*Montana—Big Sky Country—has become the most magnetic of temptations for landowners big and small. I once fell under the state’s spell and, with a wilderness fantasy born of Thoreau and Norman (A River Runs Through It) Maclean, bought eighty acres of open land on the east bank of the Bitterroot River for $40,000. My neighbors, had I ever been able to afford to build, were Huey Lewis, Christopher Lloyd, and Andie MacDowell. A year later, strapped for cash, I sold the land for a welcome $80,000. Ten years later, I returned and visited the parcel once again: the real estate agent was hesitant to tell me its most recent price: $1.25 million. I wept.

  *The invention of the airplane played havoc with this ancient maxim, and for years cases were brought suggesting that a flying machine crossing above your house constituted a trespass. A famous 1946 case, United States v. Causby, decreed an upper limit to owner exclusivity at 365 feet—one of the reasons that drone fliers nowadays, and out of an abundance of caution, fly their devices above 400 feet, still able to snoop, but in the legal free zone.

  *A German immigrant named Jacob Haish, who first fenced fields in western Illinois with bushes of the formidably spiky orange osage plant, Maclura pomifera, had taken out a patent for barbed metallic wire ten months earlier than Glidden, resulting in a vicious lawsuit that lasted for eight years; Glidden eventually won in the U.S. Supreme Court. Barbed Wire Magazine, published in Kansas to this day, writes extensively about fallout from the celebrated case, and it writes fully and sympathetically of the other soi-disant inventors, including the splendidly named Ichabod Washburn, who turned his invention of a wire-drawing process—once he realized he had missed the barbed-wire boat—into the manufacture of sewing-machine needles.

  *There is, technically, only one lake in Scotland, the Lake of Menteith in Stirlingshire—all other natural bodies of water being lochs. There is a scattering of man-made lakes, including a filigree of water in the Lammermuir Hills called Pressmennan Lake, made in 1819, and the Lake of the Hirsel on the estate of a former British prime minister, Lord Hume.

  *The Old Testament and the writings of Homer contain stories—Noah’s flood a prime example—that first appear in Gilgamesh.

  *The serendipity of dung discovery came about in the east of England when tariffs on Australian wool imports were lifted and it became uneconomical for East Anglian farmers to raise and shear their own flocks of sheep. Those running the arable farms that replaced them found they had bought fields that, unexpectedly, had been amply fertilized by decades of sheep leavings, and flourished in consequence.

  *Sydney Parkinson’s drawings and watercolors were eventually engraved onto copper plates and printed into a thirty-four-volume Florilegium which was published in London between 1980 and 1990. Parkinson never got to appreciate the massive contribution he made to botanical illustration, as he died of dysentery on Endeavour’s way home, between Java and Cape Town. His work was conducted under trying conditions in a cramped shipboard cabin; he complained that while in Tahiti, insects ate most of his paint.

  *The official stated purpose of Cook’s expedition was purely astronomical, to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun—an observation that, if sufficiently accurate, would allow by triangulation a fairly precise determination of the distance between the Earth and her parent star. The detour to Australia was officially only incidental; unofficially, it was the key component of the trip.

  *Ralph Nader, the consumer activist with a vast following, suggested it would kill eight billion, but his arithmetic was later challenged and found sorely wanting.

  *In Ottoman times the donum, like the Greek stremma, was a somewhat flexible measure, initially based on the amount of land that could be ploughed by a team of oxen in a single day. It was later amended to reflect a square of forty paces each side, but paces in Iraq turned out to be very different from those in Palestine. In recent years the donum has been redefined in metric terms and is generally accepted to be one tenth of the area of a hectare, or 1,000 square meters.

  *A Babylonian rabbi often cited in the Talmud, and renowned for his debating skills.

  *A United Nations friend with whom I was staying in Damascus once suggested to me that we go waterskiing in Haifa. The journey—across the tank-infested Golan Heights, and then passing through the substantial border fences into Israel—took less than two hours; after a lunchtime splash in the Mediterranean, we were back home in Syria in ample time for tea.

  *Before the formal establishment of the State of Israel, Zionists used the term Eretz Israel or the Land of Israel, a southern Levantine entity of a traditionally indeterminate size and shape, its dimensions varying according to numberless references in biblical texts, and representing more the Zionist dream of a Jewish state rather than any embordered practicalities. In the quarter-century existence of the Mandate, supporters would call the territory Palestine-EY, meaning Palestine-Eretz Ysrael, conflating their dream with the political realities of the day into a single quasi-national name.

