Here’s a cool thing about the founding of the United States. The social contract.

You know, that fiction by which political philosophers like John Locke explore the fundamental question of why and how we form societies with governments, and what powers the state does or does not possess based on the purpose and process by which we create them. I’m all for this sort of analysis, especially when it is John Locke doing it. But it’s just an imaginative way of thinking about the problem, people having formed themselves into societies long before there was writing or political science. There is no “social contract” signed by Neanderthals or somebody using red ochre on a buffalo hide unearthed in a cave in southern France.

Unless, of course, you’re the Pilgrims. These early migrants to what later became Massachusetts were an obscure sect within Puritanism with limited actual impact on the colony and later the nation. But when they were about to disembark from the Mayflower, on November 21 1620 (on the old calendar November 11) they signed the following document:

“In the Name of God, Amen./ We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord, King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, etc./ Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony: unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11 of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord, King James of England, France and Ireland the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth Ano. Dom. 1620.”

The Pilgrims are the only people I know who actually did this. On the eve of building a new society physically, that a disparate group from various parts of England that were currently the frequently very sea-sick inhabitants of a ship (the crew dubbed them “puke-stockings” which pretty much says it all including that some slang words are very durable) made a written covenant that created the body politic and they didn’t get it from the king. They did it themselves. The Mayflower Compact bowed down to James I but didn’t actually ask his permission. And they pledged allegiance to the covenant not the king.

In some sense all Constitution-making, if done through popular approval, has this quality. But that sort of Constitution-making is a modern habit and it all traces back to the Pilgrims. And before they more or less vanished into history, despite their place in folklore, and despite the misuse of the power to make new Constitutions in places like Revolutionary France or the U.S.S.R. they gave us a great gift by showing us the people actually constituting themselves and asserting their right to make, control and if necessary abolish governments that arise through the consent of the people when they make the very real social contract.

It’s about this whale. Specifically the apparently obscure fact, even by the standards of this series, that on November 20, 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale attacked and sank the Massachusetts whaling ship Essex off the western coast of South America. You go whale, you may be thinking. Instead it was you go Herman Melville, which isn’t as good.

It was also you go cannibalism, because the Essex sank 2,000 miles off the coast. And during 95 harrowing days at sea the originally 20 survivors ate five of their fellows who died and then, yes, began drawing lots to see who else they would eat and got through seven others before the last eight were rescued.

Two of that eight later wrote accounts of their suffering that, according to Wikipedia, “inspired Herman Melville to write his famous 1851 novel Moby-Dick.” Which is a bit odd because unless I missed something, nobody eats anybody in Moby Dick.

You have read it, of course. I mean, it’s the Great American Novel or at least one of them, along with The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath and some dreck by Hemingway all of which make you wonder what’s so great about great American novels. I personally found Moby Dick ponderous, and the endless intercalary chapters about whale skin were a total waste of paper and I would say my powers of concentration had I in fact bothered to concentrate on them sufficiently to be entirely sure they were intercalary chapters and not just long boring asides.

Which I think I just engaged in one of here. My point is, you have very probably been forced to read Moby Dick at some point, in which case you may very well share my view that the best description of it ever is in the musical Wonderful Town where a woman is trying somehow to jump-start the conversation at a failing cocktail party and comes up with “I was re-reading Moby Dick the other day... I haven’t read that since… well... I'm sure none of us has. It's worth picking up again...:” and then into the ensuing deadly silence petering out with “it's about this... whale.”

Apparently it’s not. It has a whale in it, a big one, white, bites off legs and stuff, modeled on a real, elusive albino whale called Mocha Dick. But apparently it’s really about all those great things like God, social divisions, good and evil and how to render blubber. Not that anyone noticed in 1851 when it was published; it was a commercial failure that sold barely 3,000 copies during Melville’s lifetime and was out of print when he died in 1891. But then people like Faulkner and D.H. Lawrence decided it was strange and wonderful. And to be sure the opening line “Call me Ishmael” is so famous even I have parodied it.

