Animals have used their sense of smell in a myriad of ways that have fascinated humans in the European past and continue to fascinate them today.
Birds provide an instructive example.
We start in Münster, Germany, in 1899. Here a small group of zoologists, anatomists, and natural historians have gathered - as they do each month - to hear about the [[latest research->Of birds and potatoes]] on the animal world.The story had been sent to Reeker by his friend, Mr Franz Augsburg in a letter dated 7th February 1899.
Augsburg was a consciencious man. That winter, with snow on the ground, he had decided to help out the birds that congregated in his back garden by offering them some food.
Augsburg assembled some kitchen scraps on the snowy ground, returned to the safe warmth of his house, and waited.
From his kitchen window, Augsburg saw birds appear and start to peck at the proferred produce. Blackbirds, starlings, bullfinches, titmice, and a wren all tucked into the assorted morsels.
However, shortly after they had arrived, the birds were rudely interrupted by the neighbour's cat. The cat sauntered in, scared off the birds, and proceeded to bite a potato that was hidden in one of the snow drifts, before Augsburg shooed the feline intruder away.
With the cat gone, the birds returned and new avian guests arrived to get their share of the remaining sauerkraut and potato. Soon all the food was gone. All except, that is, the potato that the cat had bitten.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Why did the birds - even those that had not been around to see the cat's arrival and swift departure - spurn the potato that the [[cat->Can birds smell cats?]] had attempted to eat?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^H. Reeker, 'Zum Geruchsinn der Vögel', //Jahres-Bericht der Zoologischen Sektion des Westfälischen Provinzial-Vereins für Wissenschaft und Kunst//, 27 (1899), pp. 44-5]The conclusion, Augsburg and Reeker suggested, was that the birds could smell the cat on the potato and kept away.
This intepretation did not receive complete assent from the assembled society members. The proceedings reported that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//These lovely observations of Mr. Augsburg provoked a lively discussion, in which people were very divided about the smell of the birds. It is therefore to be wished that the members collect as much material as possible about this question and present or send it to the board. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Augsburg's story - and how it should be interpreted - was part of a much wider controversy in nineteenth-century ornithology. To understand why, we have to turn to one particular bird: the [[vulture->Animal sagacity]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^H. Reeker, 'Zum Geruchsinn der Vögel', //Jahres-Bericht der Zoologischen Sektion des Westfälischen Provinzial-Vereins für Wissenschaft und Kunst//, 27 (1899), pp. 44-5]In 1899 one Dr H. Reeker, Zoologist and Anatomist, made a short presentation to the zoological section of the Westphalian Provinicial Society for Science and Art.
It was a story about some birds, a potato, and his neighbours [[cat->Cats and potatoes]].The vulture had, in ancient writing, been a prime example of how sensitive non-human noses could be.
Lucretius (c.99 BC-c. 55 BC), the Roman poet and Philosopher, also noted the vulture's peculiar capacity for sniffing out rotting carcasses.
In his //De Rerum Natura//, Lucretius suggested that each animal had particular pores in there noses that were suited to specific odours.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//And first, 'tis needful there be many things
From whence the streaming flow of varied odours
May roll along, and we're constrained to think
They stream and dart and sprinkle themselves about
Impartially. But for some breathing creatures
One odour is more apt, to others another-
Because of differing forms of seeds and pores.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Lucretius used vultures, as well as bees, dogs, and geese, as his examples:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Thus on and on along the zephyrs bees
Are led by odour of honey, vultures too
By carcasses. Again, the forward power
Of scent in dogs doth lead the hunter on
Whithersoever the splay-foot of wild beast
Hath hastened its career; and the white goose,
The saviour of the Roman citadel,
Forescents afar the odour of mankind.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The idea that vultures used their sense of smell to track down carcasses remained influential throughout [[the medieval period->Vultures symbolise smell]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Lucretius, //De Rerum Natura//, Book IV, lines 673-690.]In the twelth and thirteenth centuries, Europeans continued to believe that vultures sniffed out their meals.
The Persian polymath Ibn Sina (980-1037CE), the Andalusian jurist Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), and the Franciscan scholar Bartholomaeus Anglicus (1203-1272) - all of whose works were used in European universities - re-empahasied claims from ancient writings about the amazing olfactory power of vultures.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But the vulture's sniffing prowess didn't just appear in high flung scholarly texts read by elite, educated, men. It was also gestured to in medieval visual culture.
<img src="http://www.sensorystudies.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Wheel.jpg">
At Longthorpe Tower in Peterborough, built in the fourteenth century, we can find a 'Wheel of the Senses' with an animal for each sense at the end of its spokes. Here the vulture on the left stands in for smelling. On the opposite side sits a wild boar - a common representing of hearing.
The vulture was one among many animal icons for smell in European visual culture, including - of course - dogs. Vultures remained a leading example of olfactory prowess throughout the early modern period. Yet, in the early nineteenth century, the vulture's powers of smelling came under [[intense scrutiny->Audobon doubts vultures]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Simon Kemp, 'A Medieval Controversy About Odor', //Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences//, 33:3 (1997), pp.213-216]In 1827 the Haitian born, French-educated, John James Audubon (1785-1851) published an article in an Edinburgh journal. Focussing on the vulture, he aimed to challenge 'the opinion generally entertained of its extraordinary power of smelling'.
Audobon had pursued several experiments in North America that, he claimed, showed that vultures relied on sight rather than smell. In one example vultures were attracted to a deer skin stuffed with straw - tricked by the sight of the dummy into taking a closer look.
In another setup, Audobon forced a number of his slaves to carry a dead hog to a ravine and leave it there (clearly, he did not want to do the dirty work himself). Despite the putrid smell of rotting flesh, Audobon saw vultures fly over the ravine without stopping.
Audobon's conclusion was simple:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the power of smelling in these birds has been grossly exaggerated.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Other naturalists attempted to support Audobon's claims. Perhaps the most bizarre experiment came from a fellow author who show vulture paintings of dead carcasses. The vultures then attacked the paintings. This showed, or so Audobon's supporters claimed, that the birds relied on sight rather than smell.
Despite this evidence, there were at least some writers who [[questioned->Waterton defends vultures]] the claims made by Audobon and his supporters.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^J. J. Audubon, 'Account of the habits of the turkey buzzard (Vultur aura) particularly with the view of exploding the opinion generally entertained of its extraordinary power of smelling'. Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 2 (1827), pp.172-184.]Some, such as the Englishman Charles Waterton (1782-1865), thought that the experiments conducted with the aim of proving the vulture's reliance on sight were farcical. If vultures really attacked paintings of carcasses then, Waterton suggested,
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I am now quite prepared to receive accounts... of vultures attacking every shoulder-of-mutton sign in the streets, or attempting to gobble down the painted sausages over shop doors.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, Audobon had started a debate on the olfactory capacities of birds, the outcome of which was a significant long-term ignorance of the role of smell in avian life. When Reeker and his Westphalian friends discussed [[Mr Augsburg's snowy encounter->Of birds and potatoes]] with birds, a cat, and a potato in the winter of 1899, this is the conversation they were contributing to.
It has taken a long time to combat the doubts Audobon had planted. It was only in the 1970s, with the pioneering work of figures such as Betsy Bang, that a new appreciation of smell's significance in the life of birds - including the vulture - finally emerged.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
However, one reason for the renewed interest in the Turkey vulture's nose came from an unexpected place: [[the energy industry->Scenting Gas]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ Charles Waterton, 'Retrospective Criticism', //The Magazine of Natural History//, 7 (1834), p. 277.
^^2^^ Betsy G. Bang, //Functional Anatomy of the Olfactory System in 23 Orders of Birds// (S. Karger, 1971)]One of the most impressive collections of taxidermy in early nineteenth-century Europe was in the possession of Charles Waterton.
One of the reasons that Waterton's taxidermy collection was admired was that it was relatively inodorous. Even more than twenty years after they were made, most of the animals were 'as fresh as ever', with a 'corrosive sublimate and spirits of wine' ensuring that there was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//one of that sickly smell which generally prevails in other collections.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Eighteenth-century taxidermists had used a variety of preparations. The Frenchman René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur had recommended a form of embalming for birds using a range of resinous gums and aromatics including aloe, myrrh, frankicnense and cinnamon, cloves, pepper and ginger:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the result of which will be at least, that the bird, after being dried, wil smell the sweeter, and become as it were a Piece of Perfume.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In the nineteenth century preservative preparations applied to animals by taxidermists, for which taxidermy guides provided recipes, contained a range of odorous products: in soaps and solutions the odorless mercury chloride (sometimes called corrosive sublimate) was supplemented by the light woody scent of gum arabic, the wine-like odour of ethanol, herby fragrance of thyme essence, and bright and pungent smell of powdered camphor.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
[[<img src="https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/L0027664/full/full/0/default.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->Camphor and Preservation]]
(text-size:0.5)[Credit: Front Cover of Rowland Ward's,//The Sportman's Handbook to Practical Collecting and preserving Trophies// (London, 1880). Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Sarah Lee, //Taxidermy: Or, the art of Collectiong, Preparing, and Mounting Objects of Natural History// (London, 1843), p. 232
^^2^^René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, 'Divers means for preserving from corruption dead birds, intended to be sent to remove coutnires. so that they may arrive there in good condition', //Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London//, 45:487 (1748), p. 313
^^3^^Thomas Brown, //The Taxidermist's Manual; or the art of Collecting, Preparing, and Preserving Objects of Natural History// (London, 1856), pp. 115-118.]In the 1820s Charles Waterton, having returned from managing his uncle's slave plantations in British Guiana, built a nine-foot high wall around his estate, invented the first bird-nesting-box, and turned his grounds into one of the world's first nature reserves.
However, smells cross over and move around walls, as Waterton was to find out the hard way. A soap works set up next to his estate and the birds would have
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//succumbed to the abominable effluvia arising from these works... the odour from which, (the soap and vitriol works), was disagreeably offensive, as well as very detrimental to both animal and vegetable life//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Waterton therefore pursued a [[legal case->Stinking Rivers]] against the soap works.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ Richard Hobson, //Charles Waterton: His Home, Habits, and Handiwork// (London, 1866), p. 47. ]Waterton was successful. The soap works was moved to Calder Island near Wakefield.
However, whilst Waterton protected his birds, he had only moved the foul odours of the soap-works so that they now polluted another environnment and endangered other forms of wildlife. Thanks to the soap works - and other polluting industries - the Calder became
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a boiling, stinking mass.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
by the mid nineteenth century. Ashes and effluents generated by soap-making joined the many other substances (including the 'carcases of animals' which 'poisoned the air') polluting the river. By 1856 it was said that many fish - first salmon and trout, then dace and roach - had disappeared from the Calder.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The water of the Calder at Wakefield became so black that it could be used as ink. In an 1871 report for the Royal Commission on the Pollution of Rivers contained a hand-written memorandum, reproduced as a fascimile. The water was not written with a normal pen, but with the inky black water of the polluted Calder:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//This memorandum written with water taken from the point of junction this day between the river Calder and the town sewer. Could the odour only accompany this sheet also, it would add much to the interest of this memorandum.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
The Calder was not the body of water in Europe rendered stinking by the production of soap. [[Marseilles->Marseilles Harbour]] in France had long been famous for soap production and had, over time, developed its own pollution problem. In both cases, [[fish and other marine life->Smelling (un)fishy]] were under threat.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//Third Report of the Comissioners Appointed to INquire Into the best Means of Preventing the Pollution of Rivers. Rivers Aire and Calder, &c//. (London, 1867), II, 387
^^2^^ Charles Milnes Gaskell, 'On the Pollution of Our Rivers', //The Nineteenth century and after//, 54:317 (1903), pp. 86-7
^^3^^ 'The Pollution of Rivers', //The Engineer//, 31 (1871), p. 393.]In 1830, fish supposedly disappeared from the port or Marseilles. This was at the same time that a foul odour began to appear in the waters around the port, an odour that was attributed to the waste from soap factories.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^] By the 1850s:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Every one who has visited Marseilles knows what it is to hold his nose when an entering steamer paddles up the black mud from the inner harbour, the cess-pool of bygone and succeeding ages.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Below the depths the waste from soap-making - alongside an increasing number of other industries - kept accumulating. When brought to the surface, these deposits were just as stinking to the nose. In the 1880s a marine-biologist dredged the port and noted that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The machine only brings back fragments of pottery, debris of all kinds, in a black mud. Soap residue forms a rather hard crust that the dredger attacks, and underneath is a greenish silt giving off a [[sulphuric smell->Gas warfare]]. These are the polysulfides that have accumulated and destroyed almost everything.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
The smell was partly seasonal: in the heat of the summer 'the smell of the port is unbearable' exclaimed the painter and art critic Frédéric Bourgeois de Mercey in 1858.(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^] During outbreaks of cholera debate occured as to whether the port's stink was mismastic, dangerous, and infectious or whether it was merely offensive and dirty.(text-size:0.5)[^^5^^]
However, at most times of the year[[sailing into Marseilles->Navigating by stink]] was a potent olfactory experience.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^A. Commaille, //Étude sur les eaux de Marseille considérées au point de vue chimique, physique, micrographique et hygiénique// (Marseille, 1868).
^^2^^W. Bridges Adams, 'The Sewage Question', //The Engineer//, 3 (1857), p. 201.
^^3^^Daniel Faget, 'Une cité sous les cendres: les territoires de la pollution savonnière à Marseille (1750-1850)', in Thomas Le Roux and Michel Letté (ed.), //Débordements industriels: Environnement, territoire et conflit, XVIIe-XXIe siècle// (Rennes, 2013).
^^4^^Frédéric Bourgeois de Mercey, //La Otscane et le Midi de l'Italie// (Paris, 1858), I, 47
^^5^^M. Claude Fouque, //Histoire raisonnée du commerce de Marseille// (Paris, 1843), II, 399-401.]During the course of the nineteenth century industrial pollution played havoc with local waterways across Europe. The residues from the chemical, energy, and print industries (among others) discharged huge amounts of waste into rivers and streams.
People noticed this pollution in different ways.
In 1861 a writer in //Frazer's Magazine// claimed that the refuse from as gasworks at Gloucester, running into the river Severn:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...caused a cooked fish to smell so strong of gas, that it had to be sent from the table.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The eating of local fish from rivers made people sensitive to the impacts of pollution. At the Leven, a tributary of the river Clyde, bathers and tenants noted that the chloride of lime used to bleach textiles in nearby fields had polluted the river and the fish. An Angler noted that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the river was very much polluted by chloride of lime (which I know from the smell).//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^] (text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
But nineteenth-century committees, inquiries and commissions on river pollution also made it clear that humans [[paid attention to fish->Anglers and Smell]], who were believed to react to foul odours by swimming away from them.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'The British Salmon Fisheries', //Fishing Excerpts: Frazer's Magazine//, Volume III (1855-1861), p. 758
^^2^^//Fourth Report of the Commissioners Appointed in 1868 to Inquire Into the Best Means of Preventing the Pollution of River// (London, 1872), I, 399.]The thinking for many writers in the nineteenth century was that pollution did not just kill fish, it forced fish to swim away, as they fled the smells of sewage and industrial waste.
This was especially true for salmon. Pollution, according to Francis Trevelyan Buckland, deterred salmon 'from making progress up a river'. The sense of smell was the 'chief agent in enabling a salmon to discover its river' and so without it salmon lost their sense of direction.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
It was important to note, Buckland argued, that fish had 'a nose made for smelling in the water, not a nose for smelling in the air'. Since water has a 'great power of absorbing odours', to the fish 'each river has got its own smell'.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
All kinds of waste, including that from agriculture, could taint water and would surely, it was assumed, act as a 'deterrent to the ascent of a fish with such acute powers of smell as the salmon'.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
But salmon were [[not the only noses->Cows turning up their noses]] to which nineteenth-century government committees on riverine pollution attended.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Francis Trevelyan Buckland, //The Pollution of Rivers and Its Effects Upon the Fisheries and Supply of Water to Towns and Villages// (London, 1878), p. 9.
^^2^^Francis Trevelyan Buckland, Spencer Walpole, //Annual Report of the Inspectors of Salmon Fisheries// (London, 1879), p. 13
^^3^^Francis Trevelyan Buckland, Spencer Walpole, //Annual Report of the Inspectors of Salmon Fisheries// (London, 1879), p. 79]
The debate about how sensitive fish were to odours had a long history, because it was connected to a broader question about whether smells could travel underwater. For example, as one late-seventeenth-century author put it, if one held a smell to be a type of fume then
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//how comes the Fish in the Water to be sensible of Odors, where there are no fumes?//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Anglers, who spent their time trying to entice fish onto their hooks and into their nets, were perhaps the most keenly aware of the powers of scent underwater. The evidence that fish could smell was clear when one examined the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//sweet-smelling pastes, that the Anglers and crafty Fishers make for baits to take them.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In his widely read work //The Compleat Angler// Izaak Walton records a story about a friend who kept his bait - in this case worms - in a special box:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//anointed with a drop, or two, or three of the Oil of Ivy-berries, made by expression or infusion, and that by the wormes remaining in that box an hour, or a like time, they had incorporated a kind of smel that was irresistibly attractive, enough to force any fish, within the smel of them, to bite.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Nineteenth-century anglers record adding a whole range of smelly substances to their bait, including asafoetida, honey, and even gin. (text-size:0.5)[^^4^^] Another author recommended that chub would take
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a piece of high-smelling cheese, when he will take nothing else, and the more it smells the better he likes.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^5^^]
Those who lived around rivers often had local knowledge about the relationship between fish and smell. When a nineteenth-century English landowner attempted to create an artificial pass for the fish to run through, he found that the trout would not swim up it. An old shepherd standing by and watching them remarked that no fish would come, because there was no peat in the water. Some broken peat was then thrown into the arficial stream and fish then came up the pass. The conclusion was that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//peat communicates a peculiar smell to the water which the fish recognise.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^6^^]
Given the widespread belief that many fish were highly sensitive to smell, it was no surprise there were concerns about the [[impact of polluted rivers on the fish->Sensitive Salmon]] that swam within them.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Ysbrand van Diemerbroeck, //The anatomy of human bodies//, trans. William Salmon (London, 1694), p. 473
^^2^^Scipion Dupleix, //The Resolver; or Curiosities of nature written in French// (London, 1635), p. 308
^^3^^Izaak Walton, //The compleat angler// (London, 1653), p. 139.
^^4^^Joseph Tom Burgess, //Angling. A Practical Guide to Bottom Fishing, Trolling, Spinning, and Fly Fishing// (London, 1867), p. 11.
^^5^^John William Martin, //Float fishing and spinning in the Nottinham style// (London, 1882), p. 15
^^6^^Francis Trevelyan Buckland, Spencer Walpole, //Annual Report of the Inspectors of Salmon Fisheries// (London, 1879), p. 30]
The smell of preservatives used in taxidermy could permeate the whole of ninteenth-century museums. In the March 1850 issue of the artistic magazine //The Germ// the sculptor and writer John Lucas Tupper described the effect of one of these smells on a visit to the British Museum:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I remember to have discovered, after visiting the British Museum for the first time, that the [[odour of camphor->Trench Foot]], for which I had hitherto no predilection, afforded me a peculiar satisfaction, seemingly suggestive of things scientific or artistic... some time after when this happened again, and I was at once reminded of an enormous walrus at the British Museum, and then remembered how the whole collection, from end to end, was permeated with the [[odour of camphor->Working with Bees]]! Still, despite the consciousness of this, the camphor retains its influence.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
<img src="https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/V0013526/full/full/0/default.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">
(text-size:0.5)[Credit: The British Museum: the Zoological Gallery, crowded with holiday visitors. Wood engraving, 1845. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.]
However, [[responses to the smells of the alcohol and spirits->Museum Visitors Sniff out 'Hobgoblins']] used in wet-specimen jars could be rather more negative.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Lucas Tupper, 'Subject in Art, No. II', //The Germ//, 1:3 (1850), p. 123.]Certain animals might require special treatment to render them less odorous. For example, Thomas Brown - author of a widely reprinted taxidermy manual - warned his mid-nineteenth-century readers that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The skins of Shrew, Mice, Moles &c. having a very offensive smell, it will be necessary to add a considerable portion of the tincture of musk to the solution of the corrosive sublimate, with which the skins are imbued. The same applies to Badgers, Wolverenes, Polecats, and Skunks, all of which are strong smelling animals.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Various tips were also given for keeping taxidermied creatures free from insects who might nibble away at them. An 'insect powder' made from the flowers of the Russian tansy was recommended for protecting the skins of taxidermied animals from moths and other insectile attack. However, users were unusure whether the smell of the powder worked by attracting and smothering the insects or by repelling them.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^] Others recommended placing taxidermy specimens in boxes with spirit of turpentine, 'for it is said to be the most pernicious of all scents to insects'.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
All of these powders, pastes, soaps, and solutions gave the [[taxidermist's workshop->Taxidermist's shop]] a particular scent.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Thomas Brown, //The Taxidermist's Manual; or the art of Collecting, Preparing, and Preserving Objects of Natural History// (London, 1856), p. 16.
^^2^^Montagu Browne, //Artistic and Scientific Taxidermy and Modelling// (London, 1896), p. 59
^^3^^Thomas Brown, //The Taxidermist's Manual; or the art of Collecting, Preparing, and Preserving Objects of Natural History// (London, 1856), p. 84]In Charles Dicken's 1865 novel //Our Mutual Friend//, the ballad-singer Silas Wegg visits the taxidermist Mr Venus, who numbers Wegg's amputated leg among his extensive collection of human and animal remains. Sitting by the fire, Wegg breathes in the smell of the taxidermist's shop:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//'For that,’ Mr Wegg inwardly decides, as he takes a corrective sniff or two, ‘is musty, leathery, feathery, cellary, gluey, gummy, and,’ with another sniff, ‘as it might be, strong of old pairs of bellows.’//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
[[<img src="https://d3d00swyhr67nd.cloudfront.net/w1200h1200/collection/ABD/AAG/ABD_AAG_ag014134-001.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->Museums and Camphor]]
(text-size:0.5)[Credit: Rodolphe Christen, 'George Sim in his Workshop, Aberdeen', 1890, oil on canvas, 56.2 x 47.3cm, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, ABDAG014134]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Charles Dickens, //Our Mutual Friend// (London, 1865).]The courtyard of the British Museum at Monague House in London around 1810 was host to one among many examples of taxidermy burnings throughout European history. The Keeper of Natural History at the museum, Dr George Shaw (1751-1813), and his successor, Wiliam Elford Leach, both despised the taxidermy that dotted the museum and wanted rid of the multitudes of decaying specimens that had been in the Museum's care since its opening in 1750. In what was to become a frequent spectacle at the museum in the nineteenth century:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a large fire being kindled in the courts of Montague House, into which the rotten or mutiliated fragments of various zoological specimens were thrown.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Taxidermy objects in the collection that were 'in an advanced state of decomposition' were cast into the flames in the first of many of what Dr Shaw called his 'cremations'. Later, Shaw's assistant noted that 'persons in the neighbourhood complained'.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]^ As a later history of the museum surmised, the museum's gardens had been a popular spot to take a walk but
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//... the attraction of the terraces and the fragrance of the shrubberies were sadly lessened when a pungent odour of burning snakes was their accompaniment.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
[[Accidental fires->Fire at the Taxidermist's]] have also destroyed taxidermy collections.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'The British Museum', //The Edinburgh Review//, 38 (1823), p. 390.
^^2^^//Report from the Select Commmittee on the Condition, Management, and Affairs of the British Museum// (London, 1835), p. 197.
^^3^^Edward Edwards, //Livers of the Founders of the British Museum// (London, 1870), p. 576.]In 2008 the Rough Guide to Paris described the shop of the French taxidermists Deyrolle, founded in 1831 and since 1881 located in a two-story premises on the Rue de Bac. The real buissness occured:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//upstairs, in a room perfumed with the sharp, clean, coal-tar smell of taxidermy.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But at this point the shop was a shadow of its formerly self.
Earlier that same year tragedy had struck. A fire engulfed the shop and burnt out the collections. Photographs captured the mounted animals - from bears and big cats to dogs and pheasants - sitting charred and blackened in the burnt out rooms. That morning the acrid smell of smoke and burnt hair, hooves, and skins dominated the rooms.
Perhaps this was the odour encountered at the numerous burnings of unwanted, rotting, and moth-eaten taxidermy objects across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//Rough Guide to Paris// (London, 2008), p. 150.]In a report in 1809 Joseph Banks, naturalist and trustee of the British Museum, reported on the items that had been moved to the basement of the Museum's premises at Montague House in London. Among these were a large collection of 'birds and other animals in spirits', which Banks noted were:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//regarded by the visitors rather as an object of disgust than of curiosity; the room where they are kept must unavoidably smell strongly of spirits, and the snakes, fishes &c. in the bottles, are very frequently designated by the approbrious appelation of 'hobgoblins'.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
<img src="https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/V0007819ER/full/full/0/default.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">
(text-size:0.5)[Credit: Seven figures illustrating different types of anatomical specimen jars and their lids and methods of preservation used by Réaumur, Le Cat, and others. Engraving, 1749. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.]
In fact, the smell of alcohol preparations in museums can [[still be detected today->The Scent of Formalin]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Appendix no. 9 in //Report form the Select Committee on the Condition, Mangagement, and Affairs of the British Museum// (London, 1836), p. 575.]
The nineteenth century saw the use of 'camphor, tobacco, pepper, Russian leather (i.e. leather dressed with oil of birch), Russian tallow, fumes of turpentine or benzoline, and a dozen other "scents"'.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]Whilst some taxidermists were sceptical of the use of camphor, it seems that it was very widely used throughout European museums by the second half of the nineteenth century.
Writing to his father from Sydney in August 1842, the naturalist Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) described a visit to the home of William Sharp Macleay (1792-1865), a civil servant and entomologist. On entering the workshop where Macleay preserved his specimens, Hooker was instantly transported to the museum of the Linnaean Society in London and the home of Robert Brown (1773-1858), a leading botanist who was the clerk, librarian, and housekeeper of the Society:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The smell of camphor and specimens, so well known to me at home, reminded me strongly of olden times, especially as a I found everything in the inimitable mixture of confusion and order in which Mr Brown's shop at the Museum and his rooms in Deane Street are wont to be.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Camphor was a key scent in museums and zoological collections across nineteenth-century Europe. But there were also [[other smells->Wet Taxidermy]] associated with preserving animal and human specimens...
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Montague Brown, //Artistic and Scientific Taxidermy and Modelling// (London, 1896), p. 59.
^^2^^Leonard Huxley, //Life and letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker// (London, 1918), I, 123.]
In the seventeenth century the preparation of wet animal and human specimens in jars involved submerging them in mixes of spirit of wine (alcohol) and oil of turpentine (pungent and pine-like).(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^] The smell of alcohol was the signature scent of specimen collections across Europe from the seventeenth century all the way into the early twentieth century.
The biologist and geologist Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873) was very familiar with this scent. Originally studying and working in Germany and Switzerland, Agassiz ended up at Harvard University in 1847. According to English visitors to Harvard, the cellars underneath Agassiz's offices contained
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//gallons of specimens in alcohol, the odour of which is so potent, that the professor himself confessed to being unfit company for any one possessed of at all a delicate smell after a day's work among them.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
This smell also rubbed off on Agassiz's students. Agassiz taught them that the first step to being a naturalist was to learn how to look after specimens. With this in mind, one student was given a fish from a specimen jar and told to look after it. This involved gently moistening it's surface with the ancient- and fishy-smelling alcohol. The student did not enjoy the experience and
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//My friends at home, too, were annoyed, when they discovered that no amount of eau de cologne would drown the perfume that haunted me like a shadow.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
However, these odours were not always enough to overpower any [[scented signs of morality->Keeping Insects Away]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Thomas Birch, //The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge// (London, 1756), I, p. 374.
^^2^^Alice M. Frere, //The Antipodes and Round the World// (London, 1870), p. 627.
^^3^^James Russell Lowell, //Under the Old Elm And Other Poems// (New York, 1888), p. 94]There is a popular perception that the smell of specimen jars in museums is that of formaldehyde. Yet in many museums this is unlikely to be the case. Formaldehyde (or formalin as it was often known) was only discovered in 1859, produced commercially from 1889, and its hardening, preserving, uses were first noticed in 1893. Before then - and in many cases afterwards - specimens were preserved in alcohol or oil of turpentine.
In 1895 the use of formalin was mainly being used as adisinfectant and deodorant. At this point naturalists attempted to use it to preserve plants. At room temperature formalin could become gas and it was recommended that ammonia should be sprinkled in spaces where it had been used in order to remove its smell. Strangely, despite formalin's strong, irritating, odour, it was intiailly felt that one of its advantages was that it could preserve smells. When formalin was used, an 1895 report suggested,
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the odour of plants is also well preserved and quite distinguishable after the lapse of months.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Slowly the use of formalin extended its reach into other areas of preservation. By 1906 it was being recommended by the British Museum for preserving a range of specimens.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Animal specimens were not the only things occasionally preserved using formaldehyde. In the early twentieth century it could also be found in food and drink, including milk.
Despite best attempts, sometimes taxidermy simply succombed to the ravages of time and became too moth-ridden and stinking to be kept. [[It then had to be disposed of.->Burning Taxidermy]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^E. M. Holmes, 'A New Preservative Fluid', in H. M. Platnauer and E. Howarth (eds.), //Museums Association: Report of Proceedings With the Papers Read at the Sixth Annual General Meeting, Held in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne//, (London, 1895), p. 32.
^^2^^//Handbook of Instructions for Collectors, Issued by the British Museum (Natural History)// (London, 1906).]
One of the major problems with doing anything about the stink of Marseille's port was that people who lived their grew accustomed to it. As Eugène Flavard noted in 1852:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//We all know the resemblance of rotten eggs to hydrogen sulphide gas and that of rotten fish to hydrogen phosophorous gas' but many loose the ability to apprecaite these impurities in the air if 'one has become accustomed to such an atmosphere.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, for those sailing into the town, the stink was much more obvious. As you came closer to Marseilles by ship, you crossed a smell boundary between sea and port. In 1854:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//unfortunately the first impression you receive when you arrive, after having breathed the pure and healthy air of the sea, is a strong smell of cesspool being emptied.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
<img src="https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/ppmsc/09900/09984v.jpg">
(text-size:0.5)[Credit: Old Harbor (Vieux-Port), Marseille, France, from a collection of photocrom prints made between 1890 and 1900, from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington D.C, LOT 13512, no. 12.]
The reaction from tourists and visitors was often one of abject disgust. The response of Alphonse Leveaux on reaching the port from the sea in 1854 was to hold his nose and exclaim:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//here is an impertinent smell!//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
The smell was so well known that it almost became a navigational air for those familiar with the port. In a discussion of sanitation in European harbours at a meeting of a U.S city's sanitary commission in 1877, it was noted that it had:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//passed into a proverb in France that pilots could go into the harbor in the thickest fog, being guided by the smell alone.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
Marseille's soap may have been world famous, but so was the stink that resulted from its manufacture. Water pollution hasn't just stunk to human [[noses->Sensitive Salmon]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Eugène Flavard, //Lettres sur Marseille// (Marseilles, 1852), p. 105.
^^2^^Lucien Jottrand, //D'Anvers à Gênes, par les pays Rhénans, la Suisse, la Savoie et le Piémont, et retour par Marseille et le Sud de la France// (Brussels, 1854), p. 576.
^^3^^Alphonse Leveaux, //Italie et Sicile: Journal d'un Touriste// (Paris, 1854), p. 7.
^^4^^//Proceedings and reports of the Sanitary Commission of the City of Atlanta, Ga// (Atlanta, 1877), p. 57]Cattle also offered evidence of how polluted rivers had become in the nineteenth century. Along the River Almond when the oil works let out waste into the river the cattle would not drink the water 'because the smell of it is so bad'.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
On the Clyde near Dumbarton Castle, the river-water's 'dunghill' like smell could be sensed even at 400 yards distance and the 'cattle standing in the river to escape flies seem to abstain from drinking it'.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
On the Avon river, where the the smell was 'almost always disagreeable... at times overpowering', land was dropping in value 'owing to a hestitation on the part of graziers in permitting their cattle to drink such water'.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Cows then, were sensitive sniffers, and careful attention to this sensitivity also extended to the [[keeping of healthy cows for meat and milk->Sagacious Cattle]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ //Fourth Report of the Commissioners Appointed in 1868 to Inquire Into the Best Means of Preventing the Pollution of River// (London, 1872), I, 241.
^^2^^//Fourth Report of the Commissioners Appointed in 1868 to Inquire Into the Best Means of Preventing the Pollution of River// (London, 1872), I, 374
^^3^^//Fourth Report of the Commissioners Appointed in 1868 to Inquire Into the Best Means of Preventing the Pollution of River// (London, 1872), I, 318.]Bees don't like bad smells:
Their place also must be far from the Dunghils, and all dirty or miry places which might hurt them with ill smells; for they are deadly enemies to all fil∣thiuess and uncleanness.
F. B. //The office of the good house-wife// (London, 1672), p. 101
p. 151 To speake then first of the nature of Bees; it is a creature gentle, louing, and familiar about the man which hath the ordering of them, so he come neate, sweet, and cleanely amongst them; otherwise, if hee haue strong, and ill smelling sauours about him, they are curst and malicious, and will sting spitefully
p. 153 you shallfirst make a stiffe morter of Lime , and Cow - dung , mixed together ; and then hauing crosse - barred theHiue within , dawbe the outside of the Hiue with themorter , at least three inches thicke , downe close vntothe stone , so that not the least ayre may not come in : then taking a Rye - sheafe , or Wheat - sheafe that is newthresh ' t , and binding the eares together in one lumpe , put it ouer the Hiue , and so as it were thach it all o ∣ uer , and fixe it close to the Hiue with an old hoope , orgarth , and this will keepe the Hiue inwardly as warmeas may be : also before you lodge any Bee in yourHiue , you shall perfume it with Iuniper , and rubbe itall within with Fenell , Isop , and Time - flowers , and alsoall the stone vpon which the Hiue shall stand .
Gervase Markham, //Cheape and good husbandry// (London, 1614), p.
smell informs you what property of Nature had the Principle Go∣vernment in the Creature; the scent of the Dung or Ordure of most Creatures, will afford a manifest Discovery of their originl Qualities, whether clean or unclean, &c. This is apparently evident, let a Hog eat the same Grass, Corn or Food as Sheep, Oxen, Cows, &c. yet the Swines Breath, Urine and Dung will never have the same Scent or Smell with the other; so that every Creature is endued with a natural and unremoveable Power or Quality, in Changing and Transmuting the Principles of the cleanest of Meats and Drinks into the substance of their own Nature.
Thomas Tryon, //Tryon's Letters Upon Several Occasions// (London, 1700), p. 7
Swine Transmutes the Juices of the grass into its own Nature, (viz.) into gross unclean Flesh, and a foul stinking Excrement, very burthensome, and a meer loath∣ing to Nature; the Horse to a lively, strong, brisk Nourishment the Dung or Excrement not at all offensive; the Cow from the same Food doth Extract good clean Nutriment, and a considera∣ble quantity of Milk, whose pleasant Colours do declare its Ex∣cellency, and the Flesh is much finer and cleaner, also the Dung is of a good Smell, and some do esteem it a good Perfume.
Thomas Tryon, //Tryon's Letters Upon Several Occasions// (London, 1700), pp. 17-18.
'M. de Hofer, Aulic Counsellor to the Grand Duke of Baden, had for years been a proprietor and admirer of bees, and rivaled Wildman int he power he possesed of approaching them with impunity. He would at any time search for the queen and taking hold of her gently, place her on his hand. But he was unfortunately attacked with a violent fever, and long confined by it. On his recovery he attempted to resume his favourite amusement among the bees, returning to them with all the confidence and pleasure which he had felt on former occasions; when, to his great surprise and disappointment, he discovered that he was no longer in possesssion of their favour; and instead of being received by them as an old friend, he was treated as a respasser; nor was he ever able after this period to perform any operation with them, or to approach within their precincts, without exciting their anger. Here then it is pretty evidence, that some change had taken place in the Counsellor's secretions in consequence of the fever, which though not noticeable by his friends, was offensive to the olfactory nerves of bees.
Edward Bevan, //The Honey Bee Its Natural History, Physiology, and Management// (London, 1627), pp. 304-5.
Nineteenth-century naturalists argued that bees were particularly sensitive to the smell of a person's breath. François Huber noted that his assistant, Francis Burnens, was never stung by the bees they worked with and put this down to Burnens' 'habit of repressing his respiration'.
Francis Huber, //New observations on the natural history of bees// (Edinburgh, 1821), p. 361.
An article in the British Bee Journal in March 1889 reflected that 'In cultivating bees we are immproving our own powers of observation - sight, smelling, and hearing are all quickened'.
Mrs L. Harrison, 'Bee-Keeping for Women', //The British Bee Journal// 17 (1889), p. 128
'The British Bee-Keepers' Society is not only assisting people in a pecuniary point of view, but elevating them to a higher plane of thought and action; it cannot be thought otherwise. Bee-culture is an educator of a high power, all the senses are quicked, the eye notices plants and bloom which before were unnoticed as useless weeds; the ear quickly discerns the note of a swarm, the cry of the robber, the hum of plenty, or the mourning wail of the queenless. The sense of smell tells us of the blooming of the linden, buckwheat, and other flowers'
Mrs L. Harrison, 'Benefits of Bee-Culture', //The British Bee Journal// 17 (1889), p. 415.
Foul brood in a hive, one of the most feared diseases of beekeepers, could be indicated by 'a very offensive odour arising from the worst affected parts' which was likened to 'the smell of offensive glue, while it is not unlike that from guano'.
C. N. White, 'Bee-Keeping for Cottagers', //The British Bee Journal// 17 (1889), p. 525.
It was not uncommon to feed bees syrups to supplement their food. Beekeepers shared their recipes for these in bee-keeping journals. For example, one T. W. from Elham, wrote with a 'suggestion for the improvement of feeding suryp. A bee's sense of smell is more acute than most things'. Our ordinary syrup has no perfume. A dozen drops of essence of thyme in each quart would rejoice the hearts of thousands'.
T. W., 'Scenting Bee-Syrup', //British Bee Journal//, 21 (1893), p. 57.
For example, if one painted a hive, it was only useable 'just as soon as the strong smell of the paint has gone'.
'Queries and Replies', //The British Bee Journal// 21 (1893), p. 369.
In the 1850s foundations were first developed for use by beekeepers. Made from wax, they were inserted into frames and provided guides for bees to build honeycomb in, which made the comb more consistent. Readers of beekeeping journals were advised not to use white wax foundations, because of their 'tallowy' smell, and instead use pale yellow foundation with a 'honey fragrance, which make it so attractive to bees'.
J. Dean, 'White Foundation for Supers', //The British Bee Journal// 21 (1893), p. 512
Use of carbolic avid as a weed-killer in the grass around hives, because the bees would not touch it 'owing to their objection to the smell'.
'Destroying Weeds about Hives', //The British Bee Journal//, 22 (1894), p. 475
For example, one Mr Everard Jones asked 'Will you kindly tell me if bees object to the smell of manure? Our gardener has put up a hot-bed close to the bee-hives, and I wish to know if it should be taken down.
'Hot-Beds near Hives', //The British Bee Journal//, 22 (1894), p. 110.
One writer from Kingston-on-Thames, whose bees were departing and dying, worried that the effluvia from a fowl-house around 3 yards form the hive was the problem: 'Could', he asked his fellow readers, 'there be any unpleasant smell that was distasteful to the bees?'
'Echoes from the Hives', //The British Bee Journal//, 22 (1894), p. 168
Question of whether bees and other insects recognise each other by smell. One contribution to the German Gazette argued that bees recognised each other by an odour that the queen bee of a hive distributed among the hive.It was observed that if a bee or ant was placed in water, thereby washing off the scent of the hive, its colleagues would attack it and that bees who had been out labouring all day among flowers obtained entrance into hives that were not their own more eaily becasue 'its stock-odour has been redered less intensive, or altogether neutralised, by the perfumes of the flowers it has visited'.
'Mutual Recognition Among Bees', //The British Bees Journal//, 13 (1885), p. 31.
Some beekeepers wanted to try and unite more than one hive together. The main problem here was that the bees rejected the smell of the other hive and ended up fighting. The solution was placing two higes next to each other with a thin divider of perforatazed zinc that allowed the smell but not the bees to pass between the hives: 'causing the bees of both stocks to have a smell in common, hence preventing fighting'.
Sydney Ford, 'Two or More Stocks as one', //The British Bee Journal//, 9 (1881), p. 170.
Having purchased bees in Cyrprus to take back to England, cylinders containing the insects were loaded on the back of donkeys and 'the former owners of the bees fumigated both bees and ourselves by burning sweet smelling leaves on little charcoal dishes to ensure both ourselves and bees should prosper'.
'A Bee-Keeper's Experience in the East', //The British Bee Journal//, 10 (1882), p. 9
The flower Fritillaria imperialis, Linnaeus observed, had a huge amount of honey and yet bees did not flock to it. It was suggested that a reason for this was the 'disagreeable fox-like smell' emitted by the flower.
'The Bees. Book II', //The British Bee Journal//, 4 (1876), p. 165.
J. Hodgkinson, from Strensall Vicarage in York, wondered whether bees had 'a strong aversion to the smell of ants' after his bees appeared to avoid feeding on syrup that ants had touched.
'Queries and Replies', //The British Bee Journal//, 4 (1876), p. 184
A beekeeper concerned about rats getting into their hives was advised that instead of using dangerous poison the should let ferrets visit the areas where the rats were observed 'as the latter cannot bear the odour of the former'.
'Queries and Replies', //The British Bee Journal//, 4 (1876), p. 152
In 1925 'smoke or smell from a factory or coal mine, dust and motor exhaust fumes from the highway' were among the reasons apparently adduced for the lack of success seen by Scottish honey producers.
J. Anderson, 'The Season', //The Scottish Beekeper// 2, September (1925), p. 38
The large numbers of animals that died in battles across Europe and the globe, as Europeans attempted to attain control of new colonial possessions, required the burning of human and more than human bodies.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//After the seige of Multan, as the British attempted to regain control of a fort that had been captured by the Sikh Empire, the remains of 'dead horses, bullocks, camels, and men' were 'as thick as they could lie' and the 'smell was quite unberable'. The British, unwilling to deal with the problem themselves, 'set the natives to bury and burn them to get rid of the smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The smell of dead and burning horses followed European armies across the continent and into their colonial wars of oppression. The speed with which the French army marched through the Spanish Netherlands during 1694 meant that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The French Army might have been followed by the Scent which they left behind of dead Men and Horses , which were to be found all along the Road it went.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Following an army meant following the smell of death.
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/British_bicycle_troops_Brie%2C_Somme_March_1917_IWM_Q_1868.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">
(text-size:0.5)[Credit: Ernest Brooks, 'Cyclists passing through the ruined village of Brie, March 1917', Ministry of Information First World War Official Collection, Q 1868, Imperial War Museum, London.]
But what did a horse who had undergone a 'normal' death smell like? This was the question at issue in one [[late nineteenth-century trial->Smells in the Courtroom]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Ryder, //Four Years' Service in India// (London, 1853), p. 147.
^^2^^Edward D'Auvergene, //The history of the campagne in the Spanish Netherlands, Anno Dom. 1694 with the journal of the siege of Huy// (London, 1694).]
The idea that cow's were sensitive to dirt and pollution could also be found two centuries earlier.
In 1671 Margaret Cavendish imagined a cow's preferred environment. If it
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//had Wings to flye//'']]
it would live near the sun where the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Heat clarifies the Air//'']]
rather than down on earth whre could be found
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//thick and stinking Fogs// '']]
that would give them
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the Rot, and other diseases.// '']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Caring for cows therefore involved attending to smells: any holes in the floor of barns wherein
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//their Piss might stand and stink//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
should be filled with gravel and sand.
Careful curation of cow smellscapes was also needed to ensure that [[cow's reproduced properly->Smell and Bovine Reproduction]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Margaret Cavendish Newcastle, //Natures picture drawn by fancies pencil to the life// (London, 1671), p. 289.
^^2^^ F. B., //The office of the good house-wife// (London, 1672), p. 21.]In the seventeenth-century it was well known that smell was central to the process of birthing and rearing calves. Cows dying in childbirth were not unknown. If this happened and the calve survived then forms of scent-deception were needed to make sure another cow would look after it:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The female endures not a calf of another kind; knowing it by the smell, but smear it with cow-dung, the smell deceives her, and she suckles, and brings it up for her owne.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Perhaps more worrying was the contagious capacity for smell to cause herd-wide abortions of calves. This problem became especially acute in the nineteenth century, as the size of herds grew. The smell of one cow aborting could cause other cows to abort or 'slink'. Edward Skellett noted that cows were said
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//to prepossess a very nice and delicate sense of smelling, to that degree, that the slinking of one cow is apt... to be be communicated to a great number of the same herd.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Skellett advised that slinking could be prevented by obscuring the smell and ensuring other cows failed to pick it up. A mix of barbadoes tar, balsam of sulphur, rectified oil of amber, fine oil of thyme, and animal oil was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//rubbed upon the parts where the cows commonly smell each other; to be repeated occasionally as it wears off the parts.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In 1885 the London-based //Live-Stock Journal// played host to an ongoing discussion about the power of smelling in cows and its relation to abortion incidents. The well-known vet Clement Stephenson called attention to the 'highly organised sense of smell of animals, cows in particular' and argued that it was 'much more acute during the period of pregnancy'. Another correspondent suggested that if this was the case then surely smell was the solution to slinking. Good odours might counteract the bad ones and help stop abortions from taking place. He argued that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//there must be odors which produce agreeable sensations in the cow if we but search for them', noting how cats loved the smell of velarian and humans like the odor of roses. There must be odors which were equally agreeable to cows.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Figuring out what smells cows liked best was an [[ongoing quest->Olfactory Empathy]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Johnston, //A description of the nature of four-footed beasts//, trans. J. P (London, 1678), p. 33
^^2^^Edward Skellett, //A Practical Treatise on the Parturition of the Cow// (London, 1822), pp. 63, 74.
^^3^^'Abortion in Cows - A New Idea', //The Breeder's Gazette//, March 26th 1885, p. 486. ]p.14 let him smell upon every old and new dung you meet with all, for this will make him empty his body,
p.30 During the last fornight before a race 'burn upon a Chafingdish and coals in your Stable of the purest Olibanum or Frackincense mixt with Storax and Benjamina, to perfume and sweeten the room, you shall find it exceed∣ing wholesome for the horse, and he will take delight therein.'
p.50 healthy horse urine 'of a strong smell and a piercing condition'
p. 195 in case of surfeit 'Horses breath will stink and smell very strong'
pp. 295-6 Remedies for loose hoofs involved the use of fats, resins, and other smelly ingredients: burgundy pitch, tallow, bacon fat, tar, turpentine, and linseed oil were all used to soften, salve, and moisten horses hooves.
John Halfpenny, //The gentlemans jockey, and approved farrier instructing in the natures, causes, and cures of all diseases incident to horses.// (London, 1676)
Manuals on how to keep horses warned owners to use planked floors with channels under them instead of floors covered with pitch, because in the latter case the lack of run-off mean that 'the evill savour of the horse-pisse will be evermore in their nose , which is most unwholesome, noysome'.
p. 238 Horses with skin conditions might produce dung 'of a naughty savour'.
p.40 Whether white discharge from a horses nose had an 'evill savour or smell' or not could determine whether they were suffering from glanders or a cold.
p.62 If, in a horse fed upon hay and oats, 'be blackish, and doth not smell strong, then is it a signe that the horse is in danger of death'.
p. 62 The more food one gave a horse and the more healthy that food for them the strong the horse's dung was in smell: 'for the more provender, the stronger will be the smell of his Ordure, and Pease and Beanes will cause his Ordure to smell stronger than Oats, and bread more than any Grayne or Pulse; and the more bread and Provender you give him, the more perfect and sound shall you keep him in his body'.
