• Mark Boyle is the founder of the Freeconomy Community and has lived moneyless for the last 19 months. His book, The Moneyless Man, is out now, published by Oneworld – sales from the book will go to a charitable trust for the Freeconomy Community.

Hancox, the house where NOTHING has been thrown away for 120 years

By Charlotte Moore 17.07.2010.

Wartime rations in the larder. Fifty-year-old logs in the grate. And love tokens for a Victorian mistress under the stairs...

Have you got one of those attics packed full of stuff you keep meaning to clear out? Or cupboards whose contents haven't seen the light of day for years?

Well, if you think your house is cluttered, I can assure you it has nothing on mine - a rambling, dilapidated place in Sussex, with a timber-framed Tudor hall at its centre and all sorts of bits and pieces added on over the years.

It's a place that has been occupied by five generations of my family since 1888, and each of them has added their own very personal collections of treasure - or junk. And when you are lucky enough to have a large house like Hancox, things can be left to silt up, peacefully forming geological layers.

Charlotte Moore and her son Jake, at the family home, Hancox

Having gone away to work in London for a time, I moved back in 20 years ago and took over care of the house from my mother. Since then, I have lived here with my three sons - George, 20, Sam, 18, and Jake, 12. Once, such continuity would have been commonplace. Now it's unusual.

The modern way is to move house often, to throw out other people's old things, and to remodel your living quarters to suit your own tastes and needs without reference to the past. But for me and my sons, the fabric of daily life is woven from what our forebears left behind. We use their furniture, their books, their crockery, even their bed linen.

Things last for a long time if you don't mind a bit of shabbiness. I have never in my life bought a new towel.

Wartime supplies lurk at the back of the larder - rusty tins of powdered eggs and vegetable fat from Australia. Blackout curtains are rolled up in the sewing basket, and pasted to the kitchen cupboard is a list of obsolete three-digit telephone numbers for home deliveries: butcher, baker, district nurse.

All have become untouchable pieces of historical evidence, like Anglo-Saxon coins turned up by a plough.

One of the many treasures at Hancox, ehich has been home to five generations of the same family

One of the many treasures at Hancox, which has been home to five generations of the same family

As a child, my imagination was nourished by the antiquity of the place, but only in the past few years did I settle down to make sense of it all.

It was my great-grandfather's wife, Milicent, who bought Hancox in the 1880s with a legacy she'd received after being orphaned. The man she married had gone to Cambridge, became a doctor and rose to become president of the Royal College of Physicians. His son - my grandfather, who was also a doctor - took on the house and had four children, of whom one was my father. A lifelong liberal activist, he and my mother raised me and my brothers, Charles and Rowan, at Hancox.

My forebears were highly literate people living in an age when the written word was revered. They wrote diaries, nature notes, memoirs, poems, stories, and thousands and thousands of letters.

The famously efficient Victorian postal system meant that a letter posted at breakfast time in London would reach Sussex in time for lunch.

My relations valued their letters, and kept them: they're stored all over the house. Modern technology means that an accidental archive like the one at Hancox won't ever accumulate again. So I decided to explore the history of the place, which had always seemed so familiar and yet contained so much that was not.

I read through letters and diaries, scrutinised sketch books and photograph albums. Hidden human stories leapt into life and linked up with one another to form the outline of a bigger picture.

Every man-made object has a story to tell, but taken out of context, meaning evaporates and the stories remain silent. In context, things are re-animated.

To take a small example, I found some crystals, folded in a piece of yellowed paper, in a box in the black hole under the stairs. The leather box in which they were discovered was embossed with the initials E.M.P.; the paper was inscribed 'Three little Irish crystals.'

Before I began my researches, this find would have been pretty, quaint, but mysterious, its meaning hidden. Now, I know that the initials are those of Ethel Mary Portal - the woman who became my great-grandfather's mistress while somehow contriving to remain his wife's best friend. And I recognise the handwriting on the paper as my great-grandfather's, an Irishman who carried a faint sense of exile. 'Three little Irish crystals' - a love-offering from him packed with personal significance which obviously found their way back into the house.

No wonder they were shoved out of sight under the stairs.

Charlotte Moore's forebears were highly literate people living in an age when the written word was revered

The room where I'm writing now was this same Irishman's 'scriptorium', as he called it. An eminent doctor, an antiquarian, naturalist, historian and linguist, he was what was known as 'a man of letters' - which in his case was especially true. His output was prodigious. I found in the attic a letter from him, written in the 1870s, in which he apologises for the untidiness of his handwriting, 'but this is the 53rd letter I have written so far today'. He would have sat where I am now sitting, at the big bay window, distracted, as I am, by the garden and the farm and the bullocks strolling in and out of the barn, the view distorted in the same way by the shakes and ripples in the ancient greenish glass.

His meals would have been sent up by one of his six servants from the kitchen below via a dumb waiter, a lift shaft built into the wall. No one sends meals up to me, more's the pity. Nothing happens to the dumb waiter now, except that our cats occasionally get stuck in it.

My great-grandfather would have eaten his meals by the fire. This fireplace, too, is long unused. Beside it, set into the panelling, is a cupboard, still housing his poker and tongs. There are even a couple of logs in there, survivors of the last fire ever laid in that grate, before I was even born.

There are other things in the cupboard, too: chipped china, boxes of buttons, my childhood Advent calendar. In the Sixties, you didn't get a new one each year - or at least we didn't. My mother pushed the little doors back into place and, as we re-opened them each successive year, feelings of festive surprise gave way to cosy recognition. That dear old robin again!

The cupboard also holds a black leather attaché case, bulging with more than 300 letters. These are letters of condolence written to my great-grandfather after the death of his son Gillachrist, shot through the heart, aged just 20, in the first Battle of Ypres.

Hancox was Gillachrist's boyhood home, and it is full of relics of his brief life. Like his father (and like many of his relatives alive today), Gillachrist - 'Gilla' - loved natural history. He cycled, walked and rode all over the surrounding countryside, collecting shells, bones, nests, horns and butterflies, which still reside here in the drawers in which he stored them.

His rambles included clandestine visits to Mary, his sweetheart, who lived in a village a few miles away. Mary's parents were overprotective, but the co-operation of her governess was easily bought by chocolates. Gilla kept Mary's love letters in a tin box. On the lid he scratched 'Faint heart never won fair lady.'

Every family has its World War I hero. There's nothing in the short life and tragic death of Gilla that is intrinsically remarkable. But because so much of him is still here, under this roof, I feel the shock of his loss and, through him, the suffering of that doomed generation.

A total of 52,500 bronze and silver coins dating from the 3rd century AD found by hobby metal detectorist Dave Crisp

Women and body image: a man's perspective

Ever wondered why a man can look at an advert featuring a six-pack and laugh, while a woman might look at a photograph of female perfection and fall to pieces? William Leith thinks he might have uncovered the answer

By William Leith 23.05.2010

Advertising for lingerie William Leath body image

Advertising for lingerie Photo: PHILIPPE HAYS / ALAMY

Plenty of guys have told me this story. The guy in question is preparing to go to a party with his girlfriend. She is trying on shoes and dresses. He is telling her how good she looks. She tries on more shoes, more dresses. And then: the sudden, inexplicable meltdown. She crumples on the bed.

Something is horribly wrong. Now the party is out of the question.

The guy sits down. He hugs her. What's the problem? Gradually the truth emerges. 'Do you know what it was?' the guy will say later to his friends. 'She said she "didn't look right". She felt … I don't know. Fat. Or that she was the wrong shape. It's all about her body.' He goes on: 'I told her she looked great. Which she does, right?'

At this point the other guys will say, 'Yeah – she looks great.' And: 'She looks fine.' And: 'I saw her the other day, wearing those shorts.' And: 'She is hot.' Then the first guy will say, 'That's what I kept telling her. And that's when she got really upset. She said, "You just don't understand."'

It's true – men, by and large, do not understand. In her book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf made this point very powerfully. When a woman has a crisis of confidence about the way she looks there is nothing a man can do to console her.

'Whatever he says hurts her more,' says Wolf. 'If he comforts her by calling the issue trivial, he doesn't understand. It isn't trivial at all. If he agrees with her that it's serious, even worse: he can't possibly love her, he thinks she's fat and ugly.'

But it doesn't stop there, says Wolf. What if the man were to say he loves the woman just as she is – that he loves her for her? An absolute no-no, of course, because then 'he doesn't think she's beautiful'. Worse still, though, if he says he loves her because he thinks she's beautiful.

There's no way out. It seems to be, in Wolf's words, 'an uninhabitable territory between the sexes'. So why don't men understand? And, given a bit of education, can the situation be improved?

Well, I'm a man, so let's see. The first thing to say is that, when it comes to their bodies, men have a completely different attitude. I'm not saying they don't think about their bodies, or worry about them, because they do. But men relate to their bodies in a simple way.

A man's body is either fine, or it's not fine. For a man, the body is a practical object. It's a machine. Sometimes it works well; sometimes it needs fixing. Some guys know how to fix it, by taking up a sport, maybe, or cutting down on the carbs. Some don't, and go to seed.

Men see their bodies as machines because, for most of their time on this earth, they have defined themselves as hunters and protectors. They equate being attractive with being strong and fast and muscled. That's a simple concept, isn't it? And that simplicity is hard-wired into the male brain.

When his girlfriend has a meltdown, and says she hates her body, that is not a simple concept. Unlike men, women do not have a simple relationship with their bodies. They have a complex relationship with their bodies. This is what men often don't understand. When it comes to their bodies, women are extremely vulnerable – and, what's more, lots of people take advantage of that vulnerability. This makes the situation worse.

Men don't have to contend with this – the hair people, and the make-up people, and the fashion people, and the shoe people, and the bra people, and the nail people, and the eyelash people, and the Botox people, and the cosmetic surgery people, and the perfume people, and the hair-removal people. Oh, and the diet people.

Men are not at the mercy of corporate manipulation on remotely this scale. Sure, there are six-packs creeping into our field of vision every so often. And, sure, this is making us feel insecure. I know – I was fat, and it's no fun being fat, especially with all those pictures of Brad Pitt nagging away.

And then there are the adverts for Lynx, and the Reebok advert in which a man is chased around town by a big fat hairy belly. But for men the message is very direct. Buy some running shoes. Go to the gym. Cut down on the carbohydrates. For men there is no mystery behind the veil of the adverts. You either tackle the situation, or become a fat slob. End of story.

For men the holy grail is within reach – you just need to get fit, and then you'll be fine; then you can think about something else. But the messages aimed at women are much more complex and confusing. As the American social commentator Warren Farrell has pointed out, women's magazines often contain articles about being Superwoman, which are next to adverts about being Cinderella.

In other words, the words tell women how to be independent and in control. But the adverts, where the money is, tell them they have to be beautiful.

Farrell said this more than two decades ago – and, shockingly, nothing has changed. There's a solid pulse running through everything our culture aims at women – be beautiful, be beautiful, be beautiful.