To be fair, there is one thing in the book I do remember approvingly: Melville’s description of the incredible perils of manning a small whaling-boat trying to harpoon a whale, with the threat of death ever-present from the whale’s tail, a rope snaring your arm or leg as it hisses out affixed to a harpoon that has struck its target and so on. And then his point that we do not feel any such danger on an apparently safe city street yet death may await as at any turn from a runaway horse (it was 1851), a falling brick or some such accident. Oh, and the incredibly gross bit where someone harpoons an elderly whale in a giant blood blister. That has stayed with me.

For the rest, it’s one of those classics that makes we wonder about the canon. Though perhaps I should reread it. I haven’t since… well, I’m sure none of us have. But it’s about this whale and, given what humans have done to whales in recent centuries, I do like the bit where he sinks the ship.

P.S. It also set up the gag in the dud sequel Son of the Pink Panther where it turns out Clouseau and Marie Gambrelli had a son who is now a policeman and doesn’t know who his father was because, she explains “Imagine you've always wanted to be a great fisherman... and suddenly you discover that your father was Captain Ahab.”

Then there’s Bulgarian victory in the Battle of Slivnitsa. When, you cry, is there Bulgarian victory in the Battle of Slivnitsa, and against whom? Why, on November 19, 1885, in the Serbo-Bulgarian War, which helped solidify the unity of the Principality of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia.

OK, you’re thinking. Another Monty Python sketch. But nay. It was in fact a surprising victory for Bulgaria’s young army, dubbed by some the “Battle of the captains vs the generals”. And as for the feeling that even if you knew where Rumelia was you would not care, not even if it was a semi-autonomous region of Ottoman Empire with a Christian governor following the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 and the Congress of Berlin in 1878 (no, I’m not making it up and no, I won’t shut up), remember that the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire helped trigger World War I as the Great Powers scrambled to absorb its Balkan fragments or prevent others from doing so.

The Principality of Bulgaria was itself another bit of the Ottoman Empire, made entirely autonomous in 1878. But there was no taping the crumbling corpse of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century, and so something constructive had to be done. Instead the usual squabbling ensued.

For some reason Russia and Bulgaria had a falling out in 1883 and so the Russians didn’t want Bulgaria to absorb Rumelia, which is why they withdrew all their officers leaving the Bulgarians without so much as a major, let alone a general. But the Bulgarians were bent on reunification and their prince had no choice but to go along or be deposed.

So they went to war, and while the Ottomans sat there shedding bits, the Serbians intervened. And while there’s an undeniable comic opera feel to these understrength, underarmed and undercommanded Bulgarian battalions and Eastern Rumelian militia with one bad railway upsetting the confident Serbs, only to be stopped by Austrian intervention after which Bulgaria was unified in 1886 but Prince Alexander was deposed by Russian-sympathizing officers the same year (stop here for deep breath), the complex mix of Catholic versus Orthodox and Slav versus Germans and others, as well as divisions among Slavs, exacerbated by growing nationalism, was a proverbial powder keg to the point that the punchline of a popular 1913 London music hall song was “There’ll be trouble in the Balkans in the spring.” And the next summer trouble in the Balkans plunged Europe and the world into the First World War.

I’m not saying I would have known what to do about the Battle of Slivnitsa even if I could have pronounced it, found it on a map without Google, and intervened from London or Paris in 1885. But it’s yet another warning that comic opera clashes in places with funny names are often harbingers of things that are not remotely funny.

Today is the anniversary of King Christian IX of Denmark signing a constitution on November 18, 1863 that got him into The Second Schleswig War with the German Confederation. Which maybe seems like a nasty thing for Germany to do. Or, once I add that this Constitution effectively annexed Schleswig, which the King of Prussia regarded as a violation of the London Protocol, this “Schleswig-Holstein crisis” starts to sound like a Monty Python sketch about European dynastic politics. Except looking back it’s an ominous precursor to both World Wars.

It is extremely convoluted. There’s a famous remark (well, famous among people who like such things) attributed to British statesman Lord Palmerston that “Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it.” So I’m not going to try to give you all the details lest I go mad or perish. And I’m not really in a position to forget them due to never having known them. But here’s an ominous summary.

