Bering

The Russian Discovery of America

Vitus Bering was a Dane who served in the Russian navy from 1704 until his death in 1741. He is best known for leading the Second Kamchatka Expedition, which sailed from the Russian Far East to the Gulf of Alaska.

This book is primarily an account of that astonishing journey, which started out from St. Petersburg and took four years just to cross Siberia. On the east coast another four years passed before two ships, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, finally put out to sea in June of 1741. They made landfall on several islands in the Gulf of Alaska and brief contact with native Americans. In the latter case the two groups only succeeded in perplexing each other.

The St. Paul returned to Kamchatka in October, but Bering's ship, the St. Peter, was hampered by bad weather and bad decision-making, and in November was wrecked on an island (later named after Bering), which was mistaken for the mainland. Bering died the following month at the age of 60. The survivors built a smaller vessel out of wood scavenged from the St. Peter and sailed to Kamchatka the following summer.

Misc. Notes

The author incorporates two recent sources of information. One was the exhumation of Bering in 1991 by a joint Danish-Russian expedition. The other was the discovery in 1996 of a dozen letters that Bering and his wife had sent home from Kamchatka.

Bering (the author says) was virtually a hostage of his officers. In an eerie foreshadowing of socialism his orders were sometimes overturned by a sea council. The fatal decision to land on Bering Island rather than continue sailing west was not made by the captain.

Bering Island was thronged with "wicked" arctic foxes. They "dragged apart all the baggage, ate the leather sacks, scattered the provisions, stole and dragged from one man his boots, from another his socks and trousers, gloves, and coat.... They even dragged off iron and other implements that were of no use to them."

The men survived by killing manatees, also known as sea cows. One was 30 feet long and weighted nearly four tons. The men not only ate the meat and fat of these gentle creatures, but also drank their milk.

Bering's "discovery" of Alaska led to an influx of Russian fur traders, and the eventual formation of the Russian-American Company, which constructed settlements as far south as California. "Russian America" came to an end in 1867, the same year as Canadian Confederation, when the US purchased Alaska.

Stellar Steller

Bering for me remained a rather distant and shadowy individual. As the author explains, there are valid reasons for his aloofness and expensive tastes, but these are attributes that do not endear one to a modern sensibility.

Most readers, I think, will find Georg Stellar a more interesting and praiseworthy figure. A naturalist and physician, he was the butt of much unprofessional behaviour by the officers and Bering himself. Yet Steller's interest in nature remained unquenchable, and his humane behaviour when shipwrecked was exemplary. He used plants and fresh meat to cure scurvy in his crewmates, and provided the kind of leadership that helped carry them through the winter.

Steller survived the expedition, returned to Kamchatka, and died a few years later in Tyumen. Today his name graces a number of species, including Steller's Jay and Steller's Eider.

His Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742 is available in a 1993 edition prepared by the author of Bering, Orcutt Frost.

Death with Interruptions

A light-hearted tale set in a small European country where people stop dying on January 1st, with unwelcome consequences for hospitals, funeral homes, insurance companies, and religious institutions.

Worst off are those permanently stuck on the verge of death, neither recovering nor passing away. Soon family members find a very pragmatic solution. They cart their loved ones across the border, where death still has dominion, and bring them back for burial.

After seven months of these moral and economic difficulties, a letter arrives from death. People will resume dying after being notified one week in advance so they can put their affairs in order.

At this point we meet death herself, who is portrayed as a skeleton, and learn of a difficulty of her own. A letter she has sent out is inexplicably returned. It was intended for a cellist in a local orchestra, but somehow he remains alive.

Death clothes herself in flesh and pays him a visit.

Mortal Syntax

When death's initial letter is published in a newspaper, after its grammatical errors are cleaned up, including the "obsessive elimination of paragraphs" and "the intentional and almost diabolical abolition of the capital letter," death pens a heated response.

In fact, the same "syntactical blunders" in the letter are present throughout the entire novel.