Thomas de Gray, //The compleat horseman and expert ferrier In two bookes// (London, 1639)
Role of smell in impregnation. The thirteenth century scholastic philosopher Roger Bacon, in a translation of his work published in the seventeenth century, argued that
p.11 That Female Palm-trees bring forth fruit to maturity by the smell of their Males. And Mares in some King∣doms impregnate by the smell of Horses
Roger Bacon, //Frier Bacon his discovery of the miracles of art, nature, and magick faithfully translated out of Dr. Dees own copy by T.M. and never before in English.// (London, 1659)
The Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, travelling through Sweden along the Gulf of Bothnia in the late eighteenth century, noted that their journey was made difficult by their horses' nasal sensitivity:
Our horses became wild and unruly, by the sight and smell of our pelts, made of Russian wolves or bears. When a sleigh overturned, the horses hitched to it, or those of a sleigh close by, were terrified at the sight of a supposed Wolf or Bear and wanted to run away.
Giuseppe Acerbi, 'Byzonderheden, Zweeden betreffende. (Ontleend uit ascerbi's Travels through Sweden, &c.)', //Vaderlandsche letteroefeningen// (Amsterdam, 1802), p. 661.In 1892 a case was heard before the Old Bailey, London's highest criminal court.
In court that day, the various actors in the trial would have experienced very distinctive smellscapes. The robing-room, where barristers donned their wigs and gowns before entering court, was situated next to the sheriff's kitchen - from which legal professionals could 'scent an aldermanic dinner'.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Rather less savoury smells emerged from Newgate prison, which was connected to the Old Bailey. There the mix of prisoners, poor sanitation, and lack of ventilation produced a pungent odour. One visitor to Newgate in 1896 described it:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//It blows into your face in a strong breath when the door opens for you, and you find it lingering about you hours after your visit has been made. Some scientist ought to analyze this odor of the prison. It is unique. A soldier's barracks, a hospital, a ship's forecastle - all places, in short, where men live in close quarters - have an odor that tells of their origin; but the scent of the jail is different from all, and as horrible as the thing it recalls to you whenever you breath it, or fancy you do.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The stink was so bad that there were fears, in the eighteenth century, that the smells of prisoners would be brought from Newgate into the courtroom at the Old Bailey. After outbreak of goal fever in the court in 1750 herbs such as rue was strewn around the dock where the accused stood.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
However, on that day in 1892, [[smells outside the courtroom->What does a dead horse smell like?]] were in contention.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'English Courts of Law', //The Westminster Review//, 67-7 (1857), p. 20.
^^2^^Alfred Jumble, //In Jail with Charles Dickens// (London, 1896), pp. 40-1.
^^3^^John Timbs, //Doctors and Patients// (London, 2vols, 1873), I, 161.]Slovenian bees
'Here he enjoyed every savour of the summer holiday; here he rested by the glittering crossroads from which the air-trails stretch out, along which the busy animals, laden with the scent of lilies, hum from early morning till dusk; here he listened to the rational and benign voice of nature, the focus of the joyous return of life'On the Hart (male red deer) when being hunted:
At last, being for all this found out again by the observance of the Hunters, and skilful Scent of the Dogs, he flieth into the Herds of Cattle, as Cows, Sheep, &c. leaping on an Ox or Cow, laying the foreparts of his body thereon, that so touch∣ing the Earth onely with his hinder Feet, to leave a very small or no scent at all behinde for the Hounds to descern.
Nicholas Cox, //The gentleman's recreation in four parts, viz. hunting, hawking, fowling, fishing// (London, 1686), p. 61In the dock several men stood charged with attempting fraud.
They had insured four horses and poisoned them on a ship, claimed that the deaths were caused by an equine disease, and thus attempted to bag the insurance payout.
To the nose of the ship's surgeon, something had smelt off.
Wasting no time, a post-mortem had immediately been performed on one of the horses. The animal's innards emitted 'a most disagreeable., offensive, and pungent smell' and it seemed, to the nose of the same surgeon, 'there was a good deal of smell, more than that of ordinary decomposition'.
However, the man was neither a farrier nor a veterinary expert. He was used to dealing with humans rather than horses. When pushed, he admitted:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I believe a horse unbled smells more strongly than one that has been bled—I never saw a horse die before—I don't know if special diseases in horses produce special smells.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, as a plethora of texts on horse-care published between 1600 and the 1920s demonstrate, in the centuries before the automobile began to slowly replace four-legged transport for many Europeans, [[caring for horses->Healthy Horses]] involved a great deal of attention to smells.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 23 February 2023), July 1892, trial of JOHN MACHATTIE (39) LAMBERT BARRON (26) ANDREW WHITE (46) WILLIAM CATTO (46) (t18920725-739).]In the seventeenth century the ability to tell whether a horse was healthy or not involved careful attention to the smells it emitted.
According to John Halfpenny, the urine of a healthy horse was:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...of a strong smell and a piercing condition.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
If the horse was suffering from a surfeit, an overconsumption of food and drink resulting in a heavy stomach, then the:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...horses breath will stink and smell very strong.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The smell of faeces might also guide the careful horse-owner in diagnosing equine illness. In another guide for the 'horseman and expert ferrier', it was noted that horses with skin conditions might produce dung:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//... of a naughty savour//.'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
A 'naughty savour' wasn't a strong smell, but one that was qualitatively different to how the dung //should// smell. A lack of smell could be highly problematic. For example, a horse fed upon hay and oats produced dung that was:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//... blackish, and doth not smell strong, then it is a sign that the horse is in danger of death.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
In fact the more food one gave a horse and the more healthy that food for them the strong the horse's dung was in smell:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//for the more provender, the stronger will be the smell of his Ordure, and Pease and Beanes will cause his Ordure to smell stronger than Oats, and bread more than any Grayne or Pulse; and the more bread and Provender you give him, the more perfect and sound shall you keep him in his body.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
So smells - especially those of breath, urine, and dung - were a good guide to the health of a horse.
But [[remedies for sick horses->Equine Feeling]] also involved the use of aromatic gums and scents that were thought to delight the nostrils of the four-legged patient.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Halfpenny, //The gentlemans jockey, and approved farrier instructing in the natures, causes, and cures of all diseases incident to horses.// (London, 1676), p. 50.
^^2^^Halfpenny, //The gentlemans jockey//, p. 195.
^^3^^Thomas de Gray, //The compleat horseman and expert ferrier In two bookes// (London, 1639), p. 238.
^^4^^de Gray, //The compleat horseman//, p. 62.]The remedies for horse health issues could often involve highly pungent materials. Loose hooves, which needed to be softened, salved, and moistened, could be treated with mixtures made from a variety of fats and resins including burgundy pitch, tallow, bacon fat, tar, turpentine, and lineseed oil.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
It was believed that the use of fragrant substances was good for horses because they actually enjoyed the scent of many aromatics. For example, in the weeks leading up to a horse race it was recommended that the owner of a horse should:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...burn upon a Chafingdish and coals in your Stable of the purest Olibanum or [[Franckincense->Burning Saints]] mixt with Storax and Benjamina, to perfume and sweeten the room, you shall find it exceed∣ing wholesome for the horse, and he will take delight therein.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Reading the facial expressions of horses could confirm if it was enjoying a smell or if it indicated something friendly or pleasant to them. If the owner of a horse was attired in different clothes to normal, then a horse would
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//smell you, because anxious to be satisfied that it is you; thereupon... to wrinckle up the skin of the upper lip, which... is a confirmation of a horse's delight.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Horses could recognise their favourite groom by the smell and, as the veterinary surgeon animal welfare writer William Youatt (1776-1847) noted, a horse:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//examines a stranger by the smell, and, by very intelligble signs, expresses the opinion which he forms of him by his inquisition//.'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
Sometimes a horse's reactions to a smell could be far less positive. The Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, travelling through Sweden along the Gulf of Bothnia in the late eighteenth century, noted that their journey was made difficult by their horses' nasal sensitivity:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Our horses became wild and unruly, by the sight and smell of our pelts, made of Russian wolves or bears. When a sleigh overturned, the horses hitched to it, or those of a sleigh close by, were terrified at the sight of a supposed Wolf or Bear and wanted to run away.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^5^^]
As the famous observer of nature, [[Charles Darwin->Horses Navigating by Smell]], attested the noses of horses could replace their eyes in helping them to navigate the world.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Halfpenny, //The gentlemans jockey, and approved farrier instructing in the natures, causes, and cures of all diseases incident to horses.// (London, 1676), pp. 295-6.
^^2^^Halfpenny, //The gentleman's jockey//, p. 30.
^^3^^Charles Random de Berenger, //Helps and Hints How to Protect Life and Property// (London, 1835), p. 57.
^^4^^ William Youatt, //The Horse// (London, 1832), p. 118
^^5^^Giuseppe Acerbi, 'Byzonderheden, Zweeden betreffende. (Ontleend uit ascerbi's Travels through Sweden, &c.)', //Vaderlandsche letteroefeningen// (Amsterdam, 1802), p. 661.]Nineteenth-century naturalists were fascinated by the ability of animals to navigate the world through smell. In a contribution to the journal //Nature// in 1873 Charles Darwin told one such tale:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Many years ago I was on a mail-coach, and as soon as we came to a public-house, the coachman pulled up for the fraction of a second. He did so when we came to a second public-house, and I then asked him the reason. He pointed to the off-hand wheeler, and said that she had been long completely blind, and she would stop at every place on the road at which she had before stopped.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Hatchetts_-_the_White_Horse_Cellar%2C_Piccadilly_by_James_Pollard.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">
(text-size:0.5)[Credit: James Pollard (1793-1867), 'The White Horse Cellar, Picadilly', oil painting on canvas, date unknown. Denver Art Museum, image from Wikimedia.]
Darwin was fascinated:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//After this I watched her, and it was evident that she knew exactly, before the coachman began to pull up the other horses, every public-house on the road, for she had at some time stopped at all. I think there can be little doubt that this mare recognised all these houses by her sense of smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The sensitivity of horses to smell meant that those who looked after them also had to be [[highly attentive to odours->Horse Fodder]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Charles Darwin, 'Perception in the Lower Animals', //Nature//, March 13th 1873, p. 360.]In 1854 a travelling mengarie visited the town of Dorchester in Dorsert, England. Straw used for housing the 'wild beasts' from the menagerie was sold on to a local inn. But the inkeeper discovered that when the straw was put down horses stabled there refused to lie down and
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//snorted and started as if mad or frightened.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The author of the anecdote noted that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The sense of smell in the Horse must be very acute, for this happened some time after any odour could be perceived by the ostler and others.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The straw had to be removed and destroyed before the horses would settle at the inn.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
For William Youatt, smell was good evidence of what horses might be experiencing. He argued that when
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a person first enters an ill-managed stable... he is annoyed not only by the heat of the confined air, but by a pungent smell, resembling hartshorn; and can he wonder at the inflammation of the eyes, and the chronic cough, and the inflammation of the lungs, with which the animal, who has been shut up in this vitiated atmosphere all night, is often attacked?//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Grating and a sloped floor would help urine and the 'offensive smell' out of the stable and away from the horses.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^] This, as seventeenth-century writers recognised, would prevent the horse from existing in a situation in which
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the evill savour of the horse-pisse will be evermore in their nose , which is most unwholesome, noysome//.'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
As any pet-owner or farmer will know, caring for domesticated and farm animals requires at least some attentiveness to smell - even it is sometimes unconcious.
We should re-engage that olfactory empathy - so common in husbandry manuals from the early modern period all the way through into the nineteenth century - today. We are living on a planet full of smells and full of noses differently attuned to our own. History provides many examples of humans trying to engage and understand those other ways of perceiving the world.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Garland, 'Local Jottings - No. 13. Dorchester-Dorsetshire', //The Naturalist//, 4 (1854), p. 170.
^^2^^William Youatt, //The Horse// (London, 1831), pp. 347-8.
^^3^^Thomas de Gray, //The compleat horseman and expert ferrier In two bookes// (London, 1639).]More horses meant more horse excrement and this led to something of a crisis in the second half of the nineteenth century. Legal cases testify to the problems that were raised by the massive expansion of horse-drawn traffic in cities. In 1874 the owner of a coffee-house on a narrow London street sought to take his neighbours - an auction house - to trial. The reason was the enormous nuisance caused by the constant loading and unloading of horse-drawn vans filled with auctioned items. According to the plaintiff:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...the smell from the horses' manure made the house uncomfortable.//'']]
for him and his potential patrons. Nobody wanted to enjoy their refreshments in an atmosphere of putrid horse shit.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
It was even more of an olfactory nightmare if you happened to be located next to the headquarters of one of a city's horse-drawn tramway and bus companies. In 1892 the owner of a house in Tooting-Park Road, London, attempted to stop the London Tramway Company from stabling their horses nearby. The court heard that there had been:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//within the last few months, frequently and intermittently traced into the plaintiff's house and garden that which wa described by some witnessess... as a 'stink' and a very nasty stink - that is to say, that which created a nuisance and intefered with ordinary comfort.//'']]
The Tramway company attempted to deny that the stench came from them, but the court was not convinced:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//you could not have gathered together within a limited area 200 horses or more without pervading the air with a stink.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
It was perhaps no surprise that, when the autombile first arrived in European cities, its supporters claimed that it would [[end foul-smelling pollution->Horses and Cars]] associated with horse-drawn travel.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Arthur Underhill, //A Summary of the Law of Torts// (London, 1884), p. 9
^^2^^'Rapier V. The London Tramways Company, 1892 November 9th', in //The Times Law Reports//, 9 (1893), pp. 59-60]At a meeting of automobile enthusiasts and their vehicles in June 1898 outside the Whitehall Place hotel in London, a reporter described how the motors ran 'without any manifestation in the shape of noise or smell' and the added that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//If, instead of this being a motor-vehicle meet, it had been a coaching club meet, the street would have resembled a foul-smelling stable from the large quantity of fecal matter that the horses would have ejectd.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The future of travel was, the supporters of motor cars claimed, going to be far less smelly and polluting than the previous equine age.
When the automobile's detractors complained of the smells emitted by burnt oil and petrol, its defenders responded by arguing that most forms of transport emitted foul odours:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Is a locomotive free from 'offensive smells'? Or even go further, does the feacal matter of horses constitute a particularly grateful and sweet-smelling savour that a motor should be damned because at times it may emit the fumes of unburnt petroleum?//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Of course, the reality was rather different.
Despite assertions about the relative healthiness and inoffensiveness of automobiles compared to horses, the fumes of petrol would go on to have a [[smelly, detrimental, impact->Miasma and Pollution]] on the air that humans, animals, and other life forms lived in.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'The Motor-Car Club', //The Automotor and Horseless Vehicle Journal//, 2 (1898), p. 365.
^^2^^'The Motor-Car Competition', // //The Automotor and Horseless Vehicle Journal//, 1 (1897), p. 365.]
Taking care of a horse meant learning to sniff like one. There were two principle smells to watch out for.
First was the smell of the horses food, especially oats and hay. The Victorian equine expert Frederick Fitzwygram, a British army cavalry officer who would later become a member of parliament, published detailed recommendations on how to sniff out the best quality fodder for horses.
Good oats were 'entirely without smell, except that of earth in new samples', though
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//in testing oats by smell, a double handful at least should be taken for the purpose.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
to avoid being deceived by a few grains. Sniffing was the best way of determining the freshness of oats. Indeed,
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the chief distinction between new and olds lies in the smell. New oats smell fresh and of the earth' whereas old oats 'smell rather musty and frequently of rats.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Oats that had been kiln dried to get rid of dampness and softness had a 'peculiar and easily recognised smell and taste'. 'Foxy' oats that had been heated when not dry had a 'peculiar bitterness of smell'. Some less honest sellers attempted to
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//get rid of the smell by spreading out the oats in thin layers to the action of the air and then mixing them with new fresh-smelling oats.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Other sellers fumigated oats with sulphur to alter their colour, but this could easily be detected by
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//taking a handful of oats from the heap and bringing it quickly up to the nose, or by applying the nose directly to a hollow in the heap.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Hay could also be graded by the scent.
Good 'upland hay' should be 'sweet smelling', whilst bad upland hay might have
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//an odour of turpentine//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
especially when grown under fir trees. On the other hand 'Mow-burnt' hay that had been stacked too soon had a 'high smel' and in old hay the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//perfume will... change from that of a new mown grass to the smell (in extreme case) of mow-burnt hay.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The second major smell concerned [[the stables->Olfactory Empathy]] in which horses were housed.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Frederick Fitzwygram, //Horses and Stables// (London, 1886), pp. 52-79.]This could cause problems when horses were tied up in town centres outside inns and other stopping points. In an 1889 British parliametary committee on markets, evidence was heard regarding the sanitary state of Watford market, to the north-west of London. The complaint, from the local Medical Officer, was that the sheep, cows, and horses in the market caused the place to stink injuriously all year round by defecating and urinating on the stone, brick, and gravel square. But attendants at the market sought to be more precise about the guilty party:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Of course, it is a well-known fact that urine from sheep and cattle does actually not smell at all. If you walk over a place where a bullock has dropped its urine you will smell nothing, but the urine of a horse will smell for days and weeks...//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The smells of animals were only one among many odours that caused worries about public health and sanitary safety in European cities.
But horses proved a special case. Destined to pull carriages and carts rather than end up on the butcher's slab, the [[numbers of horses only increased->Horse shit intensifies]] as cities expanded.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//First Report of the Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls// (London, 1889), Volume 1, p. 152.]Whilst the sheer amount of horse manure on European city streets eventually became a serious problem, not all animal excrements were equally offensive in past European noses.
The dung of horses and cows could be described as pleasant. In one of his many works on animals, the famous vegetarian Thomas Tryon noted that the dung of horses was 'not at all offensive' and that in the case of cow dung:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the Dung is of a good Smell, and some do esteem it a good Perfume.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
According to the influential chemist Paracelsus and many subsequent writers, cow-dung could even be transformed into a perfume. One receipt, found repeated in many collections of useful recipes advised readers to:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Take Cow-dung in the month of May or June, and distil it in Balneo; and the water thereof will be an excellent perfume, and have the scent of Amber-grise.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
And yet, as Tryon went on to suggest, the excrement of pigs was felt to be particularly offensive:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Swine Transmutes the Juices of the grass into its own Nature, (viz.) into gross unclean Flesh, and a foul stinking Excrement, very burthensome, and a meer loathing to Nature.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
While animal markets for pigs, sheep, and cattle were zoned to the edges of European cities over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, [[horses->Horse piss]] remained throughout urban streets and squares.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Thomas Tryon, //Tryon's Letters Upon Several Occasions// (London, 1700), pp. 17-18.
^^2^^William Salmon, //Polygraphice// (London, 1685), p. 441.
^^3^^Tryon, //Tryon's Letters//, pp. 17-18.]Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century advocates for automobiles migh have claimed that they were less odorous and polluting than horses.
However, this was because nineteenth-century ideas about pollution were quite different from those cirucalting today. Concerns about air quality revolved around miasmas, putrefactive effluvia, and the emissions of biological decay.
Smoke was therefore much less of a concern. In fact, some chemists and public health writers argued that the chemical composition of coal smoke might be healthful. For example, Robert Angus Smith argued that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//we must not lay too much blame on the [[sulphurous->Marseilles Harbour]] acid of the coals. There can be little doubt that it acts as a disinfectant of the putrid matter in towns, and any one with an attentive smell passing through the streets of this country and the cleanest towns of the continent must feel how vastly superior our atmosphere here is in respect of putrid matter capable of affecting that sense.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In other words, smoke might cut through all the stench from horse manure and render the air cleaner.
It was only in the early twentieth century that smoke came to be popularly understood as dangerous and destructive to health.
Following this shift in focus from miasma to smoke, scientists and public health professionals measured the relative blackness of smoke, using visual aids, rather than the nose.
The shift from the nose to the eye in assessing pollution might have been [[produced by the effect of pollution on the nose->Bees and Flowers]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ Robert Angus Smith, “On the Air of Towns,” Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society, 11:3 (1859), 224.]We know today that air pollution can have a destructive effect upon the sense of smell, with studies showing that levels of smell loss and dysfunction are much higher in polluted in urban rural areas.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, for the animal world beyond humans, smokey pollution has also had transformative effects on the smelling.
Perhaps the best example comes from bees.
On the one hand, pesticides have been shown to alter the part of the brain that bees use for learning, meaning that they forget the smell of food.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
On the other hand, polluted fumes from traffic have been shown to destroy the chemicals in some flowers. This means the flowers are rendered unrecognizable to bees who are hunting for food.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Sevententh-century beekeepers could have easily predicted this, for they were highly attuned to the [[bee's olfactory sensitivities->Bees Abhor Stinks]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Kara C. Hoover, 'Sensory Disruption in Modern Living and the Emergence of Sensory Inequities', //Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine//, 91 (2018), p. 58.
^^2^^Sarah M. Wiliamson and Geraldine A. Wright, ‘Exposure to Multiple Cholinergic Pesticides Impairs Olfactory Learning and Memory in Honeybees’, //The Journal of Experimental Biology//, 216:10 (2013), 1799–807.
^^3^^Inka Lusebrink et al., ‘The Effects of Diesel Exhaust Pollution on Floral Volatiles and the Consequences for Honey Bee Olfaction’, //Journal of Chemical Ecology//, 41 (2015), pp. 904–12]
In an early seventeenth-century book of husbandry, Gervase Markham guided his readers on how to look after bees and their hives. To care for bees, Markham explained, one had to understand their nature:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//To speake then first of the nature of Bees; it is a creature gentle, louing, and familiar about the man which hath the ordering of them, so he come neate, sweet, and cleanely amongst them; otherwise, if hee haue strong, and ill smelling sauours about him, they are curst and malicious, and will sting spitefully.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Markham was not alone in noticing bee's sensitivity to smells. In another husbandry book from later in the seventeenth century, readers were advised on the location of hives:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Their place also must be far from the Dunghils, and all dirty or miry places which might hurt them with ill smells; for they are deadly enemies to all filthiness and uncleanness.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Caring for bees meant avoiding smells that both humans - and by extension bees - were believed to consider obnoxious.
For those nineteenth-century scientists who sought to understand what made bees tick, this meant carefully avoiding causing [[olfactory offense to their insect collaborators->Working with Bees]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Gervase Markham, //Cheape and good husbandry// (London, 1614), p. 151
^^2^^F. B. //The office of the good house-wife// (London, 1672), p. 101]
In an 1821 account of his research the Swiss entomologist François Huber, whose work focussed on the honey bee, described how his assistsant catered to the bees they worked with.
A glass sheet that had protected Huber and his colleague Francis Burnens from being stung by the bees, got in the way of their observations. Burnens therefore resolved to remove the screen and managed to avoid being stung because of his
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//habit of repressing his respiration.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
If Burnens did not breath then he would not offend the bees with the smell of his breath.
Huber went on to perform a whole range of experiments with bees in order to figure out which smells they liked, which smells they avoided, and the ways they managed their olfactory envrionments.
By adding [[camphor->Museums and Camphor]], which bees disliked, to honey, which they loved, Huber was able to observe that the bees rmained 'to preserve their present enjoyments' from the honey and 'sheltered thesmelves from disagreeably sensations by agitating the air' to force the smell of camphor away.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
But bees could also detect [[odours that humans could not detect->Bees Smell Things Humans Don't]] themselves.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Francis Huber, //New observations on the natural history of bees// (Edinburgh, 1821), p. 361
^^2^^Huber, //New Observations//, p. 270.]
Edward Bevan, the British naturalist and leading early-nineteenth century authority on bees agreed with his seventeenth-century forebears when he noted that the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//nicety of their (bees) smell should induce a carefulness that no offensive odours be near an apiary//.'']]
But he also rencounted a story that showed that bees could detect odours that humans could not.
It concerned a man named de Hofer, the Aulic Counsellor to the Grand Duke of Baden. Hofer was a keen beekeeper and possessed a notable ability to approach them without being injured.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//He would at any time search for the queen and taking hold of her gently, place her on his hand.//'']]
However, Hofer was 'unfortunately attacked with a violent fever, and long confined by it'. When he recovered, Hofer returned to his beekeeping. But
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//to his great surprise and disappointment, he discovered that he was no longer in possession of their favour; and instead of being received by them as an old friend, he was treated as a trespasser; nor was he ever able after this period to perform any operation with them, or to approach within their precincts, without exciting their anger.//'']]
Bevan concluded that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//some change had taken place in the Counsellor's secretions in consequence of the fever, which though not noticeable by his friends, was offensive to the olfactory nerves of bees.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
To avoid the same fate as the counsellor, [[bee-keepers had to keep a close attention to smell->Bee Keeping Magazines]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Edward Bevan, //The Honey Bee Its Natural History, Physiology, and Management// (London, 1827), pp. 303-5.]
In the nineteenth century a panolopy of new bee-keeping journals emerged across Europe, in which bee-keepers could share tips and ask for advice. These journals formed a sort of common sensorium where beekeepers speculated on the smells that bees liked or disliked and the role of scent in the lives of their hives.
This included the way in which bees interacted with each other. It was observed that if a bee or ant was placed in water, thereby washing off the scent of the hive, its colleagues would attack it and that bees who had been out labouring all day among flowers obtained entrance into hives that were not their own more easily because
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//its stock-odour has been redered less intensive, or altogether neutralised, by the perfumes of the flowers it has visited.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Several correspondents speculated on the smells that bees found distasteful. A correspondent from a Vicarage in York, wondered whether bees had 'a strong aversion to the smell of ants' after his bees appeared to avoid feeding on syrup that ants had touched.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^] Another writer from Kingston-on-Thames, whose bees were departing and dying, worried that the effluvia from a fowl-house around 3 yards from the hive was the problem: 'Could', he asked his fellow readers, 'there be any unpleasant smell that was distasteful to the bees?'(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^] Whilst a further writer asked
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Will you kindly tell me if bees object to the smell of manure? Our gardener has put up a hot-bed close to the bee-hives, and I wish to know if it should be taken down.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
It was not uncommon to feed bees syrups to supplement their food. Beekeepers also shared their recipes for these in bee-keeping journals. For example, one T. W. from Elham, wrote with a
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//suggestion for the improvement of feeding syrup. A bee's sense of smell is more acute than most things'. Our ordinary syrup has no perfume. A dozen drops of essence of thyme in each quart would rejoice the hearts of thousands.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^5^^]
Beekeeping involved sniffing out what would bring joy to their hives inhabitants. This was [[a sensory education->Sensitive Beekeepers]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'Mutual Recognition Among Bees', //The British Bees Journal//, 13 (1885), p. 31.
^^2^^'Queries and Replies', //The British Bee Journal//, 4 (1876), p. 184
^^3^^'Echoes from the Hives', //The British Bee Journal//, 22 (1894), p. 168
^^4^^ 'Hot-Beds near Hives', //The British Bee Journal//, 22 (1894), p. 110.
^^5^^ T. W., 'Scenting Bee-Syrup', //British Bee Journal//, 21 (1893), p. 57.]
Taking care of bees meant managing your senses and attempting to enter the world of the insects you were working with.
One Mrs L. Harrison, who published several articles in the //British Bee Journal// did a good job of summarising this. Harrison argued that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//In cultivating bees we are improving our own powers of observation - sight, smelling, and hearing are all quickened.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
For bee-keepers, their hobby not only brought them honey. It elevated them to
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a higher plane of thought and action; it cannot be thought otherwise. Bee-culture is an educator of a high power, all the senses are quicked, the eye notices plants and bloom which before were unnoticed as useless weeds; the ear quickly discerns the note of a swarm, the cry of the robber, the hum of plenty, or the mourning wail of the queenless. The sense of smell tells us of the blooming of the linden, buckwheat, and other flowers.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Today, an age of ecological crisis - in which biodiversity is under threat from pollution, climate change, and the destruction of habitats - we could learn a lot from beekeepers.
Even in 1925, beekeepers could already tell that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//smoke or smell from a factory or coal mine, dust and motor exhaust fumes from the highway//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Could be responsible for harming bees.
Like those beekeepers, we need to [[pay attention to ->Imagining other sensory worlds]] to both our olfactory worlds and those of other species.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Mrs L. Harrison, 'Bee-Keeping for Women', //The British Bee Journal// 17 (1889), p. 128
^^2^^Mrs L. Harrison, 'Benefits of Bee-Culture', //The British Bee Journal// 17 (1889), p. 415.
^^3^^J. Anderson, 'The Season', //The Scottish Beekeper// 2, September (1925), p. 38]Over the course of this story we have pursued the various ways in which past Europeans attended to animals and smell. In our own time industrialised farming has taken over the production of meat and dairy, markets and farms are hidden away from the eyes and noses of consumers, and in many cases we are more likely to encounter animals through the medium of sight - as beautiful moving images in TV documentaries on the national world.
This may have insulated us from the smells of animals. But it also means we are less aware of how animals make sense of their own worlds through smell. If the history of animals and smell should teach us one thing, it should be that we need more olfactory empathy with the natural world.
Being aware of air so thick with particles that bees loose their sense of direction can teach us about the pollution of water, air, and earth and encourage us to think about the smells that might not be obvious to us but which, for other animals, are at the centre of their sensory worlds.
a Hog of all other Creatures is likest to a Man in his inward parts , whose flesh is so like to mans flesh , both in smell and taste, that (as Conradus Gesner saith) several have eaten the one for the other, not discovering of it by taste or smell.
Wolgangus Franzius, The history of brutes, trans. N. W. (London, 1670), p. 127.
Tartufa ∣ li Truffes , Tubera terrae , Roots without Stems , or Plants growing from them , which they hunt after with a pig which smells them out , and discovers where they are ; these are a great dish in Italy , and though they seem to have no great nourishment in them are esteemed to be provocative .
Edward Brown, //A brief account of some travels in divers parts of Europe viz Hungaria, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli// (London, 1685), p. 191.
'Before it is ripe, the truffle has no other smell than that of the mouldiness of fertile earth, or decayed vegetables; and in that state, therefore, is not easily perceived and found by animals that have a delicate sense of smelling; but as it appraoches to ripeness, it attains the truffle smell so agreeable to epicures, which, at first, is fragrant, and often like musk; as it is nearer being ripe, it becomes sharper and more urinous; and when too ripe, or going back, and putrescence or insects have begun to make their attacks upon it, is disagreeable, and nearly resembles the smell of a cow-house.
V. F. Fischer, 'Instructions for Truffle Searching', trans. Francis Mascall, //The Gardener's Magazine//, 13 (1837) p. 393.
Nineteenth-century authors suggested that truffle hunting was first practiced with dogs in Italy, France, and Spain in the mid seventeenth century before being bought to German courts in the eighteenth century - who employed Italians and Frenchmen to find the fungi.
Poodles were esteemed the best canine truffle-hunters. Spaniels and setters might be used but these breeds were more likely to be distracted by the scent of game animals. p. 402
Training truffle-hunting dogs involved getting them to eat truffles to familiarise them with the scent and getting them to find 'artificial' truffles made from strong-smelling cheese, fresh bread, and scented with truffle oil. p. 403.
p. 405 Searching for truffles required more time and care than hunting for animals. It was advised that 'the truffle dog does not so easily, and from such a distance, scent the truffle which is concealed in the earth, and diffuses an earhty smell around, as a hound scents game in a good wind' and so the person must go 'through a place twice, and even three times, and at remaining a long time upon a small spot'.
Fischer - and most of the court-hired truffle hunters in Europe - preferred to use dogs rather than pigs. Pigs were more difficulty to train, often ate the truffles rather than just finding them, and were only really useful for around a year once trained. But there were also class concerns at issue: 'proper truffle-hunters' leave hunting with pigs 'the peasants' in France and Italy, especially women. p. 407.
'only a few people understand the art of accustoming these animals to resist their natural voracity, and to leave to man the food they have discovered' Alexander von Bornholz, 'A Treatise on the Cultivation of Truffles', trans. Francis Macsall, //The Gardener's Magazine//, 13 (1837), p. 409
in order to preserve the 'volatile matter' that gave truffles their smell, the French and Italians preserved or marinated them 'enclosed in glasses from which the air is exlucded, or dipped in oil, and then wrapped up in waxed paper.' Alexander von Bornholz, 'A Treatise on the Cultivation of Truffles', trans. Francis Macsall, //The Gardener's Magazine//, 13 (1837), p. 410
Aside from the true truffle, hunters had to watch out for 'Hog-truffle' or 'Swine-truffle', whose 'smell is disagreeably sour, and is like that of swine's dung, on which account it has received its name'. p. 414
John Evelyn noted in 1699 discussed 'trufles' which 'in Italy they fry in Oyl, and eat with Pepper' and that were 'commonly discovered by a Nasute Swine purposely bought up'
John Evelynm, //Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets// (London, 1699), p. 42.
Mrs Beeton, author of the famous book of household management, informed her readers that 'when the peasantry go to gather truffles, they take a pig with them to scent out the spot where they grow'.
Mrs Beeton, //The Book of Household Management// (London, 1861), p. 598.
Nineteenth-century guides to pig-breeding noted that wild pigs were more stupid than those cultivated by farmers 'smell alone excepted'. James Long, //The Book of the Pig// (London, 1886), p. 4
It was said that in 1870 in Perigord a 'truffle pig, well taught, is worth about 200 francs'.
Louis Figueir, Mammalia Their Various Orders and Habits Popularly Illustrated by Typical Species, trans. Parker Gillmore (London, 1870), p. 178
It was, 'a saying among a certain class of persons, that pigs can smell the wind'
John Sherer, //Rural Life Described and Illustrated// (London, 1868), p. 759.
or that they can 'smell the coming storm'.
John Lauris Blake, //The Farm and the Fireside// (London, 1853), p. 184.
In the nineteenth century several magazines suggested that a 'poor weakly boy in the neighbourhood of Würzburg... was able to detect by smell, though at some distance off, the whereabouts of truffles better than trained dogs, and he came to make his living by it'.
'Truffle Gathering', //Chambers Journal//, 632 (1876), p. 96
Stories circulated of dogs finding truffles at distances of one hundred yards or more. Truffle hunting with dogs meant following canine noses across the estates of the gentry. Some did this without permission and were condemned as poachers. Others, such as one Sussex truffle hunter pictured in an 1838 edition of The Penny Magazine, was given permission by estate owners to take his poodles through estates to find the fragrant fungi.
'Truffle Hunter', //The Penny Magazine//, 381 (1838), 89-90.Porcine and canine noses have often been used throughout the past for the purposes of food and tracking
In 1699 the natural philosopher John Evelyn published a 'Discourse of Sallets', in which he described 'trufles'. These mushroom-like fungi were a delicacy in Italy
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//where they fry in Oyl, and eat with Pepper//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Truffles were difficult to grow and instead they had to be hunted down in fields and forest. According to Evelyn, truffles were
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//commonly discovered by a Nasute Swine purposely bought up.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In Edward Brown's late seventeenth century travels around Italy he also noted the use of pigs to smell out truffles. He noted though truffles
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//seem to have no great nourishment in them they are esteemed to be provacative.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
What Brown meant by provocative was that truffles were an aphrodisiac - as an eighteenth-century medical text put it, they provoked sexual urges or 'venery'.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
What seventeenth-century Europeans had already sniffed out, was a link between [[truffles, pigs, and sex->Truffles and Sex]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Evelyn, //Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets// (London, 1699), p. 42.
^^2^^Edward Brown, //A brief account of some travels in divers parts of Europe viz Hungaria, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli// (London, 1685), p. 191.
^^3^^Robert James, //Pharmacopoeia Universalis// (London, 1747), p. 462.]There is, it turns out, good olfactory reasons for the association between the scent of truffles and sex.
Truffles want to rerproduce themselves. They do this by enticing animals to eat and, in due course, excrete them. This ensures their reproduction through the spread of their spores through the excretions left on the ground.
That enticement depends on scent. Truffles emit a scent that contains 5-alpha-androstenol, which is also contained in male human perspiration, female human urine and a secretion that male pigs use to signal their sexual availability.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In other words, truffles and sexy because the smell like a sexually excited human or pig.
The musky scent of the truffle signalled the right time to pick it. This the middle of its life course, between the earthy smells of its initial state and the more putrid, rotten, scent it acquired as it went bad:
V. F. Fischer, one of the first to publish a treatise of any length on truffle hunting, described the smell biography of the truffle:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Before it is ripe, the truffle has no other smell than that of the mouldiness of fertile earth, or decayed vegetables; and in that state, therefore, is not easily perceived and found by animals that have a delicate sense of smelling; but as it appraoches to ripeness, it attains the truffle smell so agreeable to epicures, which, at first, is fragrant, and often like musk; as it is nearer being ripe, it becomes sharper and more urinous; and when too ripe, or going back, and putrescence or insects have begun to make their attacks upon it, is disagreeable, and nearly resembles the smell of a cow-house.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The association of musky, ripe, truffles with the sex hormones of male pigs is one reason why [[female pigs->Slut the Pig]] are often used as skilled truffle-hunters.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Laura U. Marks, ‘Thinking Multisensory Culture’, in Francesca Bacci and David Melcher (eds.), //Art and the Senses// (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 241.
^^2^^V. F. Fischer, 'Instructions for Truffle Searching', trans. Francis Mascall, //The Gardener's Magazine//, 13 (1837) p. 393.]In his 1847 book on pigs, the surgeon William Youatt sought to defend the animal against the depreciations heaped upon it.
He argued that the mischaracterisation of it as a
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//stupid, brutal, rapacious, and filthy animal, grovelling and disgusting in all his habits.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
was incorrect and that, 'in a native state', pigs were gregarious, communal, and feeling, animals.
In order to further support his argument, Youatt pointed to the amazing olfactory powers of pigs. He told the story of the game-keeper Richard Toomer who tought a black sow named 'Slut' to smell out rabbits and patridges. It was said that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//her nose was superior to the best pointer they ever possessed.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This would not have surprised many rural Europeans. It was a proverb
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//among a certain class of persons, that pigs can smell the wind.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
or that they could
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//smell the coming storm.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Since truffles were difficult to farm and so were therefore expensive, prized, commodities, the 'nasute swine' that John Evelyn had described could be very valuable. In fact, it was said that in Perigord - a well-known truffle-hunting region - in 1870
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a truffle pig, well taught, is worth about 200 francs.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
However, from the eighteenth-century onwards, as truffle-hunting spread from Italy and France into Germany and Britain, the pig was slowly ousted by the [[dog->Truffle Dogs]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^William Youatt, //The Pig// (London, 1847), pp. 25-6.
^^2^^John Sherer, //Rural Life Described and Illustrated// (London, 1868), p. 759.
^^3^^John Lauris Blake, //The Farm and the Fireside// (London, 1853), p. 184.
^^4^^Louis Figueir, //Mammalia Their Various Orders and Habits Popularly Illustrated by Typical Species//, trans. Parker Gillmore (London, 1870), p. 178]Nineteenth-century authors suggested that truffle hunting was first practiced with dogs in Italy, France, and Spain in the mid seventeenth century before being bought to German courts in the eighteenth century - who employed Italians and Frenchmen to find the fungi.
Most of the truffle hunters hired by European princely courts preferred to use dogs rather than pigs. Pigs were more difficulty to train, often ate the truffles rather than just finding them, and were only really useful for around a year once trained. But there were also class concerns at issue: 'proper truffle-hunters' leave hunting with pigs 'the peasants' in France and Italy, especially women.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Truffle hunting with dogs meant following canine noses across the estates of the gentry and rich landowners. Some did this without permission and were condemned as poachers. Others, such as one Sussex truffle hunter pictured in an 1838 edition of //The Penny Magazine//, were given permission by estate owners to take his poodles through estates to [[find the fragrant fungi->Training Truffle Dogs]].^^2^^
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^V. F. Fischer, 'Instructions for Truffle Searching', trans. Francis Mascall, //The Gardener's Magazine//, 13 (1837) pp. 393-7.
^^2^^'Truffle Hunter', //The Penny Magazine//, 381 (1838), 89-90.]Poodles were esteemed the best canine truffle-hunters. Spaniels and setters might be used but these breeds were more likely to be distracted by the scent of game animals.
Training truffle-hunting dogs involved getting them to eat truffles to familiarise them with the scent and getting them to find 'artificial' truffles made from strong-smelling cheese, fresh bread, and scented with truffle oil.
Searching for truffles required more time and care than hunting for animals. It was advised that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the truffle dog does not so easily, and from such a distance, scent the truffle which is concealed in the earth, and diffuses an earthy smell around, as a hound scents game in a good wind//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
and so the dog's owner had to go
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//through a place twice, and even three times, and at remaining a long time upon a small spot//.'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Patient, careful, attention to the dog was required. The owner had to let it find its own way through the forest and give it the freedom to go to and fro without forcing it onwards.
Letting animals guide our way through the world and responding with care, compassion, and interest to the scents they find, is something we could all do more of in an age when biodiversity is under threat.
But we also have to be attentive to the ways in which animals are used as sensory prostheses that black-box forms of olfactory racism and inequity. dogs are the animal with the closest historical links to policing the public and detecting crimes. It's a history that truly begins in the [[colonies of European empires->Dogs and Runaway Slaves]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^V. F. Fischer, 'Instructions for Truffle Searching', trans. Francis Mascall, //The Gardener's Magazine//, 13 (1837) pp. 402-7.]In the Belgian novelist Heman Teirlinck first full length story The Ivory Monkey (1909), set around in Brussells and its surrounding countryside, two of the characters escape the rain in a barn where they detect 'the heavy smell of of the cows'.
Herman Teirlinck, //Het Ivoren Aappe// (Brussells, 1909), p. 63.
Cowslip, from the AS. Cus∣lippe; so called, because Cows love to eat them; or, as Dr. Th. H. supposeth, be∣cause they have a smell like that of a Cow's breath.
Stephen Skinner, //Gazophylacium anglicanum// (London, 1689)
A Water smelling like Amber, made by Paracelsus out of Cow dung.
Take of Cow dung and distil it in Balneo, and the water there∣of will have the smell of Amber gryse.
This water is very excellent in all inward inflammations.
John French, //The art of distillation// (London, 1653), p. 101
In her 1919 novel //Harvest//, Mrs Humphry Ward described the smell of cornfields and the ammonia smell of the farmyard alongside the 'sweetness left in the evening air by the chewing cows on their passage to the cow - house on the farther side of the yard'.
Mrs Humphry Ward, //Harvest// (London, 1919).
I will willingly , and smilingly grant Paracelsus the Whey , and will my self take the Cream ; Because the Butter resembles the smell of flowers , where - with the Cow is fed ; but not the Whey.
Jean Baptiste van Helmont, //Van Helmont's works//, trans. J. C. (London, 1665), p. 220
'Every Animal has a particular Scent; which Smell is communicated to Oyl, by boiling of the Flesh in it... or may be drawn from the Dungs of Animals. A Cow, Veal, or Sheep, have a moderate and Milky smell. A Fox, Horse, Catt, Dogg, or Fitchet, have a very Fetid and offensive Smell. A Martin killed, smells Musky; and a Kings-Fisher is also said to smell so... Shell-Fish and Salmon have a different Smell, resembling the semen; and therefore may be a Venereal Diet. Ducks, Geese, Swans, and divers other Wild-Fowl, have a Moorish Smell and Taste, and are crude and less wholesome Diet.
John Floyer, //Pharmako-Basanos// (London, 1687), p. 95
From the eighteenth century onwards it was widely held that the smell of cows - particularly their breath - could be good for human health. In a collection of writings celebrating life in mid-nineteenth-century rural England the poet Thomas Miller recalled the smell of a country garden:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//You feel as if you were devouring health at every mouthful; as if you were swallowing the substance from all sweet country smells and tastes, - a mixture of dews from every sweet wild-flower - perfumes from neighbouring hay-fields - hawthorn blossoms, gathered, kneaded, and baked - honey with another flavour - cream before it had grown cold or thickened - and the smell of the cow's breath floating over all... you feel as if you should never again need a doctor...//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In the early modern period this even extended to the smell of cow's dung which, far from being dismissed as a stench, could be good for certain types of people. In a late seventeenth-century book of medical advice for the poor, Thomas Cock advised that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...to receive much the sent of Cow-dung is good and necessary for hot blooded people.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Cow-dung could even be found in early modern recipes for perfume. For example, one mid-seventeenth-century book on distillation included:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//A Water smelling like Amber, made by Paracelsus out of Cow dung.
Take of Cow dung and distil it in Balneo, and the water there∣of will have the smell of Amber gryse. This water is very excellent in all inward inflammations.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
By contrast the smell of pig excrement could be [[somewhat more problematic...->Pig shit]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Thomas Miller, //The Poacher, and Other Pictures of Country Life// (London, 1858), pp. 191-2.
^^2^^Thomas Cock, //Kitchin-physick, or, Advice to the Poor// (London, 1676), p. 55.
^^3^^John French, //The art of distillation// (London, 1653), p. 101.]The use of dogs to track humans by smell - especially those deemed to be acting illegally - came into use in early modern colonial empires.
In 1658 the English 'procured some blood-hounds' and hunted runaway slaves like 'wild beasts'.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^] By the mid-eighteenth-century the French were hunting out communities of runaway slaves with dogs and by the 1790s the Spanish had developed the Cuban bloodhound - which quickly gained a reputation for sagacity and ferocity in equal measure.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The success of dogs in tracking runaway slaves depended on the assumption that all humans had an innate smell that was specific to them. It was believed, espeically from the eighteenth-century onwards, that this smell was linked to the racial identity of the individual: Europeans smelled differently to Africans, for example.
But it was the twentieth century that really saw the development of the police dog as a tool for sniffing out crime. Two primary uses were identified for canine nose. The first involved (still involves) [[tracking criminals->Tracking Criminals by Smell]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Edward Long, //The History of Jamaica: or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of the Island. With Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government//, 3 vols. (London, 1774), i, 279
^^2^^Tyler D. Parry and Charlton W. Yingling, 'Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas', //Past and Present//, 246:1 (2020), 69-108]During WWII the U.S experimented using dogs to track and then attack their enemies.
The U.S put together a training program with the aim of teaching dogs to find and attack Japanese combatants by the smell of their [[blood->Jean-Pierre Barruel Escapes his Lab]] and sweat. The training took place using interned Japanese Americans, with the U.S Army believing that they would have the same 'human scent' as the Japanese soliders American troops were facing in the Pacific theatre.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
These experiments were unsuccessful. However, in the 1970s and 1980s the East German state also developed scent tracking to observe where political dissidents and spies had been. They could follow them to their apartments, locate the drop boxes used for secret communications, and find out whether contraband such as poisons, weapons, or explosives had been touched by known enemies of the state.
The East German's secret police, the Stasi, even developed new scents that they could apply to the cars or clothes of dissidents - thereby making it easier for the dogs to follow them.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But the East Germans also collected the odours of criminals and stored them in their own scent archive.
[[<img src="https://www.deutsches-spionagemuseum.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/deutsches-spionagemuseum-berlin-glas-300x300.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->Stasi Scent Archive]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Susannah Callow, 'Odour and ethnicity: Americans and Japanese in the Second World War', in Nicholas J. Saunders and Paul Cornish (eds.), //Modern Conflict and the Senses// (Routledge, 2017), pp. 157-170.
^^2^^Kristie Macrakis, //Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World// (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 285.]The use of DNA as a molecular fingerprint did achieve widespread use in policing until the 1990s. So instead the Stasi wanted to create the a smell fingerprint collection. They would then be able to give this to the noses of their canine colleagues in order to identify potential dissidents in line-ups or through objects they had touched.
Yellow cloths were placed on special interrogation chairs, wiped around the waistbands of suspects, and used to obtain scents from crime scenes. These were then popped in sealed mason jars. These were then given to dogs to compare against jars of suspect odours in organised smell lineups.
But before the Stasi began making their smell archive, dogs had already been in use in smell-lineups for nearly a century. They also used for [[differentiating between->Smell Lineups]] suspects today.The Germans also made early forrays into using dogs for detection. Inspector Bussenius of Braunschweig, Germany, was a famous early example.
In 1903 an 11-year old girl was killed at a farm in a nearby village. All other forensic tests failed to identify the murderer. Bussenius and his dog 'Harras von der Polizei' were called in.