Both the First Schleswig War (1848–51) and the Second (1864) were fought over two duchies, Holstein and Lauenburg, driven by secessionist movements by ethnic Germans. And it is worth emphasizing that Denmark had since the 1848 wave of liberal revolutions in Europe been a constitutional monarchy, while Prussia was nothing of the sort and neither was its Austrian ally.

Now you may think it a no-brainer that Prussia and Austria walloped Denmark without undue difficulty and forced it to cede Schleswig, Holstein, and Saxe-Lauenburg. (Yes, another duchy heard from.) And the new King of Denmark did know he was in a tight spot when forced to choose between signing the November Constitution or defying the will of his people. But looking back we are more aware of the looming menace of a unifying German Empire than people might have been in 1864.

Including the Austrians who, um, got into a war with Prussia two years later that lasted only seven weeks and ended in an upset victory for Prussia which thus came to dominate Germany and, after another unexpected victory over France in 1870, to unify most of it under what would not unreasonably be called “Prussian militarism”.

Most. But not all. The ethnic map of Europe is complex even by the normal standards of humanity in which the Wilsonian dream of universal peace due to rigorous avoiding of multiculturalism is impractical. And as Germany continued to swell geographically and in ambition, it used the need to assemble all Germans under a single flag and the alleged mistreatment of German minorities as a pretext to war on one state after another in an fairly unbroken stream from 1864 through 1945. (Also, Prussia/Germany could not build the Kiel Canal to get its battleships back and forth between the Baltic to defeat Russia and the North Atlantic to defeat Britain until it controlled Holstein.)

It looked like Pythonesque rubbish back in 1864. But it would have been better for major powers to stand up to German nastiness back then when it would have been easier to stop.

On November 17, 1511, England concluded a treaty with Spain, which is pretty unusual given their long history of colonial rivalry and that unpleasant business involving sinking the “invincible Armada” or, to give it its pompously formal and half wildly inaccurate name, “La Grande y Felicísima Armada”. This “Treaty of Westminster” was against France, which is par for the English course. But it does raise the question whether if Henry VIII had not done his theology with a singularly inappropriate body part, his nation’s geopolitical strategy might not have been very different over the next few centuries.

England was, of course, long determined to prevent a major European power from threatening the “sceptre isle” and its growing overseas possessions. There was a significant division between “blue water” Tories who favoured primary reliance on the Royal Navy to contain the threat, and Whigs who believed it was wiser to intervene in continental affairs rather than wait until one major power became so dominant that it could turn its attention from land to sea. And obviously both strategies were often at the mercy of events. But it wasn’t all chess pieces and geopolitics.

As Daniel Hannan rightly reminds us in Inventing Freedom, the self-understanding of the Anglosphere from the 17th century stressed Protestantism almost as much as liberty. Mind you, in most English-speaking Protestants’ the two were not very separate; an argument could be made not only that Catholicism was associated with absolutism in, say, France but also that it was associated with would-be tyrants in England, especially the Stuarts.

It is this consideration that makes the 1511 alliance with Spain, such as it was, a bit odd, because Spain was another poster child for the allegedly pernicious influence of Catholicism on government and political culture, a major power with an absolutist system and aggressive intentions. It is of course also true that in the twists and turns of European diplomacy alliances were so fluid as to be embarrassing, and England at various times was at war with or allied with Spain and with France, the Netherlands, Russia and anybody else I can name as well as a great many I can’t. And yet on the whole there was a consistent streak of being against Catholic monarchies in the long run and the big picture of British foreign policy.

As I’ve pointed out before, there are two significant theological complications here. First, England was not “Protestant” in anything like the sense that the hard-core Lutheran and Calvinist predestinarians were. Indeed, the English Puritans who had drunk from that particular well were unwelcome in their homeland and contemptuous of the established Anglican church which they regarded, at least while in their doctrinal cups, as little better than the Papacy. In fact I’ve always found Anglican doctrine to be strangely amorphous, partly due to the British genius for compromise; most Anglicans I know are surprised to find that the 39 Articles endorse predestination (while also more or less repudiating it). As Laurence Stern rather neatly put it in the 18th century, “The Anglican Church is the best church, because it interferes neither with a man’s politics nor his religion.” And he was an Anglican clergyman.