  *To circumvent the Ottoman ban on Jewish immigrants buying land, the first plots for the new city were bought by a Dutch banker and prominent Zionist named Jacobus Kann. His membership in the Dutch aristocracy spared him from some of the initial savagery of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, but he and his wife were eventually moved to Theresienstadt in northern Czechoslovakia, where he died in 1944.

  *The other story demanding Mr. Duranty’s time and attention that April was a big political show trial in Moscow of three Britons, two of whom were sent to jail and the third expelled after being found guilty of spying and sabotage.

  *The article appeared on the “Imperial and Foreign News” page under the headline SOVIET INDUSTRIES: FAILURE OF FIVE-YEAR PLAN. The erudition of the paper’s readers of the day is amply demonstrated by some of the other stories that jostled for space, most under headlines needing no explanation for those readers: THE ORAKZAI QUARREL IN THE TIRAH; THE AFGHAN WAR, SALAMIS DISPUTE SETTLED; and, most cryptic of all, THE KONIGSSTUHL OF RHENS, which referred to the removal of a structure made in 1376—and which had once been used by the Elector of the Holy Roman Empire—to a more prominent site on the cliffs overlooking the River Rhine.

  *Daniel Green, the surgeon on Admiral Perry’s 1853 expedition to Japan, was intrigued by the “peculiar hairy-podded bean, growing upon a branching stem, called commonly Japan pea” and he brought specimens back with him in 1854. American farmers had for sixty years previously been similarly fascinated by the plant’s properties—especially its tolerance to cold and heat and indifferent soil—and began to cultivate these beans as a crop. They were, of course, soybeans, vastly important now to the American farming community, as they had been to Japan since antiquity.

  *An indication of the level of American official fear of a growing Japanese “threat” was the U.S. army’s decision of 1919 to mount a transcontinental expedition by road to see how long it might take to move a large army to the West Coast to meet the challenge of an invasion by a then unidentified “Asiatic enemy.” That supposed foe was Japan, identified by the National War College as a possible threat ever since its unanticipated defeat of Russia in 1905. Suspicion of the role of Japanese farmers in California—who were entirely innocent, as it later turned out—needs perhaps to be viewed in such a wider context.

  *The concentration camps, immeasurably vast and cheaply built, were all sited west of the Mississippi River, well away from the prying eyes of the public and the press. There were two in Arkansas, Jerome and Rohwer; two in Arizona, Gila River and Poston; two in California, Manzanar and Tule Lake; and one each in Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho: Topaz, Heart Mountain, Amache, and Minidoka. respectively. Those of us who have visited all these wretched and forgotten places are unlikey to ever forget their names. But it remains one of the sorrier aspects of American education that the stark facts of the imprisonment of so many American citizens—for no reason other than that they were of Japanese origin—are barely taught in schools today, and that to most people in the United States, the names of the camps and what occurred there are almost wholly unknown.

  *Many others were less fortunate. For example, a lawyer named Takuji Yamashita had a spectacular run of ill fortune. He came to Washington State in 1892, proved a brilliant student at the University of Washington’s new law school in 1902, but could not become a lawyer as he was a noncitizen, and the government refused to grant him citizenship. He and his wife then turned to farming. He found he could not own land for similar race-based reasons, and so persuaded a white neighbor to “own” the strawberry farm on his behalf. The Yamashitas were then sent off to a wartime detention camp and on their release found that, because they hadn’t kept up payments, they had lost their farm entirely. He was compelled to work as a Seattle housekeeper for nine humiliating years before he and his wife returned to Japan in 1954, where he soon thereafter died, aged eighty-four. But there was a happier ending: in 2001 the University of Washington successfully petitioned the state to admit Takuji Yamashita to the bar, posthumously.

  *Usually only two verses are sung in public, the first in Maori, the next the same first verse in its original English, and in that order. Since this convention was started in 1999, it is safe to say that all New Zealand schoolchildren now know the verse that begins with the words “E Ihowā Atua, O ngā iwi mātou rā Āta whakarangona”; most others also know the English “God of Nations at thy feet, In the bonds of love we meet.”

  *So popular was Chinese tea in London that the British East India Company, which had a monopoly in the trade, had run out of metal coin as payment, and in the late eighteenth century was starting to employ opium as a medium of exchange. This infuriated the Peking mandarinate, a development that led to the Opium Wars, the cession to Britain of Hong Kong, and the eventual public humiliation of imperial China. One imagines that the sealskin trade would not have had such consequences.