But being beautiful, it turns out, is a near-impossible task. It keeps getting harder and harder. Everybody knows that it entails being slim – and every year the ideal gets slimmer and slimmer. In 1960 the average model weighed 10 per cent less than the average woman. Now she weighs 25 per cent less. Soon she will weigh 30 per cent less. But she doesn't have the breasts of a skinny woman – nor, as Susie Orbach has recently pointed out, the bottom. To achieve the ideal is vanishingly impossible.

And it's getting worse. Orbach believes that we are exposed, on a weekly basis, to several thousand images that have been digitally manipulated. And this, in turn, makes more women opt for cosmetic surgery – which, of course, moves the goalposts even farther away.

When lots of people have surgery to make themselves look more beautiful this has the effect of making everybody else feel less beautiful. And this is happening on a global scale – in 2007 people spent £9 billion on cosmetic surgery; the vast majority of them, of course, were women.

So: men are told they should aspire to fitness and strength, and women are told they should aspire to something more nebulous. But that still does not explain, in terms a man could understand, why the female message is so much more powerful and disturbing.

It doesn't explain why a tenth of women are anorexic, why a growing number are bulimic, why almost half of women, at any given time, are on a diet. It doesn't quite explain the meltdowns. And it doesn't explain why women want to be so skinny. Why they think they are fat, when they are not. It doesn't explain why, when a woman's body is perfectly attractive, she often thinks it isn't, and can't be persuaded otherwise.

In short, it does not explain why a man can look at an advert featuring a six-pack and laugh at it, whereas a woman might look at a picture of Gisele Bündchen and feel a sense of unease that hangs around for days.

John Updike once said that the female body is the world's prime aesthetic object – we look at it more than we look at anything else, including landscapes, gadgets, cars. In fact, cars and gadgets are often designed to resemble the female body, and landscapes can be painted to remind us of it. When we talk about 'the nude' in art we are almost certainly referring to the female nude. As far as nudes are concerned, the male nude is a distant runner-up.

I once wrote the introduction to a book of male nudes by the photographer Rankin; it was a sequel to his previous book of female nudes. One thing struck me above all – male nudes were a much, much harder thing to portray than female ones.

That's because the female body carries with it a huge weight of iconic significance – thousands of years of being looked at. The female body has meaning. Pictures of the female body can be profound, serious and complex. For thousands of years they have been depicted with reverence. Now imagine having one of those bodies. It puts a bit of pressure on, doesn't it?

Now I'm beginning to see why women might be so addicted to perfection. They have a lot to live up to – a couple of thousand years of art history, and a couple of thousand airbrushed boobs and bums to deal with every week.

But what started this off in the first place? Why aren't there so many airbrushed pictures of men around? Of course, these pictures do exist, and their numbers are increasing. But why are women so much more vulnerable to pictures of perfect bodies than men?

In his book The Evolution of Desire, the American psychologist David Buss goes some way towards explaining why this should be so. Since the Stone Age, he explains, men and women have had different attitudes towards sex. Men can pass on their genes with very little risk – all they need is a fertile woman.

But it's different for women, because pregnancy is incredibly risky. What women need is a man who looks like a good provider – better still, who looks like a proven provider.

So let's think about our Stone Age man and woman. If he's going to settle down, and stop playing the field, he wants one thing above all – a woman who looks fertile. More than that, he wants a woman who looks as if she'll be fertile for many years to come. In other words, he might consider being a provider and protector, as long as his mate looks young, fertile and unblemished.

And now consider his mate. What does she want? Not just a man who is a good hunter and a good fighter, but a man who has a track record as a hunter and fighter. In other words, an older man. And this is not only true of Stone Age couples. In a survey conducted by David Buss, 10,000 people, in 37 cultures, were polled. 'In all 37 cultures included in the international study on choosing a mate,' writes Buss, 'women prefer men who are older than they are.'

Now I'm getting close to understanding why women are so critical of their bodies. Since prehistoric times they have had a hard-wired link to how they look. For tens of thousands of years it was crucial; it could be the difference between having a protector and not having one – between life and death, even.

For men it's not the same at all. The odd wrinkle or grey hair doesn't matter. Hell, it might even be an advantage. As long as you're good at throwing spears and building shelters, you'll be fine.

Twenty thousand years on, what has changed? Well, as David Buss points out, it's unlikely that a Stone Age man would have seen 'hundreds or even dozens of attractive women in that environment'. But now, when he looks at a Playboy centrefold, he is seeing a woman who has competed with thousands of other women for the part – not only that, he's seeing the best picture out of thousands.

And it's not just centrefolds, is it? Just look at newsreaders – mostly, it's a pretty girl and a grey-haired man. Message to men: relax. Message to women: panic! And then there are the girl groups, and the short-skirted girl on Countdown, and even the characters in the Harry Potter films, where the boys are allowed to look like geeks but the girl must look like a model.

As the art critic John Berger wrote: 'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.' It's a tough one, isn't it?

Surely guys can understand that, at least. If it happened to us, we'd have a meltdown, too.

Korda looking at a 3 Cuban Peso banknote, which also bears his famous photograph.

The man who gave Che to the world

Moves to protect Alberto Korda's iconic image from exploitation

"Guerrillero Heroico,"
photograph, 1960.

HIS remarkable photograph of Che Guevara became an icon for revolutionaries everywhere. When Alberto Korda pointed his Leica camera at the bearded Latin American freedom fighter, he unwittingly created an image that became a legend of the twentieth century.

Now, following the death of Korda in Paris on Friday at the age of 72, a battle has begun to protect the extraordinary picture from commercial exploitation, and to ensure that the photographer's legacy to the world is not besmirched by a battle to cash in.

For more than 30 years, Korda turned a blind eye to its use on T-shirts and posters by students and radicals all over the world. But he firmly resisted a string of lucrative offers to hand over the rights to the image he saw as sacred.

Last year he successfully sued Lowe Lintas, a British advertising agency, and picture agency Rex Features for using the picture in a Smirnoff vodka campaign. The British-based Cuba Solidarity Campaign helped Korda to fight the action, in which he won undisclosed damages.

'If Che was still alive, he would have done the same,' Korda said after the settlement was reached. 'To use the image of Che Guevara to sell vodka is a slur on his name and his memory. He never drank. He was not a drunk, and drink should not be associated with his immortal memory.'

Now the campaign has launched a new battle to defend the 'heroic guerrilla' amid fears it will be used by firms eager to cash in on its popularity.

Dr Stephen Wilkinson, the group's national co-ordinator, told The Observer : 'The family [Korda] have asked us to continue policing the picture and all inquiries about its use should be addressed to us. Our most abiding memory of him was in November last year when we took him a large sum of money from the sale of the photograph and he immediately had us hand it over to the Cuban Health Ministry to purchase much needed antibiotics for children.'

The picture was taken on 5 March 1960 at a memorial service for more than 100 crew members of a Belgian arms cargo ship, killed in an attack for which Cuba blamed counter-revolutionary forces aided by the US. Korda was assigned by the magazine Revolución to cover the ceremony, whose guests included Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

'Che was standing on the row behind Fidel [Castro] on the platform,' said Korda. 'You couldn't see him. Then suddenly he stepped forward to the edge of the platform. I was standing below. I saw him step forward with this absolute look of steely defiance as Fidel spoke. It was only a brief moment that I had. I managed to shoot two frames and then he was gone.'

Korda's newspaper was more interested in his pictures of Castro, but the photographer liked the image of Guevara and hung it on the wall in his Havana studio.

Seven years later, yellowed by tobacco smoke, the picture was still on the wall when an Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, called, brandishing a letter of introduction from a senior official in the Cuban administration and asked Korda for a copy. Korda handed the visitor two prints, for no charge. Guevara was killed a few months later and was immediately hailed as a martyr to the revolution.

There are conflicting stories of how the photograph came to gain such currency, but it became a rallying image in the student revolts in Paris in 1968, and Feltrinelli was quick to capitalise on its value. Of the millions of posters featuring the image that appeared around the world, some, Korda has said, even bore the notice 'copyright Feltrinelli'. Yet Korda did not bear a grudge against the enterprising publisher. 'I still forgive him, because by doing what he did he made it famous.'

'It is one of the great icons of the twentieth century,' said the artist Peter Blake, who designed the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album. 'You can compare its visual impact with Warhol's Marilyn or with Roy Lichtenstein's comic book pictures.'

So powerful is the legacy of Guevara that this year, together with the publication of new editions of the revolutionary's personal diaries, Mick Jagger and Robert Redford are producing rival films about his life.

Jagger, whose student bedroom at the London School of Economics was one of those decorated by a Che poster, is hoping that Antonio Banderas will star, while Redford has Benicio Del Torro signed up.

Argentine-born Guevara became a popular hero in Cuba after helping to lead Fidel Castro's rebel army to victory against Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship in 1959. But his mythic status - and the enduring power of Korda's photograph - was sealed when he was killed in October 1967 during an abortive attempt to foment a Cuban-style socialist uprising in Bolivia.

For many years Korda claimed to have made no money from the picture. This was chiefly because Cuba was not a signatory to the Berne Convention on intellectual property until the early 1990s and so Korda could not take legal action to establish official copyright.

He wore a reproduction in a medallion strung around his neck: 'It will stay with me until I die,' he said.

Korda, whose real name was Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, was born on 14 September 1928 in Havana. He got his first taste of photography when he took his father's Kodak 35 and began taking pictures of his girlfriend. During the Fifties he worked as a fashion photographer.

But his career changed direction after Castro came to power in Cuba.

After the revolution, he took pictures of demonstrations, sugar cane harvests and factory scenes. For 10 years he served as the Cuban leader's official photographer, accompanying Castro on trips and in meetings with foreign personalities.

Other less-known images by Korda include shots of Castro staring warily at a tiger in a New York zoo, playing golf and fishing with Guevara, skiing and hunting in Russia, and with Ernest Hemingway.

Korda's work also includes remarkable pictures of Castro's rebels riding into Havana after their triumph, and one known as 'The Quixote of the Lamp Post' showing a Cuban wearing a straw hat and sitting on a lamp post against a sea of people during a rally.

'[Korda's death] is a great loss for Cuban culture. He was one of the top chroniclers of the revolution,' said Liborio Noval, a photographer for Cuba's official Communist Party newspaper Granma who was also one of Alberto Korda's contemporaries. Korda was visiting Paris last week attending an exhibition of his works when he died. 'We had expected him to come home tomorrow,' said his daughter, Norka Korda, one of his five children, on Friday.

His body is expected to be returned to Havana.

Rome tourists to get new lowdown on Colosseum

Public will soon be allowed to visit underground area where wild animals were caged and gladiators prepared for fights

Associated Press guardian.co.uk, 26.05.2010.

Rome's culture officials say the arena's underground area will be open for tours from late summer. Photograph: Associated Press

Tourists in Rome will soon be able to visit the underground of the Colosseum, where gladiators once prepared for fights and lions and tigers were caged before entertaining a bloodthirsty public.

The city's culture officials said today that, after several months of work to make the area safe for visits, the public will be allowed to add the underground section to tours of the arena starting in late summer. No exact date has been set.

Architect Barbara Nazzaro said tourists will be able to see the spaces where lions, tigers and bulls were kept in cages before they were hoisted on elevators to ground level for entertainment in the ancient arena.

