How to escape from a T-Rex? Just zig-zag
JUST imagine: you have access to a time machine and can travel back 70 million years to the age of the dinosaurs. Amidst the very changed landscape you will see many astonishing creatures, long since vanished from the Earth.
You will see a Tyrannosaurus rex, the most fearsome of all predators. ‘Unfortunately,’ as Cassidy puts it, ‘it will see you too’. Can you possibly outrun it? The counter-intuitive answer is, ‘Yes’.
For many reasons, the T-Rex was not built primarily for speed. As long as you are fit, can run at around 12mph and zig-zag across the terrain, you stand a chance of escaping the lumbering beast behind you. (Not, however, if the T-Rex is a teenager. They have a top speed of 33mph.)
This is the first of the thought experiments Cassidy conducts as he considers how a time traveller, with the benefits of hindsight and modern science, might survive some of history’s greatest catastrophes. Quite a few of them involve the rudimentary technique of simply running away.
What should you do if you are in Pompeii in 79AD when Vesuvius erupts? Start running. It may seem a better idea to shelter from the falling ash, but it isn’t. Just get out of the city as fast as you can. Don’t head for the beach, though. Archaeologists have found a large group of bodies in nearby Herculaneum belonging to people who’d done just that.
If you run from Pompeii to Naples, 21km away, you stand a chance of escaping. Although it’s difficult not to agree with the volcanologist whose advice Cassidy sought on the best way to survive an erupting volcano. ‘Don’t live near one!’ he said.
Of course, there are plenty of disasters you simply can’t outrun. A swift turn of pace was not much use during the Black Death. Records suggest that the bubonic plague may have killed half the population of Europe in the late 1340s.
The best advice for a time traveller landing in London in 1349 is, surprisingly, not to flee to the country. Chances of survival were actually better in a city than in a village. Most importantly, don’t listen to anything physicians tell you. They know nothing. They may advocate lancing the black buboes on your body, but this will
just cause extra pain. Stranger remedies such as placing a chicken’s genitals on the swellings will prove as useful as they sound.
Several of Cassidy’s chapters cover disasters at sea, where there is simply nowhere to run. Famously, Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage of 1519-22 was the first circumnavigation of the world. Of the 260 sailors and five ships that departed Seville, only a single ship and 18 sailors returned.
Magellan himself was not among them: he was killed in the Philippines. For the time traveller aboard Magellan’s ship, the greatest threat to survival is a deeply unpleasant disease new to Europeans — scurvy.
The officers on the voyage have supplies of quince jam. Get hold of some of that. Contemporaries enjoyed it for its sugar content, but it also contains the then-undiscovered vitamin C, enough to save you from scurvy. Other chapters cover a range of threats from the past. They include the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. (Advice: Don’t stay outside. ‘The only place more dangerous than inside a wobbly building is beside one.’)
One of the most intriguing is devoted to the Donner Party, a wagon train of American pioneers travelling to California in 1846, who took a wrong turn and were trapped, starving and snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains. (Advice: Don’t be squeamish about eating your companions once they have died.)
Cassidy claims his book is ‘an entirely serious attempt to guide a visitor through our planet’s greatest catastrophes and adventures’, but How To Survive History is more a fun exercise in ‘What If?’ As such, it’s a very enjoyable read.