Francisco and Honolulu only. The round trip, including stays in port, consumes twenty-one days, dates of sailing being intermediate with those of the thru steamers.”
Oceanic eventually owned 17 ships, and was hailed at the time of its sale to Matson Navigation in 1926 by the New York Times as “one of the pioneers in transpacific trade.” The pioneer continued to sail under the name Oceanic for the rest of the century.
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Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx, c. 1875
Grove Koger
If you look up the meaning of “sphinx,” you’ll learn that (according to Britannica) it’s a “mythological creature with a lion’s body and a human head,” and that it’s “an important image in Egyptian and Greek art and legend.” Britannica adds that the Muses had taught the legendary “winged sphinx of Boeotian Thebes” a riddle, and that the creature, in turn, demanded to know of everyone it encountered, on pain of death, What creature begins four-footed, becomes two-footed, and ends up three-footed?
After who knows how many deaths, Oedipus provided the answer, and the sphinx killed herself.
Writing (with margarita Guerrero) in his 1967 Book of Imaginary Beings, the great Jorge Luis Borges noted that Greek historian Herodotus referred to the Egyptian sphinx as androsphinx (“man sphinx”), thus distinguishing it from the Greek sphinx, which is female. He adds that the Greek sphinx is in the form of a lion, with wings and a woman’s breasts. (For a time, I considered calling today’s post “Sexing the Sphinx.”)
Valère Bernard, Sphinx, 1896
Most sphinxes in Western art do seem to be feminine, although various features come and go if you look for visual representations, as I have recently. Nevertheless, they add up to a disquietingly bizarre creature that looks right. The parts really do seem to fit together.
The world’s most famous sphinx is undoubtedly the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt, which was created about four-and-a-half millennia ago by altering an enormous limestone outcropping. Egyptologists believe that it represents either the pharaoh Khufu (r. 26th century BCE), who built the Great Pyramid of Giza, or one of his sons, Djedefre or Khafre. It’s been the subject of numerous paintings, almost all of which pay tribute to its size and power. Elihu Vedder’s painting at the top of today’s post manages both of those aspects, while suggesting its mystery as well.
Gustave Moreau, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1864
There are very few appearances of the sphinx in literature. As far as Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex goes, the creature’s encounter with Oedipus has already occurred before the play begins. More interesting to me, in any case, is an 1895 story by M(atthew) P(hipps) Shiel, “Huguenin’s Wife.” In this work, the narrator has traveled to the Greek island of Delos to meet his old friend Huguenin, who appears to have gone mad. The man had been married to a woman named Andromeda, a woman who had spoken of the “eternal mutations prepared for the spirit of man” and of the “limitations of animal forms in the actual world.” She had insisted, instead, “that the spirit of an extraordinary and original man, disembodied, should and must re-embody itself in a correspondingly extraordinary and original form.” And, she insists, “‘such forms do really exist on the earth, but the God, willing to save the race from frenzy, hides them from the eyes of common men.’”
Having struck his wife at the bizarre remark, Huguenin has inadvertently killed her, and yet something has taken her place, and Huguenin is certain that his own life is “intimately bound up with the life of the being he [has] stayed to maintain.” Then, finally, we see that being. “For if I say,” says our narrator, “that it was a cheetah—of very large size … its fat and boneless body swathed in a thick panoply of dark grey feathers, vermilion-tipped—with a similitude of miniature wings on its back—with a wide, vast, downward-sweeping tail like the tail of a bird of paradise,—how by such words can I image forth all the retching nausea, all the bottomless hate and fear, with which I looked?”
Georg von Rosen, The Sphinx, 1907
Has Huguenin’s wife become a sphinx? Or has she become something more like a griffin, that mythological creature with the body and tail of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle? Something between the two? It’s hard to say, but I think it fits well enough in our discussion. Shiel’s prose is as frenzied as Huguenin himself is, and it’s not to everyone’s taste, but it matches the many visual representations of sphinxes, several of which I’ve included in today’s post.
In Jean Cocteau’s 1934 play La Machine Infernale (The Infernal Machine), the Sphinx actually tells Oedipus the answer to the riddle before formally asking it. When Oedipus replies with the correct answer, she can then be allowed to die. In other words, she has chosen to commit suicide, an act that she has longed for. Cocteau’s vision of the sphinx is as rational as Shiel’s is irrational, and the two neatly bookend the range of what might be said about the creature.
One of Palma’s sphinxes
Maggie and I have actually admired four statues of sphinxes in Palma de Majorca, although these are far more restrained than the painted representations I’ve run across. I believe that all of the latter qualify as symbolist works. Unlike realism, symbolism dealt with dreams and obsessions, and, based on the evidence that I’ve found, the movement was an ideal vehicle for representations of sphinxes.
And, by the way, the answer to the sphinx’s famous riddle is man, who crawls on four limbs as an infant, walks on two legs as a mature individual, and must use a cane or stick in his or her old age.
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Sealand in 2005. Reproduced courtesy of the Bureau of Internal Affairs, Principality of Sealand, and Wikimedia Commons
Grove Koger
The chances are that you’ve never heard of Sealand. But I’ve been reading about the place recently, and here’s what I’ve learned.