Harras was instructed to sniff the blood at the crime scene and then the surrounding area. He sniffed the assembled farm employees. When he reached the eighth employee, Harras jumped up at him. The test was performed twice with the same result.
Duwe, the farm hand that Harras had identified, then made a confession and was sentenced to death. Harras, for his part, was rewarded with a steak.
Many of the results obtained in this manner would raise sceptical eye-brows today. In some of the retellings, one wonders whether the entreaties of the dog amounted to torture of the suspect - who would then confess so that the handlers would stop the four-legged assault. In 1908, for example, Grief the dog identified a suspect in a murder in Geissen. Once he had sniffed and barked at the suspect, Grief lunged repeatedly and violently at the man until a confession was elicited.
Smell-lineups were refined by police forces over the next hundred years. In the Netherlands, for example, smell line-ups of different objects in the 1940s were replaced by line-ups of the same objects in the 1950s. These were then replaced with aluminum tubes carrying the scent of the lineup participants in the 1960s, staineless steel tubes in the 1970s, and finally special scent collection cloths in the 1980s.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Smell-lineups continue to be used in countries across the globe today, though the science behind them and the exactitude of the results thus obtained are both highly questionable.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Resi Gerritsen, Ruud Haak, Simon Prinds (ed.), //K9 Line-up Training// (Brush Education, 2023) pp. 35-44.
^^2^^Barbara Ferry et al., 'Scent lineups compared across eleven countries: Looking for the future of a controversial forensic technique', //Forensic Science International//, 302 (2019), 109895.]You are walking a European city street in the eighteenth century.
As you walk, you smell something unusual. It doesn't smell right to you.
What is it that you can smell? Is it:
[[Sulpherous and brimstone-like?->Smelling out Coining]]
[[Rotten, putrid, and decaying?->Sniffing out Murder Victims]]
On the 12th of May 1801 John Sayers, Archibald Ruthven, and William Bacon were given information that a counterfeit coin operation was being run out of 11 Church-street in Westminster.
Coining covered a range of offences including creating counterfeit coins. This included filing, milling, colouring or otherwise intefering with coins in order to use the resulting filings to help create more coins from. These were dirty processes involving acidic chemicals and sooty furnaces.
The men were part of the Bow-Street Runners, London's first professional police force, and they were used to [[sniffing out crime...->Furnace Smells]].At midnight on December 5th 1758 a constable and two watchman came to the overseer of the Parish of St Andrews Holborn with a grim request.
They had found human body parts in a gulley along one of the streets in the parish and they asked the overseer to have them carried away.
The overseer accompanied the watchmen and constable to Chick Lane and
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//when we came within a little distance of the body, it smelt so very strong, that the watchmen did not care to take up the parts.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Who did the body parts belong to and how had they ended up [[dumped on the street->A body in the attic.]]?The 24th of March 1787.
It is 02:00 in the morning and the residents of Little Pulteney Street in London's St. James parish are about to be rudely awoken.
[[<img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53140787900_cc940bbaae_o.png" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->A Smell of Fire]]
After loudly knocking and waiting a suspicously long time to be let in, the men followed their noses upstairs. Bacon
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//smelt a very nasty smell upon the staircase as we were going up, a kind of sulphurous smell...//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
and Sayers suggested that this must mean there was a furnace on the first floor.
The smell of sulphur was often associated with the dirty work of counterfeiting for other reasons. At the trial of another set of coiners, it had
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//appeared by the smell of their clothes, what sort of business they had been about, for they use a great deal of brimstone in the colouring of half-pence.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
But when Sayers and his fellow Bow Street Runners were questioned in court, the judge was interested in a different smell:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Q. The smell that you spoke of, was a sulphurous smell, and not at all like aquafortis?
A. It was not.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Why was the court so interested in the smell of [[Aqua Fortis->Aqua Fortis]]?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 30 August 2023), May 1801, trial of ANTHONY HOFFMAN THEIRERS (t18010520-69).
^^2^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 30 August 2023), July 1784, trial of ELIZABETH BICKNELL otherwise HILL, otherwise WILD THOMAS HASBRIDGE and ELIZABETH his wife THOMAS HASBRIDGE (t17840707-107).]Aqua fortis is known today as nitric acid. This was used to colour counterfiet coins by giving them a silvery shine.
The acrid, pungent, scent of aqua fortis was therefore the key tell-tale sign of counterfeit coining. It was, as another Bow-Street Runner John Armstrong put it:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a smell which wherever there has been coining going on, it is like it.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Armstrong was [[not the only nose-witness->Police Group Sniffing]] who knew the scent of aqua fortis.When the Bow-Street runners descended on a suspected dwelling, they engaged in group sniffing to determine the presence of aqua fortis. For example, in the trial of James Grace and Joseph Walker for coining in January 1789, James Shakeshaft found a bottle and offered it to his colleague John Armstrong to sniff:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//James Shakeshaft: When I went down to fetch the woman, I found this bottle; I smelt the bottle, and I smelt a sulphurous smell. I knew the smell of aqua-fortis very well; I am certain, on my oath, there had been aqua-fortis in it.
Jury. Was there any cork in it? - None. It had been rinsed out; and I put it at my nose, and it burnt the end of my nose; I afterwards gave it to Armstrong to smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Similarly, in May 1800 another runner John Ray visited the lodgings of a suspected coiner. He was also accompanied by John Armstrong:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I saw Armstrong find a rag, which we all smelt, it had the smell of aqua-fortis upon it, it was very much stained, I believe, with aqua-fortis.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Armstrong and the other runners were clearly acknowledged [[nasal experts->Smell Expertise and Crime]] when it came to aqua fortis.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 30 August 2023), January 1789, trial of JAMES GRACE JOSEPH WALKER (t17890114-24).
^^2^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 30 August 2023), May 1800, trial of EDWARDS JONES, alias DIGHT MARY CAMPBELL, alias DIGHT (t18000528-7).]In court, judge and jury were keen to ascertain the smell expertise of witnesses.
When John Ray found a bottle 'that he said smelled very strong of the aqua-fortis' in the home of a defendant, they were asked in court:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Q. Are you well acquainted with the smell of aqua-fortis? - A. I am.
Q. Have you been in the habit of apprehending many of these kind of people? - A. Yes.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, in at least one case the lawyer for the defence tried to question the olfactory expertise of the Bow Street Runners by having them smell a substance in the court room:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//John Armstrong: ...on the chimney-piece were two phials... I smelt them both; I had smelt aqua fortis before, and I took it to be aqua fortis.
Mr Garrow: Are you so well acquainted with the smell of aqua fortis, as to tell it from any strong acid?
JA: I will not pretend to say upon my oath I am judge sufficient to say that;
G: Smell that, (giving the witness a phial) do you think that is aqua fortis?
JA: I do not know that it is.
G: Are you acquainted with the smell of copperas?
JA: No, I am not.
G:You know perhaps that shoemakers use copperas to colour their heels of their shoes?
JA: They may.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
By getting Armstrong to sniff a phial in court, Garrow was - quite theatrically - attempt to cast doubt on his ability to detect aqua fortis by the smell alone.
Smell was often a silent witness, [[provoking questions->Odours of Arson]] and contradicting the statements made in the courtroom.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 30 August 2023), May 1800, trial of EDWARDS JONES, alias DIGHT MARY CAMPBELL, alias DIGHT (t18000528-7).
^^2^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 30 August 2023), February 1788, trial of JAMES FIELD SARAH FIELD WILLIAM FIELD THOMAS FIELD JOSEPH FIELD (t17880227-92).]
Ann Nailor, the unfortunate girl whose body had been left in parts on a cold London street, had been apprenticed to Sarah Metyard when she was thirteen years old.
Metyard was a cruel and abusive woman who beat both the female apprentices in her charge and her own daughter.
But this was not the only cruelty she inflicted: she also starved the girls apprenticed to her, feeding them irregularly and sometimes not at all.
One day, Metyard found that Nailor had perished as a result of her ill treatment.
Not wanting the parish authorities to find out that Nailor had been starved to death, Metyard hid the body in the garret of the house in a locked box.
But some 2 months later, Metyard decided she needed to [[get rid of the body->The Smell of Death]]Initally, Metyard had planned to burn the body. But her long-suffering daughter explained why her mother decided against this
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//she wished she could have destroyed it all by fire; she would, but it would have made such a stink, that would have alarmed all the neighbours.//'']]
Metyard therefore decided to chop up the emaciated corpse and leave it in the street. Having deposited the body, she stopped for a glass of brandy at a nearby drinking establishment.
But the smell of death lingered on her clothes. The owner shouted
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//What is the matter there is such a stink in the house?//'']]
A murmer of disquiet rippled through the pub and
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the people mentioned there was a great stink.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Worrying she would be discovered, Metyard hurried home.
But disquieting smells also came in other guises, included the[[burning, smokey, acrid->Odours of Arson]] smell of fire.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 05 September 2023), July 1762, trial of Sarah Metyard Sarah Morgan Metyard (t17620714-30).]Frances Syder, who lodged at No. 2 Little Pulteney Street, was awake.
Midway through washing up the dishes Frances smelt fire. She opened her windows and called out
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//for God's sake tell me where the fire is?//'']]
But all she recieved in reply was a voice telling her
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//hush! hush!//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Frances woke her sleeping husband who asked whether she could see the fire. She answered no but 'put your head out of the window, and you will smell it'.
[[<img src="https://www.fsai.ie/getmedia/cc59c48d-1e9f-444b-b596-d08125a545c1/Smoke-flavourings-SF-007-and-SF-010-no-longer-permitted-for-use-in-food-from-1-January-2024(1).png" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->Smelling fire leads to seeing fire]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 25 August 2023), April 1788, trial of DAVID CLARY ELIZABETH GOMBERT (t17880402-18).]Samuel Suddenwood lived across the road from No.2.
About the same time that Frances Syder was waking up her husband, Suddenwood's dog also smelt something was wrong and roused him from slumber:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I smelt fire, I threw up my chamber window, the front window directly facing his house; I saw immediately smoke at the corner of Clary's house come out at the shop windows.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
David Clary was a tailor and his house was No.1 Little Pulteney.
Inside the building, with its many lodgers, the alarm was also being raised.
[[<img src="https://collections.library.yale.edu/iiif/2/32348878/full/full/0/default.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->A burning smell that was not a candle]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 25 August 2023), April 1788, trial of DAVID CLARY ELIZABETH GOMBERT (t17880402-18).]Sarah Bishop was one of the lodgers, asleep on the bottom floor of Clary's house.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a little after two I was disturbed with the smell of something that appeared to me like a candle, that had been set under a painted board with oil... A smell of oil, very strong and powerful; it appeared to me as if somebody had left a candle on the stairs; I sat up, and I thought to myself, this is not the smell of a candle; I got out of bed, and I went to the kitchen door...//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Opening the door, Bishop was overcome by the smoke that burst out.
The fire raged and burnt out Clary's house. Before it could finally be put out the fire had also caused damage to the property next door.
Clary's house was insured with the Sun Fire Insurance company. But as soon as one of their firemen began to dig through the gutted remains of the building, it was clear that the fire was [[no mere accident->A Smell of Lamp Oil]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 23 October 2023), April 1788, trial of DAVID CLARY ELIZABETH GOMBERT (t17880402-18).]James Broughton, a fireman belonging to the Sun Fire Insurance office located the remains of a sea chest. The chest was filled
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//with paper and stinking oil; it appeared to be lamp oil, and the oil had changed the colour yellow; there was a quantity of hay-bands; I had such a cold, I could not undertake to say, whether the oil was intermixed with them in the same manner, but I shewed them to several persons, who said, they smelt the oil.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
It quickly became clear that Clary, who was in debt and falling behind on his rent, had set fire to his property deliberately in order to claim the insurance money.
At trial in April 1788, before the judge and jury at London's Old Bailey, David Clary was sentenced to death for burning down both his house and that of his neighbours.
As these cases of murder, coining and arson have all demonstrated, a careful nose could be crucial in determining the causes of potentially criminal acts in the eighteenth-century city.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 25 August 2023), April 1788, trial of DAVID CLARY ELIZABETH GOMBERT (t17880402-18).]
It's 1787, you are newly arrived in London, and you are walking the short distance from the Saracen's Head Inn to the nearby Newgate prison.
As you pass the Old Bailey courthouse you catch a terrible smell in the air.
Uncertain of its origins, you ask a lawyer as they hurry past on their way to a trial.
They tell you that the smell
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//arose from the burning of a woman who had been found guilty of coining farthings//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The public burning of women in England only ended in 1790, Catherine Hayes being the last such individual to be thus punished.
Up until 1789 the scent of burnt flesh also appeared in the courtroom itself, where some malefactors might be branded with a hot iron - "T" for theft, "F" for felon, or "M" for murder.
The smell of burning was a warning to others. But smell could also feature as part of the [[humilitation->Smell and Humiliation]] of legal or, in some cases, extra-judicial punishment.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Henry 'Orator' Hunt quoted in //Hansard's Parliamentary Debates//, third series (London,, 1832), xii, 1173]1944, near Argentan in the Orne. Allied forces are busy fighting to liberate France from Nazi German control.
Having left a newly liberated town, an American military commander leading an infantry regiment describes a foul scent on the air.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The French were rounding up collaborators, cutting their hair off and burning it in huge piles, which one could smell miles away//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
As the Nazis were driven out and Vichy collaborators removed from office, a stench-ridden ritual of expulsion centred on the bodies of women who had engaged in 'collaboration horizontale' with Nazi soldiers and officials.
Burnt hair had a long history in the context of gynaecological practice stretching back to the ancient world, where its smell was often used to repel demons, pests, or reset the internal location of a woman's womb.^^2^^
There was, it seems, a similar olfactory ritual at work in France as it underwent liberation from German control.
In burning the hair of these women, the formerly occupied French were driving out the poison of their recent past through a [[ritual of punishment and humiliation->Smells in the Pillory]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Antony Beevor, //D-Day: The Battle for Normandy// (London, 2014), p. 449
^^2^^Margaret Day Elsner, 'From Gorgons to Goop: Scent Therapy and the Smell of Transformation in Antiquity and the Holistic Health Movement', in Adeline Grand-Clément and Charlotte Ribeyrol (eds.), //The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination// (London, 2022), p. 79; Mackenzie Cooley and Kathryn Biedermann, 'Ambergris: From Sea to Scent in Renaissance Italy', in Mackenzie Cooley et al. (eds.), //Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds// (London, 2023).]The shaving and burning of French women's hair in 1944 was not the first example in European history of smells forming part of the humiliation of public punishment.
Perhaps the most obvious example comes from the use of the pillory - usually a wooden device with holes for the arms and head in which a person could be publicly displayed as punishment for their crime.
Whilst it was not necessarily a part of the legally required punishment, it was often expected that the person in the pillory would be pelted with putrid and foul-smelling materials. The stench was both a form of punishment and a marker of the shame attached to the individual.
For exampe, in London in 1755 a Frenchman was placed in the pillory:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Monsieur Henri Govers, alias de Bosier, the Parisian who yesterday honour'd the Pilori de Londres with his Gallican Presence, was severely pelted by an enrag'd English Mob. Rotten eggs, corrupted Oranges, &c. made a wretched Figure of le Gentilhomme Francois.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, where the penance did not meet with the approval of the public they might [[subvert the intentions of pillory punishment through more fragrant methods->Punishment by Flowers]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Postscript, Whitehall Evening Post, or London Intelligencer, no. 1410, Saturday May 24th to Thursday May 27th 1755.]In 1703 the author Daniel Defoe wrote and published a defence of his co-religionists - Protestant Dissenters - that earned him a place in the pillory.
Yet many members of the public disagreed with the punishment. Instead of pelting him with offal or rotten vegetabes, Defoe was covered in flowers.
In later images of the incident, members of the crowd even proffer Defoe herbs and flowers on the end of poles so that he might enjoy their scent.
[[<img src="https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/V0041680/full/full/0/default.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->Burning Saints]]Whilst the women who were burnt alive for their crimes in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England released the discomforting odour of singed flesh, other burnt bodies released fragrant fumes.
When the early Christian martyr St Polycarp was burnt at the sake in AD 155, he was said to release a 'fragrant odour as of the fumes of [[frankincense->Equine Feeling]]' - a sure indicator of his saintly virtue.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Later religious movements, hoping to capitalise on the link between scent and sanctity, tried to make infuse their own martyrs with fragrance.
1440(click-replace: "1440")[
<img src="https://www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe/woodcuts/f0735w.gif" alt="An image of Richard Wyche being burnt at the stake in 1440, from Foxe's Book of Martyrsl" style="max-width: 100%;"/></a>
In 1440 the Lollard heretic Richard Wyche was burnt at the stake in London. His co-religionists attempted to give his ashes the whiff of sanctity by mixing them with spices. In turn, the state decided to cancel out this olfactory propoganda by establishing a dung hill on the execution-site-turned-shrine.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Whilst fragrant smells were one way of resisting the power of punishment to degrade the victim, sometimes good odours could be their own [[form of punishment->Hunger Strikes]]...
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Constance Classen, //The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination// (Routledge, 2002).
^^2^^C. M. Woolgar, //The Senses in Late Medieval England// (Yale University Press, 2006), p. 125.]]In the twentieth century political prisoners often used hunger strikes as a way of protesting against their incarceration. In these instances, prison officials often responded with smells.
Mary Sophia Allen, suffragette and later Fascist, was imprisoned for breaking windows in 1909. As was common among suffragettes at the time, Allen went on hunger strike. Two days in, the guards responsed with the scent of home comforts:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//.. they brought in a kettle of boiling water, a teapot, some creamy milk, and some lump sugar. They made the tea; they held the steaming teapot under my nose. It almost drove me mad. My tongue was like leather with thirst, and the hot, fragrant smell started the saliva running at the back of my throat.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Prison food was often lamabasted for smelling and tasting foul. In order to compel hunger strikers to shut up and eat up, prison guards sometimes deployed increasingly appetising offerings. In 1961 Stokely Carmichael, a civil rights organiser and one of the 'Freedom Riders' arrested for entering a 'white' only cafeteria carriage on a train, was on hunger strike in Parcham Penitentiary in Mississippi:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Suppertime, a miraculous transformation. The food, which had always been disgusting, suddenly looked appetizing and smelled great. Fried chicken, peas, greens, and corn bread still steaming and with what looked and smelled like butter. They played the trays in the slot in the door where we could see and smell the food. The penalty for knocking over the trays was solitary confinement in the hole, so we couldn't event do that. We had to endure the smells. And it got worse (and the food better).//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The disgust of being [[forced to breathe in foul odours->Prison Odours]] could also be part of the punishment itself.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Mary Sophia Allen, //Lady in Blue// (London, 1936), p. 20
^^2^^Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, //Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) // (Scribner, 2003), 209]For seventeenth-century prisoners the smells of a prison were part of the punishment.
In England, the Quaker Anthony Mellidge described his experience of Winchester prison in 1659, aiming to make it known to the public how he and his co-religionists were suffering. He complained of the:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//most noisome stinks and filthy scents have I suffered, by being shut up in it close prisoner ten months, having no place for ayre, but in a smoaky filthy close place.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This cry has echoed down the years. One of the most common complaints about prison odours was the constant exposure to the smell of waste - both yours and that of others. The Czech author Eva Kanturkova described the smell of Ruzyne prison, where she was incarcerated in 1981-1982:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The smell holds forever the un-washedness of bodies, their sicknesses, the stench of the toilet, and the bad food, the fetid moldering smell of air breathed over and over again.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Attempts have often been made to disinfect and deodorize prisons, though they have [[not always been effective->Deodorizing Prisons]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Anthony Mellidge, //Winchester prison the 21th day of the 1 month// (London, 1659).
^^2^^Helsinki Watch, //Prison Conditions in Czechoslovakia// (Washington, 1989), pp. 9-10.]With their reputation for foul smells, prisons were key sites of experimentation when it came to purifying and deodorizing spaces.
In 1752 James Pringle and John Hales installed a new ventilator system in Newgate Prison, London. Powered by a windmill atop the prison battlements, 'the tubes from the several wards, uniting in one great trunk, convey all the putrid steams by that channel into the atmosphere, through a vent made for that purpose' which:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//threw out a considerable stream of air, of a most offensive smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But getting rid of air was not the only option. In the 1840s prisons were one of the first places where new disinfecting and deodorizing fluids promoted by British, French, and Candian entrepneurs and medical professionals were tested out. These were often made from chemicals such as chloride of lime.
In reality, these chemicals just added the melange of prisons odours. Visiting a French prison in 1950 a writer for the French newspaper //Combat// asserted that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//this smell of the prison, it is unique, though it comes in four parts: humidity, cabbage, disinfectant, toilets.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
However, one account of prison life from 1930 felt that the fug of smells created by the mix of chemicals, body odours, food, and other mixed scents was to take away the prisoner's sense of self:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//vile - smelling stuff, prison smell! That must be part of the punishment — to make them all smell alike!//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
In prisons today the absence of smells - especially food smells - the inmate's community are figured as a loss of identity and a [[painful disconnect->Prisons still stink]] from the outside world.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Pringle, 'An Account of Several Persons Seized with the Goal-Fever, Working in Newgate; And of the Manner, in Which the Infection Was Communicated to One Intire Family', //Philosophical Transactions//, 48 (1753), pp. 44-5.
^^2^^Anon, 'Des Matricules Ou Des Hommes?', //Combat//, 9:1921 (1950),p. 6
^^3^^Lewis Fisher Brown and Fay Purdy Le Compte, //Script: An Anthology of Literature Produced by the Students of the College of William and Mary// (Richmond. Williams Printing Company, 1930).]Prisons today smell slightly better than their seventeenth- or nineteenth-century counterparts. In 2010 The British prison reformer Stephen Shaw described foul smells as a part of the prison system's past:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//When I first worked at the Prison Reform Trust in 1981, the very paper on which prisoners would write to us was impregnated with a distinctive smell. You would open the envelope and be hit by a heady mix of stale cabbage, tobacco, urine, and fear. It was part of the letter itself. You would encounter the same stench when you walked onto a prison wing. This smell is now lost to history like the pea-soupers and smogs of Victorian London. The atmosphere in prisons is literally healthier than 30 years ago.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But prison conditions, even in the British system that Stephen was discussing, are still often less than fragrant.
At Her Majesty's Prison in Portland, for example, a stock of dead rats caught within the prison were stored in a shed on the premises and 'the smell of dead rodents' was unbearable for staff and prisoners alike.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Smell also continues to be used in ways that manipulate the senses of prisoners. In attempt to improve the atmopshere of prisons and reduce violence, some UK institutions have even made toasters and bread available to inmates. The smell of toast wafting through these prisons was credited with reducing violence between inmates. A source from the prison noted that the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//homely smell of toast contributes to a relatively relaxed ambiance on the wings.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Yet not all food smells are welcome. In March 2023 Pentonville prison's art group produced a project on food behind bars. In their artworks and accompanying text, more painful feelings about scent emerge:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The smells from people cooking in their cells make me jealous. When I smell fish, I think of home.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
Food served by the prison was described in less appealing terms. The smell of mince was so bad that inmates referred to it as 'HMP fertiliser'.
Smells do not merely belong to past prisons. They are still a part of contemporary experiences of incarceration.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Stephen Shaw, //Fifty Year Stretch: Prisons and Imprisonment 1980-2030// (Waterside Press, 2010), p. 57.
^^2^^'Portland prison had 'unbearable smell of dead rats', //BBC News//, 29th August 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-49500211
^^3^^Paul Whitelam, 'Gym, hot breakfast and work - new report gives snapshot of life at Lincoln prison', //Lincolnshire Live//, 6th July 2020, https://www.lincolnshirelive.co.uk/news/local-news/lincoln-prison-report-life-crime-4289962
^^4^^'The Mince is Shocking: The truth about prison food in pictures', //The Guardian//, 7th March 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2023/mar/07/the-mince-is-shocking-the-truth-about-prison-food-in-pictures]In 2022 a group of French scientists presented a tiny device that used a bio-sensor to detect odours at very low levels. The inventors suggested that the tool could be used in identifying food freshness and the presence of air pollution.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, news reporters suggested rather different uses: the detection of [[counterfeit products->Body Odour biometrics]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Rachel Berkowitz, 'A Tiny Photonic Nose Captures Odor Fingerprintsl', //Physics// 15:119 (2022), https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/119]
Over the last 15 years, scientists working in public health have developed body odour biometric technology in which a person's scent can be used to authenticate their identity.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But the idea that smell can tell us the true identity of a product or person and that this might be leveraged to legal ends [[has a long history->Jean-Pierre Barruel Escapes his Lab]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Smeena Naz et al., 'OdorTAM: Technology Acceptance Model for Biometric Authentication System Using Human Body Odor', //International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health//, 19:24 (2022), 16777]In 1829 the French chemist Jean-Pierre Barruel (1780-1838) was chased out of his work-place, coughing and spluttering, by
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//[[a smell of man's sweat->Sweating bodies]] so intense, that in infected the laboratory to the point that I was forced to give it up for several months.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The cause of this profound stench? Barruel had been [[boiling blood->Jean-Pierre Barruel Smells Blood]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Jean-Pierre Barruel, 'Mémoire sur l'existence d'un principe propre à caractériser le sang de l'homme et celui des diverses espèces d'animaux’, //Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale//, 1 (1829), 267–77.]Years earlier Barruel had been experimenting on Ox blood and, as he added sulfuric acid to the mix, he was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//struck by the strong smell of slaughter than emanated from it.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The foul scent lodged in Barruel's memory. Now, when he came to [[test a suicide victim's blood for opium->Olfactory Toxicology]] by mixing it with the same acid, an even more pungent odour choked him out of his lab.
But Barruel, like many chemists trained during the late eighteenth century, was a careful and astute sniffer.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^] The scent from [[human blood->Tracking Criminals by Smell]] seemed [[subtely different->Jean-Pierre Barruel's Smell Fingerprints]] from the ox blood he had previously worked with.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Jean-Pierre Barruel, 'Mémoire sur l'existence d'un principe propre à caractériser le sang de l'homme et celui des diverses espèces d'animaux’, //Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale//, 1 (1829), 267–77.
^^2^^Lissa Roberts, 'The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The ‘New’ Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 26:4 (1995), 503-229.]From the 1820s onwards 'medical jurisprudence' - what we might today refer to as forensics - were beginning to be taught in university curricula and and expounded on in textbooks.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
A crucial aspect of medical jurisprudence was toxicology, in which trained chemists attempted to detect the presence of poisons in persons who had recently passed away.
Testing for opium involved a complex series of chemical texts. But it could also involve [[the nose->Smelling Out Opium]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Virginia Berridge, //Opium and the People// (London, 1981), pp. 83, 88.]Barruel performed more tests with blood from different animals. His conclusions were that the blood of humans and other creatures could, when mixed with sulphuric acid, easily be distinguished by their particular scent.
For example, the blood of men gave off the 'strong smell of a sweat of a man', horse blood gave off the scent of horse dung, and frog's blood gave off a 'strong smell of marsh rushes'. Even the blood of hens, ducks, and pigeons gave off particular smells 'unique to each of them'.
Barruel asserted that doctors and pharmacists, who were often called to act as medical witnesses in French criminal cases, would need to educate their noses so that they could detect and distinguish human and animal blood.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, almost as soon as Barruel developed his smell-test, chemists and physicians [[warned against its use->Sceptics Voice Concern about Smell Fingerprints]] in the court room.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Jean-Pierre Barruel, 'Mémoire sur l'existence d'un principe propre à caractériser le sang de l'homme et celui des diverses espèces d'animaux’, //Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale//, 1 (1829), 267–77.]A the beginning of the eighteenth century European authors had recognised that opium's impact on the body was observable by its smell. The vomit, excrement, and sweat of somebody who had taken opium all exuded the 'Specifick Smell' of the drug.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This applied to dead bodies too. By the mid eighteenth century experts on opium suggested that its use in poisoning cases could be easily sniffed out. The drug was 'of so strong a nature' that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a Body... many Hours after Death, will smell so strongly of it, as to determine whether it was the Instrument of destruction used.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
However, as toxicology and medical jurisprudence took off as fields of knowledge in the early nineteenth century, advances in chemical testing put the [[use of smell into question->Can you Smell out Opium?]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Jones, //The Mysteries of Opium Reveal'd// (London, 1701), pp. 186-9.
^^2^^ John Awister, //An Essay on the Effects of Opium. Considered as a poison// (London, 1763),p. vii.]In his 1829 text on poisons, the Scottish toxicologist Robert Christison was scepticial about relying on the nose alone to detect opium in cadavers. Whilst he agree that 'the peculiar odour of opium is a delicate criterion of its presence', he felt that chemical testing should also be used.
One problem was that working with dead bodies introduced a wide variety of odours and this made detection more difficult. Christison noted that there was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//in the contents of the stomach such a complication of odours, that, with rather a delicate sense of smell, I have sometimes been unable to satisfy myself of the opiate odour.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Instead, toxicologists developed new tests that relied on vision to ascertain the presence of opium. For example, one article recommended diluting the liquid from the stomach, combining it with sesquichloride of iron, and see if it turned red. This would act
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//where no odour is perceptible, either from the quantity of the drug being too small or its being concealed by other odours//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The use of the smell-test for other poisons also came into question from the 1830s onwards. To find out more about this, pick your poison:
[[<img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53124649974_81ab39a4c8_o.png" style="max-width: 25%; max-height 25%;">->Sniffing Cyanide]]
[[<img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53124651264_6b61a04348_o.png" style="max-width: 25%; max-height 25%;">->Sniffing Arsenic]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert Christison, //A Treatise on Poisons// (Edinburgh, 1829), p. 522.
2 Alfred S. Taylor, 'Report on the Prorgess of Toxicology, in relation to Medical Jurisprudence, Medical Policy, Chemistry and Pharamacy, for the Years 1843-4', //The British and Foreign Medical Review//, 18 (1844), 557.]There were still some poisons that could be detected by the nose.
Cyanide (often known as Prussic Acid), with its bitter almond scent, was one such example.
French and British writers argued that the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//peculiar odour of the acid is a very characteristic and delicate test of its presence//'']]
even going beyond the sensitivity of chemical testing. However, it was advised that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//when the odour is resorted to as a test, it ought to be tried by several persons//'']]
in case some were less sensitive to cyanide's particular scent.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
An English case, of [[John Tawell->John Tawell's Case]], shows just how intently medical witnesses might sniff when hunting for cynaide.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert Christison, //A Treatise on Poisons// (Edinburgh, 1829), p. 556. ]Arsenic has no smell or taste when added to liquid, which makes it a rather good poison.
But when burnt arsenic emits a mild garlic smell - termed 'alliaceous'. The presence of arsenic in samples of other metals such as tin were demonstrated by the fact that, when 'held in the Flame of a Candle' they emitted
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a thick Fume, smelling Garlic; which smell is universally held, in mineral substances to be a certain Criterion of Arsenic.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
As the French chemist Antoine François Fourcroy demonstrated, burning food and drink was also recommended as a means of detecting attempted arsenic poisonings.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Christison noted in 1829, 'the alliaceous or garlicky odour' of arsenic when burning the stomach or, in at least one case, the whole body of the deceased was 'at one time much relied on'.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^] However, he argued that the test should be 'altogether discarded' because a series of other chemical reactions could emit the same scent.
Christison was [[not alone->No more Sniffing Arsenic]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert James, //Pharmacopoeia Universalis// (London, 1764), p. 321.
^^2^^Antoine François Fourcroy, //Elements of Chemistry//, trans. R. Heron (London, 4vols, 1796), p. 280.
^^3^^Robert Christison, //A Treatise on Poisons// (Edinburgh, 1829), pp. 184-5.]
By the 1820s doubts were being expressed about admissability of smell evidence for arsenic poisonings and further chemical testing was recommended instead.
The Frenchman Mateu Orfila cautioned that whilst chemists reported arsenic poisoning as soon as 'they had found in the digestive tract a substance which spreads a garlic-like odour', the nose could not always be relied upon.
However, despite well-respected toxicologists warning against the use of the nose alone, it seems that local doctors and families of victims knew that the smell of [[garlic->Phosgene]] from buring food or drink indicated the presence of arsenic.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The attack on smell was an attempt by elite, metropolitan, medical experts to exert their control over provinicial doctors.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Similar shifts were apparent in the toxicological treatment of [[Cyanide->Sniffing Cyanide]] .
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^José Romon Bertomeu Sanchez, 'Arsenic in France. The Cultures of Poison During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century', in Lissa Roberts and Simon Werrett (eds.), //Compound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840// (Leiden, 2018), pp. 139-140
^^2^^E. Claire Cage, //The Science of Proof: Forensic Medicine in Modern France// (Cambridge, 2022), p. 53]John Tawell's (1784-1845) case is famous because he was the first man to be arrested as a result of the use of telecommunications technology.
Tawell had been transported to Australia after being convicted of forgery. Having served his sentence and enriched himself through his work as a chemist, he returned to England in 1838.
It was not a happy return. Tawell's wife died of tuberculosis the same year. Not one to hang around, Tawell remarried quickly. But he also continued an affair with his late-wife's nurse - Sarah Hart - and [[bore two children by her->John Tawell Poisons Sarah Hart]]. Tawell attempted to keep his second family a secret and paid for their upkeep in a nearby cottage. But in 1845, facing financial problems, Tawell decided it might be best to get rid of his erstwhile lover. On a visit to Hart's cottage, he mixed Prussic Acid with her beer and poisoned her
Desiring a quick escape, Tawell hopped on the train at Slough and headed for London. But a telegraph message got to Paddington station first and Tawell was trailed by a policeman to a lodging house, where he was arrested the next morning.
In court, however, proving the poisoning was tricky. Let us enter the Aylesbury courthouse in 1845 and listen in.
[[<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c0/Tawell_trial.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->Cyanide on Trial]]The surgeon Henry William Champneys performed a post-mortem on Sarah Hart's body. He started by noting that the absence of the smell of prussic acid did not prove an absence of the poison. He himself noted that the smell could be disguised, as Tawell himself had done, by mixing it with a beer:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I put half a drachm of Scheele's acid into a tumbler, and filled the tumbler with Guiness's porter, the smell of the acid was then scarcely perceptible.// '']]
The defence the proceeded to [[push Champneys->Where is the Cyanide]] on whether he was able to smell prussic acid on Sarah's body.
<img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53133247942_72d69a3a25_o.png" alt="Close up of an image of the trial of John Tawell at the Aylesbury Courtroom in 1845" style="max-width: 100%;"/>(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Kelly:
Do you not believe that there must be something in the mouth or breath to indicate the presence of prussic acid if enough is taken to cause death?
Champneys:
I should always expect it, but there may be exceptions.
Kelly:
Did you not smell this woman's mouth and did you perceive any odour of the kind?
Champneys:
No but I did the next day when the body was opened. Neither Mr Pickering nor Mr Nordblad did however. It was not a passing conjecture of mine I was positive of it.
Kelly:
Is it true after opening the stomach that you did not think you smelt it there?
Champneys:
I did not smell it there.
Kelly:
Is it not the property of prussic acid as it volatilizes to emit a very peculiar odour?
Champneys:
Yes.
Kelly:
Is it not called by a high authority 'a penetrating, highly diffusive and peculiar odour'?
Champneys:
Yes.
Kelly:
Is it not more likely to be detected when exposed, as this was, to a heat of 212 degrees?
Champneys:
Yes.
Kelly:
And did you and those with you try at every heat to catch a smell of prussic acid without doing so?
Champneys:
Yes.
Kelly:
When you drew some blood shortly after death was there any smell there?
Champneys:
I perceived none. //'']]
<img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53133247942_72d69a3a25_o.png" alt="Close up of an image of the trial of John Tawell at the Aylesbury Courtroom in 1845" style="max-width: 100%;"/>
Whilst Champneys and other witnesses - including a chemist and expert in medical jurisprudence - cautioned that poisoning by prussic acid could not always be detected by the nose, a pharmacist who acted as a witness for the defence [[thought (and smelt) differently->Smelling Dead Birds]]The defence solicitor hired a chemist to perform tests at the London Hospital. The chemist concluded that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I do not believe that Scheele's prussic acid could be mixed with a drink and taken as a poison, and not be smelt after death. I do not think porter would disguise it. I have tried prussic acid on a parrot, which, being ill, a lady wished to have killed. I put about thirty drops of Scheele's prussic acid, and injected them down the throat of the bird by a glass syringe. There were three women preseant, and they were compelled to leave the room, the scent was so strong and suffocating. The bird was afterwards stuffed. On another occasion I mixed thirty drops of the acid with eleven ounces of porter, and foudn the odour of the acid slightly perceptible.//'']]
At the close of the trial, Tawell's defence lept on the indeterminate nature of the nasal evidence:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Then with regard to the question of smell, the learned counsel contrasted the evidence of the medical men, showing in it great discrepancy. Mr. Champneys fancied in one case and proved in another the existence of the smell of prussic acid from the contents of the stomach, while Mr. Norblad, notwithstanding his acute powers of smell, could not discover it at any period.//'']]
But ultimately smell was only one test among many. In his summing up, the judge reflected that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//With regard to the alleged differences of opinion as to whether the smell of prussic acid was a test or not of its presence... smell was a proof of its presence, but that the absence of smell was no proof of its absence.//'']]
It was all a question of where you sniffed. The medical witnesses could not smell the poison in the beer when the froth was there, but when they removed the froth they could. When they smelt the victim's mouth they could not detect the scent of cyanide, but they did find it when her stomach was opened up. This was the evidence of repeated, careful, collective sniffing.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Tawell was sentenced to [[death->The end of olfactory toxicology]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'The Trial of John Tawell', in William Otter Woodall (ed.), //A Collection of Reports of Celebrated Trials, Civil and Criminal// (London, 1873), i, 162-199.]Several members of Paris' foremost medical organisation, the Académie Royale de Médicine, praised Barruel's olfactory finesse, but they warned that 'these indications... require extreme caution for their use in medico-legal cases'.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The scepticism only mounted, with a range of medical and scientific experts lining up to mount their objections to Barruel's findings and the difficulty of replicating them with any certainty. (text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Yet, Barruel's test was used in several court cases. For example, in February 1838 Barruel was asked to identify the blood on a linen bed sheet, as part of a trial at the Cour d'Assises de la Seine in Paris:
[[<img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53104488922_91874601f2_o.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->Smell on Trial in 1838]]
(text-size:0.5)['Vue de la Cour d'assises de la Seine' in Edmond Texier, //Tableau de Paris// (Paris, 1852-3), p. 226.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'Sang des animaux vertébrés', //Archives générales de médicine//, 20 (1829), 455-6.
^^2^^José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez, 'Chemistry, microscopy and smell: bloodstains and nineteenth-century legal medicine', Annals of Science, 72:4 (2015), 490-516.]<img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53105374529_bdfe759813_o.png" alt="Close up of an image of a trial at the Cour d'Assises de la Seine in Paris in 1852" style="max-width: 100%;"/>
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Barruel:
The blood found on the blanket comes from different sources. As for the blood on the linen, I believe it is a woman's blood; but as the linen was not clean, I cannot affirm it in a positive manner.
Judge:
Is female blood distinguishable from male blood?
Barruel:
Very easily, Mr. President. In all animals, the female blood has very different features from those of the male blood. On white-as-snow linens, I would distinguish with total certainty, not only the blood of a woman, but the different species of female blood, young or old, blonde, brunette or redhead. I have compared and analysed more than two thousand blood samples, and I have trained my sense of smell fairly well, so as to be sure not to make mistakes.
Judge:
The blood found in the linen, could it be child's blood?
Barruel:
It is possible, but then it would be from a boy and not from a girl.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, the use of the smell test in trials such as these quickly elicited [[criticism->Critics Respond to the use of the Smell Test in 1838]] from fellow chemists and physicians.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'Cour D'Assises de La Seine (2e section)', //Gazette des Tribunaux//, 3867, (1838), p. 338.]In an article later that February, a journalist at the Gazette des Tribunaux summarised the key problems with Barruel's smell test, as raised by legal, medical, and scientific experts:
Firstly(click-replace: "Firstly")[//Firstly, the expert needed a (text-colour:#BF9365)[very practiced sense of smell]. Even then, agreement might be difficult: smell was, of all the senses, (text-colour:#BF9365)[the most deceptive, because it cannot be rectified by others].//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]]
Secondly(click-replace: "Secondly")[//Secondly, crime scenes offered less than lab-like conditions in which quantities of blood were small and contaminated by exposure to air and other materials.//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]]
Finally(click-replace: "Finally")[//Finally, did anybody believe that (text-colour:#BF9365)[public opinion, that judge of judges, would respect many judgements] based on the sense of smell alone? This was unlikely and might lead to reputational damage for the courts and their officials.//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]]
This criticism came to a head in an 1851 trial for robbery and murder, where the [[evidence of the nose->Smell Evidence in 1851]] proved to be less than convincing.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'Médicine Légale. De la possibilité de distinguer dans une expertise les différentes espèces de sang', //Gazette des Tribunaux//, 3879(1838), 386-7.]In December 1851 Barruel, a professor of medicine named Ambroise Tardieu, and the chemist Jean-Baptiste Chevallier were charged by a judge with investigating the blood samples found in the murder of a Parisian man - Mr R.
Blood was found in the cellar of the main suspect, woman A., on some earth outside the house, on a fragment of plaster, and on the clothes and bag belonging to Mr R. himself. Woman A. claimed that the blood in her cellar belonged to a sheep and not Mr R.
Barruel, Tardieu, and Chevallier therefore set about [[comparing the aroma of the different blood samples->Comparing Blood Samples in 1851]] when mixed with sulfuric acid, as per the process Barruel had developed.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^M. A . Chevellier, 'Expériences sur l'odeur du sang', Annales d'hygiène publique et de médicine légale, 49 (1853), 413-7.]However, there was a problem. The doctor, the pharmacist, and the chemist couldn't agree on the smell of the blood that they were examining.
To try and gain agreement, the investigators took 9 different samples for comparison. In turn they added sulfuric acid to each, 'examined the aroma that emanated from it' and then wrote down what they felt in their laboratory notes. They took a total of 9 samples: 3 samples from sheep's blood, 1 from Oxon blood, 1 of live human blood, 1 of human blood from a corpse, and then 3 of the blood samples from the murder case.
1. Sheep, Human, or Oxon? "Sniff vial 1"(click-replace: "Sniff vial 1")[//Hmm, could be sheep's blood? Your colleague disagrees. They think it smells more like human blood to them. Let's try another - maybe vial 4 - and see if we can get more agreement.//]
2. Sheep, Human, or Oxon?
3. Sheep, Human, or Oxon?
4. Sheep, Human, or Oxon? "Sniff vial 4"(click-replace: "Sniff vial 4")[//Now this does smell familiar. It seems very similar to the blood from the corpse of an old woman that you were dissecting only yesterday. But again, one of the other experts doesn't agree with you. They think if it //is// human blood, it's far more likely to be a young man. Let's sniff one more, vial 8, and see if we can get an agreement on anything...//]
5. Sheep, Human, or Oxon?
6. Sheep, Human, or Oxon?
7. Sheep, Human, or Oxon?
8. Sheep, Human, or Oxon? "Sniff vial 8"(click-replace: "Sniff vial 8")[//You are a bit unsure on this one. Could be Oxon blood? But it seems quite a lot like scent from vial 1, which makes you think it might be a different sample of sheep's blood. This time every other expert disagrees with you. Some of them think it's the blood of a young woman, but others seem to think it belongs to a middle-aged man. It seems [[nobody can agree on anything->The end of the Smell Test]]!//]
9. Sheep, Human, or Oxon?
Without any agreement gained, you decide that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//we cannot positively decide whether the aroma, developed from blood by sulfuric acid, is due to human blood or animal blood, that there may be errors of specification, and that it is therefore in such serious cases impossible to pronounce.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
After such a public failure, the use of the smell test for ascertaining the source of blood fell into the [[dustbin of forensic history->The end of olfactory toxicology]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ M. A. Chevallier, 'Expériences sur l'odeur du sang', //Annales d'hygiène public et de médecine légale//, 49 (1853), 416-417]Today complex chemical tests have often replaced the evidence of the nose in post-mortem and toxicological examinations.
As late as the 1850s the evidence of the nose had been a useful aid to chemists and physicians who were tasked with unveiling the causes of a suspicious demise.
Smells have not disappeared from forensic toxicologyin the twenty-first century. But the human nose is no longer the tool used to interpret them. Dogs are trained to locate decomposing corpses, different insects on a body indicate different odours and therefore different stages of decomposition, and where scent samples are taken they are analysed by gas chromotography and the other instrumentation of modern analytical chemistry.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
More than human - animal or computer - noses now do the work that human snouts once carried out.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^K. C. Titus et al. 'Forensic Odor Analysis: Current Application in Postmortem Examinations', //Research and Reports in Forensic Medical Science//, 12 (2022), 1-12.]<script>
const startPage = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search).get('goto');
if (startPage && !window.storyline.initialized) {
window.storyline.initialized = true;
window.harlowe.Engine.goToPassage(startPage);
}
</script>
<ul>
<li>[[Birds->Birds]]</li>
<li>[[Emissions->Emissions]]</li>
<li>[[Water->Water]]</li>
<li>[[Trenches->Trenches]]</li>
<li>[[Detection->Detection]]</li>
<li>[[Taxidermy->Taxidermy]]</li>
<li>[[Bells->Bells]]</li>
<li>[[Crime->Crime]]</li>
<li>[[Punishment->Punishment]]</li>
<li>[[Shores->Shores]]</li>
<li>[[Forensics->Forensics]]</li>
<li>[[Horses->Horses]]</li>
<li>[[Weapons->Weapons]]</li>
<li>[[Battlefields->Battlefields]]</li>
<li>[[City->City]]</li>
<li>[[Subways->Subways]]</li>
<li>[[Notes->Notes]]</li>
<li>[[Pomander->Pomander]]</li>
<li>[[Colonialism->Colonialism]]</li>
<li>[[Deodorization?->Deodorization?]]</li>
<li>[[Canals->Canals]]
<li>[[Hell->Hell]]
<li>[[Olfigures->Olfigures]]
<li>[[Orientalism->Orientalism]]
</ul>
Throughout European history horses have been at the centre of both everyday life and events that were subsequently declared of momentous signficance.
Take, for example, war.
Horses were a common scent that filled the air of battlefields, but the steeds that carried supplies, cannons, and cavalrymen to the front, were also able noses.
Smell is useful for horses: equine sociability, competition, and reproduction involves smelling breath, dung, urine, and newborn foals.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Europeans were very aware that horses were sensitive sniffers. In the late seventeenth century Thomas Tryon, a well-known vegetarian and early advocator of animal rights, noted that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//there is no Creature does more abominate strong fulsom Smells than Horses, or that more delight in sweet pleasant Scents, as being agreeable to their Nature. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
However, on battlefields horses were exposed to some of most pungent smells and brutal sounds of European history.
What smells might a horse have sensed at Waterloo on the day of the battle of Waterloo, [[the 18th June 1815->Waterloo Horses]]?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Michel-Antoine Leblanc, //The Mind of the Horse// (London, 2013), pp. 344-5]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Thomas Tryon, //The country-man's companion// (London, 1684), II, 310-1]Certainly one smell in the nostrils of a cavalry horse at Waterloo would have been the scent of what - to the horse at least - counted as food.