Elephants were too heavy for the rope-hoisted elevators. They made their grand entrance into the Colosseum through main gates.

The ingenious system of lifts allowing the animals to suddenly pop up at ground level would have made for an awesome sight, she said.

The animal show was just one part of a day's entertainment at the arena. First the audience watched a hunting spectacle, then came executions, and finally the gladiators squared off, said Nazzaro, who worked on the project to open the space to the public.

A piece of mortar recently broke off from a part of the Colosseum during closing hours, but caused no injuries. Officials say the monument is in need of constant monitoring and maintenance, but its overall stability is not at risk.

Chelsea flower show: Opening day

Tim Lusher looks at outdoor living, the plant of the year and the show gardens

In pictures: The Chelsea flower show blossoms into life

Award-winning gardens at the Chelsea flower show

Three gold-medal winners at this year's Chelsea flower show take Lia Leendertz on a personal tour of their show gardens

Life and style

Here come the waves

Waves are one of nature's most spectacular – and familiar – forces, but how much do we really know about them?

Gavin Pretor-Pinney The Guardian, 25.05.2010

Big wave surfing off Cape Town, South Africa

Surfer Andy Marr surfs a wave at an offshore reef known as Dungeons off Cape Town, South Africa. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA

What exactly is an ocean wave? You may think the answer is obvious: it is a moving mound of water. But if you think that, you are not watching carefully enough. The best way to understand is to observe the effect waves have on something floating in the water – a sprig of seaweed, for example. Watch it as it rises and dips and ducks and weaves, rather like a featherweight boxer. As the peaks move below it, the bobbing seaweed remains in the same general position. It isn't swept along with the crests.

So if these waves aren't travelling water, what exactly are they? What is moving from out at sea to the shore? The answer is energy. Water is just the means by which energy moves from one place to another. It is the medium through which the wave's energy travels.

When you gaze at the waves lapping up the beach of some exotic holiday location they look calm and tranquil, like the relaxed breathing of the ocean. But such a graceful arrival belies the waves' troubled upbringing. These serene visitors will often have begun life amid the chaotic, wind-torn tumult of a storm somewhere out at sea – one that has long since dissipated.

Waves are formed all the time, right across the world's oceans, but it would help to observe their formation in a clutter-free environment: on a patch of smooth, calm and wave-free sea. In reality, no such place exists. The closest approximations are probably within the "horse latitudes", the bands of the seas that fall between 30 degrees and 35 degrees latitude in both the northern and southern hemispheres, and the "doldrums", the band at the equator, extending five degrees or 10 degrees to the north and south. In both regions, the winds can be feeble and inconsistent.

The periods of calm can be persistent in the perpetually high pressure of the horse latitudes (the name is thought by some to derive from 18th-century Spanish merchant ships transporting horses to the New World having to jettison their cargo to conserve dwindling water supplies). But we don't want to wait around for ever, so let's choose a patch of water in the doldrums. As the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously described them, the winds here can be so feeble and dithering that they leave a sailing vessel "stuck, nor breath nor motion;/As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean". The word "doldrums" derives from the old English word "dol", meaning "dull". But these regions experience consistently low pressure; their sultry, eerie calm will soon be broken by weather of a very different character that will conveniently turn the gentle, glassy undulations into towering waves.

The warm, humid air around this equatorial belt can lead to intense atmospheric instability. Squalls and storms near the doldrums develop suddenly and can keep growing into enormously destructive tropical cyclones. But we don't need anything as violent as that to bring our waves into being. A simple storm at sea will do the job. Once the wind's speed has reached a couple of knots, or one metre per second, the friction it exerts on the water starts to leave subtle imprints. Tiny ripples dance across the surface, each no higher than a centimetre or so. Soon, scattered, diamond-shaped ripples, known as "cat's paws", sparkle in the light "where the wind's feet shine along the sea", to borrow a phrase from the Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne.

These incipient ripples are the newborns: the very first stage in the life cycle of a wave. They soon become established as they are nourished by the stiffening air currents of the building storm into an enduring roughening of the water's surface. This in turn increases the friction between the water and the winds. Tiny eddies develop just above the capillary waves, resulting in fluctuations in the pressure that the air exerts upon the water. The ripples respond enthusiastically to such stimuli: they lift a crest here and sink a trough there and grow in size.

Once they have risen to a couple of centimetres in height, our waves are no longer infants. They are now known as "gravity waves" because the weight of the water – the force gravity exerts on it – has become the more significant influence on them. This is now the dominant force in opposing the disturbance of the wind, tending to restore the water to its level and so powering the young waves forwards through the ensuing melee.

As the wind builds in force and becomes more sustained, so the waves' appearance changes completely. The crests and troughs now grow agitated and chaotic. They rush this way and that, running into each other, tumbling over each other, like a roomful of toddlers under the dubious guidance of a hyperactive childminder. This confused and irregular ocean surface is known simply as a "wind sea".

Before long, the significant wave height has grown to a metre. They are waves now, rather than wavelets. They grow angrier and more aggravated under the wind's abusive guardianship, until plumes of foam begin to form at their crests. Now emerging into adulthood, the waves have "badass" written all over them. This stage is marked by the appearance of foaming lips of white water on the larger specimens. Known as "whitecaps", these are the waves beginning to tumble over themselves, under the relentless, harrying force of the gale.

If storm-force winds blow for long enough, and over a large enough area, they begin to tear plumes of spray, or "spindrift", from the crests. Each wave face becomes marbled with streaks of white foam, described by Joseph Conrad as "like a wall of green glass topped with snow". The waves keep on growing, their significant heights eventually surpassing 5m. Now the whitecaps have become commonplace. Mariners sometimes describe them as "white horses", occasionally as "skipper's daughters" – the latter, presumably, because you don't want to mess with them. These spitting mountains of water are most dangerous to ships. Not only are they the steepest of waves, they are also liable to break over the ship, bringing tonnes of seawater crashing down on to deck.

To try to avert such a danger, mariners have, since classical times, had a trick up their sleeves. They have poured fish oil overboard, or hung sacks containing oil-soaked rags into the water, to calm the waves in a storm. It seems that the ancient Greeks considered that this curious effect might be explained by the film of oil that spreads over the surface, reducing friction between wind and water: "Is it, as Aristotle says," wondered the Greek historian Plutarch, "that the wind, slipping over the smoothness so caused, makes no impression and raises no swell?"

In fact, the effect the oil has on the water's surface tension is the critical factor. It spreads over it as an extremely thin film, or skin, which has a lower surface tension than the surface of water. This makes the water less able to riffle under the influence of the wind and form the centimetre-high capillary waves. By suppressing the surface ripples, the oil can make enough of a difference to the wind's grip to stop an enormous crest from being thrown on to, rather than under, the deck of a ship.

While we've been distracted, the storm has continued to howl and the waves have grown to significant heights, to 12–15m brutes the size of four-storey buildings. This is now a fully developed sea, which means that the waves have grown as high as they can under these wind speeds. For a good idea of how our waves might appear, we need look no further than Jan Porcellis's 1620 mini-masterpiece Dutch Ships in a Gale, in London's National Maritime Museum (pictured on previous page). Porcellis was hailed as the "Raphael of marine painters" by a contemporary, the artist Samuel van Hoogstraten.

Characteristically of Porcellis at this time, the painting was small, not much larger than an A4 piece of paper. But the low, dramatic perspective makes you feel as if you are peering through a window on to the marine equivalent of a ferocious tavern brawl, thanks to the sheer mayhem of these deranged and uncontrollable waves.

Only when the storm eventually passes and the winds die down do our waves enter the next stage in their lives. The waves that were generated in the wind sea continue to travel over the water – but without the need to be pushed along. They've changed from "forced waves", driven by the winds, into "free waves". And how their mood can shift as they mature and enter middle age.

No longer a wind sea, the surface is now what is known as a "swell", which seems an appropriately harmonious name. Although the storm may have passed, the energy it transferred to the water cannot simply disappear. They just roll on, doing their thing. Waves on the surface of the sea lose remarkably little of their energy to the surroundings once they are up and running. This means they can travel enormous distances. As they do so, the heights of the ocean swells diminish to minuscule levels. This is not because the energy ebbs away. It is merely a result of the way waves spread out, fan-like, from their source, the energy imparted to the surface by the storm winds spreading over increasingly greater areas of ocean.

Gone are the steep, peaked crests of the wind sea. Their smoother appearance now makes them more like the swell in Claude Monet's The Green Wave. Monet was something of a pioneer in the deployment of impressionistic techniques for painting the sea and was described by his fellow impressionist Edouard Manet, unoriginally, as the "Raphael of Water".

The swell is now a most peculiar procession of crests. They are in the form of groups of larger waves, separated by gaps, in which the waves are smaller, and sometimes barely even there. What is so strange is that each individual wave crest travels faster than the group it is in. The crest appears from the calmer water at the back of the group, travels through it and disappears again in the calmer water at the front. It is like a train, on which are running the ghosts of marathon runners. As this train chugs along in the approach to a station, it happens to be travelling at about jogging speed. Being deceased marathon runners, the ghosts on the train can't actually stop jogging. They therefore appear at the back of each carriage, run through it and disappear again at the front. As seen from the platform, the ghosts will be moving twice as fast as the carriages. This is how the waves in the swell move.

And so we come to the final stage in the life of our waves. Perhaps they have travelled in the peculiar grouped arrangement of wave adulthood for many hundreds of miles. Only as they approach landfall do they make one more transformation. This is the stage with which many of us are most familiar, when waves release their energy in a churning, foaming crash on to the shore.

Their swansong begins as they enter shallower water. Where the wave base first makes contact with the rising seabed, the waves "feel" the ground beneath them. The progress of their bases is slowed by friction. As they slow, they bunch up and steepen, so that their shapes change from smooth undulations back into the sharp peaks of their youth.

One rule comes to dominate their behaviour: the shallower the water, the slower they travel. Due to the gradient of the seabed, the crests at the front of the wave train slow down before those behind. Again, like a marathon runner stumbling so that those behind fall and ride up on top of each other, so the undulations in the water are concertinaed. As the waves are squeezed, there is nowhere for the water to go but upwards. If the gradient is just right, and the waves have enough energy, they can rise up so dramatically that they become unstable: below the water, the wave's feet slow down, while the top keeps going, and the wave trips over itself, causing the crest to pitch forward and crash over on itself.

Oceanographers tend to divide breaking waves into three types: "spilling breakers", "plunging breakers" and "surging breakers". When the slope of the beach is very shallow, the waves crumble at the crests as spillers. These fringes of white water stretch down from the lip along the front of the wave, making it look as if it is wearing one of those Tudor ruffs.

The waves depicted in Sennen Cove, Cornwall, painted by John Everett in 1919, are spilling breakers. Everett made extensive voyages around the world, often aboard merchant vessels as a working member of the crew, in order to study and paint waves. He hasn't had the acknowledgement he deserves, and I feel compelled to call him the "Raphael of Spilling Breakers".

Plunging breakers form when the slope of the beach or reef is steeper, and they are the most beautiful of the three types. The lip of the wave is thrown forward so that it curls over to form a tube before crashing to the water below. At their most impressive, these breakers are the "barrels" that surfers ride within, the canopy of water thrown over their heads as they disappear from view.