Sealand is properly known as the Principality of Sealand, and exists on (or should I say “in”?) a seafort off the mouth of Britain’s Thames River. Seaforts are military installations that were designed by Guy Maunsell (1884-1961) and erected by Britain in the estuaries of the Thames and Mersey rivers during World War II to guard against German air raids and the deployment of mines.
Paddy Roy Bates, 1977
The installations were abandoned after the war, but one, Roughs Tower, was later occupied by adventurer Paddy Roy Bates and operated as a pirate radio station. Like the other forts, Roughs Tower was outside Britain’s territorial limits at the time, and although British authorities made several efforts to seize it from Bates and his family, the efforts were eventually abandoned as being unproductive.
The saga of Sealand is recounted at some length in Dylan Taylor-Lehman’s 2020 book Sealand: The True Story of the World’s Most Stubborn Micronation and Its Eccentric Royal Family (Diversion Books).
Taylor-Lehman refers to Sealand as a “micronation,” and explains that the term is distinct from “microstate,” which is “a tiny country recognized worldwide with membership in international organizations.” As examples of the latter, he cites Andorra, Lichtenstein, and Niue. A micronation, he says, “is generally defined as as an invented country within the territory of an established nation whose boundaries typically go unrecognized on the world stage.” They’ve been declared “for reasons serious and tongue-in-cheek,” but, as he points out, “Sealand was founded on territory that was in genuinely international waters and has endured since 1967. All the while, the Sealanders have fought to keep these claims alive in ways unmatched by most other micronations.”And, on top of everything else, we can think of Sealand as a very small island, or at least as something like an island.
I’ve visited some pretty small islands, here and there (as well as Lichtenstein), and I can testify that their appeal is real, at least to some. I’m reminded in this regard of D.H. Lawrence, who wrote a cruel short story, “The Man Who Loved Islands,” about just such a person. The story’s protagonist—Cathcart—was modeled on a real individual, fellow writer Compton Mackenzie, who was attracted to islands. Mackenzie had spent a few years with his wife on the Italian island of Capri during the second decade of the twentieth century, and went on to buy and live on, successively, two small islands in the English Channel, Herm and Jethou. Subsequently, he made his home on the Scottish island of Barra. So intense was his interest in such things that he became known as a “collector” of islands—which strikes me as a pretty good thing.In Lawrence’s story, however, Cathcart’s moves to increasingly small islands are indicative of growing mental illness.
But to get back to Sealand … Its online site explains that it “was founded as a sovereign Principality on a military fortress,” and that its national motto is “E Mare Libertas”—“From the Sea, Freedom.” It has its own flag, passports, currency, stamps, and even its own Facebook page. What more could you ask? Perhaps a noble title? Well, that can be arranged. A knighthood, for instance, goes for $149.99, for which you’ll receive a digital, printable deed of title. There are classic and premium grades of knighthood as well, the latter of which comes with a title deed personally signed by Paddy Roy Bates’ son and current sovereign, Prince Michael of Sealand.
If you’d like to learn more about the entity from which you might be procuring your knighthood, you can watch a 60 Minutes episode about the principality here.
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“All those notes,” American composer Aaron Copland once remarked of Sergei Rachmaninov’s major compositions, “and to what end?”
Copland’s cutting remark is a lesson in the vagaries of reputation. In the third decade of the 21st century, I’d wager that the American’s once-bright star has dimmed among classical music listeners, while Rachmaninov’s has grown brighter.
And yet, there are a lot of notes in Rachmaninov’s music, cascades of them, along with sweeping, sonorous melodies. It’s music to be experienced emotionally, music that looks back wistfully to another era. Rachmaninov himself wrote that he felt “like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.” He had, he said, “made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today,” but it would not come to him. “I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new.”
The composer, who had been plagued in his younger years with nearly debilitating self-doubts, was, once more, being hard on himself. He was familiar with jazz and enjoyed listening to Paul Whiteman (celebrated as the “King of Jazz”) and his Palais Royal Orchestra. And he admired George Gershwin’s famous Rhapsody in Blue, which Whiteman debuted in 1924. And, unlikely as it seems, he liked motorboats and fast cars.I’ve always imagined Rachmaninov as being somewhat dour, but apparently I’ve been wrong.
Born in 1873 in western Russia, Rachmaninov had initially made efforts to accommodate himself to his country’s 1917 revolution, but soon fled with his family. And although portions of his fourth and final piano concerto were apparently written in 1917, the first published version appeared, nearly a decade after the revolution, in 1926.
According to Patrick Piggott’s “BBC Music Guides” study Rachmaninov Orchestral Music (U Washington P, 1974), the work’s first performance took place in Philadelphia. However, the composer’s (and, apparently, the public’s) dissatisfaction with it led to his revising it and republishing it two years later. Yet another revision followed in 1941. This final version is tighter than the preceding versions, and is the one most often played. And, I’d argue, it’s the equal of the more popular second and third concertos. You can watch Anna Fedorova performing it here with the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie conducted by Marzena Diakun. However, if you’re curious, you can listen to the first version on YouTube here, and the second here.
What’s old may grow new again, and “all those notes” now sing louder than Copland’s do.
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