The Thief of Beijing

Most people think the fabulous collection called The Arabian Nights' Entertainment is Arab folklore written originally in Arabic. Thus, in Disney's 1993 interpretation of Aladdin, every detail is Arabian in texture and characterization—except for one song that a nationalist organization says contains lyrics insulting to the Arab people.

Actually, the tales have been told in a wide variety of places—India, Iran, Greece, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt—with their common point of origin as the Orient, from where the Mongols brought them to the Middle East. The collection familiar to the West is more properly called The Thousand and One Nights, originally from Syrian and Egyptian texts and variously translated, notably in French by Antoine Galland and in unexpurgated English by Sir Richard Burton.

The frame story, which is set in Central Asia (‘the islands or peninsulae of India and China’), is probably Indian, although the names of its chief characters are Iranian and those of the rest are mostly Arabic. Aladdin himself is not clearly identified by nationality, but the principal location of the story makes it likely that he is Chinese. The genie that he summons from the magic lamp builds him a palace in China, and he wins the love of the daughter of the Sultan of China. His palace is transported to Africa, but when he recovers the lamp, he returns with both wife and palace to China to live happily for many years.


Can he Chew Tobacco and Smoke at the
same Time?


Our idea of a typical pirate captain comes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure story Treasure Island (1883). The protagonist in question is the colorful but mysterious ship’s cook named Long John Silver. We learn from the book that this character’s distinguishing features include a peg leg, a pipe and a parrot. Some illustrations would add a fourth ‘p’, a patch, which is wrong—neither of Long John’s eyes is shielded in any manner.

In Treasure Island, Long John goes for the pipe while the others in his scurvy lot prefer the pleasure of chewing tobacco—implying that Stevenson added the pipe merely as a glamour fixture to Long John’s image. The other pipe smokers mentioned in the novel are the supporting cast of Dr. Livesey and Captain Smollet, but they are not pirates.

Pleasantly surprised that Depp’s character Jack Sparrow does not smoke, an anti-tobacco propagandist tells us why she believes that, unlike Sparrow, pirates of the golden age were heavy into pipe smoking. “You would expect to see them smoking,” she says, “because pirates are dirty and gross, and because of the time period.” The lady’s indictment, clearly a non sequitur, assumes that tobacco, particularly when smoked from a pipe, is a cause or effect of human dereliction. She hints as well that most of the general male population of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, in the areas where piracy flourished, were addicted to pipe smoking—a view that’s hardly supported by the evidence. We can be sure tobacco has been prominently used in the West ever since its introduction from the Americas to Europe in the 15th century; however, there is no way we can determine the relative incidence of pipe smoking among various identifiable groups, such as pirates, in any era. On the contrary, the available historical records would indicate that (a) pipe smoking was only one of the ways tobacco was used before cigars and cigarettes became the vogue in the 19th century, and (b) the habit was more popular with the upper than with the lower classes to which pirates presumably belonged.


A Lot of Weemsy


One of the most enduring—and endearing—legends in American history is offered as a thesis on honesty to schoolchildren. It’s about George Washington who, when a little boy, chopped down a cherry tree and admitted it to his father. We owe this vignette to the American cleric and writer Mason Locke Weems.

Parson Weems’ first work on George Washington, written two months after the patriot’s death, was a sell-out. But it made no mention of the two most common fixtures of the legend, which were the hatchet and the cherry tree. That story would be included only in the fifth edition eight years later, when Weems’ 80-page pamphlet had expanded and began to look like a book.

A few references, including an old edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, surmise that there may have been some factual basis for the cherry tree story. Weems’ description of the event was undoubtedly overblown, but there has been no evidence to this date to disprove it. The Parson claimed he had received the gist of the tale from an aged lady who was a distant relative of the Washingtons and who spent much of her time with the family when a girl. It was only natural that Weems wouldn’t get any more witnesses or other reliable sources of information at the time of his writing, since George was only six when it happened.

The verdict nonetheless is that while George was honest, Parson Weems was not. Researchers claim that Weems, seeing a need to beef up his character study of the president, lifted the story from James Beattie’s book The Minstrel, published in London in 1799.

It would not be fair to blame Weems for all of our misconceptions about Washington and the tree. For sure, he never said George chopped down the cherry tree, merely that he “hacked and barked it” so that the tree, though severely damaged, remained standing. Also, we are told that when confronted by his father, little George said: “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.” As reported by Weems, George’s confession was, “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”