The fields where the battle took place had been covered with crops. Wiliam Leake, an English ensign in the 52nd (Oxfordshire) regiment of foot, recalled that wounded horses in front of his company
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//were eating the trodden down wheat or rye, notwitstanding that their legs were shot off, or that they were otherwise badly wounded. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
By seven o' clock in the evening the crops were conntributing to the smellscape:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//There was a peculiar smell at this time, arising from a mingling of the smell of the wheat trodden flat down with the smell of the gunpowder. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
As this suggests, the [[smell of gunpowder->Horses and gunpowder]] was a dominant note in the battlefield's odorous atmosphere.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^William Leeke, //The History of Lord Seaton's Regiment// (London, 2vols, 1866), II, 40]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^William Leeke, //The History of Lord Seaton's Regiment// (London, 2vols, 1866), II, 41]From the sixteenth century onwards, horses had to be taught to stand the smell of gunpowder. This was a bigger problem than the noise because, as one equestrian training manual noted:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//there are many horses that think nothing of the noise of the report, but who have a natural aversion to the smell. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Horses were not the only creatures believed to [[fear->Rum and Blood]] the smell of gunpowder: in the nineteenth century it was widely believed that rooks and crows, who had learnt the danger of a well-aimed fire-arm, flew their nests at the mere scent of a musket or a pistol.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Training horses to bear the smell of powder was a slow process, firing the pistol outside and then placing it in the stable, so that the horse got used to the scent, before eventually taking a horse outside and getting them to move closer and closer to small explosions until they were comfortable with it.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Human combatants had to be sensitive to the feelings of their equine colleagues.
But horses also emitted their own smells, especially when they [[became casualties->Dead horses]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^J. G. Peters, //A Treatise on Equitation// (London, 1835), p. 134.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Henry G. Bell, //Selections of the Most Remarkable Phenomena of Nature// (Edinburgh, 1827), p. 166; Joseph Hine, //One hundred original tales for children// (London, 1846), p. 87 ]
(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^An Officer of Light Dragoons, //Memorandums of Field Exercise for the troops of Gentlemen and Yeomen Cavalry// (Canterbury, 1795), p. 42.]Gunpowder was //the// smell of warfare before the late nineteenth century. Whilst innert gunpowder does not smell (or at least shouldn't), the mix of saltpetre (pottasium nitrate) with sulphur and carbon produces a explosive gush of smoke and a pungent sulphuric scent of rotten eggs when ignited.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the smell of gunwpoder was, overwhelmingly the smell of soldiering. To dislike the scent was to open onself to accusations of an effeminate and unmanly lack of martial virtue and courage.
Various proverbial phrases summed up this knowledge:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//It is better or a soldier to smell of his gun-powder than of civet.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
and
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a Soldier who hates the smell of gunpowder.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
was like
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a sailor was never at sea.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Not relishing the smell of gunpowder was a sign that one was not a good soldier. This was the accusation levelled at Prince Frederick of the Netherlands in 1830, when he led a failed attempt to suppress the Belgian Revolution and retake the City of Brussels. In one print, he is depicted fleeing the smell of gunpowder from the Belgian cannons:
<img src="https://proxy.europeana.eu/90402/RP_P_1905_3100?view=https%3A%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2FLRRKURMXBRUI6KztT4v7mFrtdMNkCld127RbfA3Yfac1aStNuWtt_kRreZuK4SHE-ij5_38-xNFwMHh2m_ZWfmIVhMg%3Ds0&disposition=inline&api_url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.europeana.eu%2Fapi" style="max-width: 100%;">
(text-size:0.5)[Image: Credit: 'Prince Frederik flees from Belgian gunpowder fumes', 1830, lithograph on paper, 21-26cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam]
However, in some contexts the smell of gunpowder could be grounds for [[serious and legitimate worry->Seige scents]] among soldiers.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^Miguel de Cervantes, //The History of the Valorous and Witty Knight-errant Don Quixote of the Mancha// (London, 4vols, 1725), III, p. 171 (originally published in Spanish in 1606/15).]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^//The London Guide// (London, 1782), p. 172.]
France.
[[1975.->A field]]What did a trench smell like during the First World War?
According to Robert Graves, Lieutenant and then Captain who fought at Loos and the Somme,
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the trenches stank with a gas-blood-lyddite-latrine smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But overwhelming all of this was the smell of death.
When the Imperial War Museum in London launched it's 'Trench Experience' in 1990, it offered a recreation of a section of trench complete with the smells of cordite, frying bacon, and lyddite from discharged shells.
The veteran Tommy Keele, aged 96 at the time the museum opened its new exhibition, mused that 'I thought I was back'. But there were limits to how far these scents could really evoke his experience. He added:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The smell of death - that's not here.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
[[<img src="https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/V0018242/full/880%2C/0/default.jpg">->Death in the trenches]]
(text-size:0.5)[Image: Credit: World War I: The Red Cross in the trenches. Oil painting by Cyrus Cuneo.Wellcome Collection.Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert Graves, //Goodbye to All That// (London, 1958), p. 140.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Graham Heathcote, ‘Museum Offers Sights, Sounds, and Smells of World War I Trench’, https://apnews.com/article/9b9f2bd201ccc751e774ba98f9f18f7b, accessed 02/11/21.]You are stood in a field, surrounded by barley as far as the [[eye->A smell in the air]] can see.But your nose detects something else. As the golden crops sway in the breeze you notice a [[scent->Metallic]] in the damp air.
It is a vaguely [[metallic->Blood or Rust?]] odour. It reminds you of something.
Could it be [[blood->Blood]]?
Or maybe the smell of [[rust->Rust]]?Passage Text
That seems unlikely.
Fifty-nine years ago, perhaps.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//You could smell blood like a slaughterhouse. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But surely not now?
How about [[rust->Rust]]?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^First World War Veteran interviewed for //In Flanders Fields: Canadian Voices From WWI//, CBC Radio 1964.]It does have an iron-like scent.
You look closer at your surroundings and realise that the beneath the barley, metallic objects can be seen, each surface covered with an orangey-brown crust of rust.
[[<img src="http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dccfarr/Iron.jpg">->Rusty coins]]This is our first olfactory figure (or Olfigure).
If you like, smell the material suggested below.
''Olfigure 1.''
(text-colour:#BF9365)[//Smell a dry paperclip with dry hands. Little or no odour right?
Lick your fingers, give the paperclip a good rub, and smell again.//]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
You are smelling (click-append: "smelling")[ the FE^^2+^^, or ferrous ions, produced by the interaction of moisture and rusty metal, the same interaction that gives blood its [[metallic smell->Iron Harvest]].]This is the smell of the 'iron harvest'.
In the wake of the First World War vast deposits of metal military objects, from munitions to barbed wire, were left in the [[fields->Battlefield scents]] of France and BelgiumEach year more of these items, including unexploded shells, are discovered by farmers. In the 1970s the mouldering metal still gave these fields a unique scent:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The smell of rust is the smell of time passing.
But what did the battlefields of European history smell like at the time?
For example, [[Waterloo->Belgian battlefields]] in 1815?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Paul Fussell, //The Great War and Modern Memory// (Oxford, 2013), p. 75.]
<iframe src="https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/52676a3d7bdaef13d49a238410a42b1f/test/index.html" frameBorder="0" style="width:100%;height:75vh;"></iframe>
From Belgian battlefields our noses can follow several different routes. We might, for example, follow the noses of [[tourists->Waterloo Tourists]] who visited the battlefiled of Waterloo in its immediate aftermath.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//Madame de Sévigné and Her Contemporaries// (London, 2vols, 1861), II, 310-1]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Edward D'Auvergne, //The History of the Campagne in Flanders// (London, 1696), p. 161]
(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^//Narrative of a Residence in Belgium during the Campaign of 1815// (London, 1817)]
(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^Major B. R. Ward (ed.), //A Week at Waterloo in 1815// (London, 1906), pp. 66-7]The travel writer and novelist Charlotte Anne Eaton's record of her travels quickly became one of the most popular guides to the battlefield. Eaton noted that in the weeks after the battle:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The effluvia, even beneath the open canopy of heaven, was horrible; and the pure west wind of summer, as it passed us, seemed pestiferous, so deadly was the smell that in many places pervaded the field. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Tourists therefore armed themselves with strong scents to defend themselves against the all pervasive stench.
A group of English shopkeepers from Brentford travelled to the battlefield to pay their patriotic respects and, as well as enlisting a tour guide at Mont St Jean, they brough three pints of brandy and a large quantity of snufff to block out the smell of the battlefield.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^] Tobacco smoke was a common smell associated with soldiering.
As this suggests, the smells of battle and its results lingered long after in the surrounding [[fields and woods->Waterloo nature]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Charlotte Ann Easton, //Narrative of a Residence in Belgium During the Campaign of 1815// (London, 1817), pp. 270-1.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Philip Shaw, //Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination// (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 67.]When the battle was the work of a day, as at Waterloo, the smell of the landscape in the immediate aftermath competed with sight to form a strange, uncanny, impression on observers.
In the woods surrounding Hougoumont, where fighting had been fierce, the tree trunks were filled with cannonball, yet they kept growing and their leaves remained.
Nature quickly took over the battlefield again, but in the months afterwards the smell of battle remained:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Wild flowers are still blooming, and wild rasberries ripening beneath their shade; while huge black piles of human ashes, dreadfully offensive in smell, are all that now remain of the heroes who fought and fell upon this fatal spot.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
On the other hand, the route from Waterloo to the city of Brussells demonstrates that the smell of death came to towns and cities far from the battlefield because this was where military hospitals could be found. This meant that the odours of battlefields invaded [[civilian homes and streets->The odour of death]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//The Battle of Waterloo// (London, 1816), pp. xxv-xxvi.]In January 1916 the nurse, novelist, and socialist Vera Brittain visited the family of her fiance, Roland, in Brighton.
Vera's fiance Roland had been killed on the front line three weeks before. When she came into the living room she found Roland's uniform, sent back to the family from the front line, lying on the floor.
Although the uniform, Vera noted, was covered in mud
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies - dead that had been dead a long, long time.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
As Roland's family gathered around his uniform and his mother and sister shed bitter tears of mourning
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The charnel-house smell seemed to grow stronger and stronger till it pervaded the room and obliterated everything else. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Finally, Roland's mother told her father to
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//take those clothes away into the kitchen, and don't let me see them again; I must either burn or bury them. They smell of death; they are not Roland, they seem to detract from his memory and spoil his glamour. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
As in the trenches, the smell of death overwhelmed all other odours.
In contrast to Marcel Proust's famous smells, which contained the power to evoke sweet nostalgia, the smell of [[blood->Jean-Pierre Barruel Escapes his Lab]] and mud threatened to invade the past and even desecrate memories with its sickly stench.
The smells of war were not only to be found in the trenches. Far from the front line, the [[atmospheres of European towns->Ersatz odours]] and cities were also altered.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Mark Bostridge and Alan Bishop (eds.), //Letters From A Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends// (London, 2008), pp. 211-212]One common complaint about smell on the home front during the First World War was the altered smell of food, especially bread.
In Germany, bread was made using a mix of rye flour and potatoes - both often already spoiled - and resulted in loaves that had a:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//disgusting, musty odor.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Raw sugar was circulated instead of the rarer, expensive, processed variety. Germans complained that it:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//has a disgusting taste and smell, is the best food for bacilli, moulds and other microbes due to its stickiness, and is also poorly kept.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Shortages of food led to worries about untrustworthy retailers. Newspapers warned Germans of attempts to sell on meat that had been treated with 'preservative salt', cautioning readers that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//"preserving salt" is not a preservative; it only feigns the freshness of the meat and conceals any spoilage. The preserving salt also has the property of taking away the smell, even of spoiled meat; it dissolves the hydrogen sulphide which produces the ugly smell. Spoiled meat can therefore no longer be recognised as such by its smell if it has been in contact with preserved salt.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
The complaints about rationed foods were confined to Germany. In Slovenia during the same period flour was adulterated with chickpeas, kidney beans, fava beans, chestnuts, and potatoes. August Reisman, a lawyer in Maribor who experienced life on the front, wrote that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Even warm bread did not have that beautiful fragrance of bread that is dreamed of by millions of hungry living beings, by millions of people regardless of where they live. After some time such bread acquired a weird taste and smell, and one’s teeth could not continue biting into that tasteless mess. and yet… one wants to live!//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
In Germany even[[ the newspapers->Newspaper smell]] where people read about food shortages were a reminder smelled of the war's impact.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Roger Chickering, //The Great War and Urban Life in Germany Freiburg, 1914-1918// (Cambridge, 2007), p. 267.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^//Der Volksfreund//, Friday 18th June 1915, p. 4.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^//Der Volksfruend//, Friday 2nd of July 1915, p. 1.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^Avgust Reisman, //Iz življenja med vojno : avstrijska sodišča// (Maribor, 1939)]Shortages led to changes in the materials used in a range of products including, for example, chicory and poppy being used in tobacco. Ersatz inks were used in the newspaper industry and this garnered complaints from readers who felt that their daily paper smelt odd. The //Pforzheimer Anzeiger// felt it had to respond at the end of December 1915:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The newspapers do not smell good at the moment. The printing ink has to be made from substitutes because the varnish is missing, and these substitutes smell bad. The whole world patiently accepts this state of affairs. Only the farmer Meier in Schmerzke near Brandenburg could not stand the fact that the "Brandenburger Anzeiger" did not smell of Cologne water...
...
For it is not ill will if we now have to torment the olfactory nerves of particularly "sensitive" readers a little, but it is a kind of wartime emergency. The smell comes from the printing ink, and we don't make it ourselves, we get it from the factories that have often complained to us about it.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But the newspapers also brought the smells of the frontline into the homes of readers. In 1916 one English journalist visited the Somme and tried to convey the air of the battleifled to readers of //The Times//:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Over all the region, of course, is that awful smell - sometimes only a tain in the air, sometimes sickeningly strong - which belongs to battlefields. But in patches, also, there are other smells, chemical and very pungent - the smell of gas shells and such abominations which have bust about here, at one time and another, in hundreds.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The potential of a gas attack at home terrified many civilians. In German cities during air-raids some resorted to handkerchiefs covered with vinegar or potash to try and defend themselves.
There were also other cases where the war encouraged a [[new sensitivity to certain scents->Alcohol on the home front]] on the home front.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//Pforzheimer Anzeiger: (Pforzheimer Geschäfts-Anzeiger für die gesamten Gold- und Silberwaren-Industrie und deren Hilfsgeschäfte)//, Friday 31st December 1915, p. 1.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^'Visit to Somme Battlefield', //The Times//, Tuesday 26th of September 1916.]On the battlefield alcohol could offer courage. However, on the home-front drinking was considered a dangerous distraction from the war effort.
In 1914 the United Kingdom passed the Defence of the Realm Act in which the opening hours of pubs and other premises lincensed for alcohol consumption were restricted to 12:00-14:00 and 18:30-21:30. In 1915, concerned this was failing to restrict drinking enough, the government announced a further series of measures that included a ban on buying rounds.
In an extreme example, the government took control of breweries and pubs in a 500 mile area along the Scottish boarder with England. Gretna was home to a major munitions factory and there were fears that drunk and disorderly behaviour by workers was threatening the war effort. The train from Carlisle to Gretna on Saturday nights, after workers had been out boozing, were an olfactory testament to the problem:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The trains were full of men in stages of intoxication – some were helpless, some vomiting, and others urinating, and the whole train reeked with the smell of whisky.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
One outcome was simply to shut many drinking establishments:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The old, evil-smelling, stuffy ramshackle premises with which most towns of any size abound can be closed down, and the trade shepherded into larger, lighter, and more desirable premises.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
By 1916 the Liquor Control Board' was also promoting lower strength 'munition' beer. The board claimed:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//It smells like beer, it looks like beer, and tastes like beer, the only difference is in the headache.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, in the rest of the country there were question about how exactly the various rules regarding alcohol were to be [[policed->Police constables sniff out alcohol]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ Robert R. G. Duncan, 'Panic Over the Pub: Drink and the First World War', PhD Thesis, University of St Andrews, pp. 166, 177]
In the West Riding of Yorkshire one superintendent told his constables that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//On entering licensed premises during restricted hours, and suspecting that a person in the room has been served with intoxicating liquor, you should smell the contents of the glass. If you think it is intoxicating liquor, charge him.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Yet constable who recounted this advice to the //The Police Review// magazine, was worried whether this really fell within the law or not. Could the police really go around sniffing people's drinks like this?
The increased attention to the smell of alcohol in public space on the part of authorities was one example among the many olfactory changes happening on the home fronts of European countries during the First World War.
It was not surprising that the police were particularly attentive to the influence of alcohol on munitions factory works. After all, making weapons and ammunition could be[[a dangerous buisness ->Gun-making]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Mary Fraser, //Policing the Home Front 1914-1918// (London, 2018).]
War requires weapons and these had to be made away from the frontline. Birmingham, the centre of gun-making in England during the Napoleonic wars, was known for it's smokey, choking, atmosphere. Robert Southey, trying to describe the air of the city noted that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//here it is active and moving, a living principle of mischief, which fills the whole atmosphere, and penetrates everywhere, spotting and staining every thing, and getting into the pores and nostrils. I feel as if my throat wanted sweeping like an English chimney. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The people of Birmingham seemed to soak up the smells of metalwork. An Irish visitor noted that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Every man whom I meet stinks of train oil and emery. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Train oil, taken from the rendered blubber of the sperm whale, was used for oil lamps. It stank but was used by the poor because it was cheap. Emery was a dark rock used for polishing metals, including weapons.
Napoleonic weapons used gunpowder as a propoellant and this had to be manufactured, carefully stored, and then taken to the front. However, this process came with the distinct [[whiff of danger->Gunpowder explosions]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert Southey, Letters from England (London, 2vols, 1814), II, 59]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^'On Birmingham',//The Irish Magazine//, February 1808, p. 259.]Manufacturing gunpowder was a potentially dangerous buisness, with the smells of battlefield-blasts erupting on the home front. At Faversham in Kent, the centre of Britain's explosives industry since the sixteenth century, one such accident happened:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//In 1781, the corning-mill, and dusting-house, were torn to pieces, by the blowing up of 7000lbs weight of powder; the sulpherous smell of which infected the air for a great distance.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Faversham was not alone, in the Netherlands artists produced images of incidents when seventeenth and eighteenth century gunpowder mills were accidentally set alight, with destructive consequences.
<img src="https://lh5.ggpht.com/0xN8ngMEDJPl4oEUfYJEHOi76XI7R_UK_UBKkgmYD1xjxb2iyLML3pHOCHR2oTVM0Vt-3Suw7JUJ0wgSm0Xuw-mFINw=s500">
(text-size:0.5)[Image: Credit: Caspar Luyken, 'Explosion of the powder tower in Delft, 1654', 1698, etching on paper, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1896-A-19368-146]
During Waterloo the battle's relatively short-term marking of the landscape was quite different to the impact felt on the home front, where factories and industries powered the war effort.
However, that relationship changed in the [[First World War->Industrialised warfare]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//Picture of Margate// (London, 1809), p. 177]In the First World War the battlefield became a kind of factory, full of chemical odours and smoke.
The Frenchman, Henri Barbusse, who novelised his experiences on the Western Front in his //Under Fire//, described daybreak above the trenches as:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the melancholy light of the North Country, of a restricted and muddy sky, a sky which itself, one would say, is heavy with the smoke and smell of factories.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Under this sky the smellscape of the industrial city merged with a muddy, barren, countryside.
The painter William Orpen described one officer's response when asked if he could paint the Somme:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Paint the Somme? I could do it from memory - just a flat horizon-line and mudholes and water, with the stumps of a few battered trees.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
But, Orpen added:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//one could not paint the smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/William_Orpen_-_Zonnebeke_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" style="max-width: 100%;">
(text-size:0.5)[Image: Credit: William Orpen, 'Zonnebeke', 1918, oil on canvas, 635-762cm, Tate Britain, London]
War produced[[ scarred smellscapes->Petroleum]] that painting could not quite capture.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Henri Barbusse, //Le Feu// (Paris, 1916).]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^William Orpen, //An Onlooker in France 1917-1919// (London, 1921)]
Picture a landscape characterised by
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a gaunt specter of dead trees. The air stunk with the smell of rotten eggs. There was no sign or sound of animal, bird, or insect life. Nothing stirred in the breeze. The silence was appalling. It was eerie and frightening. ...It smelled and looked like I imagined hell might look and smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This could have describe the Somme or Ypres during the First World War.
However, it doesn't. This is not a description of a European battlefield. This is a nosewitness account of San Diego de la Mar in Mexico, where much of the petroleum that fuelled the First World War was extracted.
Throughout the First World War European countries relied on petroleum. Whilst the Germans relied on coal, the Entente powers all used petroleum to power their tanks, airplanes, submarines, and TNT. Mexico and the Persian Gulf were major sources of petrolum for the U.S and Britain respectively.
Whilst, by the end of the 1920s, the battlefields of the Belgium and France had been reclaimed by nature, it was a different story for those areas of the world where environmental degradation - complete with the smells of hydrogen sulphide and other pollutants - would continue to scar the landscape.
Today, war continues to have an [[environmental cost->War and environmental destruction]] that is observable through our noses.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Tait Keller, 'Destruction of the Ecosystem', in: //1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War//, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson (Berlin, 2014).]Today we are used to the smells of historical battlefields being rather more serene. Reclaimed by nature, we see grass, trees, and crops rather than smelling cordite, chloride of lime, or corpses.
Our story of war and smell in Europe between 1600 and 1925 ends here. However, war continues to have a pungent odour today.
In November 2021 a team of archaeologists and historians discovered a long forgotten tunnel in Northern France. The tunnel had been un-entered since the First World War. One of the members of the team that discovered the tunnel noted that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//there is the very particular odour of a battlefield because the smell of gunpowder still lingers.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Buried for years, the smell of powder was preserved in a way that it could never be above ground.
The environmental cost of war continues to produce pungent scents. At the time of writing, the war in Ukraine is ongoing as Russia attempts to wrestle control of the country. As power stations, factories, and forests are hit the smells of rotting food, poisoned groundwater, and smoking oil depots are the key notes of the continuing conflict.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The smells of war are not just preserved in the memories of combatants and civilians. They are also retained in the environment, with its transformed smellscapes bearing silent witness to the chaos of war.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Rediscovered-WW1-tunnel-in-Oise-in-northern-France-still-smells-of-gunpowder]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^https://time.com/6222865/ukraine-environmental-damage-russia/]
In 1529 the city of Buda, the historical capital of Hungary that now forms one part of twenty-first century Budapest, was under seige by the Ottomans.
The German troops garrisoned were nervous:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//fancyed that the Castle had Bin undermined by the Turks , and that they did smell the [[Gunpowder->Stink bombs]]: so strangely fear had possessed their Minds, that no perswasion of the Governour could oblige them to a stout defence.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The troops were worried that the Ottoman forces had dug under castle, placed reservoirs of explosives, and were about to blow it up from below. Much to their captain's dismay the troops ignored calls for courage and surrendered.
But beseiged soldiers have not been the only [[living being->Crows and muskets]] afraid of the smell of gunpowder.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Marius D'Assigny, //The stratagems of war// (London, 1686), p. 75]
Animals also reacted to the smell of gunpowder. It was well known that certain birds such as rooks, crows, and jackdaws would fly away at the mere scent of gunpowder because they worried they would be shot.
Agricultural and husbandry manuals therefore recommended that farmers struggling with birds eating their grain should
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//lay Trains of Gunpowder... or let it lye scattering in the most frequented places, and the Scent of it will make them... forsake the Field.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
By the nineteenth century there was some scepticism about the crow's supposed antipathy to the scent of gunpowder, with some authors labelling it a piece of folk wisdom perpetuated by the 'vulgar'.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
When European powers brought violent colonisation to the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards, the indigenious population were said to be similarly sensitive:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Indians, reported (Like our English Crowes) to Smell Gunpowder at a great Distance.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
However, in the second half of the nineteenth century gunpowder was replaced by [[new, smokeless, powders->Cordite]] that had their own distinct odour.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Leonard Meager, //The mystery of husbandry// (London, 1697), p. 75.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Charles Waterton, 'Habits of the Carrion Crow',//Magazine of Natural History//, 6 (1833), p. 214.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^Francis Osborne, //A miscellany of sundry essayes// (London, 1659), p. 107]
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century experiments with new forms of smokeless propellant were held across Europe, as chemists and munitions manufacturers raced to find a powder that would remain stable enough to use whilst not producing the battlefield-obscuring smoke of earlier gunpowder.
Guncotton, based on nitroceullulose, and nitroglycerine were synthesised in 1846 and 1847 and these substances would become the basis for the smokeless propellants of the nineteenth century. Many of these subtances were first used as industrial explosives, since in this context they just had to cause a large bang rather than propell a projectile out of a weapon. The French 'Poudre B' and the British cordite were two varieties of smokeless powder developed in the 1880s.
The smell of weapony changed as smokeless powder became more common. Gunpowder had smelled sulpherous and rotten-egg-like. New smokeless propellants had a more bitter, acrid, smell. Initially this led to concerns:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//at one time it was thought that armies could not long stand the fire of smokeless powder on a battlefield, because of the penetrating 'chemical' smell it evolved.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Soldiers soon got used to the new smell of smokeless powders.
However, on the [[home front->Making munitions]] considerable attention was paid to the smell of smokeless powders.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ Oscar Guttman, 'The Manufacture of Smokeless Powder', in The Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry, (1894), 581.]Munitions factories came with their own smellscapes. These could be injurious for those that worked in them.
A report from the British Ministry of Munitions in 1918 noted that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The monotonous smell and lack of freshness in the air nervously disturbs the more sensitive men.... some of whom have been used to an open-air life, and who... concern themselves over chemical poisons in the air, the presence of which they believe to be indicated by the close smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, in this chemical atmosphere a careful deployment of the nose was required to ensure safety and avoid disaster. Reports from the British government's Inspectors of Explosives, produced throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, record numerous examples of tragedies in which depots and deliveries of materials for munitions making were accidentally detonated.
''Olfigure X.''
(text-colour:#BF9365)[//Get your hands on some nail polish remover and give it a good sniff.//]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
You are smelling (click-append: "smelling")[ the closest smell to acetone, a key ingredient in cordite. Acetone has a distinctive, fruity flavour that is often compared to nail polish remover.
Acetone could be highly flammable and dangerous. In Glasgow in March 1904 an accident occured when unloading empty drums that still had residual traces of acetone in them, killing two dock workers and injuring several others. In response, the Inspector of Explosives recommended that, to ensure that future drums were definitely emptied of acetone:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The drums when emptied should be left without their bungs and should be placed upon racks in the open for a few days with the bungholes downwards; if, at the end of that time, it is found that the smell of acetone is still perceptible... the last traces can be removed by directing a jet of compressed air into the drum... relying upon the absence of smell as an indication that removal is complete.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Cordite was replaced by other smokeless propellants in the 1940s and 1950s. Modern propellants also contain nitroglycerin, but in much larger quantities, and so they maintain some of the cordite scent. Despite this, those that use firearms are able to distinguish the two by the smell.
But partnership between chemistry and the munitions industry was also producing other odours on the frontline from more [[insidious weapons->Gas warfare]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//Ministry of Munitions. Health of Munition Workers Committee. Final report. Industrial health and efficiency// (London, 1918), p. 86.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^//Explosives Act, 1875 (38 Vict. c. 17). Twenty-ninth annual report of His Majesty's inspectors of explosives; being their annual report for the year 1904// (London, 1905), p. 94.]]The use of foul smelling substances as a weapon was not new in the First World War.
Previously in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries armies - particularly those besieging towns and cities - had used 'stink bombs' or 'stink pots' to try and smoke out the enemy.
These involved bunging sulphur, saltpeter, charcoal, and foul-smelling ingredients such as asafetida, stinking iris, tar, and horsehoe nails into a clay pot, lighting it, and throwing the foul-smoking object into the enemy's defenses.
Kazimierz Siemienowicz, who published a vast volume on artillery and explosives in 1650 that was then translated into many European languages, gave guidance on how to make these stink bombs. However, Siemienowicz, also issued a warning. The goal of such weapons was only to:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//molest the Enemy by their Faetid Vapours, wrap them up in artificial Mist; offend both the Nose and Head, by their Extraordinary nauseousness.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
He could not countenance the use of weapons that would actually poison the enemy with venom, lead, dangerous herbs, or arsenic:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I will not admit Poisoned Balls into the class of Warlike Inventions, nor allow the Use of them to a Soldier, who as he is a Man of generosity, and much more as he is a Christian, ought to abhor the very Thoughts of murdering his Neighbour with an invenomed Weapon.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, in the [[fields of Ypres->Chlorine gas]] in 1915, this would all change.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Kazimierz Siemienowicz,//The Great Art of Artillery//, trans. George Shelvocke. (London, 1729), pp. 289, 296.]On the 22nd of April 1915 Archibald James, an obsever with Britain's Royal Flying Corps, observed something strange from the cockpit as he flew over the trenches in which French soldiers were stationed:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Suddenly we saw to the north of us in the salient this yellow wall moving quite slowly towards our lines. We hadn’t any idea what it was. We reported it of course when we landed.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Only later did it become clear what had just happened: the first gas attack of the First World War. At the Second Battle of Ypres the Germany army deployed chlorine gas to deadly effect.
''Olfigure.''
(text-colour:#BF9365)[//Smell fresh pineapple or a pineapple flavoured sweet or drink.//]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
You are sniffing (click-append: "sniffing")[ what many soldiers in the trenches thought they could smell when a chlorine gas attack was taking place.
Overwhelming the most common comparison for chlorine gas was pineapple. A letter from the Canadian soldier Frank Maheux to his former wife captured the smell:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//We got a bad dose at Vimy – when the gas comes it is like pineapple it smells so good if you smell a lityle [sic] you die choke and you can’t get your wind I saw many dying like that healthy young men the best in the nation just kids.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]Perhaps the most problematic thing about chlorine gas was that it also smelled rather like chloride of lime, the disinfectant used to clean latrines, trenches, and arrest the decay of the dead bodies that littered the battlefield.
But chlorine was [[not the only gas->Phosgene]] deployed on the battlefields of the First World War.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'Voices of the First World War: Gas Attack at Ypres', Imperial War Museum, https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-gas-attack-at-ypres]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Tim Cook, //No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War// (Vancouver, 2011), p. 111]]
The problem with chlorine gas from the perspective of the military was that it had such a strong smell, which gave a clear warning and time for the enemy to fit a gas mask to defend themselves.
They therefore turned to other gasses that had subtler scents.
Phosgene was one such gas, which had a sweet, dusty, smell. The odour of phosgene was frequently compared to that of new mown hay.
Chlorine Gas and Phosgene were also joined by third gas with a disinctive odour: mustard gas, which smelt like onions and [[garlic->Sniffing Arsenic]].
These gases were deadly. But the [[masks->Gas masks]] that were developed to protect soldiers brought their own odours into the noses of their wearers.One response was to issue gas masks, which all sides began to offer to their troops in the summer of 1915.
The experience of wearing a gas mask might include the smells of leather, rubber, and cloth, but gauze soaked in urine was also deployed to protect the body. Many soldiers and medical staff disliked the smell and the difficulty of breathing in these masks. For example the Hypo helmet given to British and Canadian soldiers in July 1915 was described as smelling
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//like last year's bird seed.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Later issue P-Helmets provided to the British produced different difficulties. They were good at protecting the wearer, but the smell of the chemicals used to coat the mask and the relative difficult of breathing made soldiers worry that they were being gassed, which led them to take the masks off and become victims of the actual gas that was swirling around them.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, the British were not the only to struggle with the smells of gas masks. One Italani nurse, Sita Meyer Camperio, described how her and her colleagues wore
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//masks against the asphyxiating gasses; but you cannot breath in the smelly masks.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
However, it was clear that the discomfort was worth it. The effects of inhaling chlorine, phosgene, or mustard gas could be severe.
What was particularly anxiety provoking about these gasses is that they could also induce anosmia, [[the loss of smell->Anosmic soldiers]], making you less prepared for a future attack.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Tim Cook,//No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War// (Vancouver, 2011), pp. 42, 57-8]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Sita Meyer Camperio, //Luci e ombre di eroi// (Turin, 1932).]Smell loss was just one among the many effects of breathing in a gas attack.
August Hartmann (1896-1960), a German soldier on the Western Front, was one example among many who lost their sense of smell and taste after a mustard gas attack.
His anosmia stayed for the rest of his life: he would later see the funny side, as his children played tricks on him - replacing his favourite hard sausage with a replica made from soap and paint.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
For those whose sense of smell remained, an enduring sense of [[olfactory paranoia->Worrisome scents]] accompanied every waking moment in the trenches.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'August Hartmann 1896-1960', Europeana 1914-1918, http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/de/contributions/13534.]Those that survived gas attacks without injury could be left with an anxious attentiveness to the smells around them, in case an unusual odour could indicate another chemical assault.
Put yourselves in the shoes of Sergeant Bernard Joseph Brookes, an English soldier in the Queen's Westminster Rifles. On the 10th of June 1915 Brookes had been ordered to take the trench log book for his unit back to Brigade headquarters behind the lines at La Brique.
Brookes got his coat on, picked up his rifle, and set out for the journey on foot.
However, he had forgotten his gas mask.
Brookes,
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//traversed the fields in the rear of the trenches, keeping behind a hedge as very heavy firing was in progress, and got to the road, when suddenly I sniffed - gas and I had no respirator! What was I to do? I dared not go back to the trenches as I would be going further into the gas area, and would very likely be overcome before reaching my "dug-out".//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Brookes choose to [[keep walking->Odorous suspicions ]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^The War Diary of Sergeant Bernard Joseph Brookes, http://www.bobbrookes.co.uk/Diary%20Original.htm. ]But the smell did not go away:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The further I advanced, the stronger the smell, which seemed strange to me, and not like the gas we had smelt before, but a more familiar smell, and at last I began to get the "wind up", and wondered what length of time I had to live, and why in the distance to La Brique seemed so long.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Suddenly, he was awakened from his anxious speculation by a[[ sound in the distance->Petrol and fumes]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^The War Diary of Sergeant Bernard Joseph Brookes, http://www.bobbrookes.co.uk/Diary%20Original.htm. ]Gas warfare had a particular effect on soldiers.
The attentiveness needed to guard against gas attacks could lead to anxiety and stress that we might now associate with post-traumatic-stress disorder.
Robert Graves, who published a memoir of the trenches in 1929, had been awarded a disability pension by the Army Medical Board based on a diagnosis of neuraesthenia. Alongside the nightmares in which shells crashed through his bedroom ceiling in the middle of his sleep and the inability to hear sudden sounds without diving for cover, graves had also developed an odorphobia:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong smell of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Deadly gas that smelled of geraniums, disinfectant that brought back odorous memories of the corpses it attempted to cover, and the scent of smoke and burning. These smells were not unique to the trenches and many soldiers encountered on their return home.
In our own time smells continued to reside in the memories of combatants, far from the battlefields that once contained them.
For veterans, those smells can bring back the battlefield and its traumas. The burning smell of fireworks, bonfires, and other smokey smells associated with celebrations in civlian life can send veterans into palpitations and panic.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^] Soldiers returning from tours still have nightmares with olfactory hallucinations in which they smell burning flesh.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Even if the smells of war dissipate with time, their effects on the minds and bodies of combatants and civilians to continue to haunt us long after the final shot is fired.//'']]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert Graves, //Goodbye to All That// (London, 1929), p. 220.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^https://www.ptsduk.org/remember-remember-those-with-ptsd/]
(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^https://www.gov.uk/government/news/treating-ptsd-in-the-armed-forces]
From behind him, Brookes suddenly
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//heard a gentle purr, and ahead I saw the outline of a cart.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The smell grew stronger...
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//At the same time, why was the smell getting so pronounced, especially as the wind was in front of me? Surely I was getting along quicker than the gas.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But no sooner had he heard the noise and seen the cart than relief flooded his eyes and nose:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Suddenly the mystery was solved. It was not gas I could smell, but the fumes of about a dozen motor ambulances which had arrived ready to take the wounded to hospital, and they were all ready to move off, and emitting petrol fumes from the exhaust.
I cannot say that usually I enjoy the fumes of motor cars which often spoiled the sweet sense of the countryside in dear old England, but on this occasion nothing could have been sweeter.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Brookes story shows just how anxious sniffing could be in the trenches, where the threat from the air around you was as potent as the trenches in front of your lines.
That anxiety about odour could continute to haunt soldiers when they returned to [[civilian life->Trauma and Smell]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^The War Diary of Sergeant Bernard Joseph Brookes, http://www.bobbrookes.co.uk/Diary%20Original.htm. ](text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Always that smell of cemetery in the nose.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This was the Italian soldier Paolo Monelli's memory of the battlefield, looking back from the 1921. Like many soldiers, he described an unwanted intimacy with the decomposition of the dead:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//There are twenty of them crammed into a crevasse, which are slowly decomposing... There is carbon and hydrogen sulphide under us, covered by a pile of rags-uniforms; and we call them dead. But tonight you stink too much, dead.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Soldiers often recall the smell of death as an insidious, all-encompassing, odour that seeped into the pores of every material it touched. The British soldier Noel Peters, interviewed in the 1970s, remembered that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//In the background was that smell, that dreadful stink - all the time. I don't have to tell you, you can imagine it for yourself. A horrible, sweet smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The frontline was a place where one's body threatened to become part of the rotting, muddy, materiality of the trenc itself. [[Trench foot->Trench Foot]] offered one, rather pungent, example.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Franco Nicolis, ‘The scent of snow at Punta Linke: First World War sites as sense-scapes, Trentino, Italy’, in Nicholas J. Saunders and Paul Cornish (eds.), //Modern Conflict and the Senses//, (London, 2017), p.73fn3.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Steve Hurst, 'Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture',in Nicholas J. Saunders and Paul Cornish (eds.), //Modern Conflict and the Senses//, (London, 2017), p. 353]The socks of many soldiers, as one discussion of trench foot noted, had
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...a faecal odour resembling that of wounds infected with the gas bacillus... ascribed to the multiplication in the socks of organisms which got into the boots with the liquid mud. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This was one possible explanation for the causes of trench foot.
The American soldiers on the frontline used [[camphor->Museums and Camphor]] soap to prevent trench foot, which they rubbed on their feet twice a day. This was said to give:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...rise to a very pleasant aromatic smell of camphor, and is very popular with all ranks. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
However, the British soldiers were given whale oil. This had a somewhat less pleasant odour.
H. L. Silberbauer, a South African soldier who served at Loos, described how:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//In wet weather, the men had to parade in the support line and rub their feet with whale oil.., a nasty smelling process. Platoon commanders had to ensure that his men's feet were healthy.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
The smell was pretty universally hated.
E. P. F. Lynch, an Australian soldier serving in trenches of the Somme described whale oil as emitting:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//an awful smell like nothing we've ever smelt before.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
But whale oil was not the only [[industrially produced->The stench of bodies]] substance being deployed in trenches against foul smells and illness.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Basil Hughes, 'The Causes and Prevention of Trench Foot', //The British Medical Journal//, 1:2890 (1916), 712.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^George de Tarnowsky, Military Surgery of the Zone of the Advance (Philadelphia, 1918), p. 58.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^Lt Col H L Silberbauer, 'Reminiscences of the First World War', //Military History Journal//, 10:5 (1997)]
(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^E. P. F. Lynch, //Somme Mud// (London 2010), p. 56.] The foul smells associated with the gathered bodies of - potentially ill, wounded, dying, or dead - soldiers had been a constant struggle for armies and navies throughout European history.
In his his work on the diseases of different occupations, the Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini (1633-1714) blamed the 'filth and nastiness' of military encampments for the outbreaks of dysentry and fever that often haunted soldiers. He was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//inform'd by Physicians that have waited upon great Armies, that sometimes in Summer there's such a grievious Smell in Camps, that nothing can be more noisome.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Concerns about disease meant that smell often one of the key factors leading to the movement of troops. On the 14th of September 1683, a few days after the Polish-Lithuanian army beat back the Ottoman force that beseiged Vienna, the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Army decamp'd, in order to remove from the noisom Smells occasioned by the dead Bodies, and the filthiness of the Camp, which one may imagine to be infected, by a two Months Encampment of nigh 700000 Men. The Stench was so great, that this Morning the Elector of Bavaria,dining with the King of Poland, was forc'd almost all the while, to stop his Nose with his Napkin.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Moving away from the foul smells created by encampments was one solution. Another was to try and [[neutralise the odours->Disinfecting Barracks]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Bernardino Ramazzini, //A Treatise of the Diseases of Tradesmen// (London, 1705), p. 237]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Francois-Paulin Dalairac, //Polish Manuscripts// (London, 1700), pp. 105-6.]In 1758 an English assault on the French had resulted in a large number of sick and wounded British soldiers being returned to Newport and the Isle of Wight in England, where they were housed in barns, cottages, and makeshift hospitals.
In one of these makeshift hospitals disease spread quickly between soldiers. The reaction was to turn to aromatic disinfectants:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the ill-fated spot underwent a most radical purification; vinegar fumes, burnt gunpowder, indled resinous substances were used in abundance; all the continguous parts were scraped, ashed, and fumigated.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This example, one among many attempts to stop disease outbreaks in barracks, military hospitals, and encampments throughout the eighteenth century, was typical. The belief was that vinegar and aromatic materials would purify the air.
However, by the nineteenth century, military hygeine was more sceptical about the use of these subtances. The British Military surgeon Sir Charles Alexander Gordon (1821-1899), noted that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The fumes of vinegar and aromatic plants are useless as disinfecants and only serve to mask one smell by another.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Instead, a range of chemical compositions were used including:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//chlorine and the alkaline chlorides, nitrous acid vapour, bromine vapour, permanganate of potass, nitrate of lead or ion, charcoal, gypsum, quick lime, or coal tar//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The explosion of the chemical industry in the nineteenth century offered a wide range of compounds for getting rid of bad smells whilst, ostensibly, also getting rid of putrefaction and disease. Among the most popular throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century was [[chloride of lime->Chloride of Lime]]. In the first world war, the trenches were soaked with the smell of such chemicals.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'Surprising instance of the great infectiousness of some diseases, where a free current of air is wanting', //The Annual Register//, 8 (1765) p. 89]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Sir Charles Alexander Gordon, //Army Hygiene// (London, 1866), pp. 473, 475.]Chloride of Lime was one of the chief disinfectants of choice in the trenches. It was used to disinfect water; to try and cover up the odours of decomposing bodies; and to treat the waste that gathered in latrines. It was therefore everywhere. When the officer and writer Siegfried Sassoon was awoken from a deep, meditative, thought one silent night in the trenches by the sudden crash of a smoke cannister nearby and, as he came to:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the trench atmosphere reasserted itself in a smell of chloride of lime.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The substance had a chlorine smell, the kind that we find in bleaching powder in the twenty-first century. Given its use a disinfectant in institutional contexts before the war - from hospitals and prisons to schools and cesspits - it reinforced the feeling that the trench was an extention of the state.
However, it often [[failed to cover up->Sweating bodies]] many of the smells of trench life.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'Siegfried Sassoon, //Memoirs of an Infantry Officer// (London, 1930), p. 34.]Another smell that was difficult to deal with was the [[odour of sweating->Jean-Pierre Barruel Escapes his Lab]], unwashed, bodies. Acccording to an American journalist in Belgium in 1914, the odour of an army on the march was:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//smell of half-a-million unbathed men, the stench of a menagerie raised to the nth power.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
One of the consequences of war was being forced to share spaces with those from other walks of life. Middle class disgust for working class bodies therefore framed some discussions of soldiers' erstwhile comrades. An English officer who had been a white-collar worker before the war was disdainful of his fellow lower class soldiers:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//We had to sleep packed like sardines and with one of the noisiest and obscene collections of human beings it has ever been my misfortune to meet, and the smell of them packed into a small building after a hot day was truly sickening.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
But war also meant coming into contact with smells not only of other classes, but of other countries and cultures. In some cases smell could add to the sense of nationalist, xenophobic, [[disgust for the enemy->Bosche Smell]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Paul Cornish, Nicholas J. Saunders, and Mark Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Saunders and Cornish (eds.), //Modern Conflict and the Senses// (London, 2017), p. 5.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^Jonathan Wild, //The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880-1939// (Basingstoke, 2006), p.189fn20.]The sweat and of human bodies was more than a general feature of trench life in the First World War.
It was also featured in attempts to mark out the enemy as savage, less than human, and something to be both fear and repulsion.
Throughout the First World War French soldiers, physicians, and civilians asserted that the Germans had a particular 'Boche smell' that they left in the places they had been and on the objects they had touched. Soldiers described the smell when they took over German trenches. But French civilians also asserted that in the houses that the Germans had occupied:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//homes get dirty, a thick layer of dust gets all over your belongings, everywhere there is the filthy stench of sweat and tobacco, an overpowering Boche smell that won’t go away.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The French physician Doctor Edgar Bérillon (1859-1948) wrote an entire thesis on the condition, //bromidrosis//, that he believed was responsible for the 'Boche smell': a condition brought about by poor hygeine, excessive meat consumption, and an unnatural German aggression.2
German newspapers were less than happy with this characterisation, one journalist admitted that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The individual races, the individual peoples and even the individual cities really do have quite individual smells.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
But that the French were
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//merely reiterating an argument that has always played a protective role in the mutual denigration of peoples.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
For example
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The Italians accuse the Austrians of smelling of tallow because they eat candles; the white North Americans accuse their black fellow-citizens of smelling like "animals", and the latter reply to the accusation by claiming that all whites emit the smell of corpses.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Smell, as often the case in European history, was used to distinguish and demonize enemies. In a less sinister fashion, the [[smells of alcohol->Brandy in the trenches]] could also mark out national cultures on the front line.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Juliette Courmont, 'Making Sense of the War (France)', in Ute Daniel et al. (eds)., //1914-1918-online. Internationl Encyclopaedia of the First World War// (Berlin, 2014).]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^For more on this see Juliette Courmont, //L'odeur de l'ennemi. L'imaginaire olfactif en 1914-1918// (Paris, 2010).]
(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^'Der Geruch der Volfer', //Badische Presse//, Saturday 5th of February 1916, p. 5]However, the smells of alcohol could also be detected in the midst of fighting. For combatants in the First World War, each side had it's own distinct smells from different alcoholic preparations.
In his war novel //Un anno sull'Altipiano// or //One year on the High Plateau// the author Emilio Lussu (1890-1975) drew on his experience as a lieutenant in the Sassari infantry brigade stationed on the trenches of the Asiago plateau. The Austrians, who Lusso and his troops were fighting, had a distinctive odour. As the wind blew across the opposing trenches towards Lusso's line:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//From the Austrian ranks came an odor of brandy, thick, condensed, as though it were bursting forth from some dank wine cellars, closed for years. During the singing and the shouts of "Hurrah!" it seemed as though the cellars were throwing open their doors and inundating us with brandy. That brandy flowed into my nostrils in waves filtered down to my lungs, and stayed down there in an odorous blend of tar, gasoline, resin, and sour wine.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The French had their wine, the Austrians their brandy, and the [[British their rum->Rum and Blood]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Emilio Lussu, //Un anno sull'Altipiano// (Paris, Le lettere italiane, 1938)]A battlefield in France, in 1916. Soldiers wait along a trench, bayonets fixed, waiting for the signal to go over the top and charge towards the enemy's line. The atmosphere of anticipation leading up to an assault was charged with olfactory meaning:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Pervading the air was the smell of rum and blood.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In order to deal with the [[fear->Horses and gunpowder]] of battle and to give troops courage, alcohol was frequently supplied before attacks.
The British were not the only nation to do to this. The French corporal Louis Barthas, a Barrelmaker from the Languedoc region, described the build up to an attack in the summer of 1916:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//At this moment a ravitailleur arrived with two jerricans of hooch, to give out immediately. Each of us held out our canteens, but many sniffed at it with distrust; this unexpected distribution just before an attack appeared suspicious. Jordy declared that “this smells like a pharmacy,” and Tort, from Rieux, said, “It’s ether! Mondiès watered the ground with the contents of his canteen. “It’s poison!” he shouted angrily. “They want to make us crazy. But for two sous’ worth of hooch, they’re not going to make a killer out of me!”//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The smell of regional alcoholic beverages was not the only way of distinctive aroma of each nation's trenches. [[Food->French stews]] also contributed to this familiar (or alien, depending on the nose doing the sniffing) mix.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Paul Fussell, //The Great War and Modern Memory// (Oxford, 2013), p. 50]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Robert Cowley (ed.), //Poilu: The World War I Notebookes of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker 1914-1918//, trans. Edward M. Strauss (London, 2014), p. 79]Another way of demarcarcting the difference between armies in the trenches was the food they ate.
