In “Marks for the Marketplace: The Curious World of the Trademark,” which appeared in our October, 1977, issue, author Gerald Carson outlined the deadly serious corporate view of those who violate, however innocently, proper usage of trademark names: “Many firms have standard letters ready to be sent when necessary to writers, the distributors that handle their merchandise, the general public, and lexicographers, thanking them politely for their interest in the product but chiding them for sinning against the law of trademarks.”
We prefer the response of the Xerox Corporation, as reflected in the text of one of its recent magazine advertisements:
“Dust was the color of the sky.
“Dust was the color of the town.
“The young sheriff moved toward the railway platform, pausing only to wipe his moist palms on his holsters.
“He watched the Union Pacific engine hurtle around the bend and screech to a clanging, hissing stop. Silently, the Dalton boys swung from the train onto the station platform. Suddenly the sheriff found himself staring down the barrels of three shotguns. The street behind him was empty but for the dust.
“There was no turning for help.
“As his hands crept slowly toward his gun belt he knew he had to say it now or forever hold his peace. A crooked smile played about the corners of his mouth, as he drawled, ‘Boys, I want you to hear me and hear me good. Just remember, that Xerox is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation and, as its brand name, should be used only to identify its products and services.’”
CATALPA TO THE RESCUE
Among the paintings that accompanied the whaler’s diary in our August, 1977, issue was this view of a tethered sperm whale being carved up alongside the New Bedford bark Catalpa. All in a day’s work.
But a more dramatic role played by the Catalpa has been called to our attention by reader William J. Laubenstein (author of The Emerald Whaler, Bobbs-Merrill, 1960). The sight of the ship in our pages, he writes, “brought grand memories to Irish Americans of the older generation. For the Catalpa … tweaked the tail of the British lion as it had never been tweaked before.”
It seems that when the planned Fenian rising of 1865-66 was betrayed in Ireland, seven Irish members of Her Majesty’s forces who had sided with the rebels were sentenced to life in a penal colony at Fremantle on the western coast of Australia. One of the seven-a fiery poet named John Boyle O’Reilly—managed to escape in 1869 and bribe his way aboard a passing Yankee whaler that took him to America. There he eventually became editor of the influential Boston Pilot. But O’Reilly never forgot the six companions he had left behind, and in 1875 he hatched a daring plot to spring them.
With some twenty-five thousand dollars in gold—most of it secretly gathered from Irish immigrants-he hired whaling captain George Anthony to undertake the mission and bought and outfitted the old whaling vessel Catalpa. As she set out from New York for Australia in the spring of 1875, only Anthony knew of the plot; her crew assumed they were undertaking a routine whaling voyage. During the eleven months it took her to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, whaling as she went, a land party journeyed separately to Australia to arrange the escape. Its leader was John J. Breslin, an Irish patriot who specialized in derring-do; earlier, he had snatched Fenian chief James Stephens from a British prison in Dublin itself.
The six captives were alerted, and with the Catalpa waiting sixteen miles offshore, they slipped away from their guards on the morning of April 17, 1876, and rendezvoused with Breslin and his aides. “Ina daring dash through the dense bush,” writes Laubenstein, “the six escapees and their rescuers reached a cove where Captain Anthony waited with a whaleboat.” A storm kept the smaller vessel from reaching the Catalpa for two nights, but she finally made it, the men clambering over the side not long before a pursuing British ship drew alongside and fired across the whaler’s bow.
Anthony ran up the Stars and Stripes and bellowed that he was in international waters; if the British fired on the American flag, he warned, they risked war. “The British sheared off,” Laubenstein continues, “and in August, 1876, the Catalpa landed at New York where her six freed prisoners were welcomed as heroes.”
The stalwart Catalpa was less fortunate; she went out of U.S. registry in 1884 and ended her days as a coal barge in British Honduras.
OKAY-ONCE MORE FROM THE TOP
Ever since “The Star-Spangled Banner” became our national anthem, Americans have been risking damage to their larynxes by straining to meet the musical demands of “o’er the la-and of the freeeee. …” Now, at last, it appears we know who to blame for the torturous notes.