What letter is that, Let's just say that I wrote it after attending the rehearsal for your concert, You were there, Yes, I was, But I didn't see you, Of course not, you couldn't, Anyway, it's not my concert, As modest as ever, And saying let's just say isn't the same as saying what actually happened, Sometimes it is, But not in this case, Congratu-lations, you're not only modest, your're very perceptive too, What letter do you mean, You'll find out in time, So why didn't you give it to me if you had the opportunity, Two opportunties, Exactly, so why didn't you give it to me, That's what I hope to find out...

Saramago won the Nobel in 1998. He died earlier this year.

Desolation Road

I've been a fool for Mars ever since I read Robert Heinlein's juveniles as a kid. So I was immediately hooked when I saw Desolation Road's splendid cover by Stephan Martiniere. It captures perfectly the flavour of the book. (Click on the image for a closer look.)

Desolation Road is the story of a remote community on Mars that pops up unexpectedly in the middle of the Great Desert. Transportation is supplied by the Bethelem Ares Railroad, which exploits local resources as well as its own workers under the guise of "industrial feudalism."

What makes the book special is the author's fervid imagination, and his obvious relish in embroidering this world with extravagant detail. Various travelling side-shows visit the town, the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption erect a basilica, and the Truth Corps of the Whole Earth Army sets up a pirate radio station that broadcasts vampire music.

The large cast of characters includes:

• Persis Tatterdemalion
• Inspiration Cadillac
• Johnny Stalin
• Ruthie Blue Mountain
• Our Lady of Tharsis
• Heart of Lothian
• a time-travelling greenperson
• a fetus that gets exchanged for a mango
• a man whose soul passes into a locomotive
• an aging couple who turn into trees
• the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Has Ever Known
• the legendary King of Swing, Glenn Miller, who arrived on Mars via a time warp

My only complaint is that the latter part of the book is dominated by a series of tedious battles. I got tired of the all the tachyon beams and casual bloodshed, and especially of the ultimate deus ex machina, a timestorm brought about by Dr. Alimantando's chrono-kinetic arts.

Once things quieted down the story rolled on to a shapely and satisfying conclusion. The book is a clever combination of fantasy and SF, and the writing (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls it "rococo") is superb.

More Mars

Books:
Red Planet (Robert Heinlein 1949)
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury 1950)
The Sands of Mars (Arthur Clarke 1951)
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars (Kim Robinson 1992, 1993, 1996)
Mars, Return to Mars, Mars Life (Ben Bova 1992, 1999, 2008)
Moving Mars (Greg Bear 1993)
Red Dust (Paul McAuley 1993)
The Martian Race (Greg Benford 1999)
How To Live on Mars (Robert Zubrin 2008)
Packing for Mars (Mary Roach 2010)
Postcards from Mars (Jim Bell 2010)

DVDs:
Total Recall (1990)
Mission to Mars (2000)
Red Planet (2000)
Stranded (2001)
Ghosts of Mars (2001)
Roving Mars (2006)

ERB's John Carter of Mars is in production and due for release in 2012.

Galore

Galore reads like a chunk of the Old Testament set in a Newfoundland outport, where pagan and Christian beliefs exist side-by-side, and the characters are as odd a bunch as you'll find in fiction.

There's a witch, a ghost, a rogue priest, a man swallowed by a whale, a woman with webbed fingers, a mummer named Horse Chops, a horribly scalded boy, a nasty merchant who gets his ears sliced off, a 16-year-old girl who wants all her teeth pulled out, and identical triplets who impersonate each other so often they forget who they are.

When an American doctor named Newman shows up at the beginning of Part 2, his arrival signals the outport's gradual entry into the modern world. Some of the doctor's impressions:

They described the deathly ill as wonderful sick. Anything brittle or fragile or tender was nish, anything out of plumb or uneven was asquish. They called the Adam's apple a kinkorn, referred to the Devil as Horn Man. They'd once shown the doctor a scarred vellum copy of the Bible that Jabez Trim had cut from a cod's stomach nearly a century past, a relic so singular and strange that Newman asked to see it whenever he visited, leafing through the pages with a kind of secular awe. He felt at times he'd been transported to a medieval world that was still half fairy tale.

