There are a lot of ways to be famous. Not all are good. You can be incredibly brave, incredibly successful in a good cause, or even incredibly successful in a bad cause. We know Hitler’s name as well as Churchill’s. You can be famous like Napoleon for sheer audacity that wins many battles before ultimately you lose decisively. You can also be famous for daring to go big without anything necessary to back it up. Like, say, Mussolini. A dangerous buffoon who caused much misery and death. But totally out of his depth the whole way.

Then there’s this other category of ignominy, where you fail so badly at something lacking in cosmic importance that you achieve pie-in-the-face-style immortality.

Which brings me to the classic football game on September 12, 1885, in which Arbroath beat Bon Accord by a record 36-0.

Now it might not seem that dramatic, let alone a record. Until you realize that it happened in the Scottish Cup and that therefore by “football” I do indeed mean what we North Americans insist on calling “soccer,” logically reserving the name “football” for a game in which most players not only do not kick the ball but are not allowed to.

In what we call football you get as many as 6 points at once, before a guy with no mud on his uniform trots in and kicks one wimpy point before trotting out again to sit down, which makes it fairly easy to get into double digits. So I repeat, this was in soccer. The game in which top matches routinely end in shootouts because nobody can score.

To be sure, the referee did later express some doubts about the outcome. He felt that he had called offside on Arbroath too often and that the real score might well have been 43-0.

How do you do that? I don’t even know how you can score that many goals in soccer without collapsing in exhaustion. I know the players are remarkably fit but still. However my real question is how you lose by that big a score?

I’m afraid one answer is to throw a game, which happened in Madagascar in 2002 when a team utterly incensed at a referee’s call in their previous match decided to protest by kicking the ball into their own net 149 times. (Guys, I’m all for incoherent rage, but that was ridiculous.) But how else? How can you be keen enough to form a team and enter a tournament, and good enough to play a game, and then get shellacked by the equivalent of losing a “football” game by about 200-0? Which actually did happen in 1916, when Georgia Tech beat Cumberland College 222-0.

Famed sports writer Grantland Rice reported that “Cumberland's greatest individual play of the game occurred when fullback Allen circled right end for a 6-yard loss.” And Georgia Tech’s coach John Heisman, yes the guy the Heisman Trophy is named for, took pity and agreed to play 12 rather than 15 minute quarters in the 2^nd half. It didn’t help. (In 1927 a high school football game in Kansas ended 256-0. Is it worse or does it matter?)

Oh, and by the way, there was once a high school girls’ basketball game in Texas in 2009 that ended up 100 to nothing. But there’s a touching postscript. Evidently the victorious Christian school was so embarrassed at thus humiliating a tiny school for girls with learning disabilities that its administration fired their own coach and called for their victory to be forfeited for such poor sportspersonship.

Now, legend persists that the Arbroath result was due to their opponents being a cricket club invited to a soccer tournament by mistake. But evidently they weren’t. And even if they had been you’d think they’d have managed, I don’t know, a shot on goal which Bon Accord apparently did not. Or would that be weirder, like the 2003 Michigan high school basketball game that ended 115-2, the losing squad being good enough to score two points but not good enough to get two more, or even some colossal figure like six, by scoring one in three quarters of the quarters?

Still, it’s one way to become famous. At least, we know the Bon Accord goalkeeper was Andrew Lornie. Though, to steal a phrase from the classic adventure novel Captain Blood that became a classic Errol Flynn film, I describe the purpose for which he was placed there rather than the duty he fulfilled.

“Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.”

Emily Dickenson

September 11 was a busy day in history. And as I mentioned in last year’s item for that date, many of them were things Osama bin Laden was bitter about, including the beginning of the end of the 1683 Ottoman siege of Vienna. Evidently he felt that a desperate Christian counterattack against Muslim aggression was a classic unprovoked assault. So how about the end of the siege of Malta?

Yes, also September 11. 1565 this time. And another Christian stronghold under siege by the Ottomans in the name of Allah. Malta was held by the Knights Hospitaller, the same ones who in this July 23’s feature beat the Beylik of Aydin in 1319, a distinctly temporary victory. They had also been driven from Rhodes by, who else, Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522. In 1530 they set up on Rhodes and guess who showed up saying hey, it should be ours, it could be ours, give it to us, it used to be a mosque or something, God said to attack you as He so dependably does for us.