Surging breakers, which occur on the steepest gradients of the seabed, look completely different. They are hardly breakers at all. The water just sloshes up against the steep shore and back again, like water at the end of the bathtub as you sit yourself down with a thump.

Whatever the particular style of their demise, our waves finally die on the unyielding shore, as their energy dissipates. They are gone in a tumble of white water.

Extracted from The Wavewatcher's Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, published by Bloomsbury on 7 June at £14.99. To order a copy for £14.49 (including UK mainland p&p), go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. © Gavin Pretor-Pinney Limited 2010

Man 'Survives Without Food' For 70 Years © Sky News 2010

Indian doctors are studying a remarkable 83-year-old holy man who claims to have spent the last seven decades without food and water.

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Man 'Survives Without Food' For 70 Years Enlarge photo

Military medics hope the experiments on Prahlad Jani can help soldiers develop their survival strategies. The long-haired and bearded yogi is under 24-hour observation by a team of 30 doctors during three weeks of tests at a hospital in the western city of Ahmedabad.

Two cameras have been set up in his room, while a mobile camera films him when he goes outside, guaranteeing round-the-clock observation. His body will be scanned and his brain and heart activity measured with electrodes.

"The observation from this study may throw light on human survival without food and water," said Dr G. Ilavazahagan, who is directing the research.

"This may help in working out strategies for survival during natural calamities, extreme stressful conditions and extra-terrestrial explorations like future missions to the Moon and Mars by the human race."

Since the experiment began on April 22, Jani has neither eaten nor drunk and has not been to the toilet. "The exercise of taking this yogi under the medical scanner is to understand what energy supports his existence," Dr Ilavazahagan added. "Jani says he meditates to get energy. Our soldiers will not be able to meditate, but we would still like to find out more about the man and his body."

Jani, who dresses in red and wears a nose ring, grew up in Charod village in the Mehsana district in Gujarat. He claims to have been blessed by a goddess when he was aged eight, which has enabled him to survive without sustenance.

Iceland volcano: why we were lucky we weren't wiped out

The volcanic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajokull has caused travel chaos and misery. But we were lucky. An eruption in the future could wipe out the human race.

The field of gold that bloomed too late: Daffodils left to rot after long winter delays start of flowering season

Farmer Philip Parrett with his ruined crop of daffodils on his farm in Hampshire

Why FW de Klerk let Nelson Mandela out of prison Alex Duval Smith in Cape Town The Observer, 31.01.2010

On 11 February 1990, the then president of South Africa, FW de Klerk, took the fateful decision to release Nelson Mandela, the charismatic hero of the struggle against apartheid. Twenty years on, he talks about the circumstances that led him to set the world's most famous political prisoner free, launching a new era in a divided country
Mandela's release *

After 26 years in captivity, Nelson Mandela did not want to be set free straight away. Two days before his release, the world's most famous political prisoner was taken to see President FW de Klerk in his Cape Town office.

The president got a surprise. "I told him he would be flown to Johannesburg and released there on 11 February 1990. Mr Mandela's reaction was not at all as I had expected," said De Klerk. "He said: 'No, it is too soon, we need more time for preparation.' That is when I realised that long hours of negotiation lay ahead with this man."

Mono Lake, California: 'home to arsenic-loving beings' Hannah Devlin

It is the classic sci-fi scenario: discovering aliens, not in outer space, but right here on Earth, sitting next to you in the workplace, serving food in your local restaurant, or, scariest of all, in your own home.

**The premise might sound like the film Men in Black, but this week it will consume the great minds of science at a meeting of Britain’s most venerable institution, the Royal Society.

Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University, will suggest tomorrow that the search for extra-terrestrial life should be focused right under our noses. His audience will include representatives from Nasa, the European Space Agency and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, while Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society and Astronomer Royal, will also lead one of the sessions.

Addressing the meeting to mark the 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme — a quest that has fallen far short of its objectives — Professor Davies will argue that demonstrating that life has appeared more than once on Earth would be the best evidence yet that it must exist elsewhere in the Universe.

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He told The Times: “We need to give up the notion that ET is sending us some sort of customised message and take a new approach.”

According to Professor Davies, “weird” microbes that belong to a completely separate tree of life, dubbed the “shadow biosphere”, could be present in isolated ecological niches in which ordinary life struggles to survive. Likely hiding places include deserts, scalding volcanic vents, the dry valleys of Antartica or salt-saturated lakes.

One team, led by Felisa WolfeSimon, of the US Geological Survey, is investigating the possibility that places that are heavily contaminated with arsenic, such as the Mono Lake in California, might support forms of life that use arsenic in the same way that other life forms use phosphorus.

Not all are convinced by the “shadow biosphere” concept. Colin Pillinger, who led the Beagle 2 Mars landing mission, said: “I prefer to deal in scientific fact — this is wildly science fiction. You’d be off your trolley to go searching for arsenic-based life.”

Professor Pillinger, who is due to speak at the Royal Society today, argues that Mars remains the best bet for finding alien organisms.**

The conference will also address the social implications of the search for alien life. Albert Harrison, from the University of California, Davis, will discuss how human beings might respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence.

“It is easy to imagine scenarios resulting in widespread psychological disintegration and social chaos,” he said. “But historical prototypes, reactions to false alarms and survey results suggest that the predominant response to the discovery of a microwave transmission from light years away is likely to be equanimity, perhaps even delight.”

Victorian Rhapsody: Queen guitarist Brian May on the photos of a forgotten Britain that became his secret obsession By BRIAN MAY on the detective trail. 16.01.2010. editing in progress
When I was about 12 years old, Weetabix gave away a series of 3-D picture cards featuring animals - you would find them nestling between the box and the inner bag. The idea was that you could send off for a special 'Vista-Screen' viewer which, when the pictures were inserted, made them leap into amazing 3-D.

The effect was pure magic - a window into another world. It was the beginning of a love affair that has lasted most of my life, and has drawn me into an extraordinary trail of historical discovery.

Stereoscopy - to give 3-D imaging its proper name - is simple in principle. In real life our eyes see two slightly different versions of the same view - and our brains work to combine these into an instant read-out. Stereoscopy is a form of photography that works in the same way.

Two photographs are taken of the same scene, one from the position of each eye. When viewed through a stereoscope (like the one pictured below) the brain combines these images and interprets the small differences to give us a perception of depth, and the three-dimensional shape of objects. The original pictures were taken long before colour film and were painstakingly hand-coloured.

As a youngster growing up in Feltham in the suburbs of London, I was transfixed by these images and began to scour street markets for old stereo cards. Little was known about the creators of the most ancient and intriguing images, but the same proprietary marks cropped up again and again: Elliott, Silvester, and TRW.

TRW, or Thomas Richard Williams (1824-71), rapidly became my favourite. But frustratingly, the only reference I could find to him was in a little book about stereo cards, which gave just one picture and contained scant detail: the rough dates of his birth and death and that he had created a series of rural stereo views called Scenes In Our Village. But it was enough to capture my imagination.

The series has fascinated and enchanted me ever since, and after 30 years of detective work, I now know that it comprises 59 exquisite scenes, taken in and around an idyllic village of the Victorian age, featuring many local characters.

Scenes In Our Village achieved great popularity at the time it was produced, in the 1850s, but then all but disappeared, until my co-researcher and I were able to rescue it. It's been a bit like an archaeological dig! The photographs now represent an important historical document of a bygone age.

Cards from the series are rare, but, on tour for many years with Queen, I got to know specialist dealers in all the cities that we played in, and would spend hours trawling through dusty boxes in their backrooms, seeking out these gems. I found them all over the world - in America, France, Germany, even Australia. This is not, I admit, the usual leisure activity for rock stars on the road..

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BRIAN MAY WRITES: A magnificent 1850s view of the river - tranquil with a hint of suspense. Across the water lies Ferry Farm, busy with goods for the village of Hinton Waldrist, to be delivered by ferry. To the right we can see nets drying

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TURNING BARLEY: The photographer, T.R. Williams, captures perfectly the locals of Hinton Waldrist going about their daily pursuits (although to take the photo without blurring, he would have persuaded them to freeze for a minute or two).

Despite the century and a half between us, I have always felt a powerful affinity with TR Williams - an almost physical connection that spans the decades. He was interested in art for art's sake, but he was also compelled to communicate his art to an audience, to elicit a response.

As a musician, I feel the same way. I make music because I love it, and I really can't help doing it, but the greatest thrill is in the communication - in the fact that people 'out there' get excited about it as well.

When Queen stopped touring, I enlisted the help of photographic historian Elena Vidal to help piece together information about Williams's life and work. The biggest mystery of all was the identity of 'Our Village'. Some people even questioned whether the village was real or merely a composition of images from different places.

I had wrestled with this problem for years when suddenly, in a Eureka moment, I realised that someone out there must live near the church in the series. I published a picture of it on my website, and within 36 hours six people (including two from Italy) had correctly identified it as St Margaret's Church in Hinton Waldrist, which now lies in Oxfordshire, but then in Berkshire. This was the discovery I had been waiting for. I immediately jumped in the car and drove there with a great feeling of anticipation.

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THE SCHOOLMISTRESS: A poignant image, the retired village schoolmistress sitting in her neat, ordered world. Is she fondly musing on the fortunes of all her former pupils - or was she a fearsome battleaxe?

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GLEANERS RETIRING: The weariness of the labourers, returning from the fields, is palpable. The lady in pink has, understandably, moved during exposure - hence her head appears to have disappeared.

It was an extraordinary spine-chilling moment when I finally saw the church that I had been studying remotely for half of my life. It was almost unchanged - almost suspended in time. I tried to find the same position from which Williams had first photographed it - which just so happened to involve standing on the roof of my car. I took a snap from there.

Today Hinton Waldrist has four streets, 160 houses, two farms and a population of 333 - and is stuffed with cars - but in the Victorian age it was a rural idyll: thatched cottages, rosy- cheeked girls and contented elderly women

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LITTLE MARY AND HER MAGPIE: On the table sits a magpie, at which the girl gazes fondly. As the magpie is not blurred by movement, it's unlikely to have been alive. A mechanical model bird, perhaps.

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THE DAME AND SPINNING WHEEL: This could not be further away from the industrial madness of the Victorian age. A traditional way of life that was under threat, and this was the last in the village.

After an apprenticeship to a pioneering daguerreotypist, Antoine Claudet, he became a hugely successful portrait photographer in his own right. His daughter Elizabeth married a famous lens-maker, Dallmeyer; my chap with the suitcase was - and is - a Dallmeyer.

Scenes In Our Village is probably TRW's greatest work - a labour of love. In our book A Village Lost And Found, Elena and I have compiled and annotated the whole series for the first time ever, and the book comes with a new plastic stereoscopic 'viewer' of my own design.

It has been an amazing journey, and I hope people will get as much pleasure from these pictures as I have. They really do portray a lost world - perhaps a better world in many ways - and in startling realism. It is, forgive me, a kind of magic.