  *The law’s reciprocal, the Colonial Prisoners (Removal) Act of 1884, allowed prisoners of the empire to be brought back to the United Kingdom. In 1985 a senior British judge traveled to the mid-Atlantic colony of St. Helena to help retrieve an inmate from the tiny Jamestown jail, which was considered too small to hold him. Some 170 years earlier Napoleon Bonaparte had rather larger quarters during his incarceration on the same island, after his Waterloo.

  *What Maoris know as te reo, “the language.” is not dissimilar to Tahitian and other East Polynesian tongues. There was no written version until a polymathic Cambridge linguist, Samuel Lee, devised a comprehensive fifteen-letter orthography in 1820. Almost three hundred Maori words are recorded in today’s English language, most of them signifying varieties of plants, fishes, or birds, but including the pre-rugby-game terror-dance known as the haka, the amiable greeting kia-ora, and, of course, most emblematic of all, the shy and flightless kiwi.

  *Reportedly alcoholics who might otherwise have been retired from the service.

  *The gigantic kauri trees found in the far north of New Zealand ooze a particularly viscous resin which tends to collect into pods or lenticules eventually to be buried many feet down in the earth. Since the gum was much prized for making varnish and in the production of linoleum, a sizable nineteenth-century industry grew up, whereby gum diggers, using eight-foot-long hooked spears, prodded the thick soil for pods of gum, which they would then extract, wash, and send down to Auckland for export. The industry particularly attracted a large number of migrants from Europe’s Dalmatian coast, and to this day being a descendant of Dalmatian gum diggers is a badge of honor in New Zealand’s North Island.

  *The local Tainui tribe had asked that the queen speak her apology, and that she do so on Maori-owned land in Waikato, but Buckingham Palace said no. Her decision instead to sign, in triplicate, the act authorizing the compensation and the apology was said to be the first time in her reign that she had ever signed a law in public. The fact that while doing so she wore her traditional Maori korowai, woven from thousands of feathers, was seen as giving appropriate respect—mana, in Maori—to the occasion.

  *A laird is generally the owner of an estate and has no significance beyond the place that is owned. It is not a hereditary peerage, like a duke or a viscount, and is merely conferred upon purchase and transferred to a new owner upon sale.

  *Their numbers were massively whittled down during the time of the Highland clearances, more notoriously a phenomenon of northern Scotland and discussed in an earlier chapter. The basic thesis of the clearance held that sheep made better and more profitable tenants than crofters, so the major landowners moved humans from their lands—often with brutality and violence—and replaced them with flocks of animals. The displaced crofters headed off either to the cities or, more often, to the Americas—which is what took place for most of the residents of Ulva, now scattered to the four winds.

  *And still more pedantically, Eigg is in fact the third, since after Glendale there came the 1923 gift of most of the islands of Lewis and Harris, in the Outer Hebrides, to their inhabitants, by the soap-making millionaire Lord Leverhulme. The complications of this rather difficult transfer of ownership contrasts, however, with the relative simplicity of the later matters relating to Eigg.

  *Most relevant here, Runciman spent much of his time in Czechoslovakia in the friendly company of ethnic Germans who complained bitterly about Czech land reforms that they claimed were robbing them of their livelihoods—and thus driving them into the hands of the Nazis. His helpmate at the time was the infamous Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a widely bedded Viennese Jew, the wife of a minor and evidently complaisant Austro-Hungarian prince, and a friend of and suspected spy for Hitler. It is more than probable that stories of Runciman’s friendship found their way into dinner table conversation at the Italian-style lodge he built for himself on Eigg, which survives, if somewhat worn out and dilapidated, to this day.

  *The name might sound familiar to those interested in the history of war. Barnes Wallis, his surname differently spelled, was the heroic inventor of the so-called bouncing bomb, famously used for the RAF dam-busting operation against the German Ruhr in May 1943.

  *And had his wife, in a letter written to The Times, name the colony after the great Saharan river that flowed into the Atlantic Ocean through the locally British-run jungles.

  *In his wildly popular polemic Progress and Poverty (1879) the writer and political economist Henry George proposed that all taxes be abolished except for that applied to the potential rental value of unimproved land—what many have since described as the “perfect” tax. Henry George had an enormous following in America in the late nineteenth century, and his funeral in New York in 1897 drew the largest crowds ever then seen in the city. Few present-day economists could ever imagine such a send-off; yet his legacy has never found favor in any advanced country on earth, despite George’s firm belief, supported by great numbers of thinkers, that since land is a near immutable gift of Nature, logic dictates that it is the only possession that should be subject to taxation. Too difficult to administer is the usual argument against.

 

 

  Simon Winchester, Land

 

 

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