Right. The Ottomans. Still under Suleiman, and still seeking to convert by sword rather than word or example. But this time they didn’t win. The siege lasted over 3 months, from May 18 to September 11. And it was fought by a mighty Ottoman force, tens of thousands strong, one of the largest Armadas since the end of the Roman Empire, against the usual ragtag bunch of knights errant, local militia and in this case Imperial Spanish forces, (yeah, for once I’m praising them reasonably wholeheartedly), maybe 6,000 in total, half of them locals.

It was a scary business and much watched; Queen Elizabeth I of England wrote at the time that “If the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom.” But “the Turks” did not prevail.

They didn’t give up either. They kept attacking including the naval assault on the European coast of the Mediterranean that was defeated by the usual ragtag bunch at Lepanto in 1571. And of course they were moving by land toward Vienna until they were defeated by the usual ragtag bunch there in 1683.

Perhaps some would suggest that I am harping and seek to turn the conversation back to the Crusades, an unprovoked attempt to regain holy places the Muslims had, um, seized by force on the grounds that the Temple Mount used to be a mosque or something so God said to attack. But don’t you find that there are a surprising number of such incidents?

“Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance. Now, if we were not bound by our passions, a week and a hundred years would come to the same thing.”

Pascal Pensées

No, I’m not picking on the Spanish Empire here just because my September 10 topic is another of their failed North American settlements. Specifically the Jesuit Ajacán Mission (also spelled in various other ways heavy on “x”s like Axacam or Xacan) to bring Christianity to the aboriginals of Virginia. Which did go very badly.

What was meant to be St. Mary’s Mission was founded on September 10, 1570 on or near the Virginia Peninsula where Jamestown would be established 37 years later. Nobody is entirely sure where because, well, they were slaughtered.

The founder, Father Juan Bautista de Segura, was determined to found a mission without a military garrison, which made his superiors nervous. But they let him anyway, and he landed with another priest, six Jesuit brothers, a Spanish servant boy, and one “Don Luis de Velasco,” a local of Virginia who had been kidnapped in 1561 and apparently converted to Christianity, constructing a small hut with a room for Mass.

Very little is known about “Don Luis” including his original name. And there are people who think he was actually Opechancanough, half-brother or other close relative of Pocahontas’ father Powhatan and a vehement, violent opponent of European settlement in the area. But we do know that whoever “Don Luis” was, he soon left the Jesuit settlement to live with relatives he had apparently located.

The Jesuits were worried at having lost their guide and translator. And though they managed to cope, bartering for food, at some point around February 1571 three of the Jesuits went to the village where they thought he was staying. He had them killed, and took other warriors to the mission and killed everyone but the servant boy who they took with them, and stole their stuff.

A Spanish supply ship showed up in 1572 and was attacked by locals dressed in the captured clerical garb. The attack failed and captives told them the servant boy was still alive. They traded some of their prisoners for him and he told them about the massacre. The Spanish later sent a punitive expedition that couldn’t find “Don Luis” but did kill a few dozen people and then left.

What are we to make of this? The Jesuits may not have been very welcome. But they don’t seem to have taken the land they settled on by force, nor do they appear to have converted anyone by force. On the other hand, Don Luis could justly complain of his treatment by other Spaniards and if he warned his friends and relatives that European settlement would be bad for them he was not mistaken.

Does that justify treachery and murder? I don’t think it does, especially without first telling the Jesuits to leave or die and with the Jesuits deliberately showing up unarmed. And once again it indicates that the PC version of the collision between Europe and America is sanitized to the point of dishonesty when it comes to the locals, and particularly their chronic low-intensity warfare, which was not very lethal only because their weapons were not very effective. They didn’t just do this sort of thing to the white-skinned strangers. They did it to one another, relentlessly.

I do not know what advice you would have given the locals in Virginia in 1570 when the Jesuits arrived. But even knowing what you know now about the long-term consequences for aboriginals of European contact, would you have said slaughter them without warning?

If not, can you really excuse their doing so, especially since they did not know then what you know now?

“If a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous.”

G.K. Chesterton in “A Defence of Heraldry” in The Defendant

[podcast title="News and Views with Rob Snow, September 9"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/September/RobSnow160909.mp3[/podcast]

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