• A VILLAGE LOST & FOUND by Brian May & Elena Vidal is published by Frances Lincoln at £35. sat at spinning wheels. Elena Vidal and I were soon able to find other buildings that stand to this day, and 19th century maps have helped us to pinpoint the site of many houses long since gone.

In the churchyard we found the crumbling gravestone of one of the characters featured in the photographs - pig farmer John Sims. Finally it had become clear to us that TR Williams's picture series was set entirely in Hinton Waldrist and that we were standing on the very same ground as those people he'd photographed 150 years earlier.

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THE BLACKSMITH'S SHOP: A wonderful scene showing a cross-roads of the Hinton Waldrist where this vital man worked. His house is still there in the picturesque Oxfordshire settlement.

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JOHN SIMS AT HIS PIGSTY: I love this picture because after finding the village in 2003, we found John Sims's gravestone - the first proof that the beautiful picture series WAS the story of real people in a real village.

Our research was further helped along by some amazing strokes of fate. A chap wrote to me, out of the blue, and asked if he could visit my house in Surrey. It used to belong to his grandfather, and he remembered spending Christmas there.

I invited him down, and he said he was bringing a suitcase full of material relating to an old photographer, TR Williams - had I heard of him?

In a remarkable coincidence, it turned out that my correspondent was a direct descendant of Williams, and it dawned on us that this suitcase of TRW memorabilia must have resided in my own house at the end of the 19th century. I was living in a house which had belonged to the grandchild of the man I had been researching for so long.

Educated as a scientist, I don't really relate to 'destiny' or 'fate', but such an extraordinary coincidence does make me wonder if there aren't 'more things in Heaven and Earth....'

By now we had managed to piece together something of Williams's life. He was a Londoner who seems to have spent some time in Hinton Waldrist as a boy.

Old Map Shows China was the Centre of World. 2010-01-13

A rarely seen 400-year-old map that put China at the centre of the world and identified Florida as "the Land of Flowers" went on display on January 12th at the Library of Congress in the United States.

North America part of a 400-year old map created by Matteo Ricci [Photo: Global Times]

The map created by Matteo Ricci was the first in Chinese to show the Americas. Ricci, a Jesuit missionary from Italy, was among the first westerners to live in what is now Beijing in the early 1600s. Known for introducing western science to China, Ricci created the map in 1602 at the request of Emperor Wanli.

Ricci's map includes pictures and annotations describing different regions of the world. Africa was noted to have the world's highest mountain and longest river. The brief description of North America mentions "humped oxen" or bison, wild horses and a region named "Ka-na-ta."

Several Central and South American places are named, including "Wa-ti-ma-la" (Guatemala), "Yu-ho-t'ang" (Yucatan) and "Chih-Li" (Chile).

The Ricci map gained the nickname the "Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography" because it was so hard to find.

This map - one of only two in good condition - was purchased by the James Ford Bell Trust in October for $1 million, making it the second most expensive rare map ever sold. The library bought another of the world's rarest maps, the Waldseemuller world map, which was the first to name "America," for $10 million in 2003.

The Ricci map going on display had been held for years by a private collector in Japan and will eventually be housed at the Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. It map symbolizes the first connection between Eastern and Western thinking and commerce, said Ford W. Bell, co-trustee of the fund started by his grandfather, General Mills founder James Ford Bell.

The map was being shown publicly for the first time in North America. It measures about 3.7 by 1.5 metres and is printed on six rolls of rice paper.

The Library of Congress rarely exhibits artifacts it does not own because its holdings are so vast, but curators made an exception for the Ricci map. It will be on view through April alongside the Waldseemuller map and later will be shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The library also will create a digital image of the map to be posted online for researchers and students.

Ti Bin Zhang, first secretary for cultural affairs at the Chinese Embassy, said the map represents "the momentous first meeting of East and West" and was the "catalyst for commerce."

No examples of the map are known to exist in China, where Ricci was revered and buried. Only a few original copies are known to exist, held by the Vatican's libraries and collectors in France and Japan.

Editor: Du Xiaodan | Source: CRI

Vatican reveals Secret Archives

A 13th-century letter from Genghis Khan’s grandson demanding homage from the pope is among a collection of documents from the Vatican’s Secret Archives that has been published for the first time. By Nick Squires in Rome 01.01.2010

In a letter dated 1246 from Grand Khan Guyuk, pictured, to Pope Innocent IV, Genghis Khan's grandson demands that the Pontiff travel to central Asia in person

The Holy See’s archives contain scrolls, parchments and leather-bound volumes with correspondence dating back more than 1,000 years.

High-quality reproductions of 105 documents, 19 of which have never been seen before in public, have now been published in a book. The Vatican Secret Archives features a papal letter to Hitler, an entreaty to Rome written on birch bark by a tribe of North American Indians, and a plea from Mary Queen of Scots.

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The book documents the Roman Catholic Church’s often hostile dealings with the world of science and the arts, including documents from the heresy trial against Galileo and correspondence exchanged with Erasmus, Voltaire and Mozart. It also reveals the Church’s relations with princes and potentates in countries far beyond its dominion.

In a letter dated 1246 from Grand Khan Guyuk to Pope Innocent IV, Genghis Khan’s grandson demands that the pontiff travel to central Asia in person – with all of his “kings” in tow – to “pay service and homage to us” as an act of “submission”, threatening that otherwise “you shall be our enemy”.

Another formal letter in the archive highlights the papacy’s political role. In 1863 Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States, wrote to Pope Pius IX claiming that the civil war raging across America was entirely due to “Northern aggression”.

“We desire no evil to our enemies, nor do we covet any of their possessions; but are only struggling to the end that they shall cease to devastate our land and inflict useless and cruel slaughter upon our people.”

Other letters in the archive are more personal. In a 1550 note, Michelangelo demands payment from the papacy which was three months late, and complains that a papal conclave had interrupted his work on the dome of St Peter’s Basilica.

A yellowed parchment covered in neat black script reveals details of the 14th century trials of the Knights Templar on suspicion of heresy, after which members of the warrior-monk order were pardoned by Pope Clement V.

Some of the documents are already well-known, including a parchment letter written by English peers to Pope Clement VII in 1530, calling for Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon to be annulled.

An entreaty written to Rome by another British monarch, but in very different circumstances, is also reproduced in exquisite detail. In 1586 Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote from Fotheringay in Northants to Pope Sixtus V, a few months before she was beheaded for plotting against her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, pledging her eternal allegiance to Rome.

The document includes letters written to Hitler by Pope Pius XI in 1934 and one received by his controversial successor, Pius XII, from Japan’s Emperor Hirohito.

“An aura of mystery has always surrounded this important cultural institution of the Holy See due to the allusions to inaccessible secrets thanks to its very name, as well as to the publicity it has always enjoyed in literature and in the media,” Cardinal Raffaele Farina, a Vatican archivist, writes in the preface to the book, which was produced by a Belgian publisher, VdH Books.

One of the most unusual documents is a letter written on birch bark in 1887 by the Ojibwe Indians of Ontario, Canada, to Pope Leo XIII. The letter, written in May but datelined “where there is much grass, in the month of the flowers”, addresses the pontiff as “the Great Master of Prayer” and offers thanks to the Vatican for having sent a “custodian of prayer” (a bishop) to preach to them.

Although scholars have had access to the secret archives since 1881, they remain closed to the general public.

This is a brilliant story... The boy who paints like an old master

His pictures cost upwards of £900, there are 680 people on a waiting list to buy them, and his second exhibition sold out in 14 minutes. Patrick Barkham meets the gifted artist Kieron Williamson, aged seven

In pictures: Kieron Williamson's best work

Patrick Barkham The Guardian, 29.12.2009

After Gliman by Kieron Williamson. Click on the magnifying glass for a larger version

Kieron Williamson kneels on the wooden bench in his small kitchen, takes a pastel from the box by his side and rubs it on to a piece of paper.

"Have you got a picture in your head of what you're going to do?" asks his mother, Michelle.

"Yep," Kieron nods. "A snow scene."

Because it is winter at the moment, I ask.

"Yep."

Do you know how you want it to come out?

"Yep."

And does it come out how you want it to?

"Sometimes it does."

Like many great artists, small boys are not often renowned for their loquaciousness. While Kieron Williamson is a very normal seven-year-old who uses his words sparingly, what slowly emerges on the small rectangle of paper in his kitchen is extraordinarily eloquent.

This month, Kieron's second exhibition in a gallery in his home town of Holt, Norfolk, sold out in 14 minutes. The sale of 16 new paintings swelled his bank account by £18,200.

There are now 680 people on a waiting list for a Kieron original. Art lovers have driven from London to buy his work. Agents buzz around the town. People offer to buy his schoolbooks. The starting price for a simple pastel picture like the one Kieron is sketching? £900.

Kieron lives with his dad Keith, a former electrician, his mum, who is training to be a nutritionist, and Billie-Jo, his little sister, in a small flat overlooking a petrol station. When I arrive on a Saturday afternoon, Kieron and Keith are out. When Kieron returns in football socks and shorts, I assume he has been playing football. But no, he has been replenishing his stock of pastels in Holt, a chichi little place where even the chip shop has grainy portraits for sale on its walls.

Artist Kieron Williamson, age seven, painting at home in Holt, Norfolk. Photograph: Graham Turner

From Jan Lievens to Millais, there have been plenty of precocious geniuses in the art world. Excitable press coverage has compared Kieron to Picasso, who painted his first canvas, The Picador, aged eight.

"We don't know who Picasso is really," says Keith.

"I know who Picasso is," interrupts Kieron. "I don't want to become Picasso."

Who would he like to become? "Monet or Edward Seago," he says.

These days, however, we are often suspicious of child prodigies. We wonder if it is all their own work, or whether their pushy parents have hot-housed them. People who don't know the Williamsons might think Kieron is being cleverly marketed, particularly when they hear that Keith is now an art dealer.

The truth is far more innocent. Two years ago, a serious accident had forced Keith to stop work and turn his hobby – collecting art – into an occupation. The accident also stopped Keith racing around outside with his son. Confined to a flat with no garden, surrounded by paintings and, like any small boy, probably influenced by his dad, Kieron decided to take up drawing. Now, father and son are learning about art together.

Kieron is rubbing yellows and greys together for his sky. "There's some trees going straight across and then there's a lake through the centre," he explains. Is this picture something you have seen or is it in your imagination? "I saw it on the computer and every time I do the picture it changes." he says, handling his pastels expertly.

Keith ducks into the kitchen and explains that Kieron finds pictures he likes on the internet. Rather than an exact copy, however, he creates his own version. This winter scene is imagined from an image of the Norfolk Broads in summer.

Figures at Holkham by Kieron Williamson

At first, Kieron's art was pretty much like any other five-year-old's. But he quickly progressed and was soon asking questions that his parents couldn't answer. "Kieron wanted to know the technicalities of art and how to put a painting together," says Michelle. Hearing of Kieron's promise, one local artist, Carol Ann Pennington, offered him some tips. Since then, he has had lessons with other Norfolk-based painters, including Brian Ryder and his favourite, Tony Garner.