The French soldier Louis Barthas noted that the German army had set their kitchens up close to French lines and that by 'reciprocal tolerance' each side let the other's cooks get on with their food preparation. However, he was slightly less tolerant of German tastes. Had it been windy then:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the Germans could have smelled the aroma of our stews, borne by the wind, and we’d have gotten the vapors of their tasteless sauerkraut.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The English were kinder were more appreciative of the French food they encountered. In 1915 the English author and journalist Rudyard Kipling toured the French front line. As he approached one set of front line trenches
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The men were at dinner, and a good smell of food filled the trench. This was the first smell I had encountered in my long travels uphill--a mixed, entirely wholesome flavour of stew, leather, earth, and rifle-oil.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The smell of food could also be a way of blocking out, covering up, or [[minimizing less pleasant odoursr->Bacon frying]]? on the front line.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert Cowley (ed.), //Poilu: The World War I Notebookes of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker 1914-1918//, trans. Edward M. Strauss (London, 2014), p. 302]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Rudyard Kipling //France at War// (London, 1915)]''Olfigure.''
(text-colour:#BF9365)[//At this point, you might like to go to the kitchen, get out a frying pan, and fry some bacon. Snuff up the odour of the bacon frying//]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
Well, you know what you're smelling - the smell of frying bacon. This potent mix of hydrocarbons, aldehydes, alcohols, and ketones had a special significance in the trenches. Does it mean the same thing for you? [[Let's find out.->Bacon in the trenches]]In the English trenches one smell helped to block out the odours of war: the smell of frying bacon.
One poem, published in a 1915 collection of songs from the trenches, told how:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//A peculiar stench is the smell of the trench
Of that there is no denying ;
But at every post what strikes you most
Is the smell of bacon frying.
The mouldy beef of some past relief,
I grant you, is somewhat trying ;
But to counteract, you've always the fact
Of the smell of bacon frying.
At another time the chloride of lime
Will almost start you crying;
But banish the niff by having a sniff
At the smell of bacon frying.
The night has been wet, and you see with regret
Odd garments hung out drying ;
The odour is quaint, and you bless the saint
Who invented bacon frying.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But why was this smell so potent and important for the [[average English soldier->Smells of home]]?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'The Ration Rasher', in Captain C. W. Blackall, //Songs from the Trenches// (London, 1915), p. 50.]The smell of bacon might have had a unique place in the British soldier's smellscape because it was a potent reminder of home.
In June 1918 a 'young officer' wrote a poem on 'The Best Smell of All': the smell of bacon frying.
After listing the various smells of life in early twentieth-century Britain, the poet turns his nose bacon-wards:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//But there's a smell that doth excel
All other smells by far,
Even the tawny stable smell
Or the boisterous smell of tar;
A smell stupendous, past compare,
The king of smells, the prize,
That smell which floods the startled air
When home-cured bacon fries!//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Why was this smell so wonderful? For the trench-bound soldier, stuck in the mud and blood of war-torn France, it evoked the British countryside and rural hospitality:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//How good to sit at twilight's close
In a warm inn and feel
That marvellous smell caress the nose
With promise of a meal!
How good when bell for breakfast rings
To pause, while tripping down,
And snuff and snuff till Fancy brings
All Arcady to Town!
But best, when day's first glimmerings break
Through curtains half withdrawn,
To lie and smell it, scarce awake,
In some great farm at dawn;
Cocks crow, the milkmaid clanks the pails,
The housemaid bangs the stairs;
And BACON suddenly assails
The nostrils unawares.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
As one officer put it:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the homely smell of bacon gained its conquest over the reek of chloride of lime and in doing so not only brought a tacit truce to the battle front but helped in preserving sanity.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
English soldier's were not the only one derive a pleasurable reminder of home from the smell of cooking. The French also sought the [[smells of home->Uncanny battlefield smells]] in their food.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Charles Larcom Graves, //Mr Punch's History of the Great War// (London, 1919), pp. 234-53.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Captain B. H. Liddell Hart in, //Christmas Truce: The Western Front December 1914// (London, 1999), p. 29.]The French soldier Louis Barthas smelled out home in the aromas of food being cooked for officers:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Exploring the surroundings of the village that same day, prowling among the mounds of earth and the shredded, blasted trees, I saw a thin line of blue smoke curling up into the air. At the same time the appetizing aroma of rabbit stew, such as you can smell only in the Midi, caressed my nostrils; intrigued, I approached, and in a half-buried cellar I saw my Peyriac friend Richardis, among his pots and pans.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, for some the smells of home could be rendered eery, unfamiliar, and discomforting in the context of conflict. Mary Borden, an English nurse who worked in mobile hospitals near the front line, could not get to sleep if the smell of firing stopped. It was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the whispering of the grass and the scent of the new-mown hay that makes... me nervous.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
For some soldiers the movement off the front line and back home was beset by smell-hauntings and smell-loss that would colour their [[return to civilian life->Smell Hauntings]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert Cowley (ed.), //Poilu: The World War I Notebookes of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker 1914-1918//, trans. Edward M. Strauss (London, 2014), p. 279.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Mary Borden, //The Forbidden Zone// (London, 2008), p. 39]For example, Charles S. Myers' studies at the Duchess of Westminster's War Hospital in Le Touqet, one soldier was admitted on January 26th 1915, could not detect ether, peppermint, equcalyptus, ammonia, carbolic acid, or iodine tincture under his left nostril but complained for 5 days afterwards of a
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//subjective sensation of the odour of cordite.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
that would not go away.
Soldiers complained of a constant smell of corpses in their noses and being 'haunted "by that awful smell of the dead" in olfactory dreams that caused hysterical vomiting.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In another case, an English officer who had been thrown face down into the ruptured abdomen of a dead German soldier complained of being haunted the smell of the entrails. In this case the only thing that helped avoid these olfactory hallucations was for the officer to go
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//out into the country, far from every suggestion of war.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Yet for other soldiers returning to civlian life, it was the [[loss of smell->Shell shock smell loss]] that proved problematic.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Charles S. Myers, //A contribution to the study of shell shock : being an account of three cases of loss of memory, vision, smell, and taste, admitted into the Duchess of Westminster's War Hospital, Le Touquet// (London, 1915), p. 14. ]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^E. E. Southward, //Shell-Shock and other Neuropsychiatry Problems// (Boston, 1919), pp. 176, 245, 476, 491]The loss of smell was a frequent result of shell-shock and other battlefield dangers. In April 1917 a Candian soldier in France was buried by a high explosive shell and, after being dug out, realised that he could not smell anything and that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//his meals tasted as if he was eating so much 'pine wood.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
He was sent back to his unit in May 1917 and here he discovered that his loss of smell might, perversley, be quite useful:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//he went out one morning with two other men to bury some decayed meat. While digging the pit they uncovered two dead Germans. The others left because of the offensive smell, but he was able to stick it out and finish the job without much discomfort.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, the loss of smell could be less of a boon when veterans returned to civilian life.
The English journal //The Electrical Review// published an article in June 1918 listing 'the various positions and the disablement that disqualifies a man for a particular position'. This included: 'Battery attendant' who would 'cannot smell machines or cables getting hot' as well as motor inspectors, motor repairers, installation complaints assessor, heater and cooker inspector, heater and cooker repairer, mains fuse inspectors, meter testers, and coal, water, and oil testers.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The smell of the battlefield stayed with many soldiers when they returned to civilian life. But the injuries to the nose produced by shell-shock and gas-attacks also stopped some combatants from truly re-intergrating into the smellscapes of civilian life.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Digby Wheeler, 'An Unusual Psychoneurosis of War: Functional Loss of the Sense of Smell', //Canadian Medical Assocaition Journal//, 8:12 (1918), p. 113.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Research, 'Disabled Soldiers and Their Employment', //The Electrical Review//, 82:2115 (1918), p. 532.]During the late nineteenth century the use of new fuels, including blue water gas, that were both highly toxic and inodorous resulted in attempts to re-odorize gases in order to give warnings of leakages.
In the 1880s in Germany R. Von Quaglio first attempted to add ethyl mercaptan to water gas. Humans can detect this ethyl mercaptan, which has an odour resembling leeks or cooked cabbage, in very low concentrations. However, von Quaglio noted that most users confused the scent with onions and garlic and so failed to recognise escaping gas. This was also the case in Leeds in 1890, where fatalities occurred after ethyl mercaptan failed to alert workers to a gas leak.
In the 1920s the U.S Bureau of Mines conducted experiments with ethyl mercaptan as a warning smell for natural gas leaks, in mines, homes, and along pipelines. By the later twentieth century mercaptan, mixed with other odorous compounds such as dimethyl sulphide, would become a common smell in homes across Europe and America.
It was this substance - ethyl mercaptan - that would lead to a [[re-assessment of the turkey vulture's nasal power->Vultures Sniff out Leaky Pipes]].It was found in the 1930s that leaking gas pipelines in Texas attracted animals who could then be used by spotters to help them identify leaks. Hovering vultures or digging coyotes were attracted to the leaking pipes by the scent of ethyl mercaptan, which is also emitted by dead bodies in a state of decomposition.
In 1938 and 1939 a Texan engineer advised Californian workers for Union Oil and Gas company to use similar techniques in order to discern leaks in their own pipelines. Whilst at this point the scientific debate on the turkey vulture’s olfactory prowess was still open, it was clear that on the ground in their daily interactions gas engineers were convinced of the turkey vulture’s sensory skill. As one article from 1948 put it:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...the line walkers are duly grateful for this unwitting tipoff service.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
It was this evidence that fed back into a new comprehensive study of turkey vulture olfaction by Kenneth Stager, a PhD student at the University of Southern California, in the 1960s.
The olfactory powers of different bird species is still a live and ongoing debate with important implications for our understanding of the [[impacts of anthropogenic environmental change->The Smell of Plastics]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Dick Sneddon, 'Petrolic Personalities', //The Petroleum Engineer//, 20:3 (1948), p. 12.]One possible explanation for the high numbers of sea birds who die after consuming or being entraped in plastic debris in our oceans is olfactory. Seabirds are attracted to food sources by dimethly sulfide and, it turns out, plastic floating in sea water also produces the same odorous chemical. Birds are thus tricked into thinking that plastic waste is food.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
We are transforming the olfactory environments of earth - often in ways we do not realise or understand - and these transformations are having significant impacts other animals with noses that are differently tuned from our own.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ Matthew S. Savoca, 'Marine plastic debris emits a keystone infochemical for olfactory foraging seabirds', //Science Advances//, 2:11 (2016), e1600395.]The famous Liberty Bell of Philadelphia has become synonymous with both American independence and the history of political freedoms in the United States. When thinking about this object, most people would probably associate it with sound, not with smell. Originally cast in 1752 at Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^], the bell was transported to Philadelphia, casted with the lettering: "Proclaim LIBERTY Throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants Thereof".
However, from the early nineteenth century cracks slowly appeared in the bell’s copper and tin surface, rendering it a largely mute, inarticulate, symbol. On the 6th of June 1944, radio extended the bell's croaky voice across the nation, as it was tapped seven times - once for each letter in the word 'Liberty' - during a broadcast to mark the allied invasion of Europe. The sound produced was eerie and distinctly un-bell-like.
In 1999, a number of graduate students at Pennsylvania State University used acoustic modelling to reconstruct what the bell might have sounded like in the eighteenth century, before wear and tear took its (and, the bell’s) toll.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^] Yet to modern ears this recording, whilst perhaps scientifically correct, sounds more like an uncanny, computerised, version of the dim tolling of a funeral bell than a joyful celebration of liberty.
So much for the sound of liberty. What has liberty smell like?
This might sound like an odd question. However, as we will see, liberty certainly smells.
[[<img src="https://timeless-smell.com/files/fullsize/583fcbc2de307a93ea3871cc0c035b7a.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->Smells of Bells]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^https://www.thelondonbellfoundry.co.uk
^^2^^https://www.nps.gov/inde/photosmultimedia-soundofthelibertybell.htm]Some readers might think this an odd question to ask. After all, how can an abstract concept have a scent? But others will recognise that political concepts like liberty are not just political concepts, floating above the material world.
Bells (and politics) certainly have [[smells->Whitechapel Bell Foundry]].The Liberty Bell has a material history: from its initial founding at Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, through its transportation to the U.S, and in the contexts in which it was displayed.
But what does a bell foundary smell like? Let's enter and find out.
[[<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Shop-front%2C_Whitechapel_Bell_Foundry_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3714592.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">->An alchemical odour]]The foundry at Whitechapel cast its final bell in June 2017. This last item was donated to the Museum of London.
The building itself - once a busy site of production- was sold, to be turned into a boutique hotel.
This change is symptomatic of a broader turn from industry to services that has characterised the UK economy during the twenty-first century.
The distinctive smell of the foundry will therefore be lost: from the scent of molten metal to the air-conditioned fragrance of a hotel lobby. Benjamin Kipling, a bell-tuner who worked at Whitechapel, said that he would
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//never forget the atmosphere, the smell of it all//'']]
'it all' being the steaming molten bronze and the horse hair, manure, and clay used to mould the bells, a combination which has also been described as an
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//alchemical odour.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Once bells had travelled from foundries to the communities in which the would ring, they were welcomed with[[frargant ceremony->Censing bells]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/may/11/whitechapel-bell-foundry-battle-save-britains-oldest-factory]Calls for liberty – and the revolutions from which they spring – often lead to violent conflict. Throughout the American and French Revolutions – and indeed through the American Civil War and the World Wars of the twentieth century – bells were melted down and transmuted into cannons. The smells of metal, manure, hair and clay thus became intermingled with the smell of gunpowder, and other battlefield scents like blood, sweat, horses, fear and mud. In the 1860s a poem by F. Y. Rockett appealed to Confederate supporters to 'Melt the Bells', ending with a promise that the cannons would be melted back into bells again at the end of the war and used to celebrate and commemorate the lives lost.
The same process of melting metals has occurred for statues. After Waterloo, French cannons and cannonballs were melted down in order to create a statue of the Duke of Wellington that sits outside London’s Royal Exchange. On the other hand, historical regimes - including the Vichy regime in 1940s France - melted down statues of historical figures in order to use the materials for industrial-military production. Much like history itself, statues, bells, and cannons are constantly being remade - canonised, de-canonised, and re-canonised. Statutes, like bells, have also [[faced olfactory transformation in times of revolution->Stinking Statues]].
This constant flow of metal back and forth between bells, rung to celebrate or commemorate peace, and the military equipment used to prosecute war, has been a long-running characteristic of European and American history: metal reshaped in the bell and cannon-foundry just as societies were reshaped in the cauldron of conflict. It is not far from the smell of horse manure and molten metal in the foundry or the musty smell of churches and belfries, to the battlefield stench of [[sweat->Sweating bodies]], [[gunpowder->Gunpowder explosions]], and [[death->Death in the trenches]] . In the Catholic church there is a long tradition of blessing new bells for churches. The details of these ceremonies had, since the late medieval period, been laid down in pontificals and rubrics by the heads of the Catholic church in Rome.
When a community welcomed a new to bell to its church it would be given god parents, the bell would be baptised with holy water, and given a benediction by the member of church hiearchy - often the bishop for the diocese in which the bell was located.
Once this was done, the final key event in the blessing of the bell involved burning a fragrant incense composed of frankincense and myrrh directly underneath the bell, so that the smoke would fill its interior. A later nineteenth-century text describing the bell-blessing process gives a brief indication of the reasoning behind the censing of bells:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Finally a vase in which incense burns is placed under the bell so that the smoke fills the entire interior, which symbolizes the fervent prayer with which this brazen voice will henceforth call the faithful; because you are aware that the holy scriptures very often compare prayer to the scents of incense.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
<img src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VI-Brs03jgU/UgvGUIMP1hI/AAAAAAAACCE/8okoqbbwu3M/s1600/bell+with+brazier+under+it.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">
(text-size:0.5)[An image showing the burning of incense in the final stages of blessing a bell, taken from a Roman pontifical of 1595]
The blessed properties of bells meant that in Catholic tradition they were often held to have magical apotropaic effects. This included the [[banishment of dangerous smells->Bells clear the air]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Grégoire Rippel, //Beautés de l'Église catholique// (Paris, 1857), p. 524.]In times of plague and pestilence bells were often rung more frequently. They were tolled for funerals and rung for services. But they were also rung because it was believed that they could turn away the plague.
In French Catholic culture there was a widespread belief the power of bells to
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...chase away the demons who are in the air...//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
who might bring pestilence and plague to parishes.
Even in Protestant England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it was believed that ringing bells were among a number of tactics that could be used against plague:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...because these in some measure dissipate, or break down the //Miasmes// (or corrupted steams) that hover in the air.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
However, once up in a belfry, bells were not always safe from further [[olfactory transformation->Re-cannonising]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Jean-Baptiste Thiers, //Traité des cloches// (Paris, 1781), p. 130
^^2^^//The Athennian Oracle// (London, 1704), iii, 237]Throughout history, statues have bore the brunt of political interventions. This is equally the case for smell. Statues have often been attacked - either in actuality or the imagination of writers - with foul smelling odours.
Covering a statue in foul-smelling excrement might be said to do several things: in attacks the person the statue represents and degrades them; it subverts the praise or 'good odour' which statues are meant to associate with the historical individuals they represent in the public mind; and by covering the statue with stinky fecal matter the individual brings the subject down to earth from the realms of elite high culture to the world of the lower body and the street.
In 1793, during the French Revolution, statutes of monarchs across Paris were toppled, including those around Notre-Dame. Louis-Sébastien Mercier recorded the treatment of these sculptures of Kings, Queens, and other notables. They were heaped in a pile behind the church under the 'dirtiest rubbish', to which was added the excrement of those who climbed and defecated on top of them. Mercier remarked that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//it does not matter that sight and odour trespass equally on their appearance, their history already does not smell good.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The curious walking past this 'museum' of ancient and royal statues
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//pinches their nostrils and fears that these effigies more stinking than corpses will cause the plague.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
By degrading the statues of historical royals, the passerby was forced to react to them with disgust rather than awe. Stink, inescapable in its claim to the noses of audiences, demanded a repraissal of the statues by Paris' citizens.
The politics of smell has manifested itself in other ways. Most notable among these has been the use of [[stink bombs->Stink bombs]] as a form of political protest.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ Louis-Sébastien Mercier, //Paris pendant le révolution (1789-1798) ou le nouveau Paris// (Paris, 1862), II, 364-5.]Stink bombs are not a new nuisance.
In the seventeenth-century we find recipes for sulphurous explosives designed to smoke out defenders during sieges. Sometimes known as ‘stinkpots’, these were also used in naval warfare: when throw below the decks of a ship they would emit a foul stench and smoke.
Chinese sailors and soldiers became famous for their liberal use of these weapons. During the Second Opium War British sailors feared these earthenware pots filled with [[gunpowder->Seige scents]] , brimstone, and sulphur. The only response to a stink pot was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//to jump overboard or be stifled.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
It was believed that the Chinese sailors who used such weapons had learned to endure the smell of 'the most villainous-smelling compounds that can be produced in the world' and so whilst
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//... the Europeans are driven from its neighbourhood, and the pirates, who have accustomed themselves to the odor of the stink-pot, are thus enabled to gain the deck.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
However, the powers of stink bombs to clear a space also made them a handy tool of [[political protest->Making a Stink]] in the early twentieth century.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^William Robert Kennedy, //Hurrah for the Life of a Sailor! Fifty Years in the Royal Navy// (London, 1900), p.47
^^2^^Thomas W. Knox, //A Close Shave, Or How Major Flagg Won His Bet// (London, 1892), p. 156]Unlike heckling, dropping a stench into the midst of a political meeting was a sure-fire way of shutting down the conversation. Across Britain and Europe suffragettes, anti-peace campaigners, pro-vivisectionists, and antisemites all cancelled speakers by stirring up a stink.
In the inter-war period, as Germany faced the political turmoil that would give birth to the Nazi party, stink bombs were a regular occurence in political protest.
In 1921 at a Berlin performance of the Austrian dramatist Arthur Schnitzler's comedy, 'Reigen', a riot erupted in the theatre. When a character exclaimed that he thought he could smell violets
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//... a stink bomb flung from the gallery exploded on stage, emitting a perfume which did not even remotely resemble violets.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The stench was followed by shouts of 'Down with the Jews', 'Deutschland uber Alles', and 'Im Prussian'.
By 1929, as the economic situation in Germany worsened, a meeting of the Berlin Council at its City Hall to discuss the question of unemployment broke down after a stink bomb was thrown from the gallery into the midst of the Council chamber.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
By 1932, as the Nazi party were building their support, stink bombs were deployed as part of more organised, extensive, antisemitic attacks. In December of that year stink bomb attacks were made made on crowded Jewish stores in Vienna. These had been organised by the Nazi party. The party's 'Technical Storm' department, composed of Vienna University chemsitry students, prepared the bombs for the attack.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Stink has been used as a weapon both to [[resist->Skunk]]political invaders and as a tool for repressing protest.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'Theatre Riot Quelled', //Evening Telegraph// (Dundee), Thursday 24th February 1921, p. 1.
^^2^^'German Disorders', //Aberdeen Journal//, Saturday December 21st 1929, p. 7.
^^3^^'Anti-Jewish Outbreak in Vienna', //Nottingham Evening Post//, Wednesday December 21st 1932, p. 9]In 1943 the British Special Operations Executive were developing a weapon. However, it was not intended to kill. Instead it was to be used to do psychological damage.
The weapon was known as 'S-Liquid', or 'Stench' liquid. It was the product of extensive experimentation with the worst smells mid-twentieth-century chemists could get their hands on.
The formula, which included the fecal smelling skatole, was designed to be held in small atomisers or breakable glass vials. The idea was to provide the French resistance with the liquid and for them to then diffuse the scents in the present of Nazi officers in order to sow the seeds of panic, fear, and disgust. This, it was believed, would help diminish Nazi morale.
It is not clear that the 'S-Liquid' was ever used and the U.S cancelled their experiments with a similar stink weapon that they intended to use against the Japanese after a rather more deadly new weapon, the atomic bomb, laid waste to Hiroshima.
However, the idea of a smell weapon that might operate by discouraging and disgusting has not gone away.
The Israeli Defence Forces currently use 'Skunk', a highly malodorous gas, as a crowd control and protest dispersal tool. The stench created by the gas lingers for days and weeks on bodies, homes, and clothes, meaning that the effects of its use stretch far beyond the intended use of crowd control.
It thus seems that today the politics of smell continues. The same is true of [[statues->In Bad Odour]].
History is highly politicised in the present.
Historians continue to re-interpret the past using new lenses and approaches, as they have always done. Where historians had drawn on 'history from below' to write new histories of the working classes in the 1960s and 1970s, today they are turning to decolonial and postcolonial approaches that allow a re-interpretation of Europe's imperial past and its legacies in the present.
A re-evalution of the role of the past in public life is also occuring. Statues, as in the past, have been one focus of this re-evaluation. Many members of the public are asking whether we should countenance the presence of statutes of imperialists and slave-traders in public places.
A particularly public manifestation of these questions comes in the form of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol. Colston was a Bristolian who made his fortune - at least in part - from his involved with the trans-atlantic slave trade via the Royal African Company. Colston subsequently engaged in philanthopy and served as a Member of Parliament for Bristol. A statue was erected of Colston in Bristol in November 1895 in order to celebrate his empire-funded philanthropy. This was intended as a repost to the recent erection of a statue of critique of the excesses of imperialism, Edmund Burke, and the rise in the city of socialism and organised labour.
After decades of controversy over the statue and its celebration of a well-known slave-trader, the statue was taken from its plinth by protestors and dumped into Bristol harbour. It was subsequently dredged from the depths and placed in the Bristol M-Shed museum and cultural space to await its eventual fate.
What to do with Colston's statue? Despite the accusation that protestors wanted to hide, destroy, or 'cancel' history, many Bristolians who were critical of Colston's slave-trading and the presence of his statute nonethless felt that it should remain on display.
Rather than hiding the past, respondents to a survey of Bristol's inhabitants argued that it should simply be re-displayed under different conditions. Among the many respondents who called for the statue to be displayed half-submerged in the habour, one argued that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//It should stand in the harbour at the place it was thrown in, waist deep in water, with a shower above its head pouring ox blood down on the statue 24/7 for all eternity. It will stink and mess up the harbour, but that's the way to remember Colston.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Given probable sanitary concerns it is unlikely that a permanent stream of animal gore will feature in the eventual display of Colston's statue. However, this response does show that smell continues to have an important symbolic political role.
Might the statutes of the future have an olfactory component and could smell offer a unique way to promote the re-interpretation of existing statutes of historical figures?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Tim Cole,'After the fall, where?: Relocating the Colston statue in Bristol, from 2020 to imaginary futures', //Journal of Historical Geography// (2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2023.03.001.]One of the characteristic moments of ship-born travel across European history has been the smell of shores. From European harbours and ports to colonial entrepots and Pacific islands, the smells of the shore have been part of a rich tradition of thinking about smell.
This storyline is a trip around world's shores through smell. We start with the smells of [[Edenic paradise->Milton's Shores]].In John Milton's seventeenth-century poem Paradise Lost, the smell of spicy shores meets Satan's nose and foreshadow's the approach of the garden of Eden.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//... now gentle gales
Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense
Native perfumes, and whisper when they stole
Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore
Of Arabie the blest, with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
Cheered with the grateful smell of old Ocean smiles.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The smell of fragrant shores has been a [[common trope->Garden Shores]] in both travel writing and the literary imagination.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Milton, //Pardise Lost//, book 4, lines 156-165, https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/pl/book_4/text.shtml]
The writing of ancient Greek and Roman authors tesifies to the long-running association of the shores of //Arabia Felix// - Arabia the blessed - with the sweet smells of the spices and resins that could be found there.
In his //Library of History// the ancient Greek hisorian Didorus Siculus recorded similar impressions from sailors who voyaged along the shores of what we today refer to as part of Yemen:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//even though those who sail along this coast may be far from the land, that does not deprive them of a portion of the enjoyment which this fragrance affords; for in the summer season, when the wind is blowing off shore, one finds that the sweet odours exhaled by the myrrh-bearing and other aromatic trees penetrate to the near-by parts of the sea; and the reason is that the essence of the sweet-smelling herbs is not, as with us, kept laid away until it has become old and stale, but its potency is in the full bloom of its strength and fresh, and penetrates to the most delicate parts of the sense of smell. And since the breeze carries the emanation of the most fragrant plants, to the voyagers who approach the coast there is wafted a blending of perfumes, delightful and potent, and healthful withal and exotic, composed as it is of the best of them, seeing that the product of the trees has not been minced into bits and so has exhaled its own special strength, nor yet lies stored away in vessels made of a different substance, but taken at the very prime of its freshness and while its divine nature keeps the shoot pure and undefiled. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
When Siculus refered to the spices minced into bits or stored in vessels, he was thinking about the vast amounts of [[fragrant and aromatic->Sabean Houses]] materials imported by the Greeks and that would later be imported by the Romans.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Diodorus Siculus, //The Library of History// (Loeb Classical Library, 1935), ii, pp. 225-228.]
Romans used woods imported from the Sabaei in their worship.
Yet, in his discussion of aromatics and resins the Roman natural historian Pliny suggests that for the Sabaei themselves, who lived along the coast of what is now Yemen, the familarity with frankincense and fragrant woods bred contempt.
To a Roman nose, Pliny told his readers, the towns of Sabaei smell like a Roman temple or shrine. This was because the same materials the Romans imported at great cost were easily available to the Sabaei themselves, who then used them as fuel for heating and cooking. In fact, Pliny asserted, the Sabaei got so sick of the smell of highly scented woods that they burnt styrax to try and get rid of the smell!(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In turns out that the Sabaei were not the only past society who [[burnt off a glutt->Amsterdam Warehouses]] of scented materials.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Jane Draycott, 'Smelling Trees, Flowers, and Herbs in the Ancient World', in Mark Bradley (ed.), //Smell and the Ancient Senses// (Routledge, 2015), p. 68.]
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the warehouses and ports of Amsterdam were filled with spices from the East Indies. One can only imagine the smell when, in the 1760s, the VOC supposedly burnt large amounts of mace, cloves, and nutmeg from its Amsterdam warehouses in order to keep the price of both commodities artificially high. A French eye and nose witness described the fires:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//.. On June 10, 1760 I saw in Amsterdam near the Admiralty a fire whose fuel was estimated at eight million in French money, as much was to be burned the next day. The feet of the spectators were bathed in the essential oil of these substances.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Tourists and travellers often remarked on the smell of Amsterdam’s warehouses. One nineteenth-century German travel writer noted that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//In Amsterdam, as in all other Dutch commercial cities... you have no doubt that you are among mercantile people. The smell of cheese, herrings, tobacco, spices, issuing from every house, tells the passenger plainly enough in what commodity each deals.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The plethora of spices and other highly scented materials imported in Dutch vessels was even reflected in the [[naming of ships->Sniffing Ships]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^J. G. Kohl, //Russia and the Russians// (Philadelphia, 1843), I, 12.
Friedrich A. Flückiger and Daniel Hanbury, //Pharmacographia: A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin// (London, 1874), p. 452]In September 1779 on a British ship off the coast of New South Wales the sailors encountered
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a light breeze from the shore, which was so strongly impregnated with the fragrance of the trees, shrubs, and herbages that cover it, the smell being something like that of Gum Benjamin.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Benjamin, in modern terminology benzoin, has a vanilla-like smell, is often used as a fixative and was a popular ingredient in eighteenth-century perfumery. Describing the scent as redolent of benjamin therefore served to associate the scent of the island with the scent of perfumery and the trade in exotic goods.
The smell of the land would have also been a great relief to eighteenth-century sailors. Many of them would have been afflicted by the trials of [[scurvy->Scurvy]], the cause, symptoms, and cure of which were all linked to distinctive odours.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Hawkesworth, //Account of the Voyages// (London, 1773), II, 655.]In 1601 English sailors, circling the islands off Madagascar, perceived a 'fair and pleasant' land from which
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//came a fragrant smell from the Shore, as if it had been a Garden of Flowers.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The same link between fragrant gardens and the shores of islands was inculcated at home in the minds of children in Europe who read about such travels. Remembering summer months spent reading in her childhood garden, the early nineteenth-century author Letitia Landon recalled smelling the 'peculiar and aromatic fragrance' of nearby musk roses:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//We read of the gales that bear from the shores of Ceylon the breathings of the cinnamon groces. I have always fancied that the musl rose resembles them.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Landon would have read abou the smell of fragrant shores in a wide-ranging literary tradition taht went back to [[ancient authors->Sabean Shores]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels// (London, 1745), I, 266
^^2^^Letitia Elizabeth Landon, //Traits and Trials of Early Life// (London, 1836), pp. 307-8.]Bad-smelling air was one cause mooted for scurvy:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The Principal Causes of the Scurvy comes from a thick and saltish Constitution of the Air , being corrupt , as the Air near the Sea , fenny , foggy , or moist places , which infect by the unwholesome Vapours coming from the same.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
But scurvy could also be a foul smelling condition. In particular, the itchy inflammation of the gums that was one symptom meant that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The Scurvy is alwayes accompapanyed with the stinking foetor in the mouth.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Trying to understand the effects of scurvy, seventeenth-century physicians compared its heating impact on the blood to warmed wine:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//It is very probable that the Blood may be thus altered in the Scorbutic Affection; as Wines, as often as they wax hot, they degenerate into Ropy and stinking.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Today we recognise scurvy as a form of vitamin C deficiency. Even in the 1740s lemons, oranges, and other fruits were recommended as a cure:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//If the Symptoms are attended with an ill Smell of any kind , either in the Mouth , Breath , or Urine... such a disease will be cured by the Use of Acids... as the Juice of Lemons and Oranges.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
However, the [[smell of land->The Smell of the Earth]] also played a role in early cures for scurvy.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Bernard Lynch, //A guide to health through the various stages of life// (London, 1744)
^^2^^Wiliam Sermon //A friend to the sick// (London, 1673)
^^3^^A. B, //The sick-mans rare jewel wherein is discovered a speedy way how every man may recover lost health, and prolong life// (London, 1674), p. 63
^^4^^A. B, //The sick-mans rare jewel wherein is discovered a speedy way how every man may recover lost health, and prolong life// (London, 1674), p. 50]The age of European colonisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw thousands of sailors across the globe afflicted with the blight of scurvy.
Since the late eighteenth century we have understood the illness as a vitamin C deficiency.
But before then, scurvy had been treated as a form of earth-sickness, caused by a longing for land. One cure for this longing was the smell of the earth.
Philip de Saumarez, a naval officer stationed aboard HMS Centurion as it circumnavigated the globe in the 1740s, argued that no physician could find a remedy for scurvy
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//equal to the smell of a turf of grass.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Stationed in Cuba in 1741, the British Admiral Edward Vernon wrote about the actions taken to ward off scurvy among his seamen. Among other things, they had:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//erected Huts, for conveniently lodging them ashore, and their having the smell of the earth, and Opportunity of walking, by which they have many of them reaped a great benefit.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In order to best imbibe the smell of the earth, some sailors resorted to extraordinary practices. In 1761 the sailors of the English fleet mored at Belleisle on the coast of France carried their worst scurvy sufferers ashore:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//after being stript of their cloaths, were buried in a pit dug in the earth (the head being left above the ground) their bodies were covered over with the earth, and permitted to remain interred for several hours, until a large and profuse sweat ensued.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
The men then seemed miraculously cured and were able to walk back to their ships unaided.
In this case the smell of the shore was considered healthy for those at sea. But for landlubbers, standing on the shore and [[smelling the sea->Ozone shores]] could also bring healthy results.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Philip de Saumerez, 'Copy of a Letter written in the Year 1742 by Philip de Saumarez Esq.', //The Naval Chronicle//, 31 (1814), 271.
^^2^^Edward Vernon, //Original papers relating to the expedition to the Island of Cuba// (London, 1744), p. 154
^^3^^James Lind, //A Treatise on the Scurvy// (London, 1772), p. 534]
In the 1840 the German chemist needed a name for the strange odour given off by electric sparks passing through dry air. Given that the most distinctive sensory property of this new gas was its odour, Schöbein devised the word ‘ozone’ from the Greek ozein, meaning ‘to smell’.
Ozone quickly became associated with fresh sea air. It was believed to be good for the health and breathing it in was thought to stimulate the senses and revitalise respiration.
As people flocked to the coast on trains for their holidays by the sea, the smell of ozone told them that there were getting near.
By contrast returning from holiday in the late nineteenth century could involve feelings of loss as one exchanged the scent of ozone for less salutary odours:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//... we may feel a pang at exchanging the sweet smell of the moorland heather and the "champagne draughts" of ozone for the close musty atmopshere of our hives.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
By the 1860s chemists were devising ways of recreating the healthy smells of ozone in the home. Our modern chemists, one author noted
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//profess their ability to bring home to us in our counting-houses or professional dens the fragrance and the ozone of the sea-coast. Setting free in our closest courts and frowziest city slums a whiff of their "essence of sea-air" is, they tell us, almost the same thing as inhaling the briny freshness of nature on Brighton Downs or Scarborough Cliff.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
This even led to the production and marketing of ozonator machines, such as the 1920s example below, that claimed to creat 'artificial sea air' in the home.
<img src="https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/uploads/default/original/2X/6/6b20e0c060c1ff8258afaacd27b916e0d52be951.png" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">
One reason for its continued presence in sea air was that it was not disrupted by the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//foul odours or steaming alleys filled with human beings and the filth of all kinds that is constantly generated and collected wherever man makes his home.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
However, might perceive a rather different olfactory picture of oceans when approaching [[our shores today->Shoreline Shit]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^R. F. A, 'After the Holidays', //The Graphic//, 18 (1878), p. 335
^^2^^'Ormsby's Rambles in North Africa', //The Saturday Review of Politics//, 17 (1864), p. 124
^^3^^Dr T. Wood., 'Ozone', //Meliora//, 8 (1864), p. 158]Some sailors could even smell the land before they could see it. In this context smell became a navigational aid.
For example, in the seventeenth century John Ovington noted that the island of Annabon near the coast of Guinea
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//gratified us with the fragrant Smells which were wafted from the Shoar, from whence at three Leagues distance we scented the Odours of Flowers and fresh Herbs.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
He added that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//our Smell in dark and misty Weather has outdone the Acuteness of our Sight; and we have discovered Land by the fresh Smells, before we discern’d it with our Eyes.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Similar statements were made by Europeans voyaging to the Americas. On the 2nd of December 1632 the Dutch merchant David Piertes de Vries, sailing towards Delaware Bay on the north-east seaboard of North America
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//smelt the land, which gave a sweet perfume, as the wind came from the north-west, which blew off the land, and caused these sweet odours. This comes from the Indians setting fire, at this time of year, to the woods and thickets, in order to hunt; and the land is full of sweet-smelling herbs, such as sassafras, which has a sweet smell. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Among the different coasts described fragrant terms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, perhaps the best example came in the form of the islands of the [[Pacific->Pacific shores]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^John Ovington, //A voyage to Suratt in the year 1689// (London, 1696), p. 55.
^^2^^David Pieters de Vries, //Voyages from Holland to America, A.D. 1632 to 1644//, trans. Henry C. Murphy (Philadelphia, 1853), p. 31]In Malaku in the late eighteenth century, one of the areas where the Dutch East India Company (VOC) still held power over trade, one of their ships was named 'the Snuffelaar' or 'the sniffer'. This was not an uncommon name, linking colonial exploration, extraction, and sniffing.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
We find another ship named the 'Snuffelaar' operating in 1732 from Delagoa Bay (now Maputo Bay) off the coast of Mozambique, where it was engaged in the rather less pleasant smelling trade of whaling. Whilst the ship might have been in the buisness of sniffing out its watery quarry it is doubtful many would have wanted to sniff the foul smelling process of rendering whale blubber into oil for lighting lamps and lubricating machinery.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
However, it was not just the ships doing the sniff. Some sailors even suggested that one might navigate by scent, [[sniffing the land->Navigation by Smell]] before one could see it.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Muridan Satrio Widjojo, //The Revolt of Prince Nuku// (Leiden, 2009), p. 39
^^2^^Linell Chewins, 'The Relationship between Trade in Southern Mozambique and State Formation: Reassessing Hedges on Cattle, Ivory and Brass', //Journal of Southern African Studies, 42:4 (2016), 725-741.]As we entered the age of mass industrial pollution in the nineteenth century, the shorelines of many European countries began to stink.
Marseilles, port and home of France's soap trade, was a case point.
As you came closer to Marseilles by ship, you crossed a smell boundary between sea and port. In 1854:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//unfortunately the first impression you receive when you arrive, after having breathed the pure and healthy air of the sea, is a strong smell of cesspool being emptied.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The reaction from tourists and visitors was often one of abject disgust. The response of Alphonse Leveaux on reaching the port from the sea in 1854 was to hold his nose and exclaim:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//here is an impertinent smell!//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The smell was so well known that it almost became a navigational air for those familiar with the port. In a discussion of sanitation in European harbours at a meeting of a U.S city's sanitary commission in 1877, it was noted that it had:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//passed into a proverb in France that pilots could go into the harbor in the thickest fog, being guided by the smell alone.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Marseille's soap may have been world famous, but so was the stink that resulted from its manufacturer.
Today, the foul smells on beaches and shorelines are not just from industrial pollution. Sewage leaks, especially in the UK, are rendering beaches and shorelines into a muddy mix of foul-smelling and potentially dangerous excremement.
Writers in newspapers have called upon historical precedent in their cries for action to be taken. Referring to the summer stench of 1858 that finally caused politicians to clean up London's rivers after years of inaction, they have called for a similar reaction to the 'new great stink'.(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
As the ocean acidifies and waste piles up on the beaches of many European countries, what will our shores smell like in years to come?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Lucien Jottrand, //D'Anvers à Gênes, par les pays Rhénans, la Suisse, la Savoie et le Piémont, et retour par Marseille et le Sud de la France// (Brussels, 1854), p. 576.
^^2^^Alphonse Leveaux, //Italie et Sicile: Journal d'un Touriste// (Paris, 1854), p. 7.
^^3^^//Proceedings and reports of the Sanitary Commission of the City of Atlanta, Ga// (Atlanta, 1877), p. 57
^^4^^https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/06/britain-rivers-beaches-seas-sewage-great-stink]The many cities of Europe are each home to different smellscapes.
As the Scottish distiller and lawer Robert Stodart Wyld remarked in 1875:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//every country and every large city we visit has its distinct savour woven with its other wonders into the mind and which, like a mysterious and invisible genius, hovers over it. The coal smoke of London fills the nostrils of the visitor, and never leaves them; the damp greasy flavour of the narrow streets of Paris; the turfy smell of Holland and the putrid effluvia of Constantinople give a smack and character to each place which is not easily forgotten.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This story takes us into the streets of Amsterdam and we start on fragrantly-named [[rozemarijn-steeg->Rozemarijn-steeg]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^R. S. Wyld's, //The Physics and Philosophy of the Senses// (London, 1875), p. 266]
It is not unusual across Europe to find streets named for the smells associated with them.
In fact, a 'Rosemary street' can also be found in Breda. Here the name was deliberately misleading. Rozemarijn Straatje was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//one of the dirtiest and stinking back streets in Breda. Since in other cities people often give such streets an uncivilized name, it has been borrowed here by contrast from a sweet-smelling herb, as a fine joke.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
However, Amsterdam's Rozemarijnsteeg was named after the herb for far more fragrant reasons. Inscribed above one of the doors on that street is the following verse:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Here they make wreaths according to everyone's wishes
To adorn the dead people
Those who have died pure belong to this honor
Also brides who get married now I tell you no more.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Why was the smell of [[rosemary->Rosemary for Memory]] associated with these wreaths?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Jacob H. Hoeufft, //Proeve van Bredaasch taa-leigen// (Breda, 1836), p. 502
^^2^^Hieronymus Sweerts, //Koddige en ernstige opschriften// (Amsterdam, 1846), p. 185.]Both today and in the past, rosemary has been linked to memory and the passing of time. Scientific studies show that rosemary significantly enhances mental alertness and memory: one experiment showed that students working in a room scented with rosemary oil performed between 5% and 7% better in memory tests.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Several of William Shakespeare's characters note the use of rosemary ‘for remembrance’ and a herbal, which offered readers knowledge of the different medicinal uses of plants, published in 1690 recommended that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Rosemary-Tea is good for the Memory.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The relationship between memory and rosemary was particularly strong in the seventeenth century because it was used at times when people wanted to remember their family and loved ones. Rosemary was distributed to guests or held by brides at weddings and it was strewn on the floor of churches or thrown into graves during funeral ceremonies.
So it was natural that the wreaths made my women on Amsterdam's Rozemarijnsteeg, included rosemary - the smell of marriage, death, and the memory thereof.
But rosemary's scent was not only found at funerals. In fact, it could also be useful in [[preventing the need->Rosemary and Plague]] for a burial in the first place.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/news/2016/04/herbs-that-can-boost-your-mood-and-memory/
^^2^^Leonard Meager, //The Compleat English Gardener// (Lodon, 1710), p. 151.]
In the seventeenth-century rosemary was used to fumigate houses and ward off plague, causing its price to greatly increase whenever infection threatened cities. This involved throwing burning the herb alongside other fragrant ingredients:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//set your pans in the midsts of the roome, and be sure to ayre every roome twice a weeke at the least, and put into your fire, a little Frankincense, Juniper, dryed Rosemary, or Bay-leaves, Sage and Lavender.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
People might also carry rosemary to sniff and project themselves on the streets of cities: the English seventeenth-century playwright Thomas Dekker observed that people looked like boar’s heads stuffed with rosemary and ready for the oven:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//miching and muffled vp & downe with Rue and Wormewood putt into their eares and nosthrils, looking like so many Bores heads stuck with branches of Rosemary, to be served in for Brawne at Christmas.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Many of these herbs and trees were still being used to protect against cholera outbreaks across Europe in the nineteenth century.
Rosemary continues to have medicinal uses today. In the late nineteenth century rosemary was an ingredient in anti-mosquito soaps used by European colonialists to defend themselves against the malaria-spreading insects they encountered as they attempted to violently subjugate and control the interior of Africa. Rosemary is one of a number of highly scented ingredients - including lavender, menthol, and clove - which are still used as insect-repellants.
[<img src="https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/L0040565/full/full/0/default.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">]
If the history of rosemary proves anything, it is that even the smells of simple herbs - used as plague preventatives or insecticidal prophylactics - can be [[big money->Pecunia Olet]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//Especiall Observations and approved physicall rules// (London, 1625)
^^2^^Thomas Dekker, //The vvonderfull yeare// (London, 1603)]
In the seventeenth century rosemary joined the scent of cloves, nutmeg, mace, and cinnamon in pomanders - balls of perfumed paste or small metal trinkets with a series of spice-carrying compartments that protected the user against deadly infections such as the plague. Pomanders came in all shapes and sizes - designs included skulls, books, ships, and human heads. These were multi-functional objects that counteracted plague in several ways:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The conintual uses of these good odours comforteth the heart and vitall spirites, driveth away all venemous vapours, and rectifieth the ayre that whirleth about us.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
One form of pomander - used in the sixteenth century - was an orange hollowed out and filled with a sponge containing vinegar or spices to sniff. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this evolved into the pomander that is commonly known today - an orange studded with cloves and sometimes infused with clove-oil. The modern pomander maintains its link with the citrus and spice of its early-modern predecessor but now performs the function of freshening, scenting, and repelling moths from drawers of clothing and linen.
[<img src="https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/es/original/DP-1717-096.jpg?_gl=1*h5mluf*_ga*MTY2NTE0NDUxNC4xNjk3MzkwNjM4*_ga_Y0W8DGNBTB*MTY5ODU4MTkyOC41LjEuMTY5ODU4MTk0MS4wLjAuMA.." style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">]
The other compartments on this Dutch pomander included labels for cinnamon and nutmeg. In the seventeenth century these spices were imported to Amsterdam from [[colonial outposts->Spice Islands]] in Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and the Malaku islands.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Thomas Lodge, //A Treatise of the Plague// (London, 1603)]In the course of the seventeenth century the VOC, using violence and forced labour to expand its trade, brought many new commodities back to Amsterdam. In particular, the Dutch company brought an influx of spices into Europe. Chief among these were nutmeg, [[cinnamon->Sukarno's Scent]], mace, and cloves.
Ths 'spice islands', as they were known, became associated with the fragrance that greated sailors from the sea. Sailing past Sumatra one
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...at three Leagues distance, might smell the sweet and strong Odours of the spices that grow on the Island.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Ceylon - now Sri Lanka - was associated with the Dutch production of cinnamon. On sailing near Ceylon in the 1750s, two English voyagers were:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//regaled with the fragrant Smell of the Spices from ashore, tho' two Leagues from it.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Transporting fragrant spices and other commodities back to Europe meant having to take care that they [[kept their scent->Smell Contamination]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^//A Collection of Voyages Undertaken by the Dutch East-India Company// (London, 1703), p. 135.