In managing such a large cast of characters, the author skims over them quickly, giving us just enough information to keep the story moving along. There is no linear plot as such, just the constant ebb and flow of life and death over several generations, and the slow movement away from a life of hardship and superstition, and the interactions of two warring families whose names, the Sellers and the Devines, provide a clue as to their roles.

The book is filled with wonderful dialogue, thronged with humour and character and incident, and topped off with a satisfying conclusion that gives the story a fine symmetry.

This is a rich novel that people will read more than once.

Jerome

Judah, the man swallowed by a whale, reminded me of Jerome, a man found legless on the Fundy shore in the 19th century. Who he was, where he came from, and how he got there were never discovered. He spent the rest of his life in Nova Scotia without uttering a word. Was he mute like Judah, or did he simply refuse to speak? How he lost his legs, and even his real name (like Judah's), remain a mystery to this day.

John Mutford's interview with Michael Crummey

Adventures Among Ants

A Global Sarafi with a Cast of Trillions

Mark Moffett studied under E.O. Wilson, who described ant societies as "civilizations in the dirt." This book, printed on coated stock and illustrated throughout with wonderful close-ups of ants, is a justification of that term.

The focus is on six different kinds of ants: marauder, weaver, leafcutter, Amazon, Argentine, and African army.

A few interesting details:

The global biomass of ants equals that of human beings.

Ants are self-organizing. They have no leaders, yet somehow accomplish feats rivalled only by humans.

Some species build roadways. Others herd insects and create underground gardens.

Some are arboreal, constructing shelters in trees out of leaves.

Some raid the nests of other ant species and carry home the pupae, which become willing "slaves" of their kidnappers.

Some are a suicide bombers, blowing themselves up and spraying out a toxic glue that immobilizes foes.

Some can remain underwater for several hours, and others when dislodged from a tree can control the direction of their fall and glide back to the tree.

Argentine Ant

This is an introduced species that doesn't sting and is too small to bite humans. Yet somehow it has developed the ability to form "supercolonies," which consist of widely distributed nests.

One of them has taken over most of California. Thus an Argentine ant from LA can be dropped among other Argentine ants in San Francisco, and not be torn to pieces. It is accepted as a sister.

The largest such colony to date is one that stretches from Italy to Spain.

The only ant which so far has been able to resist the Argentine ant is the fire ant, which originates from the same area of Argentina.

Links

Adventures Among Ants website
Mark Moffett's website
Great ant photos by Alex Wild

The Kraken Wakes

This classic SF novel was first published in 1953 and is still in print, a testimony to John Wyndham's ability to create pleasantly chilling scenarios. His calm, matter-of-fact tone is perfect for relating catastrophic events.

In this book, ETs have arrived on earth and taken up residence in the deepest parts of the ocean. Soon ships begin disappearing, then coastal raids take place. Finally the glaciers and ice-caps start melting. London floods and Parliament is forced to relocate. Compounding the problem are inept governments, misguided newspapers, and befuddled scientists.

Through it all a husband-and-wife team working for the English Broadcasting Company provide a sane and steady perspective, especially when society begins falling apart. Their breezy and intelligent conversation helps carry the book through the slow buildup to disaster.

Wyndham's books are the equivalent of cosy English murder mysteries, perfect for summer reading.

Links

1965 CBC radio adaptation (downloadable)
Kraken book sculpture
Kraken Rum

More Tales of a Ruined Earth

The Last Man by Mary Shelley 1826
The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel 1901
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart 1949
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham 1951
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank 1959
Davy by Edgar Pangborn 1964
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban 1980
The Postman by David Brin 1985
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 2003
The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006

A few that I've particularly enjoyed:

Daybreak - 2250 AD by Andre Norton 1952
On the Beach by Nevil Shute 1957
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr. 1960
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard 1962
Ariel by Steven R. Boyett 1983
Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson 1985
Cloud Master by David Mitchell 2004

The City & the City

A murder has been committed in Beszel, a city in Eastern Europe, and Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad is assigned the case.

But far more mysterious than the crime is the setting. Somehow Beszel and a sister city, Ul Qomar, share the same location, even though the inhabitants speak different languages, have different customs, and are generally distrustful of each other.