Garner, a professional artist, has taught more than 1,000 adults over the last few decades and Kieron, he says, is head and shoulders above everyone. "He doesn't say very much, he doesn't ask very much, he just looks. He's a very visual learner. If I did a picture with most students, they will copy it but Kieron is different. He will copy it and then he will Kieronise it," he says. "It might be a bit naive at the moment but there's a lovely freshness about what he does. The confidence that this little chap has got – he just doesn't see any danger."

Garner says his parents have been brilliant at shielding Kieron from the business side and the pressure this invariably brings. Keith and Michelle are extremely proud, and protective, and perhaps slightly in awe of their son. They insist that Kieron only paints when he wants to.

"We judge ourselves every day, wondering whether we are making the right choices," says Michelle. "Kieron is such a strong character you wouldn't get him to do anything he didn't want to do anyway. It's a hobby. Some could argue he's got such a talent, why aren't we doing more for him in terms of touring galleries every weekend. We are a family and we've got Billie-Jo to consider; you've got to strike a balance." Boat at half way house by Kieron Williamson

With all the people wanting paintings, I ask Kieron if he feels he has to do them. He says no.

So you only paint when you want to? "Yep."

Do you have days when you feel you don't want to paint?

"Yep."

So you only do it when you're in the mood?

"Yep."

How many paintings or drawings do you do each week? One or two? "About six."

Is he a perfectionist? "You've got a bit of an artist's temperament, haven't you?" says Michelle, softly, as Kieron continues wielding his pastels. "You get really frustrated if it doesn't work out. You punched a hole in the canvas once, didn't you?"

That was rare. Sometimes, however, Kieron will produce "what we classify as a bag of trosh," says Michelle. "He's just got to go through the motions. It's almost as if it's a release. It's difficult to explain – it's the process that he enjoys, because there are days when he is not really focused on his work but he just enjoys doing it."

Sometimes, when they have taken Kieron out on painting trips in the countryside, the little boy has had other ideas: he has gone off and played in the mud or a stream. He is still allowed to be seven years old.

What do his school friends think? Are they impressed? "Yep." A few moments later, Kieron pauses. "I am also top of the class in maths, English, geography and science," he says carefully, rubbing the sky in his picture.

Kieron explains he is sticking to landscapes for now but plans to paint a portrait of his 98-year-old nan when she turns 100. What does he think about people spending so much money on his paintings? "Really good." Would he like to be a professional painter? "Yep." So he doesn't want to be a footballer when he is older? "I want to be a footballer and a painter."

Kieron enjoys playing football and, like his dad, supports Leeds United ("I haven't ever pushed him into it," says Keith quickly). What other things does Kieron like doing? "You played on the Xbox but then you got bored of it didn't you?" says Keith.

"You said I could have it out when Christmas comes," says Kieron.

"You can have it out in the holidays," promises Michelle. "He's a bit all-or-nothing with whatever he does, like the artwork. You have to pull the reins in a bit because otherwise he'd be up all night."

What would his parents say if Kieron turned around and told them he was not going to paint any more? "Leave him to it. As long as he's happy. At the end of the day, he's at his happiest painting," says Keith. "It's entirely his choice," says Michelle. "We don't know what's around the corner. Kieron might decide to put his boxes away and football might take over and that would be entirely his choice. We're feeling slightly under pressure at the moment because there is such a waiting list of people wanting Kieron's work, but I'm inclined to tell them to wait, really."

I doubt many artists could paint or draw while answering questions and being photographed but Kieron carries on. When he finishes, we lean over to look. "Not bad. That's nice," says Keith, who can't watch Kieron at work; I wonder if it is because he is worried about his son making a mistake but Keith says he just prefers to see the finished article.

"Is it as good as the one I did this morning or better?" asks Kieron.

"What do you think?" replies Keith. "It's got a nice glow on it, hasn't it?"

Kieron nods.

I would love one of his pictures but, I tell Kieron, he is already too expensive for me. "I can price one down for you," he says, as quick as a flash.

No, no, I couldn't, I say, worried I would be exploiting a little boy who is eager to please. I thank him for his time and hand him my business card. And Kieron trots into his bedroom, comes out with his business card and says thank you back.

Kieron's tips for landscape painting

1 "Go on holiday to where you really want to go, and be inspired."

2 "Start with acrylics, then watercolours, then pastels and then oils"

3 When you set out to do a landscape, "start with the sky first, top to bottom."

4 "When you do distance, it's lighter, and when you do foreground it comes darker."

5 "If you're doing a figure in the winter, do a brown head, leave a small gap, do a blue jacket and brown legs. Then with the gap get a red pastel and do a flick of red so it looks like a scarf."

6 "Keep on painting."
Top 10 British myths and legends

Whether they’re true, just good stories or somewhere in between, we all love a juicy myth or legend. Here are some of Britain’s best and the places to experience them.

Tintagel, Cornwall
Head to the wild and unspoiled cliffs of Tintagel to discover the mythical birthplace of King Arthur. It was medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth who first proposed the theory that Arthur was born here and that the wizard Merlin lived in a cave nearby. Ruined Tintagel Castle, set on the blustery cliff top, is a wonderfully romantic setting from which to explore the legend.

- Find out more about Cornwall

Robin Hood, Nottingham
We all know this one. Or do we? The outlaw hero and expert archer who robs the rich to feed the poor is about as English as tea and crumpets. But surprisingly little is known about the man himself. So don your suit of green, assemble some merry men and head to Nottingham to see if you can discover this elusive chap yourself. You might find him at the Major Oak, the ancient tree in Sherwood Forest rumoured to be his hideout.

- Find out more about Robin Hood

Glastonbury, Somerset
Glastonbury is knee-deep in supernatural associations. It stands at the junction of ley lines, the supposed mystical motorways of spiritual energy and is said to be the final resting place of King Arthur. Many believe a young Jesus Christ visited the site and that the town’s Chalice Well is the hiding place of the Holy Grail. A visit from Jesus is not as far fetched as it sounds - Joseph of Arimathea, a relation of Mary, owned a mine in the area.

- Discover more about Glastonbury

The Loch Ness Monster, Loch Ness, Scottish Highlands
Few things shout Scotland louder than the mythical monster that skulks in Loch Ness, Britain's longest body of fresh water. Sightings of Nessie have declined over recent years and despite high-profile submarine searches and much-disputed photographs, the beast seems quite content to maintain its low profile. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t catch a glimpse of Nessie, though. The loch itself is beautiful enough and the Highlands have sufficient mystery and magic for anyone.

- To learn more about Loch Ness, visit our Loch Ness destination guide

Rosslyn Chapel, Roslin, Scotland
This medieval church outside Edinburgh has long-standing links to the Knights Templar and Freemasonry. Carvings, rich in symbolism, sprout from every surface in an astonishing ‘essay in stone’ and many believe the Chapel is the repository for the Holy Grail – as speculated in The Da Vinci Code. Whatever you believe, Rosslyn’s forest of carvings is inspiring, mystifying and truly unique.

- To find out more about Rosslyn visit the chapel website

Jack the Ripper, East London
The serial killer known as Jack the Ripper was scarily real and the fact that 5 London prostitutes were brutally murdered in 1888 is beyond dispute. More mysterious is the identity of the killer with suspects ranging from artist Walter Sickert to author Lewis Carroll. Tour the fog-cloaked streets of East London to review the evidence for yourself. While Whitechapel retains something of the night, by day it has a great mix of hip boutiques, designer bars and, on Brick Lane, curry houses as far as the eye can see.

- Discover London with our destination guide

St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall
St Michael's Mount at Penzance is a small tidal island just off the coast of Cornwall. Legend has it the Mount was the work of Cornish giant Cormoran who built a fortified home from where he could terrorise the locals living in the coastal village of Marazion. But one night, local lad Jack crept over to the island and dug a hole disguising it with straw. When Jack woke him, Cormoran blundered into the hole never to escape. Walk up St Michael's Mount, see Jack’s hole and put your head against the nearby rock. It is said you can still hear the giant's heart beating.

- Learn more about Cornish legends at Visit Cornwall

Stonehenge, Salisbury
Stonehenge is the most famous megalithic (literally meaning ‘big stone’) monument in the world. Dating back an amazing 50,000 years, it’s drawn visitors for literally millennia. A place of ritual sacrifice and sun worship or a massive calendar? Nobody really knows its purpose, but no one who has ever been there will deny, it is truly awe inspiring.

- Get more information on Stonehenge

Wookey Hole Witch, Wookey Hole

Caves near Wells
Deep within the dank, underground caves of Wookey Hole lived the fearsome Wookey Hole Witch. Long ago, the villagers of Wookey implored the Abbot of Glastonbury to send a protector against this malevolent hag. Enter Father Bernard, Benedictine monk and crack exorcist. Bernard scooped up some water, quickly blessed it and threw it over the witch turning her to stone. You can still see the witch’s petrified form deep in these extraordinary caves.

- Find out more about the Wookey Hole Witch

Cerne Abbas Giant, Cerne Abbas near Dorchester
A gigantic figure etched in a chalk hillside guards the village of Cerne Abbas near Dorchester. Naked apart from a huge club he’s certainly an arresting sight. But his true meaning and even his age are in dispute. Is he an ancient fertility symbol, a cheeky 17th-century joke or something else entirely? The only time he’s been clothed is during World War II when he was disguised to prevent the enemy from using him as an aerial landmark.

- Find out more about the Cerne Abbas Giant

- Read about the UK's best Christmas lights

Child rights convention marks 20 years. Editor: Zhang Pengfei | Source: CCTV.com 2009-11-20

Special Report: Universal Children's Day |

The United Nations Children's Fund, or UNICEF, has commemorated the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Geneva. It marked the occasion on Thursday by releasing a new status report and holding a news conference in New York.

The State of the World's Children is a special edition of UNICEF's flagship report showcasing progress made since the Convention entered into force in September 1990.

The report noted that one of the Convention's outstanding achievements has been the improvement in child survival rates. The number of children who die before they reach the age of five has declined 28 percent between 1990 and 2008.

Nevertheless, UNICEF said that the rights of children are far from assured. An estimated one billion children lack access to proper health care, adequate nutrition, education, clean water, sanitation facilities or adequate shelter.

Ann Veneman, UNICEF Excutive Director, said, "The convention stands at a pivotal moment. Its relevance remains timeless. The challenge for the next 20 years is to build on the progress achieved, working together to reach those children who are still being denied their rights to survival, development, protection and participation."

Related stories

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China Maternal and Child Health Association set up 2009-11-17

Child neglect, poverty, abuse among top concerns over children: report 2009-11-13

UNICEF chief brings world attention to child, maternal undernutrition 2009-11-12

Spooky!... Britain's 10 most haunted places

1. Highgate Cemetery, London
By night, Highgate Cemetery is like something out of a horror movie. Eerie crooked gravestones, headless angles covered in ivy, dark overgrown passages between the tombs, it's no wonder this is Britain's number one ghost spot. Despite its chilling atmosphere, by day Highgate Cemetery showcases some of the Britain's most spectacular Gothic architecture, offers fascinating guided tours and is also the burial place of Karl Marx.

