Lew Cowperthwaite
Phenomenal denial
With the various theories surrounding his vanishing while swimming in 1967, Barry Baldwin may well wonder [FT395:69] what became of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt. However, I fear the disappearance of Lew Cowperthwaite the previous year is, sadly, not so much of a mystery. Cowperthwaite was born in the Haymarket area of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1936, emigrating to Australia with his parents and elder brother Thomas in 1950 so his father could take up the position of minister at the newly built Presbyterian church in Ashford, New South Wales. The Cowperthwaite boys became well known for their academic and sporting
prowess, especially Lew, who excelled in football, swimming and rugby.
Lew went on to become a teacher in nearby Armidale and married local girl Marlene Newly. The death of their infant son, Andrew, in 1961 devastated the couple and, by December 1965, Lew’s depression resulted in his sacking by the Department of Education, who stated he was “incapable of undertaking his duties”. Unfortunately, it’s not hard to see how Lew’s story ended a few months later – and it certainly didn’t involve a Chinese submarine or CIA assassination. If any readers have further information on Lew or the Cowperthwaite family, I’d appreciate it greatly.
Lorne Grant
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Gordon Rutter, in his delightful potted history of Flat Earth theory [FT393:42-45], made no mention of one definitive argument for the Earth’s sphericity: the direct correlation between celestial and geographic latitude. As you move from the geographical North Pole to the Equator, the north celestial pole appears to move down from the zenith to the northern horizon. In theory, this could still be accommodated by a hemispherical Earth. The clincher for globularity is that the onward journey south from the Equator comes with the apparent rising over the horizon of a second celestial pole – the southern one. This latter proof is unassailable, but remained theoretical until Columbus’s age. For example, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, that indefatigable Italian humanist chronicler of Spain’s first explorations in the Americas, wrote in his Ocean Decade (9. 2), first published in full in 1511, on the voyage thither by Vicente Yáñez and Arias Pinzón in early 1500:
“When by their reckoning they had sailed 300 leagues in the direction of that wind they say that they lost sight of the arctic pole. At the very moment they noticed it set, a wild storm arose with winds, whirlwinds and seething seas. Yet they continued on their voyage, though in very great danger, always following the same wind, guided by a pole they had now lost from sight, for over 240 leagues. So let those men and the ancients, whether those be philosophers, or poets or cosmographers, discuss whether the equatorial line is habitable or unapproachable. For these maintain that it is inhabited by dense populations, but those ancients write that it is uninhabitable because of the Sun being directly overhead.
“Yet there were some among the ancients who attempted to prove that it was habitable. These sailors on being questioned by me whether they had seen an Antarctic pole say that they have discovered no distinctive star around the southern point like our Arctic star. But they say that they have seen a panorama of stars, different in appearance from ours, and they saw some thick steamy mist on the horizon, which more or less blotted out their view. They maintain that a mound rises in the middle of the Earth – which, until one has gone completely beyond it, stands in the way of seeing the Antarctic pole. But they believe that they have seen constellations of stars which are very different from the stars in our hemisphere.” (tr. G Eatough, Selections from Peter Martyr, Turnhout: Brepols, 1998, p.99)
Spot on, of course, apart from the curious allusion to the vestigial myth of a ‘central mountain’; for more on that, see my recent book On the Origin of Myths in Catastrophic Experience, vol.1, available at lulu.com. Still, to round this off, a pedant could grant the Flat Earthers the concession that the Earth is in fact not spherical: it’s an oblate spheroid.
Marinus van der Sluijs Vancouver, Canada
Re the Flat Earth controversy, it’s interesting to note that, while attention is kept largely focused on possible NASA conspiracies, doctored photos and various clever-sounding technical quibbles, everyone seems to be carefully ignoring a simple fact which would appear to blow the whole thing wide open: the night sky revolves anti-clockwise around Polaris in the north, clockwise around Sigma Octanis in the south, and vertically at the equator, whereas from a flat Earth it would obviously spin the same way whether viewed from Perth, Scotland, or Perth, Australia. Let them get round that one before attempting to replace tried and tested science with a load of half-baked, unsubstantiated assertions.
Roger Wyld
By email
Martin Jenkins makes some easy assumptions regarding Flat Earthers [FT395:74]: that they all believe that the Earth is somehow special, and that they are unique in pursuing a sense of significance. Not everybody derives their sense of cosmic significance from the size or centrality of the body whose surface they inhabit. Why would they? Most people find their significance from their place among other humans. It’s far more likely that Flat Earthers are a product of the intellectual independence engendered by the Internet, a platform that puts all human opinion on a roughly equal footing, as well as threatening people’s sense of uniqueness by giving them a sense of being one among billions.
Rather than checking Flat Earth belief against religious or anti-scientific leanings, it might make more sense to check it against class. How many Flat Earthers are of a class used to being talked down to, and having knowledge dictated to them, by other classes and the ‘official’ systems of education built by them? Perhaps the appeal of being a Flat Earther is simply that of shrugging off all the supports and biases of the ages, and shouldering the intellectual weight of the world? This might apply to quite a few eccentric beliefs. That this leaves people a little shaky is understandable, and though I don’t believe their conclusions, I can’t help admiring their ambition and independent spirit.
Dean Teasdale
Gateshead, Tyne and Wear
I found Richard George’s Forum article on the “roll-off’’ factor [FT394:57] really interesting. I hadn’t heard this term before, but I have often thought about what is behind similar thought processes as I have recognised them both in fortean accounts and on a personal level. It seems people of a certain disposition have to attempt to almost (or completely?) block out what their minds cannot handle. Does this tie in with screen memories?
I am also reminded of that old and much twisted story about 17th century natives not being able to see HMS Endeavour off the east coast of Australia during the first voyage of Captain James Cook. The origin of this story apparently lies with the ship’s botanist Sir Joseph Banks. Was the ship so alien to the native mind that, by some unknown mental process, it was blocked out? Or were the natives too busy and uninterested to pay any attention?
John Hope
Bournemouth, Dorset
1. Duncan Forrester saw this tree man in Lineover Woods, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
2. While identifying fungi in the Swiss Alps last autumn, Jonathan Revett came across this tree face complete with a newly formed “bracket” fungus forming the tongue. “The fungus is Red Banded Polypore Fomitopsis pinicola which is particularly common on dead and dying coniferous trees and was growing in the exact spot to bring this Alpine denizen to life,” he writes.
3. Joe Galvin spotted this friendly wooden character at an Iron Age hill fort site near Boxford in Suffolk.
4. While walking in Queens Park, Glasgow, Scott Wilson saw this “old man in a tree taking a nap” and commented: “Perhaps he is a sleeping Treant, slumbering until Sauron rises again. I thought it best not to disturb him.”