It has long been accepted that the tune to which Francis Scott Key’s words were attached was lifted from “The Anacreontic Song,” a ditty composed about 1779 for the Anacreontic Society, a convivial group of London wits, musicians, and littérateurs. But the authorship of the tune has remained in question. In the July, 1977, issue of the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, however, William Lichtenwanger—a retired official of the Library’s music division—maintained that he had pinned down the culprit. He was, Mr. Lichtenwanger says, John Stafford Smith, an associate of the Anacreontic Society who had been suspected for some time but, until now, never proved to be responsible. Diligently working through the ten volumes of the Recollections and Diaries of Richard John Samuel Stevens, a contemporary Society member, Mr. Lichtenwanger came across a reference to “The Anacreontic Song” which, in Stevens’ words, “Stafford Smith set to music.”
This seems to be pretty solid evidence, but for those who would be willing to run Stafford Smith out of town on a rail, were he alive and available, it should be pointed out in his favor that he was also the author of a collection of compositions called the Fifth Book of Canzonets, Canons, Catches, and Glees, a title for which much must be forgiven him.
JENNY AFLOAT
In chronicling the Jenny Lindomania that gripped America during the soprano’s triumphal U.S. tour in 1850-51 (our October, 1977, issue), we featured an array of colorful period objects—from fans and paper dolls to five-cent cigarsadorned with her name and face.
Now reader Anthony Peluso of Yonkers, New York, reminds us of another, grander tribute to the Swedish Nightingale. In August, 1851, Jenny and her entourage slipped aboard Captain Albert DeGroot’s Hudson River steamboat, the Reindeer, supposedly incognito. But according to the Democratic Journal of Kingston, New York, the other passengers immediately recognized her: “The excitement was very great, and for a part of the passage Capt. DeGroot tendered her his private saloon. … In grateful appreciation of the courtesies extended to her, Jenny Lind, upon her arrival at Albany, presented Capt. DeGroot with an elegant diamond breast pin.”
Smitten by Jenny, as so many other men had been, DeGroot named one of the finest vessels in his fleet for her, and had its paddle box decorated with her curiously grim countenance. This view of the vessel was drawn by the captain’s brother-inlaw, James Bard, who is the subject of Mr. Peluso’s recent book, J & J Bard Picture Painters (Hudson River Press, 1977). The author says the book is the “result of a love affair” with Bard’s work that began after he read Oliver Jensen’s article “Side-Wheels and Walking Beams” in our August, 1961, issue.
A PHANTOM LOCOMOTIVE
In a caption accompanying “The Most Extraordinary and Astounding Ad- venture of the Civil War” in our December, 1977, issue, we essayed a description of the Confederate engine” … Yankee, one of the three locomotives commandeered for the chase. …” As a number of readers have pointed out, neither the article nor any evidence known to man suggests the existence of the Yankee; the locomotive in question was the Texas. Lapsus gratuitus!
NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT
When John Trumbull, the celebrated artist of the American Revolution, was living in London in 1789, he received this pleasant message from an acquaintance in Paris: “If he [William Short] goes, would you like his office of private secretary? It’s duties consist almost solely in copying papers, and were you to do this yourself it would only occupy now and then one of your evenings: and if you did not chuse to do it yourself, you can hire it for so many sous a sheet. … The salary is 300 pounds sterling a year which is paid by the public. I have given Mr. Short his lodgings and board, and should do the same to you with great pleasure. I think it will not take a moment of your time from your present pursuit. Perhaps it might advantage that by transferring it for a while to Paris, and perhaps it may give you an opportunity of going to Italy; as your duties performed by another during your absence would cost a very little part of your salary. Think of this proposition, my dear Sir, and give me your answer as soon as you can decide to your satisfaction. …”
The writer of this “proposition” was Thomas Jefferson, then United States minister to France—a man not usually given to regarding a public office as a public trough, yet withal a realist and, obviously, a generous friend. Trumbull was never to enjoy the proffered plum, however: William Short—perhaps because he had fallen madly in love with the young wife of an amiable duke, or perhaps because Jefferson had made him realize the remarkable merits of his positionstayed on.