Moreover, occupants of each city are forbidden to interact in any way. When they pass in the street they must "unsee" each other. There's only one official channel between the two, and that is (the brilliantly named) Copula Hall, which is a sort of customs and border post.

Should anyone violate the rules of non-interaction, they are said to have "breached" the invisible membrane separating the two cities, and are quickly apprehended by a shadowy but much-feared group known only as "Breach." Its powers take precedence over those of the local authorities.

It is uncertain whether Beszel and Ul Qomar were once a single city, or whether they were two cities that have somehow converged. Canadian archeologists have been working in Ul Qomar, and one of them has written a provocative book called Between the City and the City, which suggests a precursor civilization called Orciny.

Interpretations

At first the book reads like an urban fantasy, describing something that could never exist in the real world. Yet as the reader learns more and more about Beszel, Ul Qomar, and Breach, it becomes apparent that the situation is not beyond the realm of possibility. Surreal, yes, but not impossible.

Even if it were, it still contains uncomfortable echoes of the real world, where there are (or were) divided cities like Berlin and Jerusalem, and societies whose sense of reality has been distorted by secret police. And who among us has not walked past beggars or the homeless without seeing them?

Conclusion

Though the ending was not as satisfying as I wished for, The City & the City is built on a fascinating concept.

Mieville has also altered his style to one that is gritty and noirish, with lots of choppy dialogue and awkward sentences, to reflect the strange and ugly place he's describing. It's a risky but effective artistic choice.

I can't wait to get my hands on Mieville's latest, which came out just last month. There's no author better equipped to tackle a novel named Kraken.

Links

China Mieville talks about The City & the City
SF Reviews
Schuler Books

Moneyball

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

This book follows the fortunes of the Oakland A's around the turn of the century.

Under the guidance of general manager Billy Beane, the team compiled some wonderful winning records despite having one of the smallest payrolls in major league baseball.

In an early chapter, "Field of Ignorance," we learn about sabermetrics, a word coined by baseball nut, Bill James, who came to notice in 1977 when he self-published a mimeographed annual Baseball Abstract.

In it he described his thinking about the need for better baseball stats. He sold 75 copies.

Now, decades after that humble beginning, sabermetrics has become a mainstream concept. Some of the ideas mentioned in Moneyball:

• clutch-hitting is a myth
• bunting, base-stealing, and sac flies are counter-productive
• on-base percentage is a more important stat than batting average or RBIs

Billy Beane's implementation of such radical new ideas makes for great reading, especially as he wheels and deals for players undervalued by traditional stats. People like submariner Chad Bradford, whose unnatural delivery kept scouts from seeing his true worth. His knuckles would actually scrape the ground when he threw.

And catcher Scott Hatteberg, whose damaged arm should have spelled the end of his career. He didn't have a flashy batting average, but he did have an uncanny ability to get on base, so the A's rehabilitated him as a first baseman. Says Lewis: "He waits for pitches like a man picking through an apple bin at a grocery store, looking for the ripest."

Hatteberg's patience at the plate, and his ability to foul off pitches he didn't like, furnishes a priceless anecdote. During a game a frustrated pitcher stepped off the mound and said to him, "Just tell me what you want. Tell me what you want and I'll throw it."

Billy Beane

Baseball is full of colourful characters, and Billy Beane is one of them. His own story is as fascinating as any in the book, first as a highly regarded prospect, then as a maverick GM.

It was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.

J.P. Ricciardi, who was the A's director of player development, said that watching Billy do a deal was "like watching the Wolf talk to Little Red Riding Hood."

(Ricciardi took Billy Beane's approach with him when he was hired as the Blue Jay's GM. One of the first things he did was hire Bill James as a consultant.)

More Lewis

This book was so interesting, so entertaining, that I could not stop reading. I sped through it with increasing delight, and when I finished I immediately made plans to buy more books by Michael Lewis.

One of these has already been turned into a pretty good movie, The Blind Side. Moneyball is next, with Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane.

Anthill

As fascinating as ant societies are, they seem to have limited narrative potential. Usually they're portrayed as menacing hordes or anthropomorphized creatures with little resemblance to the real thing.