^^2^^Gentleman who was in the Expedition, //Journal of a Voyage to the East Indies, and Back to England// (Edinburgh, 1756), p. 5.]Packing and unpacking vast quantities of strong spices could a dangerous enterprise. Observing the boxing-up of cloves at Amboina, a nose-witness noted that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The smell of 'em is so strong, that some People have been suffocated with it when they have been busie with too great quantities of 'em, and in too close a place.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
On board ships, fragrant products had to be carefully kept to ensure that their smell did not percolate into the goods arranged around them. Tea was particularly susceptible to sucking up the odours of other commodities. In his remarks on the tea trade, the merchant Richard Twining quoted a description of smuggled tea that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//got a bad taste and smell from being packed in oiled-skin bags, and lying in damp places, or having improper ingredients mixed with them.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Once all these new commodities were back in Amsterdam, they were kept in [[vast warehouses->Warehouse Odours]] that were filled with the powerful smells of these luxury products.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Christopher Fryke and Christopher Schewitzer, //A Relation of Two several Voyages Made into the East Indies//, trans. S. L (London, 1700), p. 119
^^2^^Richard Twining, //An Answer to the Second Report of the East India Directors, Respecting the Sale and Prices of Tea// (London, 1785), p. 71.]The warehouses of Amsterdam were famous for their mix of odours. In some cases they were even described as being healthful. In the seventeenth century Sir William Temple, the pro-Dutch English diplomat, visited these warehouses:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I remember walking in a long gallery of the Indian houses of amsterdam, where vast quantities of mace, cloves, and nutmeg were kept in great open chests all along one side of the room; I found something so reviving by the perfumed Air, that I took notice of it to the Company with me, which was a great deal; and they all were sensible of the same effect. Which is enough to shew the power of smells...//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Discussing the medicinal impacts of smells, the late-eighteenth-century author Francis Fitzgerald described a doctor who made regular use of warehouse atmosphere. He recallled
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a physician, who, by way of medicine, daily walked a time in the warsehouses of the India Company at Amsterdam, that he might inhale the fragrance of the spices, &c. there deposited, unpacked, sorted, &c.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
However, if one wanted to purchase these spices - for example to put them in a pomander - one would have to visit an [[apothecary->Jacob Hooy's Apothecary]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Sir William Temple, 'An essay upon health and long life', in //Miscellanea// (London, 1701), pp. 158-9.
^^2^^Francis Fitzgerald, //Surveys of nature; historical, moral and entertaining// (London, 1787), p. 213.]Today one can still visit an eighteenth-century apothecary in Amsterdam.
Jacob Hooy established his apothecary in 1743 to sell herbs and spices. The fragrant ingredients could be used for medical purposes, to flavour food, and to perfume the body and the home. Wondrous scents fill Jacob Hooy’s apothecary. Hooy was the son of a sailor, and the shop that bares his name is now Amsterdam’s longest-running apothecary.
Wondrous scents fill Jacob Hooy’s apothecary and, it was suggested, would even preserve him against disease. Of course to Hooy, who encountered the odours daily, the collected smells were not so pungent. As the priest Amaat Honoraat Joos noted in 1911:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...many a pharmacist probably thinks that his shop is odorless, while the concentrated odors hit the noses of everyone who enters.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Despite this, apothecaries were known for their olfactory skill. Even in the early twentieth century, pharmacists were still distinguishing their products by the scent. Joos asked a Dutch pharmacist
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//... which pharmaceutical substances he could distinguish by smell alone, and he gave me this (text-colour:#779E50)[long list]//''](click-replace: "long list")[''//long list
Acetum.
Acidum aceticum.
Acidum carbolicum, sheet: phenicum.
Acidum chlorhydricum.
Acidum hydrocyanicum dilutum.
Acidum nitricum.
Aetheres (omnes).
Ammonium hydricum solutum, sheet: Ammonia liquida.
Amylium nitrosum, sheet: Nitris amylicus.
Aquae aromaticae omnes; Lauro cerasi aqua; Chamomillae aqua; Anisi aqua; Aqua bromata; Aqua chlorata; Aqua phenolata; Aurantii citri florum aqua; Camphorae aqua; Chloroformii aqua; Cinnamomi aqua; Foeniculi aqua; Melissae aqua; Menthae aqua; Picis aqua; Rosae aqua; Sambuci aqua; Tiliae aqua; Valerianae aqua.
Balsama, ut: Copaïvae balsamum; Peruvianum balsamum; Tolutanum.
Bromoformium.
Bromum.
Cacao oleum; Cocoa powder.
Camphora.
Carboneum sulfuratum, sheet: Sulphuretum carbonis.
Calcium sulfuratum solutum, sheet: Sulphuretum calcii liquidum.
Chloralum hydratum.
Chloroformium.
Chocolate.
Cortex cinnamomi.
Cresolum crudum.
Crocus.
Essentiae (omnes).
Extractum valerianae.
Farina lini; Farina sinapis.
Formaldehyde.
Flores et Folia diversa, et Fructus.
Guajacolum.
Gummi: Asa foetida; Benzoin; Myrrha; Incensum.
Iodoformium.
Iodum.
Kreosotum.
Lecithinum.
Manna.
Mel.
Mentholum.
Methylum salicylicum.
Muscus.
Myristicae semen, sheet: Nux moschata.
Naphthalinum.
Olea aliqua; 'Huile de Cade'; Oleum lini; Oleum jecoris aselli; Oleum olivarum.
Opium.
Peptonum.
Petroleinum.
Phosphorus.
Piperis fructus.
Pix liquida.
Radix valerianae, et aliqua alia.
Resinae: Jalappae et Scammoniae.
Rhum.
Sapones omnes.
Semen aliquarum plantarum.
Sirupi earum plantarum.
Spirits, sheet: Alcohol.
Storax calamita.
Styrax liquides.
Succi aliquorum fructuum.
Terebinthina veneta.
Terebinthinae essentia.
Terpinolum.
Thymolum.
Tincturae plantarum cum aromata.
Tinctura iodi,
Valerianata omnia.
Vanillae fructus.
Vanillinum.
Vina.//''](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
One product that was missing from this list was civet - the substance produced by the perineal gland of the civet cat. By 1911 this scent was no longer used for medicine. But in the seventeenth century it had been an important drug. So much so that in Shakespear's //King Lear// a character demands:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.//'']]
Civet cats, from which the civet was taken, were brought to Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and farmed by [[civet farmers->Farming Civets]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Canon Amaat Joos, 'Over den reuk', //Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde// (Gent, 1911), p. 351-3.]]Fifteen minutes west of Jacob Hooy is the house at Reestrat 5, where Harmen Reijnierszn de Coninck lived in 1629. He had the extraordinary profession of a civet cat farmer.
De Coninck might have kept around twenty civet cats at one time. Because they were believed to be ferocious creatures, the cats were always kept in cages. There was some pride in the civet cat farmer’s profession, as paintings of the cats were known to deck the interiors of their farmers’ homes. Perhaps the farmer also had a painting or two of the cats. After all, he had them to thank for affording a home like his.
[<img src="https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/L0081836/full/full/0/default.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">]
(text-size:0.5)[A woodcut of a civet cat from Carolus Clusius, //Caroli Clvsii Atrebatis Cvrae posteriores// (London, 1611)]
Given it's brown, unctuous texture, and fecal scent, civet was often compared by satirists to human excrement. In Shakespeare's //As You Like it//, rather than sweetening the imagination civet is described as being
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//of baser birth than tar; the very uncleanly flux of a civet cat.//'']]
The smell of shit was, unfortunately, a long-standing problem on Amsterdam's streets. To explore that story, we turn to an interesting building on Waterlooplein with a [[peculiar sign->Pecunia Olet]] above it.Waterlooplein 337, Amsterdam.
You are standing outside a building that was a bank from when it was built in 1929 to 1939. However, where there was once a sign for ‘De Twentsche Bank’ the words across the entrance now state
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//'Pecunia Olet’: money stinks. //'']]
Traditionally it was said that money has no smell. However, as you can read below, the business of making money has always created a stink throughout history and continues to do so today.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//'Pecunia non olet': money does not stink //'']]
or so said the Roman emperor Vespasian, who reimposed a tax on the urine from Rome's public urinals, used by tanners (of leather, to remove hair from hides), fullers (of wool, to whiten cloth), and launders (of togas, to clean them). Vespasian's son Titus complained about the existence of such a disgusting tax, prompting Vespasian to remark that the urine might stink but that the money the tax produced did not smell at all.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, urine continued to be used in tanning, fulling, and laundering in many European countries. Both [[urine and feces->Tanning]] had particular properties that could make them valuable.Throughout European history urine was used for tanning leather, washing clothes, and treating wool.
In mediaeval and early modern Europe towns and cities put on Corpus Christi and Passion plays at Easter. These plays depicted the trial, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ. The guilds were often charged with arranging a stop on the theatrical tour. The stink of urine associated with their trade meant the tanners guilds often represented hell and the devil through their malodorous materials. In vegetable tanning, urine was used to remove the hair from hides before they were tanned with solutions of barks obtained from trees - especially chestnut, oak, mountain ash and hemlock - which made the leather flexible and resistant to water and bacteria.
<img src="https://www.nuernberger-hausbuecher.de/75-Amb-2-317b-77-r/large" style="max-width: 100%; max-height 100%;">
(text-size:0.5)[A tanner removing hair from a hide after soaking in urine. Mendell House Book II, 1609, Amb. 317b.2° Folio 77 recto, courtesy of the Nuernberger-hausbuecher project.]
However, whilst tanning with urine is still practised in many parts of the world, in Europe it has been replaced by the chrome tanning process that took over at the end of the nineteenth century. This technique, first developed in Europe in the 1850s but only patented in the 1880s by an American chemist, used a mix of acids, chemicals and salts that produced a thinner, softer, and lighter leather.
Initially, chemists and leather-workers were sceptical about whether chrome-leather could take off. In 1885 Alexander Watt argued that it would take
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a very long time before the world - so accustomed to the smell of tan - would believe//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
in a chemical alternative.
Indeed, the smell of chrome-treated leather is completely different to that of vegetable tanning. By the early twentieth century the chrome process dominated the production of leather in Europe. Many of these processes release toxic and foul-smelling gases such as the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulphide. Scrubbing towers aim to deodorise emissions before they emerge from factory chimneys, but they cannot capture every scent and sometimes malfunction.
The alchemy of converting stench-producing materials into riches has a long history. As late as the twentieth century Amsterdam’s sewage continued to be transported to the edges of cities for use as fertiliser.
The evolution of the first ‘deodorants’ in the nineteenth century, powders and fluids that aimed to deodorise cesspits full of human waste, came from a desire, inspired by agricultural chemists such as the German Justus Leibig, to collect and re-use the human waste of cities whilst trying not to stink up the neighbourhoods where such collection was taking place.
But to make use of excrement, one had to collect it. In Amsterdam, even in the twentieth-century, this involved collecting it in [[cesspits and buckets->Fosse Mobile]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Alexander Watt, //The Art of Leather Manufacture// (London, 1885), p. 258.]Amsterdam's waste disposal system worked through a series of stages. By the nineteenth century a great deal of human waste ended up in large cesspits that needed to be either covered up or empited regularly.
Between 1870s and early 1900s a new 'fosse-mobile' system was introduced that involved keeping waste in buckets that were regularly emptied before the materials were carted away for re-use or disposal.
The fosse mobile system was an improvement because, sadly, human waste often ended up dumped in [[Amsterdam's canals->Canals]].In the fourteenth century Amsterdam's canals had been clear enough to support a population of fish - which the city council tried to protect by making fishing on the canals illegal. However, by the sixteenth century the quality of the water had deteriorated and the city council was busy trying to stop the dumping of human, animal, and industrial waste into its waters through a series of decrees.
The creation of a sewage system in Amsterdam in the 1660s only made the state of the canals worse, since pipes deposited human waste directly into the watery thoroughfares. This became a serious problem in many of the Dutch towns that introduced sewer systems in the seventeenth century. In Leiden in the 1670s, live fish disappeared from the canals. One writer called the waterways a
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//great stinkhole//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
that smelled like a 'common privy' and a Leiden Burgher, Van der Goes, argued that in 1669 a disease outbreak was caused by the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//reeking water and the beer brewed from it//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In the nineteenth century this problem only continued, as waste continued to be dumped into the canals. Butchers shops, tanneries, ink factories, and caustic soda factories all discharged their waste into Amsterdam's canals. Dead horses, cats, and dogs floated in the dirty water.
The smell of Amsterdam's canals became an often-noted scent in the work of [[travel writers->Travellers and Canals]] who visited the city.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Roos van Oosten, 'The Dutch Great Stink: The End of the Cesspit Era in the Pre-Industrial Towns of Leiden and Haarlem', //European Journal of Archaeology//, 19:4 (2016), 704-727.]The scent of canal-life was always noted by visitors to Amsterdam. In 1894 the Italian writer Edmondo de Amicis described the smell of Amsterdam’s canals as a series of competing odours:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//on the one side one smells the sweet scent of flowers from the window-gardens and the odor of delicate restaurants; on the other the reek of tar and the fumes of poor cookery arising from the sailing boats.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The competition between the odours of the canal and fragrant attempts to overpower them was also the focus of eighteenth-century accounts. In the late 1700s, the Englishman William Beckford suggested that the Dutch were in love with the stinks of their odoriferous canals:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Every flower that wealth can purchase diffuses its perfume on one side whilst every stench a canal can exhale poisons the air on the other. These sluggish puddles defy all the power of the United Provinces and retain the freedom of stinking in spite of any endeavour to conquer their filthiness… Who knows but their odour is congenial to a Dutch constitution? //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Beckford argued that the smell of the canals got into the homes set along them and overpowered the flowers designed to act as a fragrant barrier. However, the Dutch themselves also recognised this. One writer in the 1730s described Amsterdam as a ‘een schoone maagd met een stinkenden adem’, or ‘a beautiful virgin with a smelly breath’.
One response to the smells of canals was to plant the streets around them with [[trees to purify the air->Linden Trees]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Edmondo De Amicis, //Holland//, trans. Helen Zimmern (Philadelphia, 1894), II, 66.
^^2^^William Beckford, //Italy, Spain, and Portugal, with an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha.// (London, 1840), p. 14]In the nineteenth century the pollution of Amsterdam's canals was getting even worse, as waste continued to be dumped into the canals. Butchers shops, tanneries, ink factories, and caustic soda factories all discharged their waste into Amsterdam's canals. Dead horses, cats, and dogs floated in the dirty water.
In some cases, canals in Amsterdam were filled to avoid their stench. The Rozengracht (ironically meaning 'Rose Canal') was one of six canals in the Jordaan area to be covered in the late nineteenth century. In May 1889, residents in Rozengracht submitted a general address to the city council noting that while the inhabitants desire to
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//smell lilacs and hawthorn//'']]
there was a big difference between these scents and
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the volatile sulfur compounds that bubble up from the Rozengracht.//'']]
The huge relief that residents felt when a particular stinking canal was filled resulted in celebrations. In August 1857, the residents of Goudsbloemgracht threw a party and sang ballads describing their joy that the 'stench' that 'often choaked your throat bad’ disappeared from the street.
By the 1880s, a combination of public health fears about ‘canal air’, the claim that canals were too costly to look after, and the need for wider streets to accommodate growing traffic all boosted the arguments of those who sought to fill in many of Amsterdam’s stinkier waterways.
Amsterdam was not the only place where concerns were being raised about foul odours from waterways. In the nineteenth century [[Europe's rivers->Stinking Rivers]] were also in trouble.
However, the covering up of canals in the nineteenth and early twentieth century led to concerns that Amsterdam was loosing an important part of its [[heritage->Protecting and Re-instating Canals]].Between 1828 and 1970, Amsterdam City Council partially or fully filled seventy-eight canals. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, there were increasing attempts to prevent the stopping up of Amsterdam’s canals in order to preserve the history and heritage of the city.
On the one hand were those who argued that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//filling up the most beautiful canals in Amsterdam is worse than selling beautiful old paintings//'']]
whilst on the other hand residents in many of the most stinking streets complained that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//As taxpayers, don't residents... have the same right to fresh air as other districts?//'']]
Here was a battle between the preservation of the past and the convenience and health offered to Amsterdam’s residents.
In 1901, the painter and art critic Jan Veth published a famous pamphlet, //Stedenschennis// (Desecration of the City), which sought to defend Amsterdam’s historical fabric - especially its canals - from further destruction.
Veth’s pamphlet is often credited with being one of the earliest examples of preservationist activism in Amsterdam. Veth blamed Amsterdam’s ‘lower class’ residents for disposing of their rubbish in their canals, which then led to the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//the stench… that gave the canals a bad name.//'']]
Veth did not mention that Amsterdam’s lower class residents often had little choice about where to dispose of their rubbish, given the less than satisfactory sanitary facilities.
Today, many Dutch cities are attempting to reverse the impact of canal-covering: in Utrecht the the Stadsbuitengracht canal which first appeared in 1122 and was covered by a motorway in the 1970s has now been restored in attempt to replace the stink of asphalt and exhaust fumes with greenery and water.
New campaigns against urban pollution might trick us into thinking that odorous pollution is a think of the past. But the reality is that foul-smelling pollution has simply been moved elsewhere. [[Making money still stinks->Money stinks]].We can end to returning to the 'Pecunia Olet' building.
Money - both cash itself and the digital currencies now circulate through servers across the globe - does in fact have a smell. In the U.S, scientists have attempted to stop smugglers transporting dollars across the Mexican border by developing machines that can sniff out the tell-tale volatile organic compounds - the chemical components of scent - that come from the bills. As with sniffer dogs, smelling has been useful in enacting the power of the state and policing its borders.
Meanwhile, the vast server plants that produce the computing power necessary for mining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, are busy producing waste gases and liquids that, in some documented examples, pollute nearby atmospheres and watercourses. Cryptocurrencies have a smell, even if that smell is located a world away from our computer screens.
As you explore the contemporary city, it is worth keeping the moral of this story in mind: what you are unable to smell is just as important as what you can smell.
Contemporary European cities may appear relatively odourless compared to their early modern forebears, but if we follow our noses we can find that they are anything but.
In the middle ages even those living in cities would have been a short walk away from the countryside and its bushes, trees, and shrubs. However, the expansion of cities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to attempts to re-introduce the country into the city.
In 1661 the Englishman John Evelyn published one of the earliest major works on air pollution, in which he lamented the choking smoke produced by the proliferation of coal-fires in many cities - including his home of London. Evelyn’s solution was to banish polluting trades to the outskirts of cities and protect the inhabitants with a ring of gardens filled with trees, shrubs, and flowers. Evelyn may have been inspired by his visit to Amsterdam in 1641, when he wandered at the streets
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//planted and shaded with beautiful lime trees, which are set in rows before every man's house.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The seventeenth-century writer Melchior Fokkens celebrated Amstedam's lindens in a poem:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The city is door to door, ornamented with green lindens:
Where shall one find in the world such a site?
The green woody grove itself is here before our door,
And gives us with pleasant scent much delight.//'']]
Lime, or as they are known in the Netherlands, linden trees became common in many European cities in the eighteenth century. Their fragrance was celebrated for its ‘delicious’ associations with summer-days, when linden trees usually bloom. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cities also began to support parks that would offer the fresh air that was thought necessary for the health of city dwellers.
However, the smell of linden trees was soon joined by [[competing odours->Asphalt]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^William Bray (ed.), //Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, F. R. S.// (London, 1859), I, 26.]In the eighteenth century and nineteenth century many of Amsterdam’s linden trees were replaced with elms, which were better suited to the soil, and there are now an estimated 75,000 elm trees in the city.
However, in the same period the linden tree’s scent had to compete with other smells. In the 1850s, one visitor to Paris described how the
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//asphalt sidewalks of the Boulevards have melted under the sun's rays, and perfumed the air with anything but a Sabaen odour! The fragrance of the linden trees was entirely overpowered.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The tar-like and bituminous smell of asphalt paving had usually associated with sailors and seafairing, as similar-smelling pitch was used to waterproof the seams of wooden vessels. Coming across asphalt on a hot summer day in the city might therefore elicit memories of a quite different place:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The odour of tar calls up many a watering-place in the summer - we are on the pier in an instant, with some little child, perchance now grown up or dead - the fishing-smack lies alongside lazily, smoke issuing from a pot at the stern - a sailor sits with a pipe in his mouth, throwing vegetable parings into the black kettle for the nondescript mid-day meal - the hot sea beneath a blazing sun lies almost stagnant, waiting for the turn of the tide - the white cliffs glimmer along the coat - and all this flashes fo ra moment before the mind's eye as we chance to pass over a piece of asphalt pavement newly laid down, and smelling faintly of pitch.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In fact, asphalt was becoming a more common smell in Amsterdam during the nineteenth century. As the stench of Amsterdam's canals increased - thanks to a rising population and the expansion of industrial production - their existence was [[put into doubt->Covering Stinking Canals]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Charles Fairbanks, //Aguecheek// (London, 1859), p. 110
^^2^^H. R Hwaeis, 'Music and Morals', //The Contemporary Review//, 17 (1871), p. 499]In his 1918 travelogue the American author Samuel Murray described the smell of the underground railway - the tube, subway, or metro - as a unifying smell common to cities across the western world:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The atmosphere of a subway is perhaps a more cosmopolitan phase than any other of our industrial factors. Were a blind person—one familiar with our underground railway odors—to sail from New York for Europe, being ignorant of the presence of subways there, and later, in London or Paris, find himself at the entrance of a "tube," he would at once know he was at the approach of a subway by the presence of the smell, as a similar atmosphere emanates from all of them. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Yet, despite Murray's claim, it seems that many metro systems across the world //do// in fact have their own distinct odours. So let us leave Murray at the entrance, descend into the subway, and get on the next train.
As you pull into the next station, you wonder whether to keep riding or get off and give the next platform a sniff.
(cycling-link: "Keep riding on? [[Or get off?->stop 1]]", "Keep riding the subway? [[Or get off->stop 2]]", "Not alighting yet? [[Or get off?->stop 3]]", "Stay on the subway for now? [[Or get off?->stop 4]]", "Looks like you need to travel a few more stops? [[Or get off?->stop 5]]")
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^Samuel Murray, //Seven Legs Across the Sea// (New York, 1918]What does hell smell like?
In James Joyce's novel, //A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man//, Stephen Dedalus sits in on one of the sermons of Father Arnall. The sermon terrifies him with its multisensory evocation of the smells of hell:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This reeking sermon sits within a long tradition of what has come to be known as 'hellfire' preaching, in which preachers have asked their audiences to imagine the smell of hell with intolerable vividness. Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century colonial American preacher, was an earlier example: it was said that Edwards' congregations could smell the sulphur of underworld tickling their noses, such was the force of his rhetoric.
However, as we shall see, these invocations of hell-sent-smells have a [[long and rich history->Schaffner's Hell]] that connected the underworld with the foulest smells imaginable in the daily lives of Europeans.(live: 6s)[
(transition-depart: "dissolve")(go-to: "Top notes 2")
]
//When he took out his yellow pocket - handkerchief with his hand that was cased in white kids, a delightful odour of musk and bergamot was shaken through the house. He was evidently a personage of rank...//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
(live: 2s)[//Trees of myrtle bordered bordered the road , which wound among groves of orange, lemon and burgamot, whose delicious fragrance comes to the sense mingled with the breath of roses and carnations that blossomed in their shade.//(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]]
(live: 4s)[//Gillette are targeting younger consumers with the launch of two more variants to the Right Guard range. Rapide for Men has a fragrance combining bergamot , lavender and mandarin with woody notes. Packaging is in light and dark green. //(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^William Makepeace Thackeray, //History of Pendennis// (London, 1849)]
(live: 2s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Ann Ward Radcliffe, //The Romance of the Forest// (London, 1792)]
(live: 4s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^//The Chemist and Druggist//, May 15th, 1993](live: 8s)[
(transition-depart: "dissolve")(go-to: "Top notes 3")
]
//...Aunt Milly's thoughtful present of house-linen, which now lay in the new press with a sweet smell of lavender breathing through every fold...//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
(live: 4s)[//Through the open windows the sound of the chimes in the convent clock-tower, and the echoes of the city bustle, poured in and mingled with the clear responses of the girls' voices. The rustling of the leaves of the trees in the front, and the smell of the mignonette and lavender in the garden under the windows, came in with the warm air.//(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]]
(live: 6s)[//At the back of the house there was a long narrow garden, with great bushes of lavender and rosemary. The letters that came to Hugh were all fragrant with lavender, great bunches of it decked the vases in his little parlour at Miss Farrer's...//(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Margaret Argles, //Doris// (London, 1884)]
(live: 4s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Mav Laffan, //Hogan, MP. A novel// (London, 1881)]
(live: 6s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^W. H. F Hutchinston, //Pen and pencil sketches// (London, 1883).](live: 8s)[
(transition-depart: "dissolve")(go-to: "Heart notes 1")
]
//Then, again, I had another hot bath. This one was just perceptibly scented with the rich lemon - like fragrance of magnolia. And then I found myself again in bed, with lights burning under pleasant shades in swinging cressets, and again I fell fast asleep.//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
(live: 4s)[//There was a large party of farmers and others assembled , nearly all of whom were known to Knight and his friend. There was burnt brandy punch going on, and a strong odour of lemons and rum pervaded the apartment .//(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]]
(live: 6s)[//There is a large orange and lemon grove on the grounds of our hotel, and from them the evening breezes came loaded with their rich odor, giving a fragrance as delicious as the groves are beautiful.//(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Francis Charles Phllips, //The Strange Adventures of Lucy Smith// (London, 1887)]
(live: 4s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Helen B. Mathers, //"Cherry Ripe!" A Romance// (London, 1878)]
(live: 6s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^3^James Henry Coghill, //Abroad. Journal of a tour through Great Britain and on the Continent// (London, 1868)](live: 12s)[
(transition-depart: "dissolve")(go-to: "Heart notes 2")
]
//If I were a young man going a courting, I'd scent my letters with rose or something nice, and I'd write 'em on pink paper — I would!//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
(live: 4s)[//Her dress touched his knee. The scent of the roses which she fastened at her neck came to him with each puff of wind, and every now and then she would turn and say to him some gentle, grateful word, or point out some beauty of the landscape, some fresh variation of the wonderful wonderful autumn colouring.//(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]]
(live: 7s)[//I was sitting here in my room this morning, ripping up my white dress, and smelling the roses. I shall never smell those roses and honeysuckles again, I think, without remembering this day.//(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]]
(live: 10s)[//Agnes was at the piano when they came into the dim, rose-scented drawing-room, but she rose and left it immediately.//(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Margaret Veley, //"For Percival"// (London, 1878)]
(live: 4s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Justin MacCarthy //Ladies' Gallery. A novel// (London, 1888)]
(live: 7s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^Susan Bogert Warner, //My Desire, etc.// (London, 1879)]
(live: 10s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^Helen Shipton, //Dagmar// (London, 1891)](live: 12s)[
(transition-depart: "dissolve")(go-to: "Heart notes 3")
]
//The room was very still as I approached the bureau, — possessed, it seemed to be, by a sort of hush of expectation. The faint odour of orris - root that floated forth as I let down the flap, seemed to identify itself with the yellows and browns of the old wood, till hue and scent were of one quality and interchangeable.//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
(live: 4s)[//Years afterwards, and when the girl, ripened into a thoughtful woman, had learnt to value the blessed gift of peace, the curious and old - fashioned odour of sweet sandalwood, with aromatic orris-root, and other by-gone scents, called back to her, with painful vividness, the days when, restless and rebellious, she felt no gratitude either to the gentle woman who had offered her a home...//(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]]
(live: 7s)[//The atmosphere grew heavier and than ever charged with ylang-ylang, opoponax, new-mown hay, and other pungent feminine odours, and the perfume exhaled by silken stuffs, silken tresses, and lace that had laid amid sachets of orris.//(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]]
(live: 10s)[//...there was the work-basket, with its silky cover and faint perfume of orris-root, there were the carefully bound books, tehre was all the trinketry of the writing table, the cage where the canary lived...//(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Kenneth Grahame, //Golden Age// (London, 1895)]
(live: 4s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^M. Houston //Such Things are// (London, 1863)]
(live: 7s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^Matilde Serao //Fantasy: A Novel// (London, 1891)]
(live: 10s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^Charlotte Louisa Hawkins Dempster, //The Hôtel Du Petit St. Jean// (London, 1872)](live: 12s)[
(transition-depart: "dissolve")(go-to: "Base notes 1")
]
//He was suffused with delirious emotions. A voice murmured in his ear, the scent of jasmine was in his nostrils. Ideas, reminiscences, memories, floated sweetly through his mind.//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
(live: 4s)[//...boats glided hither and thither on the lamp - lit river; sailors sang sweet baracolles, the sound of Avhich was wafted across the water. The jasmine's scent was strong and passing sweet. Paul was more madly infatuated, as he told himself, than ever.//(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]]
(live: 7s)[//Past and future had vanished; the present stood alone. It came to an end, because the music ceased, and these echoes which sounded in his ears as he paced down the dark side of the moonlit street were but echoes, this scent of jasmine...//(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]]
(live: 10s)[//There was a brilliant moon, which displayed the whole scene in tones of subtle monochrome. The jasmine, twining up the pillars of the verandah, gave forth a scent of powerful powerful sweetness. The silence was broken by the faint stir of the leaves.//(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^T. Mullett Ellis, //Zalma// (London, 1895)]
(live: 4s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Cicely Powell //Paul Sterne// (London, 1885)]
(live: 7s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^Gertrude Georgina Douglas//A Wasted Life and Marr'd// (London, 1892)]
(live: 10s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^Isabel Constance Clark //Episodes of Alethia// (London, 1879)](live: 18s)[
(go-to: "Dry down")
]
//The chairs were quaint, and varied in size and shape, being nearly all covered with wool work and bead embroidery, embroidery, the work of the hands of the different ladies of the house. There was a faint smell of dead and gone generations, generations mixed with sandal wood and dried rose leaves, pervading these old rooms.//(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
(live: 5s)[//Luxurious velvet - cushioned seats, richly carved in various unique figures and device , were scattered about amidst a collection of foreign rarities, and a spicy odour of sandal wood pervaded the atmosphere.//(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]]
(live: 10s)[//Hilary, being in a romantic frame of mind herself, wonders if the yellow-leaved, sandal-wood-scented old diary laid away in Aunt Cicely's writing - desk, could tell.//(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]]
(live: 15s)[//...their mother's clothes folded away in the long unopened drawers of the wardrobe in her room — the room in which lie had slept and died only a few weeks ago. These precious garments, smelling of lavender, camphor, and sandalwood, were all taken out and looked at, and tenderly smoothed afresh , and laid in a deep drawer of the bureau.There were treasures amongst them...//(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Mark Trehern, //Paths that Cross// (London, 1895)]
(live: 5s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Helen Pinkerton Redden //M'Clellan of M'Clellan// (London, 1895)]
(live: 10s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^Curtis Yorke//Dudley// (London, 1893)]
(live: 15s)+(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^ //Three Miss Kings// (London, 1891)]Spray again?
[[Yes->Notes]]
[[No->Perfume and time]]This story has been an exploration of perfume and time.
The art of perfumery is the art of temporalising smells into stories.
History is concerned with examining phenomnena //in// and //over// time and using the evidence of the past to construct narratives.
There is a long history of thinking of perfume in terms of ‘notes’. In the 1862 edition of his //Art of Perfumery//, Septimus Piesse had outlined a ‘gamut’ of odours that indexed the components of perfumes against musical notes, organized them along the treble and bass clefs, and discussed how perfumers might create harmonies by building bouquets of different ‘chords’.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Whilst Piesse’s gamut failed to take off, the idea of thinking of perfume in terms of ‘notes’ persisted. In the 1950s William Poucher and Edward Maurer helped to popularize the idea of ‘top’, ‘middle’ and ‘basic’ notes, with each note separated into one of the three categories by their relative volatility – the length of time it took for their distinctive scent to completely evaporate and disappear.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Classifying notes by volatility helped perfumers to think in terms of time when composing their scents. In perfumery manuals a basic structure – often represented as a pyramid – is outlined that moves from a top note which first strikes the nose when the perfume is applied and lasts only a few minutes, through middle or heart notes which emerge after the top notes which may last anywhere up to four hours, and base notes which may last from a few hours to multiple days.
The pyramid structure, from shortest to longest duration, echoes another tripartite division of times that is often invoked in historical writing: that advocated by the Annales historian Fernand Braudel.
In several articles in the late 1940s and 1950s Braudel outlined a conception of time that was tripartite, with each part incorporating several different facets: geographical time, social time and individual time; the longue durée structures, medium-term processes and short-term events; and different temporal speeds from the slow to the quick. Braudel’s temporal structure is also sometimes imagined as a triangle from short term at the top to longue durée at the broad base.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Perfumery and history are both temporal arts. Perhaps they could learn more from each other?
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Catherine Maxwell, //Scents and Sensibility// (Oxford, 2017), pp. 23-6
^^2^^W. A. Poucher, ‘A Classification of Odours and Its Uses’, //Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists//, 6:2 (1955), pp. 81–94; Edward S. Maurer, //Perfumes and Their Production// (London, 1958), pp. 60–1.
^^3^^Berber Bevernage, //History, Memory and State-sponsored Violence//(London, 2011), pp. 112–16.]Glasgow, 1977.
You emerge onto the platform at Merkland street station on Glasgow's metro - a line sometimes affectionately known as 'The Clockwork Orange'.
A strange odour tingles your nostrils. It's earthy, pitchy, and slightly acrid.
One of the other travellers notices you snuffing the air and turns to speak to you:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//That's the smell of history right there, fella.//'']]
Originally - from 1896 to 1935 - the odour of the Glasgow metro had come from the tar and creosote used to coat the rope that pulled the carriages along. Tar was believed to be a healthy odour and mothers even brought their ailing children down into the depths to sniff the medicated air. (text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The subway system was electrified in the 1930s and subsequently it was suggested that the distinctive odour of the stations was dominated by 'a mixture of dampness and the niff from the electrics'. Yet many still felt they could sense the tarry odour.
Having told you all of this, your fellow traveller emits a sigh and laments:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//But later this year they'll be closing down the whole system for modernisation. All the newspapers tell us the smell will be lost. 'Progress', but at what cost?//'']]
Newspapers had asked readers what they thought the distinctive smell might come from. Biologists attempted to culture the various bacteria in the tunnels with the hope of discovering the source of the distinctive scent. Glaswegian journalist and novelist George Fraser had even mused that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//If only the smell could be got into an aerosol to sell world-wide to Glasgow folk of the dispersal, it would zip him up a million, he believed. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Merkland street will go out of service when the metro closes for renovation, becoming the only 'ghost' station on the Glasgow metro. Its innards will be re-assembled in Glasgow's transport museum. However, as one writer to a local newspaper lamented:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//... one thing is certain - they won't be able to reproduce the characteristic smell of the old Glasgow subway.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Considering this, you think it's best to get back on the next train and remove yourself from the station in case you end up disappearing with it.
The train pulls up, you step onto a carriage, and you trundle along to the next stop.
(cycling-link: "Not alighting yet? [[Or get off?->stop 3]]", "Stay on the subway for now? [[Or get off?->stop 4]]", "Looks like you need to travel a few more stops? [[Or get off?->stop 5]]", "Keep riding on? [[Or get off?->stop 1]]", "Keep riding the subway? [[Or get off->stop 2]]")
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'A look back at the old glasgow subway with Jack House', //Evening Times//, Thursday November 1st 1979, p. 26.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^'Hunter's Friday: The Truth about Merkland Street', //Glasgow Herald//, Friday April 9th, 1976, p. 6]
(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^J. S. Shawlands, 'A Smell to Remember', //Evening Times//, Tuesday December 18th 1979, p. 7]You emerge onto a London Underground station. It is November 12th 2002.
A sweet, slightly cloying, aroma in the air. The passengers around you have noticed it too. Some seem confused, others slightly worried.
The odour is the sweet almond perfume of Disaranno liquer.
Tomorrow, the 13th of November, the smell will disappear.
Metal boxes with fans had been set up at the bottom of escalators in three London Underground stations in order to waft the smell of Disaranno throughout the platforms. This was meant to be a cunning advertising campaign.
The plan backfired. After only a day the fans stopped whirring and the tube-station smellscape regained its dominating notes of earth, metal, rubber, and sweat.
With worries about terrorism in European cities at an all-time high, the UK Home Office had intervened. Earlier that week Londoner's had been warned to be alert to potential terrorist attacks using poisonous gases. There was concern that the average Londoner would mistake the sweet almond scent of Disaranno with the bitter-almond scent of cyanide gas.
Living in a world of synthetic scent, where everything can smell of everything, our noses are apt to be tricked, confused, and bemused.
Like the odour of the liquer, you decide not to stick around. You board the next train and soon the doors are opening at the next stop on the line.
(cycling-link: "Stay on the subway for now? [[Or get off?->stop 4]]", "Looks like you need to travel a few more stops? [[Or get off?->stop 5]]", "Keep riding on? [[Or get off?->stop 1]]", "Keep riding the subway? [[Or get off->stop 2]]", "Not alighting yet? [[Or get off?->stop 3]]")1930s New York. You emerge onto the platform of 42nd street IND station.
The stench hits you.
It nearly knocks you backwards but you manage to maintain your balance.
Unsurprisingly, the platform seems to be deserted - no doubt most commuters have fled upwards to the street above for some (comparatively, at least) fresh air.
Holding your breath, you glance down the platform and notice a man emerge from the darkened tunnel at one end. He shouts at you:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//It smells like elephants to me! //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The man is James 'Smelly' Kelly, an Irishman and former sailor in the British Royal Navy who now works for New York's Transit Authority sniffing out dangerous leaks in the underground maze that makes up the city's subway.
Kelly, as it turned out, was not wrong. The Hippodrome, now long gone, had once sat on the site where the station could now be found. This had been a place where performing animals had lived and worked - including elephants, whose dung was buried on site.
A burst water main had rehydrated the long-dead pachiderms' archival 'deposits' in the ground and caused the smell that now permeated the air around you.
However, the stink is too much for you to say and wonder at the ingenuity of Kelly's nose. You leap onto the next train and finally manage to gasp for air.
Looking sheepishly out the carriage window, you wonder whether the station you are now pulling up at will be less offensive to the nostrils?
(cycling-link: "Looks like you need to travel a few more stops? [[Or get off?->stop 5]]", "Keep riding on? [[Or get off?->stop 1]]", "Keep riding the subway? [[Or get off->stop 2]]", "Not alighting yet? [[Or get off?->stop 3]]", "Stay on the subway for now? [[Or get off?->stop 4]]")
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert Daley, //The World Beneath the city// (Philadelphia, 1959), p. 111]1916, the Central London Railway or 'Twopenny tube'.
You alight at the British Museum.
<img src=https://www.prints-online.com/p/164/underground-railway-british-museum-tube-station-14195764.jpg>
The station has a peculiar smell. The scent quickens your respiration. It has a vaguely fresh, seaside scent.
It is ozone, pumped into the stations along with fresh air using machines installed in 1911.
Only 6 months after opening the travellers and employees on the Central London Railway were complaining about 'a peculiar smell in the tunnel which is difficult to account for'. One Sudanese visitor to London even compared the scent to that of a 'crocodile's breath'.
A professor at the Royal Horticultural Society suggested the possibility of placing bushes on the platforms to freshen the air. However, this was deemed impractical. In the end large ventilation fans and ozonators were installed by 1911 to freshen the air.
A report in the medical journal //The Lancet//, a year after the introduction of ozone to Central London Railway stations, reported that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...it has already given great satisfaction to the employees on the line, who speak of the obvious relief from stuffiness and objectionable odour. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The new scent even merrited a - perhaps less enthusiastic - poetic response from John Betjeman. In 1960 he recalled his time spent on the underground during the summers of late 1910s:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The Central London, with its cut-glass shades
On draughty stations, had an ozone smell-
Not seaweed-scented ozone from the sea
But something chemical from Birmingham. //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Having sampled this particular tube station, perhaps we should get back on and sniff out some other underground odours.
The next train pulls up, you jump on, and within minutes you are at the next station on the line.
(cycling-link: "Keep riding the subway? [[Or get off->stop 2]]", "Not alighting yet? [[Or get off?->stop 3]]", "Stay on the subway for now? [[Or get off?->stop 4]]", "Looks like you need to travel a few more stops? [[Or get off?->stop 5]]", "Keep riding on? [[Or get off?->stop 1]]")
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'Ozonized air in tube railways', //The Lancet//, May 18th 1912, p. 1353]
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^Pamela Gilbert, //Imagined Londons// (New York, 2012), p. 111]It's 1998, you emerge onto the platform at Invalides station on the Paris Métro.
As walk along the platform a faint scent lingers in the air around you. Is it:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//lemon, orange and lavender, with an extra hint of floral bouquet and underlying woody notes, accompanied by vanilla and musk//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
or is it
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//more like a disinfecant? //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
These are two descriptions of the same scent: Madeleine, which in 1998 was used to perfume the train stations on the Paris Métro. Madeleine was selected from a list of 500 scents and tested at length after its predecessor 'Francine', a mix of mint, lavender, and eucalyptus, elicited more complaints than approbation.
This was not the first time attempts had been made to perfume the Paris Métro, which have peppered the period from the 1920s to the present. In 1960 some passengers on the Paris Métro could held their handkerchiefs to the spray nozels on rear cars to get their own fix of carnation-perfumed disinfectant.
[<img src="https://www.flickr.com/photos/198987515@N08/53566731356/in/dateposted-public/">]
The scent used in 1998 - which was later used in Hong Kong and London - was sprayed on the platform and released as passengers walked across it. Perfumes released by perambulation were not in the 1990s. In fact, this was a technique for odorising public places that stretched back to the medieval and early modern periods.
In churches rushes, herbs, and flowers had been strewn on the floor to cover up the odours from the bodies buried below the stones. Meanwhile, at coronations and other public festivities, flowers and herbs were distributed before the feet of parading notables.
[<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/The_Coronation_Procession_of_King_James_II_and_Queen_Mary_of_Modena_%28c._1685%29.jpg">]
(text-size:0.5)[Herbs are strewn before the coronation procession of King James II in 1685.]
The scent here is certainly more agreeable than some of the other stops on your journey so far. You linger a while, but resolve to get back on the next train and carry on your journey.
You join the crowds boarding a newly arrived carriage and, within minutes, you are at the next station on the line.
(cycling-link: "Keep riding on? [[Or get off?->stop 1]]", "Keep riding the subway? [[Or get off->stop 2]]", "Not alighting yet? [[Or get off?->stop 3]]", "Stay on the subway for now? [[Or get off?->stop 4]]")
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^'World: Europe Aromatherapy for Paris Metro', //BBC News//, 20th December 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/238747.stm]This Storyline is authored by Elenea Montanaro, Odeuropa Intern.
Atlantic Ocean.
[[18th century]].
You are sailing with your crew to the "New World" on a large [[merchant ship]].
However, as you admire the vast expanse of blue water around you, your nose detects a strong, [[putrid smell]].
It is a hideous stench that vaguely reminds you of [[rotten fish]]. As hours pass by, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore it.
But where does it come from?
Could it be that a [[whale]] swam by?Yes, it may be.
You remember that stories of great sailors often referred to the particularly unbearable odour emanated by whales when they pass by the ship.
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//The number of whales which are seen here creates surprise, as much as their familiarity. They frequently spouted at a small distance from the ship, and the water thus scattered emitted an offensive stench"//] (text-size:0.5) [^^1^^]
However, the stench becomes stronger and stronger. You have never smelled something so malodorous. You become convinced it does not come from a whale.
[[What is it, then?]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^The Voyages and Travels of Capt. Cook, Mungo Park, La Perouse, and others; with a geogrphical description of the World. Embellished with engravings...the present state of the Universe. (1808) Vol II.]
It is the bilge!
Indeed, it was known among 18th-century sailors, that the ship's bilge smelled unbearably if not cleaned. But what is the bilge?
The bilge is the lowest part of a ship, where the so-called bilge water - a mix of fresh water, salty water, oils, chemicals and other fluids - accumulates. The more the bilge water stays in the bilge, the more pungent its smell gets. If we take into account that, in this period, a journey from Europe to the Americas could take about two months...imagine how bad the bilge could smell! What is more, not only was this putrefying stench unbearable to smell, but also often facilitated the spread of contagious diseases among the sailors.
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//The odious stench in ships - arising from the bilge water - is not only pernicious and destructive to the health of the men, especially in hot countries and long voyages, but oftentimes produces contagious distempers, to the ruin of many men's lives on shipboard"//] (text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
A [[deep cleaning]] of the ship was often necessary.
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^ //Mr. George Oldner's invention to preserve ships from foundering, or sinking, at sea, etc. experimented &, approv'd : and now propos'd for the universal good of all nations concern'd in navigation : as appears by the following proposal// (1698)]How did 18th-century sailors get rid of bad odors on ships?
Several techniques were used to avoid unpleasant smells, including the use of ''vinegar and juniper'' to cover them. For example, a book of instructions on how to clean Danish ships states:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"Three times a day the ship must be washed down inside and out, and every morning, while the slaves are eating on deck, the hold where they slept must be cleaned out...Three times a week the quarters are fumigated with juniper...occasionally with gunpowder, followed by a sprinkling of vinegar"//] (text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
An account by Jean Barbon, describing his voyage on slave ships, also confirms the importance of vinegar for cleaning the vessel:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"We were very nice in keeping the places where the slaves lay clean and neat...thrice a week we perfumed betwixt decks with a quantity of good vinegar in pails, and red-hot iron bullets in them, to expel the bad air, after the place had been well washed and scrubbed with brooms; after the deck was cleaned with cold vinegar"//] (text-size:0.5)[^^4^^]
Alternatively, the use of ''salt'' was also recommended by ship builders to cover the smell of rotten bilge water:
((text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"The method recommended by the author for preventing the occurrence of the dry - rot in ships is to impregnate the timbers and planks with common salt, as it is practiced by the shipbuilders in Philadelphia"//] (text-size:0.5)[^^5^^]
Additionally, sailors often carried large quantities of ''spices and fruits'', whose sweet scents helped distract the crew from [[unpleasant smells]]. These included, among others, dried roses, lemons, oranges, angelica, rosemary and cloves.
(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^ Eric Robert Taylor, //If We Must Die Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade //(Louisiana State University Press, 2006), p. 74]
(text-size:0.5)[^^4^^ Jean, Barbot, //A Description of the coasts of North and South-Guinea, and of Ethiopia Inferior, vulgarly Angola...With Appendix// (1732), p. 546]
(text-size:0.5)[^^5^^ James Mease, //Observations on the Dry-Rot of Ships, and an Effectual Method to Prevent It Pointed Out// (1830)]
Which other smell was typically detectable on a 18th-century merchant ship on its way to the Americas?
Apart from the strong stench of the bilge water, there was another smell that was often described as unbearable in many accounts of 18th-century European sailors: that of the ''slaves''.
The words of former slave trader John Newton (1725-1807) in his //Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade// speak clearly:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//The heat and smell of these rooms (is) insupportable, to a person not accustomed to them"//](text-size:0.5 )[^^6^^]
Indeed, white European merchants were not alone on the vessel. In a small, dark room below deck, hundreds of black slaves - mainly coming from West Africa - faced the atrocious conditions of the journey to the Americas. Captured, sold and traded in huge numbers, these slaves were treated like goods, traded like property and wholly deprived of their rights and humanity. From the 16th to the 19th century, European merchants transported between 10 million and 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean, in what historians refer to as the "Atlantic Slave Trade". This was the second of the three stages of the "triangular trade" in which European weapons and textiles were shipped to Africa, enslaved people from Africa to the Americas and coffee and sugar from the Americas back to Europe.
The conditions in which the slaves were kept was deplorable to say the least. Forced into an extremely restricted space, they suffered deeply. The slaves' condition is painfully remembered in the following poem titled "The Worn-Out Negro Slave":
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//Midst filth and stench/in gloom and midnight shade,/beneath the deck, in iron fetters bound,/In dreadful rows, close packed, we there were laid,/ Where comfort, ease, or rest, were never found//"] (text-size:0.5)[^^7^^]
<img src=https://www.brh.org.uk/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/slaveship.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[Enslaved Africans in Hold of Slave Ship, 1827. Source: https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/pictures-of-the-trans-atlantic-slave-trade-abolitionists-and-maroon-rebels/]
Given the appalling health conditions that black slaves were forced to withstand on merchant ships, the room in which they were kept often produced a very [[strong and unpleasant odor]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^6^^Andrew Kettler, //The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World// (Cambridge, 2020), p.13]The rhetoric around the supposed 'bad smell' emanated by black slaves had an important implication, upon which it is necessary to reflect.