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2. Borley Rectory, Essex
The stories of Borley Rectory mainly come from the work of famous 18th-century ghost hunter, Harry Price. Price got involved in a case at the rectory after a newspaper ran a story about a phantom nun in 1929. His investigations led to the rectory being named 'The Most Haunted House in England'. The building was destroyed by a fire in 1939, but this has done nothing to dispel stories of spooky happenings, or deter ghost hunters from visiting the site.

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3. Pendle Hill, Lancashire
The area known as Pendle Witch Country in the Lancashire Pennines is dominated by the dark brooding mass of Pendle Hill. Nearby is the site of Britain's most famous (and most grim) witch trial – the case of the 'Witches of Pendle'. In 1612 ten so-called witches were hanged at Lancaster Castle and they are said to still haunt the local area. The hill itself has even featured on Living TV's Most Haunted.

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4. Red Lion, Avebury, Wiltshire
Pubs in Britain are often said to be haunted. This might be because they are often in ancient buildings, or it could just be that ghosts like a pint as much as the rest of us. The 400-year-old Red Lion Inn in Wiltshire is one Britain's most haunted pubs and is actually situated inside Avebury Stone Circle – the largest stone circle in Europe and a World Heritage Site. The pub is never short of weird shadows, orbs or light, ghostly figures, sudden cold spots and unexplained noises in the night... should you dare to stay over.

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5. Ancient Ram Inn, Wotten-under-Edge, Gloucestershire
Whether you believe in ghosts or not, a trip to the Ancient Ram Inn is an unsettling experience. Its creaky floorboards, cold bare walls, musty smells and dimly lit nooks and crannies epitomise everything a haunted house should be. And the stories attached to this creepy building are not for the fainthearted: Murder, satanism and child sacrifice are just a few of the dark deeds said to have occurred here, oh and did we mention apparently it's built on a pagan burial ground?

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6. Glamis Castle, Angus, Scotland
The spires, turrets, towers and statues seize your attention immediately. Glamis Castle is one of Scotland's most impressive castles, but not just for the amazing architecture and 600 years of royal history. Glamis is also one of Scotland's most haunted castles. Among the many spirits said to inhabit the place is the ghost of the Monster of Glamis – a hideously deformed child who was kept locked up in a hidden room his entire life.

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7. Tower of London, London
Not only is the Tower of London a World Heritage Site and one of the capital's favourite attractions, it's also home to many inhabitants of the undead variety. Which is no surprise really when you consider the number of beheadings, hangings and tortures that have gone on there. Some of the most-sighted ghouls include the Princes in the Tower, allegedly murdered by their uncle Richard III, Anne Boleyn and the White Lady, who apparently brings a strange perfume smell with her on her hauntings.

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8. Culloden Moor, near Inverness
On the 16 April 1746 the last-ever battle to take place on British soil was fought on Culloden Moor. Here the Jacobite rebellion, vastly outnumbered, was massacred there on the moor. And as you might think, any battle as bloody as this is bound to leave a few tormented souls. Legend has it that every year on the battle's anniversary, war-cries can still be heard as the warriors battle on in the after world.

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9. Llancaiach Fawr Manor, near Caerphilly
The peaceful, rural setting of Llancaiach Fawr Manor gives no clue to the turmoil of its history and the bloody civil war that was fought there. And these great battles have left no shortage of spectres wondering around the manor. In fact, strange things have been experienced in almost every room, along corridors and on stairs. Things seen, heard or felt, or sometimes odours in the air of violets or lavender - and on some occasions, roast beef!

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10. Berry Pomeroy Castle, near Totness, Devon
The 14th-century Berry Pomeroy Castle has two famous female ghosts; the White Lady and the Blue Lady. According to legend the White Lady is the spirit of Margaret Pomeroy, who starved to death while imprisoned in the dungeons by her jealous sister. Apparently she haunts the dark dungeons and rises from St Margaret's Tower to the castle walls. The Blue Lady is not confined to specific areas and is supposed to lure people into hidden parts of the ruin. Apparently it's a very bad idea to follow her!

Why are pirates called pirates?... because that's their name! Ahhh...ha..ha!

My preference for relaxing reading, are biogaphies. I came across this new publication about one of our most famous pirate hunters, Captain Woodes Rogers and Blackbeard, probably Britain's most notorious pirate of the 18th century. A second feature gives more information of his background and escapades.

PIRATE HUNTER: The Life Of Captain Woodes Rogers by Graham A. Thomas (Pen & Sword Ltd).

He beheaded Blackbeard and hanged cut-throats by the dozen... the life of history's most ruthless pirate hunter.
By Andrew Roberts 6th December 2008

Despite the calm sea, the chase was on. Sand was thrown across the decks to stop them becoming slippery with blood, and the men set up nets under the masts in case rigging came tumbling down, shot off by cannon fire. To stop flying splinters, hammocks and bedding were stuffed in the netting, while sheets of lead were laid out ready to plug leaks from small arms fire and cannon shot at the waterline. To prevent the men from scuttling to safety below deck while the fight was on, hatches were shut tight.

The date was December 21, 1709, and after 16 months at sea, two tiny British frigates under the command of Captain Woodes Rogers had finally caught sight of one of the richest prizes afloat - the 500-ton Spanish galleon, the Encarnacion, on her way to Acapulco.

A painting by artist Jean Leon Jerome Ferris depicts the notorious pirate Blackbeard (wearing the red coat)

A painting by the artist Jean Leon Jerome Ferris depicts the capture of notorious pirate Blackbeard (left)

The Encarnacion was loaded down with bejewelled snuffboxes, pearls, rich tapestries and priceless china made for the Queen of Spain, as well as laced ivory fans, embroidered silk gowns, more than 1,000 pairs of silk stockings, chests of musk, tons of rare spices and other plunder valued at more than £1 million on the London market - equivalent to several hundred million pounds today.

Captain Woodes Rogers was a privateer - a pirate in all but name - whose expeditions were funded by British businessmen in return for a share of the booty, and sanctioned by the Navy on condition that he confined his attacks to enemy vessels.

And he was so successful, so consummately aware of the tricks of the trade, that he was eventually persuaded by George II to turn from poacher to gamekeeper.

In an age when brutality and ruthlessness were the law of the ocean, he become the most successful pirate hunter of all time. Utterly fearless, he circumnavigated the globe, overcoming mutiny, scurvy, tornadoes and starvation, not to mention the cutlasses, grapeshot and broadsides of the vessels he attacked.

He discovered the real Robinson Crusoe - a Scots seaman named Alexander Selkirk, who had been marooned on an uninhabited island off Chile for four-and-a-half years after a row with his captain - and it was his friendship with the writer Daniel Defoe that led to the novel. By the end of his career, he had become Governor of the Bahamas, charged with stopping the 2,000 or more pirates who were decimating British trade in the area.

Following intense hand-to-hand fighting, his men killed and beheaded the infamous Blackbeard, leaving the body of the world's most feared pirate riddled with pistol balls and slashed raw by 20 cutlass wounds.

Such was their triumph in his death, they displayed his 'glowering head' on the bowsprit of one of their vessels.

Now, 300 years after he captured that fabulous Spanish galleon the Encarnacion, a new book, The Pirate Hunter, by the veteran military historian Graham A. Thomas, tells Woodes Rogers' remarkable story.

Nor does the author attempt to romanticise the tale: he rightly points out that then - as now - piracy was a murderous, vicious way of life, based on heartless plunder, terror and rape.

Blackbeard (James Purefoy) as depicted in the 2006 BBC docu-drama

James Purefoy portrays Blackbeard in the 2006 BBC docu-drama

Born in Bristol in 1679, the son of a sea captain, Woodes Rogers married the daughter of an admiral. Before the age of 30, he had shown such seamanship and leadership that a consortium of Bristol merchants raised the money to buy two frigates - the Duke (320 tons and 36 guns) and the Duchess ( 260 tons and 26 guns) - with the commission to capture, ransom and rob any ships he found anywhere in the world.

As a privateer, Woodes Rogers was bound by no laws beyond his own morality. It was agreed that the plunder he brought home would be split two-thirds for the expedition's backers, and one-third to his officers and the crew of 340. On August 22, 1708, Rogers weighed anchor from Bristol, first setting sail for the Canaries. He was fortunate enough to have secured the services of William Dampier, an explorer who had twice circumnavigated the world and whose experience was to be invaluable.

Unfortunately, he was also forced to take along Dr Thomas Dover, who, as a major investor in the enterprise and the representative of the Bristol merchants, had to be given a major say in decision-making during the expedition. Woodes Rogers told his merchant backers that he hoped 'the blessing of God may bring vast riches to Great Britain'. As a precaution, he took 36 officers, twice the usual number, 'to prevent mutinies, which often happen in long voyages, and that we might have a large provision for a succession in case of mortality'.

Within a month, the little fleet had captured their first prize off Tenerife - a Spanish vessel loaded with two butts of wine and a hogshead of brandy. 'Now we are well stocked with liquors we shall be better able to endure cold when we get the length of Cape Horn,' Woodes Rogers wrote in his journal.

It took the two tiny ships - hardly bigger than modern fishing trawlers - ten days to round Cape Horn in January 1709, being buffeted by high gales that sent them rolling from beam to beam. Sails were lost and icebergs narrowly avoided, with every sailor soaked to the skin for days on end; but, nonetheless, they made it around the most treacherous sea lane in the world.

They were in the South Seas of the Pacific Ocean, and desperately short of food and fresh water. Going ashore on Juan Fernandez Island for new provisions, they found an 'abundance of crawfish and a man in goat's skins who looked wilder than the first owners of them'.

This was Alexander Selkirk, who had been put ashore on the island four years and four months previously, by a Captain Stradling with whom he had fallen out. He had been allowed to take his clothes, bedding, a pistol and some powder, tobacco, a hatchet and knife, a kettle, the Bible and some mathematical instruments - but no food.

He expected it to be a short visit, as he was convinced he would soon be picked up. Sadly, he was mistaken. Although ships visited the island during Selkirk's lonely sojourn, they were mostly Spanish and their crews had fired on him. Selkirk built a camp of goatskin tents. He found the first eight months the worst, but had succeeding in making fire by rubbing together two sticks of pimento wood, and had lived off goats that inhabited the island after they had escaped - along with cats and rats - from the ships and pirate vessels that had anchored there.

Johnny Depp stars as Captain Jack Sparrow in the film Pirates of the Caribbean

He devoured the turnips which grew plentifully; he exercised, ate well and became extraordinarily fit. When his knife broke, he made replacements out of the hoops of rotten barrels left by earlier ships that had come in for water.

To keep down the island's rat population after he had woken one night to find them gnawing his feet, he used goat meat to lure more than 100 cats into his compound, where they slept every night.

In 1709, he saw sails and a British flag on the horizon, and then Woodes Rogers' men came ashore in long boats. They were startled by the 'wildman' running at them along the beach. 'He ran with wonderful swiftness through the woods and up the rocks and hills,' said Woodes Rogers later. 'We had a bulldog, which we sent with several of our nimblest runners to help him in catching goats; but he distanced and tired both the dog and men.'

At first it was hard to understand what Selkirk was saying, because he had not heard English spoken in more than four years. The terror of being alone 'in such a wild and desolate place,' he said, had been dulled by regular prayer and psalm-singing.