Thus, when I heard that the great myrmecologist, E.O. Wilson, had brought forth a novel, I was keen to see how he approached this challenge.

The Ants

The heart of the book is a 70-page account of warring anthills in southern Alabama. A slight mutation has caused one of the anthills to become a supercolony with thousands of "queenlets." This allows it to outcompete all other colonies in the vicinity, to the point that its success becomes its downfall. It is out of balance with its surroundings, and on the verge of a Malthusian downfall, when humans intervene.

The name of this section is "The Anthill Chronicles." It is centrally positioned in the book and purports to be a laundered version of Raff Cody's honours thesis. The colonies inhabit a patch of old-growth forest with which he is intimately acquainted.

The People

Prior to "The Anthill Chronicles" we learn the story of Raff's upbringing, and are given a satisfying glimpse of life -- both animal and human -- in southern Alabama where Wilson himself grew up.

In the final portion of the book, after "The Anthill Chronicles," Raff heads off to Harvard to study law, the application of which he decides is the best way to save the old-growth forest. Wilson's acquaintance with academic life in "the great brainy anthill" of Harvard infuses this part of the story.

After graduating Raff returns to Alabama and, in a nice dove-tailing of events, gets caught up with the very people who intervened in the fate of the supercolony.

The Ending

The novel so far has been an enjoyable read. It educates, it entertains, it keeps us guessing. Now it suddenly shifts gears and becomes a plot-driven thriller with a conclusion that felt (to me) unsatisfying and out of character with the rest of the book.

The Lesson

In a short prologue Wilson says, "This is a story about three parallel worlds, which nevertheless exist in the same space and time." They are the world of ants, the world of humans, and the world in which both live, the biosphere.

The supercolony then is a symbol for humanity. It "mastered the environment, subdued its rivals and enemies, increased its space, drawn down new sources of energy..." We too are in danger of authoring our own demise by our very success. And just as humans played a godlike role in the supercolony's destiny, so too might the biosphere play a similar role in ours.

Links

Margaret Atwood's review ("Homer of the Ants")
Barbara Kingsolver's review ("Ear to the Ground")
Radio interview with Anna Maria Tremonti

Suggested Reading

"The Empire of the Ants" by H.G. Wells (1905) appeared in The Time Machine and Other Stories.

Consider Her Ways by Frederick Philip Grove (1947) is a Canadian SF classic, not to be confused with the John Wyndham novella of the same name.

The Ant Men by Eric North (1953) is pure pulp fiction, yet appeared first in hard cover before going through several softcover printings.

The Fungus Garden by Brian Brett (1988) takes the reader on a surreal journey underground into the world of termites.

Les Fourmis trilogy by Bernard Werber includes Les Fourmis (1991), which sold more than two million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 languages (Empire of the Ants in English), Le Jour des Fourmis (1992), and La Revolution des Fourmis (1996).

The Hacker and the Ants v. 2.0 by Rudy Rucker (2003) is a sci-fi tale involving software ants.

Journey to the Ants by Wilson and Holldobler (1994) is one of my favourite books, and likely more fascinating than any work of ant fiction can aspire to. Highly recommended.

Adventures among Ants by Mark Moffett (2010) is a work of popular myrmecology by a former student of E.O. Wilson. Fabulous photos.

Battle Cry of Freedom

The Civil War Era

This 900-page treatment of the Civil War was published in 1988. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and may be the finest one-volume history of the war.

It's not just an account of the terrible battles that took place. It also provides political, economic, and social commentary. The first shots are not fired until page 273.

Having read the book, it now seems to me impossible to understand the United States without having a sound knowledge of the Civil War. As the author points out, more books have been written about it than on any other topic of American history.

There are useful quotes from speeches, newspapers, diaries, and letters from soldiers. Scarcely a page escapes a footnote, yet the writing is clear and easy to follow.

There are two sections of black-and-white photos, and numerous battlefield maps.

Lincoln

The Civil War (1861-65) exactly defined Lincoln's presidency. His election in 1860 triggered the secession of seven Southern states before he even took office. The month after he was inaugurated in 1861, the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, and four more states joined the Confederacy. Four years later, within days of Lee's surrender to Grant, he was assassinated by a Rebel sympathizer who took umbrage at a speech promoting black suffrage.