The other significant theological complication is that England was itself Catholic from its second evangelization under the Saxons until the break with Rome, and under that faith it developed its remarkable and unique effective culture and system of liberty under law. Magna Carta was the product of a Catholic nation, though one quite unlike the others in many ways, a nation that routinely told the Pope to buzz off (including under King John), and the heroic Archbishop of Canterbury who was the prime mover behind Magna Carta, Stephen Langton, was a Catholic not an Anglican prelate.

These two considerations together suggest that the Anglican Reformation, for all its deplorable excesses, was probably a less significant event than it seemed at least in secular terms. English and then British foreign policy would likely have followed quite a similar course down through the years had Catherine of Aragon born Henry VIII six stout sons, and the English approach to religious doctrine and especially to the relationship between national independence and allegiance to Rome would probably have taken a far healthier course than it often did among the continental powers.

To say so is to suggest the uncomfortable possibility that ideas, especially formal ideas of the sort expressed in catechisms, may have less influence on the minds of men than they sometimes appear to. But then, Paul did say that we see through a glass darkly, a consideration that presumably pertains to rendering unto Caesar as it does to many other things. And in Britain, on that last point, the vision was always less murky than elsewhere, both before and after Henry’s formal break with Rome. Which, again, leads me to suspect that if it hadn’t happened, the strong and effective British opposition to the domination of Europe by any particular type of absolutism, including later both French militant atheism, Napoleonic whatever-that-was-aboutism, the Kaiser’s ostensibly Luthern nationalism and Hitler’s semi-pagan Naziism would have been very similar to what it actually was.

On this date in 1849 the Tsar’s government sentenced Fyodor Dostoevskii to death. It was a true Russian classic.

In the first place, they arrested and sentenced him for belonging to a revolutionary circle, not for writing unbearably long depressing tormented novels. Not that a man should be sentenced to death for such deeds although if he complains that he’s not enjoying huge commercial success one might justifiably say that the problem might lie with his books at least as much as with his audience.

Nor should he have been sentenced to death for his political views or activities. He held such mad notions as that censorship was bad and so was serfdom. And the “Petrashevsky circle” to which he belonged, partly because they helped him survive despite having no money, was in fact extremely mild in its goals and its, well, I was going to say methods, but really it was just the methods it advocated since it never really got sufficiently organized or energetic to undertake much of anything.

The Tsarist government, painfully aware of the fragility of its superficially omnipotent and seedily magnificent regime, nevertheless reacted harshly to all efforts to develop what we would now call “civil society,” however feeble. So 60 of them were arrested, tried under martial rather than civil law just because, and 15 were sentenced to death, which a higher court stroked its long grey beard and declared to have been a judicial error and they should all be executed. So they were lined up and theatrically pardoned at the last minute by a personal letter from Tsar Nikolai I, who had staged the whole thing.

Instead Dostoevskii and others were, duh, sent to Siberia and treated with such flippant cruelty that it’s amazing anyone survived. But he did, both four years’ hard labour and then even more dangerous compulsory military service, and went on to have a miserable life, sickly, unhappy in love, poor much of the time and a reckless gambler when he had any money.

So now of course he’s a literary giant. But I digress. My point here is that the whole oppression-mock execution affair was a Tsarist classic, witlessly repressive yet unwilling to use genuinely brutal force in a sustained way. The Bolsheviks not only regarded the Tsars as vicious monsters, they somehow convinced the world it was true and that their own regime was, if worse, only marginally so, and at least had better motives.

The truth is that Tsarism was more marked by stagnation than any sort of systematic, energetic effort to make people miserable. The Tsars and their advisors mostly figured that any significant political development would be disastrous and tried to make sure none happened. I don’t endorse this policy, and in the end it failed in a very disastrous way. But I will say this.