He told how he had danced with his pet cats and goats in the moonlight to avoid the near- suicidal loneliness that fell upon him, and how he had 'diverted himself sometime by cutting his name on trees'.

On his rescue, Selkirk joined the expedition and was soon given command of one of the vessels Rogers captured. He was introduced to foreigners as 'the Governor of Juan Fernandez Island', which in a way he had been. History sadly does not relate what passed between him and Captain Stradling when next they met, if ever they did.

After three months of waylaying ships off the west coast of South America, Rogers' fleet had increased to eight vessels, as well as the Duke and Duchess. Sadly, his 20-year-old brother Thomas was killed, shot through the head in one engagement against the Spanish.

On April 22, 1709, Rogers conceived a plan to capture and pillage the Peruvian town of Guayaquil, which he had learned contained a rich treasury.

A statue of Alexander Selkirk, on Robinson Crusoe Island. 'Rogers ordered his pinnace forward, heading for the shore, fully confident that the other boats would follow,' records Graham Thomas. Yet at the key moment, cowardly Dr Dover, representing the investors, argued that the town had been warned - bells were being rung and fireworks were going off - and that the assault was therefore hopelessly compromised. By the time they realised the next day that Guayaquil had merely been celebrating a saint's day, the town was, indeed, warned, and carried a vast fortune in gold inland to be buried in secret.

Rogers attacked nonetheless, but when they captured the town by a brave frontal assault, all they found was 'flour, peas, beans and jars of wine and brandy'. So, they negotiated with the Spanish not to raze it to the ground and managed to extract 22,000 silver pieces of eight out of the authorities before sailing away.

Throughout his piratical career, Rogers enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for treating his prisoners with respect. They were ransomed for the maximum possible price, it was true, but the women were treated with civility, and the men allowed to retain their dignity, often being invited to dine with Rogers.

The ultimate prize for all English pirates between 1565 and 1815 was the Manila galleons. These vast, well-armed ships carried huge riches on both legs of their journey between Manila and Acapulco.

Going westwards, they carried silver pesos, rubies, pearls, jade, gold and silver plate. Those sailing eastwards towards New Spain (Mexico, California and Central America) carried spices and silks for the European markets.

For a privateer to capture a well-laden Manila galleon meant never having to work again. By late November 1709, things were going badly for Rogers' fleet. Water was low, all the turtles (their emergency rations) had been eaten, many of the crew were ill and sailors were stealing each other's bread, even at the risk of being flogged and then clapped in irons in the hold.

Rogers knew they could not backtrack southwards to Cape Horn because the Spanish, with hugely superior forces, were waiting for them there. 'We are now something dubious of seeing the Manila ship,' he wrote disconsolately. 'It's nearly a month after the time they generally fall in with this coast.'

Yet just as doubt was giving way to despair, at 9am on December 21, off the coast of California, a lookout in the crow's nest spotted a sail seven leagues (21 miles) away, and the fleet gave chase.

Rogers had spent the many months at sea drilling his gun-crews so that they could fire faster and more accurately than any enemy. That way, he hoped the British pirates would be able to take on the larger, 500-ton, 50-gun Encarnacion. After a long chase, 'both ships were parallel, and firing broadsides at each other at point-blank range.

'Thickening, choking smoke from the roaring guns filled the air, shrouding both ships with a black gloom, while above the whine of shot, the splintering of wood and the ripping of sails came the whip-crack sounds of small arms fire as the snipers in the rigging of both ships opened fire, trying to pick off the officers on the decks of each ship.' Rogers later wrote of how 'They return [fire] as thick for a while, but they did not ply their guns as fast as we'.

'Surgeons lit their lanterns below decks,' records Graham Thomas, 'spreading canvas on the wooden operating tables and laying out their instruments, knives, saws, probes, ligatures and gags to stop the men screaming as they cut off arms or legs while assistants brought boiling pitch to cauterise the men's wounds.'

At one time, a 12lb cannonball hit and split the mizzenmast of the Duke. Had it come down, it would have spelled the end for the ship, with the crew winding up prisoners of the Spanish. Luckily, it held. Soon afterwards, Rogers was hit in the left cheek by a musket ball which tore away a large part of his upper jaw and knocked several teeth out onto the deck. He stayed conscious and fought on, however, writing out his orders 'to prevent the loss of blood and because of the pain I suffered by speaking'. The Spanish struck their colours - or surrendered - soon afterwards.

Rogers' capture of the Encarnacion was a great feat of leadership and seamanship, but after long legal wranglings once he had returned home with his plunder, he wound up with only £1,600 of the prize money. It hardly covered the debts his wife had notched up in the three years of his absence.

For this reason, he decided to accept George II's commission to sail to the West Indies as Governor of the Bahamas, to root out the piracy that was threatening to strangle all trade in the Caribbean. Rogers landed at Nassau in 1718 and conducted a vicious, but ultimately successful war against the 'disorderly, unwashed bunch of cutthroats' he hunted down there.

On one occasion, he hanged eight pirates in one day (although he spared a ninth at the last minute when he discovered his 'loyal and good' parents came from Weymouth.)

Understanding well the mind of a pirate, he was the scourge of the Jolly Roger until his death in 1732.

Shipwreck clues could clear Blackbeard of sinking his ship to swindle his crew

He was history's most feared pirate, striking terror into seafarers as he cut a bloodthirsty swathe through the Caribbean and North Atlantic. By Jasper Copping

Blackbeard. Photo: from Hulton Archive.

New research has found that Blackbeard may be innocent of one of the most notorious charges against him. For almost 300 years, the British pirate captain has stood accused of deliberately sinking his flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge, so he could swindle his crew out of their share of loot they had plundered.

Marine archaeologists, who are conducting a diving expedition on the vessel's presumed wreck, now believe it may have run aground by accident. They have even found evidence suggesting that Blackbeard made repeated attempts to rescue the stricken craft.

They have discovered a large pile of ballast, including anchors and several cannon, in the middle section of the ship. They believe Blackbeard ordered the crew to move the heavy items from their original positions, near the bow of the vessel, back towards the stern in an effort to lift the vessel's bows from the submerged sandbank onto which it had run.

It follows the discovery of an anchor on the sea bed, 450ft (137m) away from the ship, which experts believe would have been used to try to winch the boat free.

Chris Southerly, chief archaeologist for the project, said: "If Blackbeard had intended to sink the ship on purpose, this seems an awful lot of labour and effort to make it look good to the crew, to allay their fears that he was abandoning them. "The main ballast pile, which has two large anchors and at least six cannon and a huge pile of ballast stones, is just about amidships, roughly where the upper aft deck would have started. "It would have been very hard to move things further aft than that, because the deck is on a different level and there is a wall in the way. They may have moved things as far aft as could easily be done, to try to save the ship and then abandoned the effort, realising it still wouldn't save the ship. The impression, from what I have seen, is that it was an accident."

The ship ran aground on a sandbank about a mile from shore on June 10 1718, as Blackbeard's flotilla of four vessels was heading for Beaufort Inlet, in the British colony of North Carolina. Days earlier, Blackbeard had blockaded the major port of Charleston, South Carolina, and knew that the Royal Navy would be closing the net around him. Historians have long believed that he deliberately grounded his largest vessel so that he could split up his followers in the ensuing chaos, thus "downsizing" his crew and ensuring the loot was transferred to another vessel.

In the event, that is precisely what he did, escaping with the treasure and stranding 30 men on a nearby island. But Mr Southerly added: "I think he probably just made the most of a bad situation."

Blackbeard is believed to have been born Edward Teach, or Edward Thatch, in Bristol, in 1680. He fought as a privateer for the British, attacking Spanish and French ships in the War of the Spanish Succession before turning to piracy. His troop captured a French slave ship called La Concorde near the Caribbean island of St Vincent in November 1717 and renamed it Queen Anne's Revenge.

It became his flagship, sailing alongside three smaller sloops. His flotilla is said to have taken 45 ships. Blackbeard's striking appearance and character has inspired many subsequent depictions of pirates, most recently in Pirates of the Caribbean, the Hollywood trilogy starring Johnny Depp. He is said to have had 14 wives and would tie burning fuses into his long beard during battle, to give himself a demonic appearance.

On one occasion, while playing cards with a member of his crew, he is said to have shot him in the kneecaps under the table. After the loss of the Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard sought and was granted a pardon. But he continued to seize ships, and the Royal Navy were sent to track him down. He was killed in a battle with the Royal Navy in November 1718.

Blackbeard's head was cut off and his body tossed overboard. According to legend, his headless body swam around his ship five times before he finally died. His head was attached to the bowsprit of a Navy ship and his skull was later used as a punch bowl.

The wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge lies in about 23 feet (seven metres) of water. It was first discovered in 1996 but the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources is now funding a project to excavate and recover items from the ship, as it is feared they could be lost as sand around the wreck is eroded away.

Previous expeditions have recovered items from the stern section and the current project, which started last month and is expected to continue until November, is examining the mid section, where the ballast pile is located.

The team have so far recovered 9,000 flecks of gold, which add up to just a quarter of an ounce (seven grams), suggesting that Blackbeard was able to get the treasure off the ship. Mark Wilde-Ramsing, project leader, added: "The crew don't seem to have been in survival mode. They were able to get most things they wanted off."

Items recovered so far include navigational instruments, carpentry tools and bells. The new findings have provoked controversy among experts. Angus Konstam, author of Piracy: The Complete History, welcomed the research but said the discoveries could still be consistent with Blackbeard having deliberately run the ship aground.

"Blackbeard would have had to try to dupe his crew," he said. "When the ship went aground, it was in his interest to make it look as if it was an accident, to avoid getting lynched by his own crew. But the great thing about archaeology is that it can come up with new ways to stand theories on their head."By Jasper Copping

I feel Fine.. Some things in China never cease to amuse me. Some people refer to them as 'Chinglish', which I think is rather insulting, as although the companies or organisations concerned clearly haven't consulted a natural English Speaker with their translations - and there are many of us around in schools and universities, who would willingly help out, at least they have made an effort. I prefer to call it 'Peoney English'. I think it sounds better and goes someway to bridging the cultural divide.

Begining with the Nescafe, individual sachets (packets) of coffee. The instructions for opening the item said 'Tear here', but the nick for begining the operation was on the other side of the packet.

I love this one... from information leaflet in Dabao SOD Milk moisturising cream.

'Dabao SOD Milk contains rich SOD (Superoxide Dismietase) and extract of Ginseng and Astragalus Root (percious Chinese herbal medicine) as it's main ingredients. It can effectively retard the progress of the skins senility, resolve pigmentation and nourish the skin..... Through constant use, it would bestow on you a look so graceful and tender that you could become more lovely and charming.' That makes me feel good. There's hope for me yet!

Then I opened a new toothbrush from Sion to clean my teeth...

'The highest quality shape hair brush, it can go deep into the tooth sews, which is the commonest can't, pure out the dental dirts, and work the brush the bacteria spot of tooth.'

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Sion's website is: www.sion.com.cn e-mail: yzsion@sina.com

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