Indeed, these descriptions - often produced by sailors and traders in direct contact with the slaves - directly spread the idea that the African continent and its people were naturally characterized by a pungent and unbearable smell. As a consequence, Europeans increasingly discussed African odors as a visible, undeniable mark of their biological inferiority. With the advent of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution - as well as the 'scientific and rational knowledge' that they claimed to produce - ''"blackness" and "whiteness"'' became defined upon a cultural binary, where whiteness symbolizes purity and floral essences, while blackness marked an inherent dirtiness and [[bad odor.]]
<img src= https://encyclopediavirginia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/4367hpr_1b00ad1ebe6e598-847x1024.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[The Slave Deck on the bark "Wildfire" brought into Key West on April 30th, 1860. Source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98501624/]The work of French biologist Julien-Joseph Virey particularly represented such growing ideals amongst the educated and aristocratic classes in Europe. In his "Natural History of the N---- race" (1837), Virey categorized different African nations through their odors and increasingly tied them to what was considered the "objective" language of science and medicine at the beginning of Social Darwinism.
In the same book, Virey notes:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["When the N----- sweat, their skin is covered with an oily and blackish perpiration, which stains clothes, and generally exhales a very unpleasant porraceous smell"](text-size:0.5)[^^8^^]
In a similar style, Thomas Jefferson - the lexical founder of American liberty - argued in his "Notes on The State of Virginia" that Africans:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["Secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreable odor."] (text-size:0.5)[^^9^^]
Following the increasing "professional" and racist language of pro-slavery colonialist discourse, many scholars - such as Josiah Priest - started to use the alleged 'bad odor' of African bodies to spread stereotypical beliefs regarding how they digested complex food better than Europeans. In his "Slavery, As It Relates to the N----- or African Race" (1843), Priest argued that slave bodies had a pungent odor and a smoother alimentary process because they often ingested human flesh while living as ''cannibals'' in the African continent. (text-size:0.5)[^^10^^]
Additionally, many Europeans explained the strong smell of African slaves as a consequence of their "bizarre" cosmetic practices, including the use of grease to cover their bodies. Indeed, in 1699, William Dampier notes that Africans made use of various types of oil and grease to smear their bodies in order to stop their pores against disease and add to their beauty. According to him, this practice resulted in a (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["very unpleasant smell"](text-size:0.5)[^^11^^]
In the end, the supposed 'bad odor' [[emanated]] by black slaves became an important - often overlooked - justification for racism and colonialism, and contributed to the formation of stereotypes that haunt the African continent and its people to this day.
(text-size:0.5)[^^8^^Andrew Kettler, //The Smell of Slavery//, p. 18]
(text-size:0.5)[^^9^^ Ibid., p. 11]
But, which smells were associated with slaves and the small room below deck in which they were kept?
The overwhelming majority of the accounts written by sailors crossing the Atlantic to the Americas refers to the strong stench coming from the slaves' ''excrements'' and ''urine''.
In fact, each room contained - depending on its size - two or three conical buckets, to which the slaves could do recourse if they needed to defecate and urinate. However, as a consequence of the heavy chains that tied them together, their movements were severely limited. Reaching these buckets was extremely hard, especially for those who were sitting far from them. In this situation, slaves often defecated and urinated on the floor, thus putting a further strain on the already appalling health conditions of the room. As the room was cleaned only once (or less) than a day, the captives were exposed to each other's excrements and urine for a long time and could not even breathe properly.
In his 1788 "Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa", Alexander Falconbridge described in meticulous detail the threat of odor beneath the decks where the African slaves were kept:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"In each of the apartment are placed three or four large buckets, of a conical form, being near two feet in diameter at the bottom, and only one foot at the top, and in depth about twenty-eight inches; to which, when necessary, the n------ have to recourse. It often happens that, those who are placed at a distance from the buckets, in endeavoring to get to them, tumble over their companions, in consequence of their being shackled. (...) In this distressed situation, unable to proceed, and prevented from getting to the tubs, they desist from the attempt; and, as the necessities of nature are not to be repelled, ease themselves as they lie. This becomes a fresh source of broils and disturbances, and tends to render the conditions of the poor captives wretches still more uncomfortable"//](text-size:0.5)[^^12^^]
The stench of excrement and urine, combined with a persistent smell of [[sweat]], rendered the small room below deck truly unbearable to live in.
(text-size:0.5)[^^12^^Alexander Falconbridge, //An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa// (1788), Ch. 2: Treatment of the Slaves, p. 20]
'Sweat'' was another smell that was strongly associated with the captives' journey to the Americas.
Kept in huge numbers in an extremely restricted space, they could barely move and their skins often touched one another for the entirety of the journey. Indeed, their room was so small that the only posture they could have was lying on their sides as the height between the decks was not enough for them to stand. Fresh air barely entered the space, and the air conditions were truly intolerable. To enable the slaves to breathe, most of the time ships were provided with five or six air-ports between the decks or with what sailors called "wind sails". However, these were closed if the wind was too strong and the rain too heavy, thus completely excluding the slaves from fresh air and facilitating the spread of highly contagious diseases in the room.
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"During the voyages I made, I was frequently a witness to the fatal effects of this exclusion of the fresh air (...) The fresh air being thus excluded, the n-----'s rooms very soon grew intolerably hot. The confined air, rendered noxious by the effluvia exhaled from their bodies, and by being repeatedly breathed, soon produces fevers and fluxes, which generally carries off great numbers of them (...) The climate was too warm to admit the wearing of any clothing but a shirt, and that I had pulled off before I went down; notwithstanding which, by only continuing among them for about a quarter of an hour, I was so overcome with the heat, stench and foul air, that I had nearly fainted, and it was not without assistance that I could get upon deck. The consequence was that I soon after fell sick of the same disorder, from which I did not recover for several months."//](text-size:0.5)[^^13^^]
Similarly, the freed slave Olaudah Equiano painfully recalls his traumatic experiences on a slave ship directed to the Americas and the terrible stench in the room resulting from the appalling conditions in which he and his black companions were kept.
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.//"](text-size:0.5)[^^14^^]
The most frequent diseases affecting the slaves were [[flux and dysentery]], and particular smells were associated with those suffering from them.
(text-size:0.5)[^^13^^Alexander Falconbridge, //An Account of the Slave Trade//, p. 24-25]
(text-size:0.5)[^^14^^Olaudah Equiano, //The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African// (1789), Ch. 2, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15399/15399-h/15399-h.htm]
Two of the strongest smells associated with sick slaves and their bodies were those of ''blood and mucus'', contained in the feces of the captives that fell victim to flux and dysentery.
Alexander Falconbridge vividly recalls this. He says:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//The excessive heat was not the only thing that rendered the situation intolerable. The deck, that is, the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting. The stench and foul air were intolerable."//] (text-size:0.5)[^^15^^]
Blood in particular was a dominant odor on the ship. It not only came from the excrements of the sick slaves, but was also emanated by the deep wounds that they had on their bodies. In fact, as the captives laid on bare planks, they often had their skin and flesh abraded by the constant motion of the ship:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"The place allotted for the sick n------ is under the half deck, where they lie on the bare planks. By this means, those who are emaciated, frequently have their skin, and even their flesh, entirely rubbed off, by the motion of the ship, from the prominent parts of the shoulders, elbows and hips, so as to render the bones in those parts quite bare."//] (text-size:0.5)[^^16^^]
As a consequence of these dreadful conditions, many slaves died before reaching the Americas and their bodies - covered in [[blood]] - were thrown overboard and slowly sank into the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
<img src = https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/320xn/p01g7vtk.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[Slaves been thrown overboard from an unidentified slave ship, 1832. Source: Handler, J. S. (2006). "Identifying pictorial images of Atlantic slavery: Three case studies". Slavery & Abolition 27: 55. DOI:10.1080/01440390500499943]
(text-size:0.5)[^^15^^Alexander Falconbridge, //An account of The Slave Trade on The Coast of Africa//(1788), p. 25]
(text-size:0.5)[^^16^^Ibid., p.28]
Many meters down in the water, another nose - patiently observant and extremely longing - immediately detects the smell of blood coming from the slaves' corpses just thrown in the water. Ever-hungry and voracious, this marine predator starts to follow the ship to catch his abundant meal: it is a ''shark''!
In fact, many rumors circulated amongst 18th-sailors that sharks followed the slave ships across the Atlantic and - attracted by the smell of blood - feasted on human remains that were thrown overboard during the Middle Passage.
Take, for example, the following poem wrote by James Thomson in 1788:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"Here dwells the direful shark. Lur'd by the scent
Of streaming crouds, of rank diseases, & death,
Behold! He rushing cuts the briny flood,
Swift as the gale can bear the ship along;
And, from the partners of that cruel trade,
Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons,
Demands his share of prey; demands themselves.
The stormy fates descend: one death involves
Tyrants and slaves; when strait, their mangles limbs
Crashing at once, he dyes the purple sease
With gore, and riots in the vengeant meal."//](text-size:0.5)[^^17^^]
Similarly, abolitionist Thomas Clarkson narrates the story taken from a "little manuscript" about a sailor on a Guinea ship who whipped an African slave to death and then ordered to the rest of the crew
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["...to carry the dead body to the water's side, where without any ceremony or delay, being thrown into the sea, the tragedy was supposed to have been immediately finished by the not more inhuman sharks, with which the harbour then abounded. These voracious fish were supposed to have followed the vessels from the coast of Africa, in which ten thousands slaves were imported in that one season, being allured by the stench, and daily fed by the dead carcasses thrown overboard on the voyage".] (text-size:0.5)[^^18^^]
<img src=https://www.piratesurgeon.com/pages/surgeon_pages/images/ship_and_shark_nouveau_voyage_aux_isles_de_l_Amerique_labat_jean_baptiste_1722_v1.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[Ship and Shark. From Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l'Amerique,
by Jean-Baptiste Labat, Vol. 1, 1722.]
The marine predator soon became connected to the slave ships in historical and popular memory, especially due to the work of abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson. Seizing upon the image of the voracious animal, abolitionists used it to make vivid the horrors of the slave trade and as a symbol of the inherent violence and terror of the slaves' experience on ships. Indeed, Marcus Rediker affirms that:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//The destruction of the corpse by sharks was a public spectacle and part of the degradation of enslavement//"](text-size:0.5)[^^19^^]
But, what happened if a [[sailor]] - rather than a slave - died on the ship?
(text-size:0.5)[^^17^^Marcus Rediker, 'History from Below the Water Line: Sharks and the Atlantic Slave Trade', //Atlantic Studies//, 5:2 (2008), p. 286]
(text-size:0.5)[^^18^^Ibid., p. 291]
(text-size:0.5)[^^19^^Ibid.]
Indeed, slaves were not the only ones that easily died on ships. European sailors, too, often fell victim to contagious diseases and perished in great numbers before reaching the New World. If the dead slaves were immediately thrown overboard, white sailors were buried ashore and a small ceremony was often dedicated to them.
Sharks - and their extremely sensitive nose - represented a problem for the sailors' corpses, too. Indeed, in one of his voyages to Bonny, Alexander Falconbridge noted that:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["The corpses of sailors were buried in shallow graves on a sandy point about a quarter mile from the main trading town. But when the tidal river rose, the current washed the sand away from the bodies, causing a noxious stench and exposing the bodies to the sharks. This is why coastal Africans buried their dead at such a distance from the sea that the sharks cannot smell them."](text-size:0.5)[^^20^^]
Diseases really decimated slaves and sailors alike and, in the end, only a rather small number of people managed to reach the so awaited [[Americas.]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^20^^Ibid.]
You are one of the lucky ones.
You survived the putrefying smell of bilge water, the seasickness, and you did not catch any contagious disease. But you are tired and increasingly weak. You have been sailing for about two months now and the vast expanse of blue water around you is all you have seen so far.
Where is this marvellous place that everyone in Europe is talking about?
Is this journey worth its hardship?
Are you going to make it alive?
However, just when fear and discouragement are about to take over, your nose detects a [[scent.]]
It is something sweet, something that reminds you of a flower.
What is it? [[A rose, perhaps?]]
You start to look around you to find the source of this extremely pleasant smell.
Then, the rest of your crew looks at you. Their eyes are filled with joy.
It is in that moment that you understand.
[[That smell, that beautiful smell...]]
It's the smell of land!
Indeed, many 18th-century European sailors and travelers argued that they could smell the forest of the coming American land before they could visualize the coastline. In sharp contrast to the putrefying and unpleasant odors that they were exposed to on ships for the entirety of their journey, the "scent of land" is described as extremely sweet, pleasant and floreal. Take, for example, the accounts written by the earliest explorers of Virginia - Arthur Barlowe and Philip Amadas - and their description of the new scents they could smell:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"Shole water, wher we smelt so sweet, and so strong a smel, as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with all kinde of odoriferous flowers, by which we were assured that the land could not be farre distanct"//](text-size:0.5)[^^21^^]
Other accounts report that European sailors could smell the American coastline from afar due to the Natives' practice of burning trees, which produced a strong and recognizable odor. Indeed, the English read of Dutch traveler David Pieterz De Vries wrote that the crew on the ship:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...smelt the land, which gave a sweet perfume, as the wind came from the northwest, which blew off land, and caused these sweet odors. This comes from the Indians setting fire, at this time of year, to the woods and thickets, in order to hunt; and the land is full of sweet-smelling herbs, as sassafras, which has a sweet smell. When the wind blows out of the northwest, and the smoke is driven to sea, it happens that the land is smelt before it is seen."//](text-size:0.5)[^^22^^]
<img src=https://www.theyachtmarket.com/articleuploads/uploads/mayflower2.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[The Mayflower reaching land, 1621. Source: https://www.theyachtmarket.com/en/articles/general/voyage-of-the-mayflower/]
You have finally [[arrived]] at destination. As soon as you step on land, your nose is immediately overwhelmed by a series of new, unusual smells.
(text-size:0.5)[^^21^^Andrew Kettler, 'Odor and Power in the Americas: Olfactory Consciousness from Colombus to Emancipation' (2017), PhD thesis, University of South Carolina, p. 174]
(text-size:0.5)[^^22^^Ibid., p. 175]
How did the Americas smell according to Europeans?
Indigenous [[animals]] were considered extremely bizarre and fascinating, and their smell - often pungent and strong - often disturbed Europeans' picky noses.
Botanists, too, - who often sailed with sailors and merchants to the Americas - wrote extensively on the unusual [[plants]] that grew on the American land as well as the special scents that they emanated.
Finally, the encounters between Europeans and [[Native Americans]] directly produced a large number of texts in which sailors, merchants and scientists alike described the alleged "typical odor" of the American peoples. The Americas welcomed a wide range of fauna, most of which was unknown to Europeans. This land was a truly new world for them. Many explorers - fascinated by the diversity of these animals - reported all the species they saw on their notebooks, with frequent reference to their unusual and strong smell.
In his 17th-century "Account of Two Voyages to New-England", English traveler John Josselyn described in detail the new incredible animals he saw on the American land, and the particular scents that characterized them.
The skunk, among others, was described as an animal with a particularly persistent and strong stench:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"The Squnck is almost as big as a Racoon, perfect black and white or pye-bald, with a bush-tail like a Fox, an offensive Carion; the Urine of this creature is of so strong a scent, that if it light upon any thing, there is no abiding of it, it will make a man smell, though we were of Alexander complexion; and so sharp that if he do but whisk his bush which he pisseth upon in the face of a dog hunting of him and that any of it light in his eyes it will make him almost mad with the smart thereof."//](text-size:0.5)[^^23^^]
<img src= https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/preview/M/M088/M088006_The-Brazilian-Skunk-Mephitis-Suffocans.jpg>
Muskrats, too, had a special scent:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"The Musquashes is a small Beast that lives in shallow ponds, where they build them houses of earth in shape like mole-hills, and feed upon Calamus Aromaticus; in May, they scent very strong of Muske; their furr is of no great esteem; their stones wrapt up in Cotten-wool will continue a long time, and are good to lay amongst cloths to give them a grateful smell".//](text-size:0.5)[^^24^^]
<img src=https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1341186211/vector/muskrat.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=7e2oQZTEBlwE4d_2g92wfy-SXxi4ed1lakRSVjmQSHo=>
The smell of bugs - particularly of the bed bug - was reported as very odious:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"Sow-bugs or Millipedes there be good store, but none of that sort that are blew and turn around as a pea when they are touched; neither are there any Beetles nor Maple-bugs, but a stinking black and ref Bug called a Cocarooch or Cockroach (...) Besides, there is a Bug, but whether it be a Native to the Countrie or a stranger I cannot say: Some are of opinion that they are brought in by the Merchant with Spanish goods, they infest our beds most, all day they hide themselves, but when night comes they will creep to the sleeping wretch and bite him worse than a flea, which raiseth a swelling knub that will itch intolerably (...) and if you have the chance to break one of the Bugs it will stink odiously: they call them Chinches or Wood-lice."//](text-size:0.5)[^^25^^]
<img src=https://i.pinimg.com/originals/39/50/c4/3950c4b859011a7fdbd783321bed4f4c.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[^^23^^John Josselyn, //An Account of Two Voyages to New England// (1638-1663), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/66922/66922-h/66922-h.htm]
(text-size:0.5)[^^24^^Ibid.^^]
(text-size:0.5)[^^25^^Ibid.]
Indigenous plants, too, were rather different from those found in Europe.
European botanists had a keen interest in the rich vegetation of the New World, and used their noses to detect its new, surprising smells - often compared to those of their homeland. Again, the descriptions of John Josselyn are particularly telling.
Sassafras - then unknown to Europe - were described as having a very pleasant smell, rather similar to that of fennel:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//The Sassafras-tree is no great tree, I have met with some as big as my middle, the rind is tawny and upon that a thin colour of Ashes, the inner part is white, of an excellent smell like Fennel, of a sweet tast with some bitterness; the leaves are like Fig-leaves of a dark green"//](text-size:0.5)[^^26^^]
Josselyn reported that the fruits of sambucus - commonly referred to as elderberry - did not smell as strong as their European counterparts:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"Elder in New Englandis shrubbie, & dies in two years: there is a sort of dwarf Elder that grows by the Sea-side that hath a red pith, the berries of both are smaller than English-Elder, not round but corner'd, neitehr of them smell so strong as ours."//](text-size:0.5)[^^27^^]
Currant bushes, instead, - particularly popular in North America - were found to have a pungent and unpleasant odor:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"Current-bushes are of two kinds red and black, the black currents which are larger than the red smell like cats piss, yet are reasonable pleasant in eating."//](text-size:0.5)[^^28^^]
(text-size:0.5)[^^26^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^27^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^28^^Ibid.]
Early travel accounts of European explorers in the Americas, described Natives' smell as very sweet and pleasant, and noted that they had (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//breaths as sweet as the air they breathe"//](text-size:0.5)[^^29^^]
English naturalist and explorer John Lawson, indeed, noted in 1709 that he did not feel
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...any ill, unsavoury smell in their Cabins, whereas, should we live in our Houses, as they do, we should be poisoned with our own Nastiness; which confirms these Indians to be...some of the sweetest People in the World."//] (text-size:0.5)[^^30^^]
In spite of these positive accounts describing Natives' smell as sweat and pleasant, other European explorers had a different opinion. Indeed - just like in the case of Africans - some of them seemed to dislike the smell of bears' grease with which the Natives used to cover their bodies. Take, for example, a letter written in 1700 by the Earl of Bellmont to the Coucil of Trade and Plantations reporting a meeting with Indian leaders in Albany. He described the (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//stink of bear's grease, with which they plentifully daub themselves' as a great fatigue."//] (text-size:0.5)[^^31^^]
However, until the middle of the eighteenth century, most explorers emphasized that - in spite of their "savage living conditions" - Native Americans still emanated a sweet scent. These observations were often comparative. Indeed, it was often said that:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"Native Americans were sweet when compared to the 'stinks or unsavoury smells that we meet with in the dwellings of our poor and indolent' and the 'rankness that is so remarkable in N------"//](text-size:0.5)[^^32^^]
In the 18th century, things changed. As a direct consequence of the Seven Years War - a drastic shift in these descriptions occurred. Indeed, extremely negative depictions of the Indians and their smells started to appear in newspapers and periodicals, placing greater emphasis on the nastiness of bear's grease, filthy houses and stinky clothes. In line with this new current, explorers such as Isaac Weld stated that the odor that Natives emanated was (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["offensive in the highest degree"](text-size:0.5)[^^33^^].
Similarly, Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix - during his travels to North America - wrote that Indians rubbed themselves with strong-smelling oil and grease and the stench that resulted from this practice was so unpleasant that
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["...one cannot enter into their cabins without being almost poisoned."](text-size: 0.5)[^^34^^]
In spite of these negative descriptions, Europeans lauded Native Americans' [[sensory capabilities]] upon first contact, and noted that their sense of smell was far more developed than that of their European counterparts.
(text-size:0.5)[^^29^^William Tullett, 'Grease and Sweat and Smell in 18th-century English Culture', //Cultural and Social History//, 13:13, (2016), p. 310]
(text-size:0.5)[^^30^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^31^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^32^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^33^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^34^^Ibid.]
According to many European explorers of the time, Indians' subsistence practices involved an extremely good knowledge of odors and a particularly developed and sensitive nose.
This was particularly useful for hunting. Colonel James Smith, a captive among the Mohawk people (present-day Canada) in 1755, was fascinated by his abductors' practice to use the aromatic environment to their advantage in hunting the beaver, which Europeans could never catch. After asking his captor what was the use of the beaver's stones or glands, he replied:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...that as the beavers are the dumbest of all animals, and scarcely ever make noise, and as they were working creatures they made use of this smell in order to work in concert. If an old beaver was to come on the bank and rub his breech upon the ground, and raise a perfume the others will collect from different places and go to work: this is also of use to them in traveling, that they may thereby search out and find their company. Cunning hunters, finding this out, have made use of it against the beavers, in order to catch them...by this perfume...they decoy them to the trap."//](text-size:0.5)[^^35^^]
Additionally, it was said that indigenous people could smell fire from very great distances, which enabled them to locate their enemies and prepare for a potential attack. For example, Italian Jesuit missionary Francesco Giuseppe Bressani wrote during his travels to New France - in the 17th century - that Natives were:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...certainly worthy of particular admiration...their sense, which are the most perfect, include a rare sense of smell, with which they frequently discover fire long before seeing it, especially at night."//](text-size:0.5)[^^36^^]
Similarly, Jesuit priest Pierre Charlevoix wrote:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"It is besides certain that they have great advantages over us, and I hold for the first of all the extreme perfection of their sense over us both internal and external...their smelling is so exquisite, that they smell fire at a great distance."//] (text-size:0.50)[^^37^^]
Franciscan priest Louis Hennepin lauded the Native Americans use of smell as a safeguarding agent:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["In these countries they smell fire at two or three leagues distance, according to the wind...savages take a particular notice of it, to discover where their enemies are."](text-size:0.5)[^^38^^]
Moreover, it was reported that Indians could track Europeans by the smell of their body odour, gunpowder and footprints. Indeed, numerous explorers noted that they could detect the difference in the smell of white and black bodies and that they had (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//three words to express their idea of the smell of the European, the aboriginal American and the Negro."//](text-size:0.5)[^^39^^]
Finally, it was found that Native Americans valued their sense of smell also for [[religious practices]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^35^^Andrew Kettler, 'Ravishing Odors of Paradise: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America', //Journal of American Studies//, 50:4 (2016), p. 842]
(text-size:0.5)[^^36^^Ibid., p. 836]
(text-size:0.5)[^^37^^Ibid, p. 837]
(text-size:0.5)[^^38^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^39^^William Tullett, 'Grease and Sweat'. p. 312]
(text-size:0.5)[^^38^^Ibid., p. 837]
The scent of ''tobacco smoke'', in particular, had an important metaphysical value to some indigenous communities, such as the Iroquois living in the St. Lawrence Valley. Indeed, it was believed that the graceful smell of tobacco fumes brought joy to the spirits who, in turn, put blessings upon those on earth.
Mary Jemison, an Englishwoman taken captive by the Shawnee people during the French and Indian War, wrote about a Shawnee religious ceremony in which the Natives made use of their sense of smell for the ritual slaughter of dogs. In 1775, she observed that the dogs:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["...are burnt with the incense of tobacco or the like into the fire, the scent of which, they say, goes up to Nuawaneu, to whom it is pleasant and acceptable."](text-size:0.5)[^^41^^]
At the same time, strong and unpleasant smells were used in some communities to disgust demons and spirits who were believed to cause sufferings in their lives. For instance, Jesuits Gabriel Lalemant and Paul Le Jeune wrote about the North American "manitou spirit", and the story of a "savage" who was:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[..."very sick...his wife waited upon him with great kindness; when she saw that he was struggling and becoming frantic, she took a piece of skin and set fire to it, then rubbed it upon his head, that she might by this foul odor disgust the manitou,- that is to say, the Devil, - so that he should not approach her husband."](text-size:0.5)[^^42^^]
Similarly, Le Jeune discussed that a Jesuit Father witnessed some Natives burning (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["some ill-smelling thing to turn away the souls...by odor...they even put something with a bad odor upon their heads, so that the souls may not come near them."](text-size:0.5)[^^43^^]
The sensory capabilities of Native Americans and their particularly developed sense of smell caught the attention of a specific group of people: the [[Jesuits]]. Sailing in great numbers on ships to the America, the Jesuits were a crucial part of the European colonizing mission and played an important role in the spread of the Christian creed overseas. The Jesuits became immediately aware of the value that Indians gave to the sensate - especially in religious practices -and turned to their own noses when trying to convert them.
(text-size:0.5)[^^41^^Ibid., p. 838]
(text-size:0.5)[^^42^^Ibid., p. 839]
(text-size:0.5)[^^43^^Ibid.]
Jesuits valued scent and smell-related rituals for their religious practices, too. In sharp contrast to the champions of the European Reformation - and their refusal of miraculous proofs of God's existence - Jesuits remained deeply attached to olfactory religious confirmations. Indeed, they believed in (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["annihilating the self through sensory purification involving an appreciation of the worldy capability of recognizing the scents of damnation or paradise on earth."](text-size:0.5)[^^44^^]
For example, in Ignatius' fundamental meditation on hell in "Spiritual Exercises", he discussed the discovery of the Devil on earth through (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["the smoke, the sulfur, the filth and the rotting things"](text-size:0.5)[^^45^^]
Throughout their conversion efforts in North America, Jesuit priests continued to use their sense of smell to prove God's eminence and detect the presence of the Devil well into the eighteenth-century. According to Andrew Kettler, similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensorium facilitated the conversion of many Natives and helped create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and indigenous people.
For example, as historian James Axtell noted:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["The mysterious fragrance of incense, which resembled (Native Americans) own tobacco offering to the Great Spirit"], provided fundamental for the Jesuits' conversion of many Natives. (text-size:0.5)[^^46^^]
Finally, it was common belief amongst the Jesuits that:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["...the smell of Natives who converted to Catholicism transitioned from an odor of impurity to cleanly aromas or the absence of odors'](text-size:0.5)[^^47^^]
<img src= https://aarondenhamcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/800px-canyon_of_the_little_christians.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[Encounter between a group of Jesuits and Native Americans, 1842. Source: https://aarondenham.com/2019/07/17/between-two-worlds-serving-the-creator-not-the-man/]
However...
Sailors, botanists, Jesuits and Natives were not the only ones using their noses in the context of 18th-century European imperialism in the Americas. Another large group of people - exhausted by the journey on the ship - was also overwhelmed by a series of new smells on land: [[slaves]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^44^^Andrew Kettler, 'Ravishing Odors of Paradise', p. 834]
(text-size:0.5)[^^45^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^46^^Ibid., p. 828]
(text-size:0.5)[^^47^^Ibid.]
It was not only in microscopic and filthy cabins below deck that slaves found odor to be extremely detrimental and a constant reminder of their unfortunate conditions. In fact, once they arrived in the Americas and were taken to work on sugar plantations, slaves became familiar with a set of new, equally horrific smells.
What were some of the smells associated with the experience of slaves on sugar plantations?
One of the most prominent odors associated with slavery was emanated from sick bays on plantations due to the ''putrefying wounds'' emblazoned upon the slaves' bodies by their master's whips. Similarly, Planter Arthur Hodge - who owned an estate in the British Virdgin Islands of 1811 - was known to dip slaves
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...in copper kettles until their skin seared off from their muscles."//](text-size:0.5)[^^48^^]
Arthur Hodge was particularly famous for torturing slaves by - among other things - purposefully drowning and reviving them through a sadistic game of power, forcing them to drink boiling water until their throat and stomach were slowly destroyed and whipping them to death. Although Hodge was eventually executed for his crimes, his case should not be considered unusual or uniquely brutal in the Atlantic World. Such practices - and the consequent smells that they emanated - were, indeed, quite common throughout the entire American continent. So bad was the pungency of the odors connected to them that those visiting sugar plantations affirmed to avoid the slave dwellings due
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...to the offensive smell proceeding from the wounds occasioned by cartwhippings on Negroes therein confined."//](text-size:0.5)[^^49^^]
Additionally, Andrew Kettler points out that another smell related to slavery and the slaves' miserable living conditions on sugar plantations was that of ''cane trash''. In fact, sugar cane trash could become rather ill-smelling when rotting in the humidity of countries such as the Caribbean. As he suggests,
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["Upon burning, the fumes of cane trash may also have become a sweet-scented and redolent reminder of the damp vaporous that frequently hung above the scalding liquid where skimmers constantly worked in boiling houses - aromas that must have often reminded reticent slaves of the countless and repetitive days of labor devoted to sweetness forever lost to the master's command".](text-size:0.5)[^^50^^]
Additionally, black slaves that had tried to escape were often victims of punishments that either used odor as a part of their violent ceremonies or created putridity as evidence of their malevolent rituality. (text-size:0.5)[^^48^^] One of the most common smell associated with such practices is that of ''excrements.'' For example, the case of the vile and infamous Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood became well-known. Indeed, his deplorable "Derby Dose" involved the culminatic act of punishment where a slave was forced to defecate in the mouth of a [[captured runaway]] who had tried to escape the miserable conditions he faced on sugar plantations. Thistlewood punished slaves in such manners many times throughout the 18th century on his Jamaican plantations which - additionally - were popular in the continent for hundreds of instances of rape and repeated brutality against African captives.
(text-size:0.5)[^^48^^Andrew Kettler, //The Smell of Slavery//, p. 14]
(text-size:0.5)[^^49^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^50^^Ibid., p.15]
Captured runaways were considered to be particularly problematic by masters and were often victims of the most deplorable brutalities of all. Indeed - when captured - they endured a myriad of punishments including violence, rape, torture and even death.
<img src=https://blog.newspapers.library.in.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/nypl.digitalcollections.510d47da-75ac-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.w.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[Slave owner shooting a fugitive slave, 1853. Source: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-75ac-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99]
But...how could captured runaways - who often covered kilometers after escaping - be located by their masters? How could planters know which directions they took? How could they follow them?
Another nose - extremely acute and iper-sensitive - provided masters with valuable help in completing this task. Being highly trained and having impressive sensory capabilities, this nose was able to follow black slaves' smell wherever they went and locate their exact position.
But, [[who?]]
Maybe a Native American? That seems unlikely.
A Jesuit priest, perhaps? That sounds rather doubtful, too.
Or maybe...a [[hunting dog?]]
Yes! That's it!
<img src= https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/136._Cuban_Mastiff.JPG/345px-136._Cuban_Mastiff.JPG>
(text-size:0.5)[Dogo Cubano, introduced to catch runaway slaves in the Americas. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogo_Cubano>]
Hunting dogs were, in fact, the nightmare of many slaves who hoped to escape the dreadful working conditions that they endured on sugar plantations. Dogs were considered even more frightening than the wild fauna living in the large American forests. Take, for example, the following passage written by Solomon Northup, a famous ex-slave giving an account of his attempted escape:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"For thirty or forty miles it is without habitants, save wild beasts – the bear, the wild-cat, the tiger, and great slimy reptiles, that are crawling through it everywhere. I staggered on, fearing every instant I should feel the dreadful sting of the moccasin, or be crushed within the jaws of some disturbed alligator. The dread of them now almost equalled the fear of the pursuing hounds"//](text-size:0.5)[^^51^^]
In fact, it was very commong amongst white planters in the Americas to use highly trained dogs - so-called "n----dogs" - to track runaway slaves once they tried to escape. These included ancestors of dogs such as bloodhounds, foxhounds, bulldogs, scotch staghounds, and curs. A very socially accepted practice (also defended and justified in court), the training of hunting dogs followed the following steps.
Firstly, the dogs were locked up in cages and were not allowed to see black slaves except while trying to catch them.
Secondly, dogs were given the ''scent of a slave's shoe ''- or any other of his personal item - and taught how to follow that odor.
Thirdly, a slave would be sent out as a trainee and a dog would be sent after him.
Fourth - if the animal managed to capture him - it was given meat as a reward.
By the end of the process, dogs:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...learn(ed) how to follow any particular n---- by scent."//](text-size:0.5)[^^52^^]
After being caught, the slave was violently whipped by his master and taken back to the sugar plantation, where he was punished again. Sometimes, it could happen that particularly strong slaves - just like it happened in the story of ex-slave Uncle Isom - managed to catch the hunting dogs. However,
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...upon being overpowered by the white men, the dogs were allowed to bite off the victim’s body parts. When returned to the plantation, Uncle Isom was given 300 lashes."//](text-size:0.5)[^^53^^]
<img src=https://sniffingthepast.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/fugitive-slave-attacked-by-dogs2.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[Fugitive slave attacked by dogs, 19th century. Source: https://sniffingthepast.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/slavery-and-dogs-in-the-antebellum-south/]
However, the African community's [[knowledge of smells]] and their highly developed sensory capabilities - which survived the Middle Passage - became a powerful weapon against these dogs and masters.
(text-size:0.5)[^^51^^//Twelve Years a Slave//, edited by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon (1968), 103-104]
(text-size:0.5)[^^52^^Black Voice News - Paulette Brown-Hinds, 'Slave Owenrs' Negro Dogs' (2007), https://blackvoicenews.com/2007/10/04/slave-owners-negro-dogs/ (consulted 12 May 2023)]
(text-size:0.5)[^^53^^Ibid.]
The previously mentioned captured slave Solomon Northup, for example, after his scape wrote of
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...his cleansing swim in the bayou that he used to overcome the slight, mysterious scent that the quick-smelling hounds searched to chase fugitive slaves."//](text-size:0.5)[^^54^^]
Another narrative - that of a slave named Burrus - describes his practice to cover his feet in ''stinking pig's grease ''so that the hunting dogs could not detect his smell during his attempt to flee from slavery in North Carolina. (text-size:0.5)[^^55^^]
Similarly, other accounts describe that many slaves would often rub their feet with a native American herb that emanated a strong smell, as it is remembered by Gus Smith, a freedman from Missouri. Vernaculary termed ''"Indian turnip"'', this plant was believed to lead dogs astray during their attempt to catch runaway slaves and his odor was so intense that it was able to cover their smell.(text-size:0.5)[^^56^^]
This proves that - in spite of obvious structural constraints - African slaves managed to retain some [[agency]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^54^^Kettler, //The Smell of Slavery// p. 171]
(text-size:0.5)[^^55^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^56^^Ibid., p. 172]
Indeed, it would be wrong to assume that African slaves were passive actors, solely subject to the actions and sadic wills of their masters. Their powerful historical agency - often overlooked or bluntly ignored - must be re-included as a subject of historical inquiry. In fact, not only does it provide another, unexplored perspectives on the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade but gives justice to voices which, for too long, have not been made part of its narrative.
The small number of articles that decided to explore this issue show that, In spite of their extremely limiting conditions, slaves were able to retain important aspects of their culture and mark [[their own identity]] throughout the Atlantic World. Odors and scents, in many cases, were an important part of the process. What is more, the slaves' olfactory traditions were hard to identify and rather troublesome to white planters who could not perceive the (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["olfactory complexity of African culture."](text-size:0.5)[^^57^^] As a result, the slaves' use of odors became a "powerful weapon of the weak", to which (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["the elites of colonial culture were partially anosmiac due to their stereotypical and blindigly racist olfactory mindfulness."](text-size:0.5)[^^58^^]
(text-size:0.5)[^^57^^Ibid., p. 159]
(text-size:0.5)[^^58^^Ibid.]
Traditions of ''herbalism'' - and the smells related to them - were an important part of the slaves' experience throughout the Atlantic World. For example, in South America, Brazilian black laundress Isabel Maria de Oliviera was remembered to place
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...scented roots inside the clothing of the men she wanted to win over..(Many) people accused this unmarried woman of being a sorceress."//](text-size:0.5)[^^59^^]
When interrogated by the Holy Office on the grounds that she was a witch, she claimed that
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"...she used these roots so the clothes she ironed would smell fragrant and pleasing to her customers"//](text-size:0.5)[^^60^^]
Additionally, Rachel Hardin noted how black slaves often carried with them strong-smelling roots that - allegedly - protected them against their vile masters. Indeed, it was believed that magic was placed upon them by who they called the //feticiero// - Jose' Francisco Pereira - who was prosecuted by white planters in 1771 for his supposed witchcraft.
Herbal remedies that were famous for the smells they emanated were part of many slave medical traditions across plantations. The role of conjurers and roof doctors in the context of such practices is particularly relevant. For example, conjurer William Webb - living in Kentucky in the 19th century - convinced many slaves to fill large bags with sweet-scented and odoriferous herbs. These sacks were then placed in front of the master's house, as the pleasant odor that they emanated was believed to entice dreams of slave retribution in the master's mind and induce him to treat black slaves with more respect. (text-size:0.5)[^^61^^]
Some smell-related practices were also performed by slaves to fool or protect themselves [[against masters.]]
(text-size:0.5)[^^59^^Ibid, p. 162]
(text-size:0.5)[^^60^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^61^^Ibid., p. 166-167]
Black slaves often used their superior knowledge of smells to escape their masters' punishments for their actions. Indeed, it was common that slaves stole food or other precious items from their master's house and brought it back to their mansions. Food, in particular, was the most stolen commodity, as the magre diet reserved to slaves was undoubtedly insufficient to compensate for their appalling working rhythms. When this happened, slaves would often light fires or burn rags to cover the smell of the cooked meal, so that planters would not find out about the theft. One Arkansas observer - Dicey Thomas - noted:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["You couldn't cook nothing without somebody knowing it. Couldn't cook and eat in the back while white folk sit in the front without them knowing it. They used to steal from the old master and cook it and they would be burning rags or something to keep the white folks from smelling it."](text-size:0.5)[^^62^^]
Similarly, a tale exists about a whole chicken - stolen by ex-slave Millie Williams from Texas - which had to be covered in "bedclothes" so his masters could not smell it. Benjamin Johnson, a former slave in Georgia, noted:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["You had to be careful am' bury all de feathers in de groun' 'cause if you burned them the white folks would smell them"](text-size:0.5)[^^63^^]
Finally, smell-related rituals were also important for some [[slaves' religious practices]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^62^^Ibid., p. 168]
(text-size:0.5)[^^63^^Ibid.]
There is some evidence of the existence of a diasporic tradition called Mami Wata that represents the retention of African olfactory rituals within South America.
<img src= https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/mamiwata/images/ZoumanaSanelg.jpg>
(text-size:0.5)[Drawing of Mami Wata. Source: https://www.aawiccan.org/mami-wata]
Mami Wata - or, in its Westernized form - Water Mama, was the mermaid or water spirit of many African nations and ceremonies in Her name often included dancers performing inside a mobile ring of their fellow slaves. (text-size:0.5)[^^64^^] In 1775 Suriname, the retention of ways of smelling as divining was part of this dance. As noted by the Dutch governor Jean Nepveu, the ceremony involved dancers moving within a circle of onlookers and smelling-out the metaphorical poison within certain spectators who were then forced out of the circle. (text-size:0.5)[^^65^^] He described that:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"They pretend that they cannot stand the smell of poisoners who are among the crowd, and who drive them mad; when these are driven away, they start dancing again."//](text-size:0.5)[^^66^^]
Although this is a starting point, there is definetely an urgent need to conduct much more research on the spiritual agency of African slaves in the Atlantic World and do not limit our study to that of botanists and [[sailors]]. As new - and more unstated - forms of racism and racial discrimination keep emerging from all sides of the world, it is important to learn how to celebrate the beauty, diversity, and resilience of black culture, as well as appreciate its more hidden and unexplored sides.
(text-size:0.5)[^^64^^Ibid., p. 163]
(text-size:0.5)[^^65^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^66^^Ibid.]
You are now about to return to Europe...
After a few months - sometimes weeks - spent in the 'New World' sailors and merchants had to jump back on their vessels and return home.
Ships were charged with (often stolen) spices, corn, tobacco and many other indigenous products that were exported from the Americas to feed the rapidly growing and ever-demanding European consumerist society.
The smells of the Americas, and the odor of (text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["sweet land"] were left behind.
Again, all you can see is a vast expanse of [[blue, dark water]]
However....
...just when home seems to be closer than ever...
A wave. And then another one.
Blue, violent and gigantic bodies of water start to crash on the ship from all sides. The vessel starts to shake and sailors are falling, yelling, panicking, crying.
Another wave. The smell of salt and fish gets stronger and stronger, as water rapidly infiltrates on the ship.
Another wave.
The Atlantic ocean -mysterious and ravenous - is slowly swallowing the vessel and the sailors on it. The sharks immediately activate their nose, ready to claim their abundant meal.
Another wave. You soon realize that there is not much you can do.
The ship - with its smell and fragrances - inevitably starts sinking in the water. It will forever repose on the seabed, [[never to be found.]]
Or...that is what you thought.
In 2011, the wreck of the "Mary Celestia" - a civil war blockade runner - was found near the coast of Bermuda, where it sank in 1864.
After divers visited the wreck, they discovered something extremely unusual: a perfeclty preserved bottle of perfume complete with the branding of a chic London parfumerie of the day.
<img src=https://theworld.org/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.pri.org%2Fs3fs-public%2Fstyles%2Fw512%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2020%2F07%2Fbottle.jpg%3Fitok%3DR0hdnqE9&w=808&q=75>
(text-size:0.5)[Picture of the perfume found in the Mary Celestia, 2011. Source: https://www.bermuda.com/mary-celestia-2/]
Isabelle Ramsay-Brackstone - a perfumer and owner of Lili Bermuda fragrances in Bermuda - was rather frank in describing the smell of it, claiming that it really was not "love at first sniff". She says:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)["//When I opened it, it did smell like rotten pirate’s feet. It was truly one of the most disgusting things I had ever smelled."//](text-size:0.5)[^^67^^]
After taking the bottle to a laboratory in the United States and analyzing its content with gas chromatography, Ramsay-Brackstone worked to reverse-engineer the original scent. According to the perfumer:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//"People were wearing those fragrances on their gloves, on their scarves, and it would cover them from the stench of walking in the streets of London."//](text-size:0.5)[^^68^^].
Ramsay-Brackstone's version of this 150-year-old fragrance reminds her of a mix of "grapefruit, orange and rosewood." She admits:
(text-style:"expand")+(text-colour:#BF9365)[//“I love that fragrance with all my heart. When I wear it, I always feel I am in the presence of something that’s bigger than me. I don’t call it my own per se. It belongs to another era, it belongs to another time".//](text-size:0.5)[^^69^^]
A myriad of fragrances - jealously guarded by merchant ships reposing on the Atlantic seabed - might still be there for us to discover. And when we do - just like in the case of the Mary Celestia - the smell of the 'Americas' and its products could materialize itself in front of our noses.
Such is the power of scent.
(text-size:0.5)[^^67^^Amanda McGowan, 'Shipwrecked scent: a perfume recreates a 150-year-old fragrance' (2020) The World (consulted 14 May 2023)]
(text-size:0.5)[^^68^^Ibid.]
(text-size:0.5)[^^69^^Ibid.]
In 1925 a new perfume was launched by the French perfume house Guerlain.
The perfume was called 'Shalimar'. It contained the signature of what would become known as the 'Oriental' family of perfumes, including the ambreine accord of bergamot, vanilla, coumarin, and civet along with wood and rose notes.
The scent was supposedly inspired by the a maharajah visiting Paris who, Jacques and Raymond Guerlain had claimed, told themabout the legen of the gardens of Shalimar that sheltered the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and his chief consort Mumtaz Mahal.
In the wake of Shalimar a whole suite of 'Oriental' perfumes followed. But today perfumers are [[re-considering->Orientalism and Smell]] the use of the term in describing and marketing scent.Today we live in a deodorized society. [[Or do we?->Hogs]]
The past was a smellier place. [[Or was it?->Filthy Cities]]Many interpretations of history that contrast a smelly past with a deodorized present suggest that during the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries people became more sensitive to smells.
Yet when it came to the smells of animal excrement this disgust was hardly new. In the medieval and early modern periods the excrement of pigs was felt to be particularly offensive:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Swine Transmutes the Juices of the grass into its own Nature, (viz.) into gross unclean Flesh, and a foul stinking Excrement, very burthensome, and a meer loathing to Nature.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Yet in eighteenth and nineteenth century cities - where animals like pigs, horses, cows, and even sheep lived cheek-by-jowl with human owners and neighbours - the numbers of animals belonging to individuals were relatively small.
What happened in the nineteenth century was not necessarily the evolution of a 'new' distaste for the smell of animal waste. Rather, the massive increase in the numbers of humans and other animals that populated cities caused a intensification of stench that made the smells of livestock less bearable than they had previously been.
When nineteenth-century writers on sanitation and hygeine discussed the dangers of livestock in cities they framed it in terms of the //concentration// of smells from larger numbers of animals.
For example, contrasted small pig-stys 'placed at a considerable from the dwelling' that were 'not in the country of much annoyance' with the odour of 'large hog-yards in cities'. The latter was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...peculiarly disgusting, and is sometimes carried by the wind to a considerable distance.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Similarly, whilst sheep were 'remarkably quiet and inoffensive' when in
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//..large stock-yards, where they are herded by hundreds or thousands, they cause some smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Goats, whilst they were 'frequently found in cities' were 'not kept in large numbers' and therefore
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//...the hircine smell does not become very perceptible.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
The particular qualities of these odours taken individually was not at issue. What rendered these odours problematic was their intense concentration in very large buisness.
Rather than a story about the rise of a new modern sensitivity to smell, we could therefore tell a different tale about the intensification of odour in an urbanizing and industrialising west that came into conflict with long-held disgust for the smells of certain animals and their excrements.
In the twenty-first century pigs are not found in the centre of most European or American cities. Their stench is [[concentrated elsewhere->Hogs]].
In the past, cities have also had to contend with [[human waste->Great Stinks]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Thomas Tryon, //Tryon's Letters Upon Several Occasions// (London, 1700), pp. 17-18.
^^2^^Albert Henry Buck, //A Treatise on Hygiene and Public Health// (New York, 1879), p. 399]On the 18th of April 2008 a foul smell washed over the southern England. On social media and in the pages of newspapers people wondered where the stench had come from. The latter revelled in nationalist stereotyping - blaming smelly continental Europeans for 'Le Stink' or 'Der Stank'.
The weather watchers at the Met Office revealed all: the odour was the accumulated waste from Dutch and German pig farms (among other scents) that had been trapped under a motionless cloud before being blow across the channel to English noses.
Whilst in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries people might have lived in closer proximity to livestock, farms, and abbatoirs, by the early twentieth century a shift had taken livestock farming away from towns and into the countrysdie.
Over the course of the twentieth century a mix of innovations including vitamin supplements, antiobiotics, vaccines, and pesticides allowed for the intensive farming of massive numbers of animals on a scale that had previously been unimaginable. In the era after WWII support for intensive livestock farming from govenrments increased and, by 2005, 40% of the world's meat production was provided by intensive animal farms.
What resulted was a re-location, distillation, and therefore intensification of the smells of livestock farming. Instead of many small farms in closer proximity to towns, a smaller number of large intensive farms could be found in the middle of the countryside. But the huge numbers of livestock meant an intensification of stench. From animal urine, faeces, and carcasses emerges an intense and overwhelming stink of ammonia and hydrogen sulphide.
Modern meat production has caused a big stink over the last fifty years. The smell of intensive agriculture - of pig and chicken farms in particular - was responsible for the emergence of odour pollution regulation across Europe in the 1970s.