Lincoln was the first Republican president. The party had only been in existence for a few years. It opposed the pro-Southern Democrats, and one of its avowed goals was to prevent the sanctioning of slavery in newly formed states. Since it was composed completely of Northerners (making it the first "sectional" party in power), the South realized it had lost the ability to influence the federal government, and thus elected to secede.

Lincoln took an active role in the war -- haunting the telegraph office for reports from the battlefield, suggesting strategy to his generals and urging them to take the offensive, visiting fortifications when Rebels invaded the North (where he was told to keep his damn fool head down). When the Confederate capital of Richmond was captured, Lincoln was sitting in Jefferson Davis's study within 40 hours of the Confederate President's departure.

During the war Lincoln and the Republicans enjoyed public support as long as the war was going well. At other times there was widespread alarm, panic and even riots. Confederate forces at one point were five miles from the White House. Lincoln feared that he would not win re-election in 1864.

Generals

In combat, officers "led from the front, not the rear" and "generals suffered the highest combat casualties, their chances of being killed in battle were 50 percent greater than the privates'." In one battle, when Robert E. Lee tried to lead "a desperate counterattack," his troops pleaded with him to return to the rear.

Two of the Confederacy's most effective generals, Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, were mistakenly felled by Rebel fire. Jackson died, and Longstreet was out of combat for five months.

During the war several Union generals were removed from command for their timidity in engaging the enemy.

John C. Breckinridge, Vice President under James Buchanan (the President who preceded Lincoln), became a general in the Southern army.

After the war Union General Lew Wallace wrote Ben-Hur, the best-selling American novel of the 19th century.

Tactics

"The close-order formation was...necessary to concentrate the firepower of these inaccurate weapons [muzzle-loaders]" and "bayonet charges could succeed because double-timing infantry could cover the last eighty yards [the effective range of muzzle-loaders] during the twenty-five seconds it took defending infantry men to reload their muskets after firing a volley."

"The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation. With an effective range of three or four hundred yards, defenders firing rifles decimated these attacks."

"The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I." Photos of battlefields in both wars are eerily similar.

"...the large caliber and low muzzle velocity of Civil War rifles caused horrible wounds with the bullet usually remaining in the body rather than going through it... Stomach wounds were generally fatal because there was no known prevention of peritonitis."

Miscellaneous

Over 600,000 soldiers died, more than the combined total of all other wars that America has fought in, before and since.

Both sides claimed to be fighting for freedom and liberty. The industrial North wanted to keep the Union intact and end slavery. The rural gentrified South fought for autonomy and against the "wage-slavery" of Northern workers. "We are either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it," declared a secessionist without irony.

The ironclad CSA Viriginia, aka Merrimack, sank two unarmored Northern warships in the space of a few hours, "a feat no other enemy would accomplish until 1941." The next day it met the Union ironclad, Monitor, and fought to a draw. The battle caused the London Times to declare that nearly all of the British fleet was now obsolete.

The James and Younger brothers began their careers as Southern guerillas in Missouri. Wild Bill Hickok was a scout for the Union army in Missouri. Another famous name on the Union side was George Armstrong Custer, who took part in the "bloodiest cavalry action of the war" north of Richmond.

During the war, the North enacted for the first time conscription on a national level. However, draftees still had the option of hiring substitutes to take their place, a practice "hallowed by tradition."

"Several hundred women...dressed as men and managed to enlist as soldiers...."

Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both born in Kentucky.

Nova Scotia

My interest in the Civil War was triggered last month by a grave marker ceremony organized by the Maritime Civil War Living History Association. A re-enactment unit, the 20th Maine Volunteers, No. 1 Company (New Brunswick), paid tribute to three local veterans:

Ardent Tupper - served in the 20th Maine Infantry, present at Lee's surrender at Appomattox

William Kinsman - served in the 1st Massachusetts Light Artillery, took part in 17 battles

Ben Jackson - served in the Union navy, awarded the Civil War Campaign Medal