If Lenin or Stalin had sentenced a writer to death, or even if they hadn’t, there would have been nothing mock about their execution or mysterious accident. If they sent someone to Siberia, they almost certainly stayed there permanently. And we wouldn’t now have their 38,000-page books to pore over.

So it says here that on November 15 Penda of Mercia was defeated by Oswiu of Northumbria. And evidently he was, since he died on that same day at the Battle of Winwaed or, if you’re Penda, Losewaed I suppose.

Now you may be tempted to dismiss this as a load of antiquarian dingoes’ kidneys since it happened in 655 AD, as part of the darkness that characterised the darker bits of the Dark Ages. Supposedly his victories laid the basis for Mercian supremacy in the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy which I’m sure was a great consolation as cold steel passed through his body at the Winwaed. And in any case Mercia ended up secondary to Wessex in the great events that did establish premodern England as a land of liberty nearly 250 years later. Penda, not so much.

For all that, and considerable obscurity about his antecedents, date of accession, and why he’s the only king called Penda which I’m sure was really puzzling you too, there is one interesting thing. He was evidently a fierce and enthusiastic fighter, cruel in victory and pagan in religion, the last great pagan Saxon warrior king. So he somehow became the focus of two BBC television productions in the 1970s. And it’s amusing to imagine how he would have reacted if he could somehow have seen himself depicted on television with cheap, theatrical sets and people with sideburns in a bleak, Labour-dominated, stagnant Britain.

He would, I suspect, have been surprised that people in those days looked down reflexively on the culture and attainments of his own time. And I expect the TV would have wound up, as his foes often did, in pieces each on its own spike.

Often they sneak up on you. Genuinely historic events, I mean. Indeed, when you look at list of “It Happened Today” type things, the most recent ones frequently appear ephemeral, earthquakes and conferences and sports victories, precisely because they are headline-grabbers rather than things we know from experience still seemed important a century or more later. What might people have thought in late 1910 would be key events from their own time?

Well, how about the one involving Eugene Burton Ely? What’s that? It seems to have vanished and him with it? Well, I don’t know how big a noise it made back then either, at least figuratively. But it was probably kind of loud at the time and it got considerably louder as the years went by.

What Ely actually did, you see, was take off from a ship in an airplane on November 14, 1910. Given the technology of the time, just seven years after the Wright brothers first took off at all, and using an improvised platform on the bow of a cruiser, it sounds like an elaborate and expensive way to die. (Which he did in a plane crash less than a year later, managing to jump from a wrecked plane despite a broken neck, only to die within minutes while ghastly bystanders combed the wreck for souvenirs including his hat.) But the fact is that, like those guys with the steam engines in hydrogen blimps, people do have an incorrigible habit of pushing the limits of technology and it certainly does move things along even if it makes their life insurance premiums a thing of horror.

Planes taking off from ships remained a curiosity through at least the First World War. But it ended only 7 years after his feat. By the late 1920s, aircraft carriers were a reality, though they got more attention in Japan than in the West apparently. Hence the success of the Imperial Japanese Navy, at least from a short-term perspective, in sneaking up on the Americans at Pearl Harbor. And while the Royal Navy’s defeat of the dreaded Bismarck resulted from a successful attack by torpedo bombers from HMS Victorious, the fact that all the Royal Navy had on hand were these obsolescent biplanes underlines that the British still had more faith in surface vessels at that point (the planes were in fact Fairey Swordfish which is probably not a name you could use today).

So does the fact that the Americans had war-gamed successful aerial attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1932 and 1936 and blown off the results. Of course it’s easy to see in retrospect how it would turn out. But a number of people saw it ahead of time.

By that of course I mean in the 1930s. Back in 1911, there must have been some people who saw the implications of Ely’s feat, though it wasn’t until 1933 that he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. For most people at the time, the reaction must have been either “Those airplane chaps certainly are brave” or “That guy must have a death wish.”

Unless of course it was “Eugene Barton Who”?