To live near to these intensified, distilled, odours of livestock is not to live in a deodorized world. The removal of livestock from urban centres to the countryside [[in the nineteenth century->Filthy Cities]] might have removed their odours from towns. But the odours are displaced to whole regions of the countryside.
If you are driving through Germany today, it is said, you can tell by the smell if you are in Lower Saxony. This is the home to Germany's 'pig belt', where intensive farming. As one English complainant suggets, the odours of intensive livestock farming are not perceived as the real smell of the countryside:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Chicken muck is beyond the pale … ! Because you can’t breathe. The smell of cow manure is the countryside. But chicken muck is rotting carcasses and really thick dust and flies, it’s awful… //'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In the case of livestock odours the modern world has not been 'deodorized'. These smells have not been removed. Rather, they have been displaced onto rural populations and intensified. The modern world is one where smells have been concentrated in particular geographical locations.
But humans have also been busy [[creating waste->Stop the Stink]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/26/how-germany-pig-belt-got-too-big-lower-saxony
^^2^^ Alison Caffyn, 'Contesting countryside smells: The power of intensive livestock odours', //Journal of Rural Studies//, 86 (2021), 554-565.]In April 2023 a newspaper article called on the UK's population to
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//kick up a new great stink.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
That year Britain faced the start of a sewage crisis - that is still ongoing in 2024 - with water firms pumping huge amounts of sewage through outflows and into rivers across the country.
During the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries towns and cities across Europe attempted to clean up their waterways. In some cases - as in Amsterdam's canals - urban blue space was transformed from a repository for rubbish into flowing water.
Yet now a combination of over-exploitation of water resources by industry and climate change are leading to a growing number of instances of heavy rainfall. This is resulting in a greater amount of untreated sewage being released into rivers across Europe.
The concentrated stench of waste was, in the nineteenth century, also found at the [[heart of cities->Great Stinks]]. But are we now entering a new era of 'Great Stinks?'
The impacts of odour pollution from waste are not evenly distributed across society. Their precise impact is determined by [[race->Deodorization and Race]], [[class->Deodorization and Class]], and [[gender->Deodorization and Gender]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/06/britain-rivers-beaches-seas-sewage-great-stink]In the summer of 1858 a crisis of stench struck London. Massive urban expansion coupled with institutional inertia and bickering had allowed London's chief river the Thames, which had been polluted by a mix of industrial and human waste, to turn into an open sewer.
This was no 'medieval' stench: it was the smell of modernity. This was the smell of expanding industry, growing populations, and the sanitary crisis producing by flushing toilets.
But the stench that emerged from the river in the heat of July and August 1858 also caused politicians and sanitarians to devise a solution to the river’s parlous state: ‘in times of crisis, smell trumped politics’.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^] As one contemporary discussion put it:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Even party feeling and political rancour have given way before the stink of old Father Thames.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In the present, climate change is threatening the [[re-appearance->Stop the Stink]] of 'great stinks'. But will they encourage politicians to respond once again?
Concern about odours extended from the streets of towns and cities to the bodies that used them. Who was exposed to foul odours or accusations of stink in the past? The answer to that question is determined by [[race->Deodorization and Race Past]], [[class->Deodorization and Class Past]], and [[gender->Deodorization and Gender Past]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^David Barnes, ‘Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris’, in William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (eds.), //Filth, Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life// (Minneapolis, 2004), p. 107.
^^2^^ 'Cholera and the Thames', //The St James's Medley// (London, 1858), ii, 478.]In 2015 at a police station in Rome, a Roma woman was brought in from the city's metro. The woman, who was accused of pick-pocketing, was strip-searched by one of the female police officers. Returning to the office, the police officer told a researcher that all Gypsies had a '//puzza//' - an acrid stench that could be smelt from miles away - and, as she hastiled reached for some disinfectant gel, added that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//this smell stays with you regardless of how much you wash your hands.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In contemporary Europe smell continues to be used to mark racialised difference. It is estimated that 85% of Italian and 65% of French people hold unfavourable views on Roma. This antigypsyism is frequently evoked through accusations that Roma people smell different and, in particular, that the have poor hygeine.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
'Deodorization' - the positive value placed on a lack of odour - continues to work as a [[tool of power->Deodorization and Power]] in the present by enabling a contrast between groups. The odourless norm is contrasted with the ostensibly odorous racialised other. The fixing of smell to minority populations helps to induce and justify feelings of aversion and rhetorics of contamination that attempt to keep them at arm's length.
Those racialised ideas of odour have a long [[historical pedigree->Deodorization and Race Past]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ Andreea Racleș and Ana Ivasiuc, 'Emplacing Smells: Spatialities and Materialities of 'Gypsiness', //Anthropological Journal of European Cultures//, 28:1 (2019), 32.
^^2^^ 'Antigypsyism', https://www.enar-eu.org/about/antigypsyism/. ]In October 2022 a report suggested that 3.2 million adults in the UK experienced hygiene poverty.
12% of those surveyed said that they had felt ashamed to go to work because their inability to afford deodorant or cleaning products would mean they smelt to their co-workers.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In February 2022 one article among many highlighted the plight of those living in poorly maintained council houses.
According to a survey from the homelessness charity Shelter 26% of UK renters were affected by damp, draughts, and mould. One woman, who lived with her family in a flat covered in black mould, said that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//It smells awful in the flat, like a sewer - it doesn’t matter how much bleach you use, it doesn’t get rid of the smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Meanwhile, across Europe (and indeed the rest of the globe) those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to be exposed to particulate pollution that leads to the diminuition of olfactory sensitivity.(text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Whilst its manifestations might be historically distinctive, the link between socio-economic inequality and smell has been as common in the [[past->Deodorization and Class Past]] as in the present.
Deodorization has therefore provided and continues to provide yet another way to enact and represent [[inequities->Deodorization and Power]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63403823
^^2^^ https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/17680949/council-house-sewer-mould-damp/
^^3^^Kara C. Hoover, 'Sensory Disruption in Modern Living and the Emergence of Sensory Inequities', //Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine//, 91:1 (2018), 53-62.]In 2020 Gwyneth Paltro debuted a candle in her online 'Goop' wellness store. The candle instantly went viral on the internet, inducing a raft of commentary on social and news media. The reason for the interest was the candles name:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//This Smells Like My Vagina.//'']]
The candle did not, in fact, smell of vagina. The aroma was a mix of bergamot, geranium, and cedar alongside damask rose and ambrette seed. Paltrow later argued that she was making a feminist statement about female empowerment.
Yet it would be easy to see the candle in quite a different context, one in which wellness culture was rehabilitating an age-old myth: women should smell naturally pleasant, floral, and perfumed. In an oddly similar move, when the pornographic magazine //Hustler// published its first ever 'scratch and sniff' centre-fold in August 1977 the smell that issued on furtive rubbing was that of violets. The accompanying text explained that this was meant to evoke the model's use of a violet scented-douche.
In the 1970s and 1980s vaginal hygeine products were advertised with increasing regularity. This advertising acted as a form of shaming, inducing concern about body odours that women might not have otherwise noted. A 1972 survey by //Which// noted that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//of the women who could pin down a particular reason for first worrying about vaginal smell … one in eight said – without prompting – that it was advertisements which had first made them worry.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Today a vast array of feminine hygeine products are sold to women with the express goal of helping them to render their genitalia either odourless or pleasant smelling. In 2022 a survey by the healthcare provider Livi suggested that 'vaginal odour' was among //the// most frequently searched issues connected to female health in the UK, France, and Sweden.
In the U.S nearly four times as many black women as white women douche. Douching has been associated with adverse health outcomes that include:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//pelvic inflammatory disease, bacterial vaginosis, cervical cancer, ectopic pregnancy, preterm delivery, infertility, and even increased transmission rates of HIV and other STDs.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
In this respect, olfactory mysogyn works in tandem with [[olfactory racism->Deodorization and Race]]. It is these interactions between forms of olfactory discrimination that have made doeodirzation such a versatile tool for enacting and representing [[inequality->Deodorization and Power]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Daisy Payling, 'Selling Shame: Feminine Hygiene Advertising and the Boundaries of Permissiveness in 1970s Britain', //Gender & History//, 35:3 (2023), 1089-1110.
^^2^^https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/womens-health-vaginal-odour-perimenopause-b2302210.html
^^3^^Michelle Ferranti, 'An Odor of Racism: Vaginal Deodorants in African-American Beauty Culture and Advertising', //Advertisting & Society Review//, 11:4 (2011).]Accusations of odorousness have, throughout the past, been connected to racism. The odourless 'in' group has always been contrasted with 'others' that are ascribed a foul and dangerous odour.
Take the example of the 'foetor judaicus', a long running trope that has equated Jewishness with foul smell.
In the medieval Christian olfactory imagination the stink ascribed to the Jews had taken on a particular material significance. Early church writers, including several bishops, argued that the Jews were marked by the ‘stench of their unbelief’ that this ‘Jewish stench’ slapped Christians in the face. By the thirteenth century writers such as the German Seifried Helbling argued that only thirty Jews would be enough to saturate a country with both stench and unbelief. These two things – a lack of belief and foul odour – were linked because medieval Europe was a world where smell both indicated the spiritual state of an individual and had the power to produce forms of religious transformation.
The precise odours associated with the //foetor judaicus// have changed over time. In the medieval imagination the strongest association was with the smell of the goat. The thirteenth-century Franciscan preacher Berthold of Regensburg argued that the odour of the ‘stinking goatish Jew’ was ‘offensive to all’. In the twentieth-century a Romanian saying associated Jews with ‘the smell of a mangy goat’. The smell of goat - the 'hircine' smell - was also associated with [[women->Deodorization and Gender Past]].
But by the early modern period antisemitic ideas about smell had also fixated on the smell of garlic and onions. The late nineteenth century German ethnographer Richard Andree, whose work was used by the psychologist of smell Gustav Jaeger to argue for distinct racial smells, claimed that the smell associated with Jews was due to their consumption leeks, onions, and garlic. In the twentieth century wherever Jewish populations could be found in Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary they were associated with garlic. Polish newspapers attacked the ‘bad smell of sweat, garlic and onion hovers in the air’ of city parks in which Jews circulated.
As this suggests, ideas about race and smell have a long history. They have become part of a [[racist common sense->Deodorization and Race]] in many countries across Europe.
Smell provides yet one more versatile way for enacting and representing [[inequities->Deodorization and Power]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Robert Jütte, //The Jewish Body: A History// (Philadelphia, 2020), pp. 48-9.
^^2^^Irven M. Resnick, //Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages// (Washington, 2012), p. 238.
^^3^^Gustav Jaeger, //Entdeckung der Seele// (Leipzig, 1884), I, 113.
^^4^^Stephanie Weismann, ‘The Smellscape of Jewish Lublin and its Afterlife’, in Anna Artwinska and Anja Tippner (eds.), //The Afterlife of the Shoa in Central and Eastern European Cities// (London, 2022), p. 119.]In his 1937 work //The Road to Wigan Pier// George Orwell gave the world a much-quoted phrase:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The real secret of class distinctions in the West–the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell. That was what we were taught–the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Yet the idea that the lower orders smelled was not new. In both France and Britain the sanitary campaigns of the nineteenth century had also been premised on the idea that working class families living in slum housing had become habituated to the odours around them. Their noses dulled, they failed to really worry about the stench and squalor in which they lived.
A few decades later, in the 1860s, the smells of the lower-middle classes and upper-working classes were often couched in terms of the odours associated with their work. The more substantial middling sort, working in offices and other white-collar spaces in professional, thinking, occupations contrasted their own lot with that of those below them. These men still laboured with materials, tools, and methods that made them smell of their work. In Charles Dickens' novel //Great Expectations//, the wheelright Hubble who works with wood is described as:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a tough high-shouldered stooping old man, of a sawdusty fragrance.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
As this suggests, class distinction through smell could work in different ways. Again in the eighteenth century a contrast might be drawn between overly perfumed and foppish aristocrat who smelled of expensive, exotic, attar of roses and the more humble middle class woman who smelled of lavender.
On the other hand, those middle class men who found themselves unable to pay their bills ended up in debtors prisons, where they lamented their exposure to odorous and fetid atmospheres that were more suited to a lower class nose. The law had placed these men
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//a tough high-shouldered stooping old man, of a sawdusty fragrance.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^3^^]
Today [[socio-economic inequalities->Deodorization and Class]] continue to determine the degree of exposure to foul odours. In the past and present smell provides yet one more versatile way for enacting and representing [[inequities->Deodorization and Power]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Janice Carlisle, 'The Smell of Class: British Novels of the 1860s', //Victorian Literature and Culture//, 29:1 (2001), 5.
^^2^^William Tullett, //Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense// (Oxford, 2019)
^^3^^Moses Pitt, //The cry of the oppressed being a true and tragical account// (London, 1691)]The links between mysogyny and smell have a long history stretching back to antiquity. Medical thinkers such as Hippocrates associated women's bodies with troubling pollution and foul odours. These needed controlling. The Roman satirist Plautus coined a maxim that was repeatedly quoted in the centuries since:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The best odour in a woman is not to smell at all.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In fact, if the normative state of women was to be odourlessness or, at the very least, a pleasant and subtle fragrance, smell could even be used to distinguish the virtuous from the unvirtuous woman. As the early twentieth-century sexologist Havelock Ellis noted:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Many ancient medical writers described the goaty smell produced by venery, especially in women; they regarded it as specially marked in harlots and in the newly married, and sometimes even considered it a certain sign of defloration.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^^]
Goaty smells were also associated with [[racial others->Deodorization and Race Past]]. Smell has provided a neat way of linking together those beyond the realm of white, elite, men with foul odours. Smell is therefore a versatile and useful means of enacting and representing [[inequities->Deodorization and Power]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Michel de Montaigne, //Essays of Michael, seigneur de Montaigne in three books//, trans. George Savile (London, 1687), p. 531.
^^2^^ Havelock Ellis, //Studies in the Psychology of Sex// (London, 1927), iv.]Deodorization is a neat way of exerting power precisely because complete absence of odour is almost impossible. It is therefore very useful for articulating and re-articulating difference. For this reason, deodorization doesn't really aim at getting rid of odours.
This means that in the past and present deodorization has really meant [[moving->Moving Smells]] them to different places, making them [[tomorrow's->Burying Smells]] problem, or[[replacing->Reodorization]] them with other odours.Often attempts at 'deodorization' have simply involved moving smells elsewhere.
We might think that 'the cloud' and the world of the internet are comparatively odourless. In 2013 Google even made an April Fools day joke out of the comparative odourless of the internet, by announcing the fake launc of 'Google Nose Beta' that would allow you to search the internet for odours.
Yet this is not really the case - the smells are just quite far away from us. The vast server plants that produce the computing power necessary for cloud storage or mining bitcoin are busy producing waste gases and liquids that, in some documented examples, pollute nearby atmospheres and watercourses. The cloud, the internet, and cryptocurrencies have a smell, even if that smell is located a world away from our computer screens.
The quest to rid our bodies and environments of smells is an ever-receding [[mirage->Is Deodorization Good for Us?]].The act of deodorizing often ends up simply producing more smells. Sometimes these odours end up symbolising the very thing they sought to cover in the first place.
Perhaps the best illustration of this is the 'hospital smell'. In 1877 the British pelvic surgeon Lawson Tait wrote that
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//no one can have visited a large hospital without becoming acquainted with the ever-present hospital smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
A pungent mix of the odours of human bodies and the carbolic and chloride of lime that attempted to neutralise them, the ‘hospital smell’ became proverbial.
By the 1920s surgeons noted with dismay that the ‘peculiar odour’ of medicines, disinfectants, and anaesthetics was really the scent of care and yet it was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//so universally associated with sickness, operations and death that there are many people who will faint or turn sick at a mere whiff of this aroma.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In reality deodorization is re-odorization. New smells - often from the deodorizing practices themselves - end up repopulation the air around us. The smell of cleanliness can end up being just as fear-inducing as the odours it aims to replace. In fact, the production of deodorizing agents themselves can frequently produce [[yet more foul odours->Burying Smells]].
The quest to rid our bodies and environments of smells is an ever-receding [[mirage->Is Deodorization Good for Us?]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Lawson Tait, //Essay on Hospital Mortality// (London, 1877).
^^2^^George B. Lake, 'The Henry Ford Hospital', //Hospital Topics/, 3:5 (1925), 13.]In the 1880s, as gas became more widely used for heating and lighting in homes and public spaces, a new gas plant was built in the north of Amsterdam. The Westergasfabriek would have emitted a range of foul smells from coal-gas production . However, it also produced odours that have lurked below the ground. As gas-lighting began to spread in the 1810s and 1820s, gas companies had to develop ways of treating coal gas that removed some of its more toxic ingredients: odourless carbon monoxide, the rotten-egg stink of hydrogen sulfide, and the urinous smell of ammonia.
The process, using slaked lime and water, produced a substance that came to be known as ‘blue billy’. This material, named for its colour and similarity to Prussian blue, could not be reused and emitted a rancid, unusual, stench. The substance was therefore buried. Removing smells from coal gas above ground meant attempting to bury more odours below ground. The smell of buried blue billy - the bitter almond scent of cyanide - emerged from the rivers, sewers, and ground that it polluted. As reports from the first half of the nineteenth century testify, its inhalation could cause suffocation and death. Blue billy’s odours not only threatened the health of early nineteenth-century townsfolk: they are still a threat today.
There is danger lurking in the heritage of Amsterdam's energy production. In 1992 the Westergasfabriek was acquired by the district council and they began the process of cleaning up the site and converting it into cultural and conference spaces including a theater, cinema, and restaurant.
In May 2000 cyanide was discovered on the site - a by-product of the cleaning of coal-gas that had taken place at the plant - workers started vomiting, experienced difficulty breathing, and a 'strange smell' was reported. Further redevelopment of the site was thus necessary, including the removal of the toxic and foul-smelling sludge from the central gas tank.
Today Westergasfabriek is a successful cultural heritage site, with plenty of green space, and its polluted and odorous past has largely been covered - buried beneath the soil - or extracted from the site and disposed of. Whether it is burning whale oil, linseed oil, and tallow or the coal-fired power stations that produce both electricity and the stink of pollutants, lighting and heating our world has often depended - indeed continues to depend - on smelly processes and materials.
Deodorized coal gas production simply left other, equally dangerous and toxic odours, in the ground. Across Europe, as brown-field and grey-field sites are redeveloped, this waste is being discovered and these odours are now emerging from the ground.
The quest to rid our bodies and environments of smells is therefore an ever-receding [[mirage->Is Deodorization Good for Us?]].Replacing one smell with another; moving a smell somewhere else; making smells yesterday or tomorrow's problem; or simply revealing the latent odours in the olfactory background.
Deodorization can never be total. It is always an act of displacing a smell onto someone, some-when, or somewhere else.
From the ancient world to today deodorization has been inextricably linked with the unequal distribution of power.
Is a desire to rid the world of odour really good for us?In early modern sermons preachers provided rich descriptions of the smell of hell for their audiences. However, in order to do so they had to speak in terms of smells that might be recognisably foul to then noses of their congregations.
Take, for example, Jeremy Taylor's 1698 description. Taylor argued that hell's atmosphere was dominated by putrefying, pestilential, stinks. For those souls unfortunate enough to end up in Satan's dungeon:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//The smell shall also be tormented with a most pestilential stink... each Body of the Damned is more loathsome and unsavoury than a Million of dead Dogs.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Why dead dogs? For those listening to or reading Taylor's words this might have brought to mind an experience that, for early moderns, came close to hell-on-earth: plague outbreaks. In early modern towns and cities across Europe, dogs were massacred in their hundreds and thousands, for fear that they might spread disease and as a warning to their human owners to stay indoors.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In fact, for late medieval Europeans, the hellish smell of putrefaction might be deliberately staged as part of the performance of [[mystery plays->Hell is a tanyard]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Jeremy Taylor, //Contemplations of the State of Man in this Life, and in that which is to Come// (London, 1698)
^^2^^Mark S. R. Jenner, 'The Great Dog Massacre', in William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts (eds.), //Fear in early modern society// (Manchester, 1997), 44-61.]
In 1608 Synnel Stumpff of Insming was accused of witchraft. Among the accusers was René de Villiers, then aged 32, he said he had spotted Synnel rooting around in a hedge with a pot that she had placed on the floor. The pot contained 'something black and smelly'. On a separate occasion Synnel was spotted next to a tree that was surrounded by smoke.
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w098.pdf
In 1596 Jeanne Martin stood charged with witchcraft. Around 3 years before, Jacques Valentine had visited a group of women and girls who were spinning together. Jeanne Martin had come up to him and blown on his face, causing a 'bad-smelling breath to enter his body. Three months later, Jacques was dead, after maintaining that Jeanne had poisoned him and that he had 'never known such a bad smell'.
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w164.pdf
On some occasions we get a glimpse into an odorous battle between good and evil. In 1611 Marguitte Haxo of Fosse, aged 43, was accused of witchraft. In her interrogation she told a story about how, whilst in prison, she had been visited by a bird who had flow around and left an 'unendurable smell' that had clung to her clothes. The next day the smell returned. The day after that her cell was whitened and cleansed of smell and Marguitte belieed that 'good angels' had done this.
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w268.pdf
Odd encounters in the countryside featured in several trials. For exmaple, at the 1616 trial of Jennon Hennemant for witchcraft in S. Michel-sur-Meurthe, a labourer named Mengeon Claude Gerard claimed he had come across Jennon some 6 years earlier when on his may to market. Jennon had seemed drunk, falling over and clutching to a nearby hedge, and there had been a 'tremendous smell of sulphur'.
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w284.pdf
For early modern writers, it was clear that fire was an integral part of the burning, suffocating, odour of hell. But it was not fire as was known in the day to day life of Europeans. It was a fire that smelled different. As Isaac Ambrose put it in 1650:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//our fire is fed with the fuell of Wood or Cole, but hell fire is tempered with all the terrible torturing ingredients of Sulphur, and Brimstone… they burn as Brimstone, darkly to grieve the sight, sharply to afflict the sense, loathsomly to perplexe the smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In other words, hellfire was a different kind of fire. It was greenish, acrid, and somehow worse in odour than the fires of homely hearths in European cities.
That belief in the weirdness of hellfire's smell also reared its head in[[witchcraft cases->Burnt Offerings]]. Here, evidence for witchraft came from fire that did not smell as it should.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Isaac Ambrose, //Ultima// (London, 1650)]Witchcraft trials often featured references to strange-smelling fire. In these examples, from the Dutchy of Lorraine in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, we can see that things that smelled strange when burnt were often mobilised as evidence for malevolent intent on behalf of those that have offered them.
In 1624 Annon Bourguignotte from Bettoncourt was accused of witchraft. One Jean Derrand accused Annon of bewitching a child. The accusation included a story in which Annon had sent the child, who was ill at the time, a plaint of ointment. The family had been fearful of Annon's intentions and burnt the ointment instead of using it, which produced a 'green flame and a bad smell'.
However, even the burning of the suspect items might release an odour that could do the same dirty work of bewitching those that breathed it in. In September 1596 Meline Gentilhomme stood accused of witchraft. Demenge Mareschal had bought a house 10 years earlier and evicted Meline so that he could live there himself. He found some powder in a horn of paper in one of the rooms and when he threw it on the fire it gave off a 'great smell', after which he was seized by a two-year long illness.
The smell of [[poisonous->Poisonous perfumes]] food and medicine was a dead give-away that witchcraft was afoot.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^All references come from trial abtracts compiled by Professor Robin Briggs, see:
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w114.pdf
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w158.pdf]Martin Scahffner's 1549 'Anastasis/Christ in Limbo', offers us a glimpse of Christ on the threshold of hell. From the gates of underowlrd we see a pall of greenish smoke billow into the blue sky beyond, evoking both cadaverous decay and sulphurous brimstone. A sword-wielding dragon blows fire into the face of those attempting to rescue the souls of the damned.
[<img src="https://odeuropa.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Martin-Schaffner-Christus-in-der-Vorhoelle-1519-Mischtechnik-auf-Holz-Museum-Ulm-Dauerleihgabe-der-Staatsgalerie-Stuttgart-Foto-Oleg-Kuchar.jpg">]
(text-size:0.5)[Martin Schaffner, 'Anastasis/Christ in Limbo', 1549, oil on panel. Image courtesy of Museum Ulm, Germany.]
For early modern writers across Europe the bouquet of hell was framed by three key scents, all of them evoked in Schaffner's painting:
[[Sulphur->Meditating on Hell]]
[[Fire->Hellfire]]
[[Putrefaction->Sermons]]In his spiritual exercises the sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic priest and theologian Ignatius of Loyola urged Christians to meditate on the horrors of hell. In their minds, he asked them
to smell with the smell smoke, sulphur, dregs and putrid things.
For late medieval and early modern audiences, the link between demons, hell, and sulphurous smells was made concrete in [[plays->Staging Sulphur]] staged on streets and in playhouses.Late medieval mystery plays, in which the streets of towns played host to performances of biblical stories, could sometimes involve the sulphurous staging of hell. At Coventry, payments were made for the construction of a 'hell mouth' complete with a fire that may have included pitch and other foul-smelling, sulphurous, components.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^] This was one among a [[number of olfactory effects->Hell is a tanyard]] used to evoke hell in the medieval mystery plays.
When plays moved stage-ward in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, various olfactory effects were used to conjure up hellish smells. In Christopher Marloe's 'Doctor Faustus', in which the titular character summons a demon and strikes a deal with the devil, deployed a chafing dish of burning sea-coal to bring the sulphurous stink of hell to the noses of audiences.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
In William Shakespeare's //Macbeth//, the first scene sees a trio of witches around a cauldron, with lightning patterning the foul and filthy air. These atmospheric effects were evoked on stage with explosive squibs made from brimstone, coal, and saltpetre that would have produced a suitably demonic odour.(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
As this suggests, the smell of sulphur was - for the early modern nose - especially linked to the presence of the [[devil->Eau de Devil]] and his agents on earth.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Rory G. Critten and Anette Kern-Stähler, 'Smell in the York Corpus Christi Plays', in Annette Kern-Stähler and Kathrin Scheuchzer (eds.), //The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England// (Leiden, 2016), p. 240
^^2^^Chloe Kathleen Preedy, //Aerial Environments on the Early Modern Stage// (Oxford, 2022), p. 230.
^^3^^Jonathan Gil Harris, 'The Smell of Macbeth', //Shakespeare Quarterly//, 58:4 (2007), 465-486.]When late medieval Europeans wanted to stage hell, they could look to some of the industries that dotted their towns for the raw materials.
At York and Chester the tanners guilds were made responsible for staging one of the many mystery plays that formed a wider urban performance of biblical stories, they were given the 'Fall of Lucifer'.
Satan tumbling into hell was an easy ask for the tanners. They had their own stinking pits to aid them in the performance. Tanning leather in medieval and early modern towns involved soaking raw hides in caustic substances. The tanners pits held a mix of dung, urine, and fermented grains. It is perhaps unsurprising that Europeans made the connection between the tanners' pit and the stench of hell.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
For early modern Europeans the smell of putrefaction might signal that hell had indeed come to earth and that the [[devil was at work->Bewitched bodies]] among them.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Rory G. Critten and Anette Kern-Stähler, 'Smell in the York Corpus Christi Plays', in Annette Kern-Stähler and Kathrin Scheuchzer (eds.), //The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England// (Leiden, 2016), pp. 249-50]Perhaps the best evidence for the sulphurous odours associated with the demonic comes form witchcraft trials. For some examples, we can turn to the trials of witches in the Duchy of Lorraine in France during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In 1621 Fleuratte Valdexey of Clefcy stood accused of witchraft. During the trial Zabel Jeandel, then 50 years old, claimed that in 1591 Fleuratte had been sleeping in a barn when
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//something like a wind came into the barn, smelling of sulphur.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
after which it appeared that Fleuratte talked to somebody in hushed tones.
Was the smell the presence of the devil? That was certainly what Zabel thought.
The devil's sabbats, where he met and had sex with witches, was also characterised by a sulphurous odour. In 1599 a 45-year old woman from the commune of Bruyeres fell ill with a pain in her back and left side. The woman was worried that she had been bewitched. One of the pieces of evidence was a monster 'full of worms' that she had found at her stable door. They [[set the monster on fire->Burnt Offerings]] and it made a 'terrible smell'.
This story emerged during March 1601, when a woman from Epina named Claudette Clauchepied was tried as a witch. In the course of the trial Claudette confessed to having sex with the devil and visiting a sabbath that was
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//lit only by a fire which smelled of sulphur.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The forms of malevolent magic performed by witches could also be associated with a sulphurous smell. This was in part because it was thought that witches could control the weather, calling down lightning upon their enemies.
In 1621 Jehenne de la Moictresse, a woman from Nutting in Lorraine, was accused of being a witch. One of her accusors, Jacques Gerard, accused her of killing one of his foals. The body of the foal had been found sat between two other horses, who were live and well, in Gerard's barn. The air of the barn was filled with the smell of sulphur. Jehenne claimed a lightning bolt had struck the barn, but there was no damage to the building and so Gerard surmised it must have been the smell of Jehenne's malovent magical attack on his livestock.
In another case, this time from 1596, a family thought that they had been cursed by Libaire Bouchier - a witch in their village - and crossed themselves when they return home. Suddenly, without warning, a lighting bolt hit the house and left behind it a terrible smell of sulphur. The witch had enacted a vengeful response to the godly gesture.
By the end of the eighteenth century many victims of lightning were more likely to explain the sulphurous scent with reference to scientific theories. But this did not mean the association between hell and sulphur disappeared, it was simply derived of its magical power. In the nineteenth century, one observer looked down upon an industrialising Welsh landscape and noted that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//At night the Swansea Valley forms no bad representation of the infernal regions, for the smell aids the eye. Large groups of chimneys and ricketty flues emit [[sulphurous arsenical smoke->Marseilles Harbour]].//'']](text-size:0.5)
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^All references come from trial abtracts compiled by Professor Robin Briggs, see:
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w309.pdf
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w056.pdf
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w050.pdf
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w171.pdf]In witchcraft trials, in this case a series of trials from the Dutchy of Lorraine in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, it becomes clear that the malevolent magic of witches could cause putrefaction to beset their victims.
Witches could make hell of the insides of bodies.
In a number of cases, accused witches were said to have poisoned children, resulting in an inward putrefaction that led to their untimely death.
Jean Laiffer of Insming, then aged 40, accused Synnelle Hanns of witchraft in 1608. She belived that Synnelle had poisoned her son, who died after expelling quantities of foul-smelling excrement. In another case from 1617 in Haréville, Catherine Collin accused Jennon Petit Didier of killing her daughter with witchcraft. The daugher had died after spending 14 weeks expelling foul smelling excrement from her body.
The same effects were noted in livestock that witches were accused of killing.
In 1607 a woman named Catherine la Rondellate was accused of witchcraft. A man going by the name Fanel reported that a year before his cow had died after licking a wall outside the accused witch's house and, when the bovine corpse was cut up, it was said to have the worst smell the witnesses had even known. In 1593 Jacquot Masson, accused Jean Colas Claude Martin of witchcraft. Jacquot's pig had done some damage to Jean's garden. In response Jacquot thought that Jean had killed one of his bulls - which within a week had sickened and died, leaving a
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//terrible smell.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
In all of these cases what is significant is that the smell was not the normal odour of decay or death. This was something more. The odour was terrible, the worst a person had even known, not the normal smell of a corpse or of excrement.
The early modern nose was highly sensitive to the presence of putrefaction. This was an odour that [[portended plague->Rosemary and Plague]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^All references come from trial abtracts compiled by Professor Robin Briggs, see:
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w100.pdf
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w110.pdf
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w073.pdf
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w152.pdf]When Guerlain first marketed Shalimar in 1925, they were selling a perfume whose ingredients had initially entered mass European conciousness - in part - with the bounties of seveteenth-century colonialism. Cinnamon bark oil - now in the form of synthetic equivalents - is stil lone of the key ingredients in the formula for Shalimar.
In 1945, after decades of struggle, Indonesia gained its independence. Sukarno, the leader of the campaign, became Indonesia's first president and served until 1967. He was one of the leaders of the non-aligned movement, a group of fcountries form Asia, Africa, and Latin-America that came together in 1955 to express their desire not to align with the either the U.S or Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Sukarno was known to wear a particular perfume and that perfume was... Guerlain's Shalimar! A bottle of it was found among his posessions on his death in 1970. Sukarno may have simply enjoyed the fragrance on a purely aesthetic level. However, it is possible that in wearing Shalimar, a perfume built on orientalist foundations using the same odours that Europeans had obtained from Sukarno's own homeland via forced extraction, Sukarno was practicing a knowing kind of subversion.
This is just one example of playful subversion that begs the question: should be stop using the term 'oriental' in perfumery and use other, [[different terms->Decolonising Smell]]?The answer to this question from many perfumers across the globe today is: ''yes'', we should stop using the term oriental.
Yosh Han and Dana El Masri are just two among a growing number of perfumers who have been calling the perfume industry to decolonise its advertising and terminology. As Han put its:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//We’ve had primarily white people going to foreign countries and making fragrances that inspire them from their travels in a far-away land – that Marco Polo narrative – and we don’t need it anymore.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Campaigns to decolonise perfumery are beginning to have some success. The fragrance wheels produced by Michael Edwards since 1983 have featured the term 'Oriental'. But in 2021 Edwards updated the wheel, replacing 'Oriental' with 'Ambery'.
Whilst this is positive, there is still more work to be done in confronting [[olfactory racism->Deodorization and Race]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^2^^] https://www.ft.com/content/21bab58a-7317-411b-912e-e4abdf50e4eeAccused witches were frequently charged with poisoning their victims.
In 1596 Jeanne Martin stood charged with witchcraft. Around 3 years before, Jacques Valentine had visited a group of women and girls who were spinning together. Jeanne Martin had come up to him and blown on his face, causing a 'bad-smelling breath to enter his body'. Three months later, Jacques was dead, after maintaining that Jeanne had poisoned him and that he had 'never known such a bad smell'.
More often than not, strange concoctions with odd smells were identified as the witch's tools. In 1619 a woman named Marie Plaid, from Aydoilles, was accused of witchcraft. One of the chief accusations was that Marie had killed the animals of other inhabitants of Aydoilles using an 'evil-smelling' and sulpherous drug. In a similar example, in 1608 Synnel Stumpff of Insming was accused of witchraft. Among the accusers was René de Villiers, then aged 32, he said he had spotted Synnel rooting around in a hedge with a pot that she had placed on the floor. The pot contained 'something black and smelly'.(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
This meant that suspect smells found on the property of witches were taken seriously in witchcraft trials. Justices looking for evidence of witchcraft were therefore advised:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//upon the Apprehension of any suspected, to search also their houses diligently for Pictures of Clay or Wax, &c. Hair cut, Bones, Powders, Books of Witchcraft, Charmes, and for Pots or Places where their spirits may be kept, the smell of which places will stink detestably.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^2^^]
Witchcraft trials were just one in a long list of historical examples of smell having an important [[legal status->Olfactory Toxicology]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^All references come from trial abtracts compiled by Professor Robin Briggs, see:
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w164.pdf
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w065D.pdf
https://witchcraft.history.ox.ac.uk/pdf/w098.pdf
^^2^^Michael Dalton, //The Countrey Justice// (London, 1677), p. p. 385.]Even at the birth of perfume marketing, when eighteenth-century perfumers began to use - sometimes richly illustrated - trade cards, the 'east' featured as a catch-all for fragrance.
The best example comes from the eighteent-century London perfumer Richard Warren, whose elaborate trade card featured references to eastern shores and the gifts of frankincense and myrrh proferred by the the magic to the Christ child.
<img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53578486057_01b62eda72_t.jpg"style="max-width: 100%;"/>
(text-size:0.5)[Trade Card for Richard Warren, c.1780, British Museum, London, D,2.3318.]
Warren's trade card also featured a poetic description of the [[shores of 'arabia'->Milton's Shores]]from John Milton, whose words were part of a rich tradition describing the perfumes of the 'east' smelt from the decks from the ships that had come to capture them.
But the role of orientalism in perfumery was not only linked to a series of ideas Europeans held about 'the East'. It was also linked to a history in which European empires had [[violently and forcibly->Spice Islands]] turned large swathes of the globe into monocultures growing the same spices that would later find their way into 'oriental' fragrances.Outside of the perfume world today, Oriental is a term that connotes the attitudes of nineteenth and early twentieth century European colonialism. In the that period the 'orient' was constructed as an eastern other to the western occident. The Orient was represented as exotic, mysterious, and above all sensuous.
The Orient was a cultural collage composed of bits of many different cultures that had been thrown together into a monolithic conception of the 'East'. In a similar fashion, 'Oriental' fragrance came to be a mish-mash of scents taken from across the globe and forced together. Raw vanilla from Mexico, spices from India, and aromatic resins from North africa. All of these scents were simply blended together into a fantasty smellscape of non-European otherness.
Shalimar and its advertising was - and still is - of a piece with a [[European olfactory fantasy->Shalimar and the Women of Algiers]] of the 'east'. As of 2024, the description of Shalimar from Guerlain's own website reads:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Shalimar is a hauntingly sensual, timeless scent in an eocnomic bottle symbolizing a mythical, incadescent love story. The first Oriental fragrance in perfumery, it embodies intoxicating feminity and a hint of the forbidden.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
Each and every part of this quote - from '[[timeless->Timeless Orient]]'-ness to the reference to [[intoxicating feminity->Female Sensuality]] - is of a piece with European orientalist fantasies.
But Shalimar was not the first [[perfume->Grossmiths]] to evoke the 'orient'.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^^https://www.guerlain.com/uk/en-uk/fragrance/woman/collections/shalimar/#:~:text=Guerlain%27s%20legendary%20fragrance%2C%20Shalimar%2C%20is,a%20hint%20of%20the%20forbidden.]By associating the 'Orient' with a timeless, mystic, past it became an other not just for a geographically distinct western occident, but also for representations of a progressive western modernity.
For example, a late-nineteenth-century writer describing Melbourne’s Chinese quarter, conjured the area as a strange, vague and threatening brew that erupts from a historically distant world:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//I defy him to forget the peculiar smell which will there and then regale his olfactories. Even Shakespeare could not imagine anything in that line going beyond ‘a most ancient and fishlike smell’; but the odour I am speaking of beats this by many degrees. De Quincey would have described it as immemorially old, distinctly Asiatic, heterogenous, and unspeakable.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
The odour of fish is the central thread in a long history of othering, abjection and discrimination. From the fishlike smell attached to Caliban by Trinculo in Shakespeare’s Tempest, to nineteenth-century descriptions of Chinese diasporic communities, and all the way to the present in which sufferers from trimethylaminuria (which causes the sweat to smell like fish) continue to face stigma and exclusion.
But the smell of orientalism has also had an important [[gendered quality->Female Sensuality]].
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^D. Blair, ‘The Memory of Smells’, Notes and Queries, 4th Series, VII, 18th May (1871), p. 413]'Hauntingly sensual' and 'intoxicating feminity'. These elements of the Shalimar marketing are orientalist staples.
Orientalist painting imagined an 'East' characterised by lazy, sensual, women in bathing houses and harems. For at least some viewers, these images conjured up associated odours.
On seeing Eugene Delacroix's 'Women of Algiers' in 1846, the French poet Charles Bauldelaire had commented that:
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//This little poem of an interior... seems somehow to exhal the heady scent of a house of ill repute.//'']](text-size:0.5)[^^1^^]
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Femmes_d%27Alger_dans_leur_appartement%2C_Eugène_Delacroix_-_Musée_du_Louvre_Peintures_INV_3824_-_Q1212737.jpg/1920px-Femmes_d%27Alger_dans_leur_appartement%2C_Eugène_Delacroix_-_Musée_du_Louvre_Peintures_INV_3824_-_Q1212737.jpg"style="max-width: 100%;"/>
(text-size:0.5)[Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834, Oil on canvas, 180 × 229cm Louvre]
The evocation of intoxicating feminity has been a staple of perfume advertising. In the year 2000 a advertisement for Yves Saint Laurent's perfume 'Opium'became the most complained about advertisement in British history. The image showed the model Sophie Dahl naked except for a necklace and high heels, stretched out on her back, with legs open, and sporting a faciale expression that mixed pleasure with drugged intoxication.
The history of orientalism in perfume is also a history of misogyny. As in the case of [[deodorant culture->Deodorization and Gender]], race and gender work together.
(text-size:0.5)[^^1^^Walter Benjamin, //The Arcardes Project//, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 301]Starting in 1888 the London-based perfumers, Grossmiths, had produced a number of perfumes that they chose to market as the scents of the 'orient'.
1888's Hasu-No-Hana was supposedly based on the Japanese Lotus Lily, 1891's Phul-nana had the tag-line 'Bouquet of Indian Flowers', and 1906's Shem-el-Nessim used the slogan 'The Scent of Araby'.
<img src="https://i0.wp.com/kafkaesqueblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Shem-El-Nessim-vintage-poster.jpg"style="max-width: 100%;"/>
All of these perfumes drew on stereotyped images of 'the orient' from camels and headscarves to lounging women and copius soft furnishings. These were, to quote one advertisement, 'richly oriental in character'.
However, the evocation of the 'East' had emerged in perfume advertising at its very inception - in the [[trade cards->Warren's perfumed east]] of eighteenth century perfumers.When we read we don't often smell - or at least we don't intentionally smell things as part of our reading experience.
This Storyline encourages you to do just that.
To sniff all of the scents involved you'll need the following:
- Smelling salts.
- Truffle oil.
- A match.
- A book.
- Toilet cleaner.
- Rosemary (dried or fresh).
Each part of the story offers you a chance to sniff and then compare with historical descriptions.
But first, you'll need to simply [[sniff the air around you->Sniffing the Air]].You might like to start by familiarizing yourself with own olfactory environments.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Olfactory Figure 1. Breathe in your surroundings. Give your immediate environment a good sniff – both the ambient atmosphere and the objects around you. Does the space where you are reading this have a particular smell? How has this impacted your reading of this text so far?//'']]
Smells, especially those around us on a daily basis in our work and home life, are often taken for granted. This is in part because we get used to odours fairly quickly. Think about the classic example of coming back from a holiday or a period away and realizing, as you cross the threshold, that your home has a distinctive smell. You had become used to it before but now, after spending time away, you have become desensitized to the smellscape.
This Olfactory Figure is an opportunity for you to become attuned to your olfactory environment, to sniff actively rather than existing passively in your particular atmosphere and to consider the role it might play in your reading and thinking.
Take your time. When you are finished sniffing, we will [[continue onwards->Ammonia]].Now we turn to our first smell.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Olfactory Figure 2. Take a brief sniff of some smelling salts.//'']]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
You are sniffing (click-append: "sniffing") [Ammonia – in the form of stale urine – was a smell associated with fulling and tanning throughout the ancient, medieval and early modern periods. But it is also the main ingredient in the smelling salts used throughout the early modern and modern periods to rejuvenate and enliven the senses. Frequently contained in smelling bottles, ammonia – could be applied to the nose to give a rush by triggering the trigeminal nerve – a tactic still used by boxers and American football players today. Ammonia is also often found in animal urine, which takes us to our [[next smell->Truffle Oil]]]
Our second smell comes in the form of truffle oil - taken from truffles, which are a type of fungi.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Olfactory Figure 3. Sniff truffles or, more likely, truffle oil.//'']]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
You are smelling (click-append: "smelling") [porcine flirtation. Fungi communicate with both each other and the world around them via odorous compounds. It has been suggested that ‘through smell, we can participate in the molecular discourse fungi use to organize much of their existence’. For example, truffles emit a scent that contains 5-alpha-androstenol, which is also contained in male perspiration, female urine and a secretion that male pigs use to signal their sexual availability. The latter is why female pigs have historicall been used as skilled truffle-hunters. By enticing animals to eat and, in due course, excrete them, truffles ensure their reproduction through the spread of their spores. If one were serving a romantic dinner, one might offer a plate of truffle past to heighten the amorous feelings of your prospective partner. One might also [[light a candle->Strike a Match]].]Lighting a candle often means striking a match. But when we blow a match out (lest our fingers get burnt off!) it leaves behind a tell tale odour.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Olfactory Figure 4. Light a safety match, blow it out and sniff the smoke.//'']]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
You are smelling (click-append: "smelling") [sulphur-dioxide. In this case SO2 is the by-product of the chemical reaction caused when you light a match. The sulphurous smoke emitted by matches was one reason why earlier, nineteenth-century, friction matches were called ‘lucifers’ – a slang term that continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – thus playing on the long-running link between sulphurous smells and [[hell->Meditating on Hell]]. Sulphur dioxide is also belched out by volcanoes in prodigious quantities, which have no doubt furthered the connection between underworlds and pungent smoke. But sulphur dioxide is also a component of historical pollution, including London’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century fogs, the 1930 Meuse Valley disaster, and the 1948 Donora smog that devastated the respiratory health of at least 6,000 people in Pennsylvania. One industry responsible for emitting large amounts of sulphurous pollution in the past and present has been [[paper-making->Books]].]Book production - or at any rate the production of paper - often involves pulping processes that emit vast amounts of sulphurous pollution in the air. Nonetheless, many people wax lyrical when it comes to the smell of the finished product. Books have a distinctive scent.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Olfactory Figure 5. A book or any number of books in your possess (try, if you can, to sniff of varying vintages and materials).//'']]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
You are smelling (click-append: "smelling")[the odour of decay. As any historian will recognize, the average archive, museum or library is full of smells. However, the odorous volatility of historical objects is more than just an element in the feverish experience of archival atmospherics. The distinctive smell of old books is produced by the slow decay of their paper pages. The volatile organic compounds which produce the unique smell can be examined by heritage scientists in order to discern the level of degradation. However, another smell you might well encounter in the archives - in a brief trip to the restoom - is that of [[bleach->Bleach]] and other toilet cleaners.]
In the average toilet at home or in public one is likely to come across the smell of cleaning products.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Olfactory Figure 6. Give some kind of toilet cleaner a quick sniff (or put some down your own toilet and then smell the resulting odour!).//'']]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
You are (probably) smelling (click-append: "smelling")[chloride of lime, which is the active ingredient in many toilet cleaners. From the 1790s onwards, when chloride of lime was first developed as a bleaching agent in textile manufacture, it became the smell of institutions, states and bureaucracies at work: from the atmospheres of schools in the 1830s, to sanitarians in the 1840s attempting to deodorize cesspits and sewage, through homes, hospitals and workhouses in the 1860s, and into the battlefields of the First World War where chloride of lime used to deodorize toilets, disinfect dead bodies and render water safe (but not pleasant) to drink. However, the extensive use of chlorides often meant that their smell came to be associated with the same emotions evoked by the smell they were [[trying to cover up->Reodorization]]. In fact, the same thing happened with the smell of[[rosemary]] in the seventeenth century]
Like chloride of lime in the nineteenth century, in the seventeenth century rosemary's use as a plague preventative sometimes resulted in the association of the scent with feelings of profound anxiety. Give it a sniff yourself and see how you feel.
(text-style:"expand")[(text-colour:#BF9365)[''//Olfactory Figure 7. Dried or fresh rosemary, rubbing it between your fingers to help release the scent.//'']]
How would you describe the smell? Do you associate it with a time or place?
(input-box: bind $code, "XX=", 3)
You might like to consider (click-append: "consider")[,briefly, the various associations you have with that scent and the various places in which you might find it today. You might also consider the other scents that it echoes, rhymes with or suggests. Today many readers will no doubt be most familiar with rosemary’s use in cooking meat, roasting vegetables or as part of herbal teas. Plenty of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipes also record culinary uses for rosemary. You might detect the herb’s scent in the world of perfumery, since rosemary was the main ingredient in one of the earliest alcohol-based perfumes in Europe – ‘Hungary water’, ostensibly developed in the fourteenth century – and continues to be a note deployed by perfumers today. However, rosemary has also had a long association with [[memory->Rosemary for Memory]] .]