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REBECCA WEAVER˜HIGHTOWER
Frontier
Fictions
SETTLER SAGAS AND POSTCOLONIAL GUILT
Frontier Fictions
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
Frontier Fictions
Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND, USA
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
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For Marcus
Acknowledgements
They say it takes a village to raise a child; it has taken more than a village
to write this book. To all of you who have helped my research and writ-
ing or provided inspiration and influence, please know that I am grateful.
You are too many to thank in this space. But I would like to call out the
following for special thanks:
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Index 235
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 The walls surrounding the historic Lower Fort Garry site
in Manitoba (Picture by the author) 3
Fig. 1.2 The empty tepee visitors pass to visit the Lower Fort Garry
site in Manitoba (Picture by the author) 4
Fig. 1.3 The frontispiece to Conquering the Wilderness… by Colonel
Frank Triplett presents its own settler fantasy 6
Fig. 2.1 Settler and Aboriginal Family Round a Fire, South Australia by
Edward Russell (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library
of Australia, collection number an5880827) 57
Fig. 2.2 A Native Family of New South Wales Sitting Down on an
English Settlers Farm, by Augustus Earle (Reproduced
courtesy of the National Library of Australia, collection
number an2818442-v) 58
Fig. 3.1 Still from the American “Crying Indian” Keep American
Beautiful public service announcement of 1971 82
Fig. 4.1 Peaceable Kingdom (1834), the version housed in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (US) and a detail from the
background of the same painting, showing the painting’s
animal analogy 123
Fig. 4.2 Peaceable Kingdom (1834), the version housed in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (US) and a detail from
the background of the same painting, showing the painting’s
human analogy 124
Fig. 5.1 An 1871 illustrated edition from Kingsley’s The Lost Child 173
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 5.2 The Little Wanderers, William Strutt’s painting of the living
Duff children resembling a postmortem drawing
(Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia,
collection number 3240607) 174
Fig. 5.3 A photograph by Jose Maria Mora of an unknown deceased
girl, posed as if asleep out in nature 175
Fig. A.1 Still from the YouTube video “Inside Voortrekker
Monument, Day of the Vow” that shows the cenotaph, the
shaft of sunlight, and the crowd of onlookers 200
Introduction: “Sorry Books”
and the Guilt That Never Goes Away
xiii
xiv INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
the first settlers’ hardship. Yet Need’s very next sentence complicates this
justification by acknowledging the prior existence of indigenous peo-
ple. The rest of his surveying party, he explains, was roasting “a haunch
of venison, bought of an Indian, as usual” (54). These “Indians” from
whom his men “as usual” buy meat were already present on the land
Need claims for his own.2 This prior existence, even if Need does not
acknowledge it, would have meant inhabitance, if not ownership.3 These
two juxtaposed sentences—one justifying Need’s ownership and the next
undermining it—show the competing demands settlers like Need had
to manage: while writing their own ownership into existence, they had
to account for the prior presence of indigenous people on the land they
want to claim, but in such a way that their settler ownership would not
be endangered.
Need presents an even clearer example of this cognitive dissonance a
year later:
experience guilt. Instead Frontier Fictions argues that texts like Need’s
would not have worked so hard to depict the heroic settler as undis-
puted landowner if doubt were not already circulating. Examining guilt
requires some nuance, though. Unlike Need’s account, protagonists of
most settler texts do not ponder being intruders. Instead, as this book
will illustrate, most reveal guilty thoughts and feelings through echoes,
efforts to bury or disguise them, and translucent fantasies that only par-
tially cloak the ghostly contours underneath.
As I have shared bits of this research in the decade it took to write
this book, I often encountered two responses. Some listeners patiently
explained that of course settlers felt guilt and wrote about it (as if this book
and its examination were unnecessary). These scholars reminded that guilt
over colonization and settlement is clearly visible in the work of writers
like Thomas Pringle, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others, as well as in the
work of benevolence and missionary societies. These texts not only indi-
cate an awareness that wrongs have been committed against indigenous
peoples, but also often express some level of culpability for those wrongs.
On the other hand, other listeners patiently explained that of course set-
tlers did not feel guilty (as if this book and its examination were anachro-
nistic). Guilt and feelings of responsibility for the treatment of indigenous
peoples, they said, are twentieth/twenty-first-century responses that I am
imposing on nineteenth-century people, who did not see indigenous peo-
ple as human or understand colonization as a form of invasion.
Frontier Fictions walks a line in the middle of these two reactions. It
recognizes authors on both poles, those who much discussed guilt and
those who completely ignored it, paying the greatest attention, as I will
explain, to texts that fall in between. Frontier Fictions examines how
ordinary settlers, perhaps not fully conscious of guilty feelings, expressed
ambivalence in subtle, indirect ways—misgivings flashing onto the pages
of otherwise typical settlement narratives. Thus this book conceptual-
izes guilt not just as the reaction of a few progressives with greater than
average sensitivity and insight, but as an understandable—even predict-
able—reaction to an emotionally difficult circumstance. Historians like
Henry Reynolds have likewise archived examples of ordinary people
expressing reservations about the morality of settlement, such as when
a Port Philip settler wrote in the 1840s “this right to Australia is a sore
subject with many of the British settlers… and they strive to satisfy their
consciences in various ways” (Frontier: Reports from the Edge of White
Settlement 162). Such direct discussions of guilty consciences are few and
xvi INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
far between. But one can only speculate how many more people expe-
rienced pangs of conscience than those with the literacy skills and time
to record them. Writing is all the evidence contemporary scholars have
to uncover complicated historical responses to colonization, so we must
unearth underlying guilt by analyzing stories that recur in text after text
about settlers and settlement, stories that betray all the hallmarks of what
psychologists and psychoanalysts call “defense mechanisms.”
Frontier Fictions, in focusing on narrative defense mechanisms, is a
book about psychological guilt and all the ways literature can provide
means to defend against that guilt. As I have indicated above, nine-
teenth-century European settlers and their descendants were and are
wrestling with complicated and often un(der)expressed guilt inherent in
the colonizing process, which throughout this book I refer to as “set-
tler guilt,” a state of mind that can be historically situated but that is
ongoing. The fields of settler colonial studies and postcolonial studies
would benefit from paying greater attention to settler guilt, especially to
how literature expresses and interacts with it.4 A greater understanding
of settler guilt will result in a more nuanced awareness of settlement as a
transnational, historic and contemporary phenomenon and appreciation
of literature as part of that culture. By reading texts like Catherine Parr
Traill’s Backwoods of Canada or Marcus Clarke’s For the Terms of His
Natural Life in terms of their expressions of or denials of psychological
guilt, we gain insight into the historic and contemporary transnational
situation that we call “settlement.”
Frontier Fictions investigates how the narrative tropes this book exam-
ines—the heroic settler, the “doomed” native, the coveted landscape, the
allegorical animal, and the lost child—together function to justify settle-
ment and so appear in texts across settler cultures. By exploring com-
monalities among settler cultures, this book recognizes that the settler
experience includes wrestling with guilt, even if denying it. These com-
monalities lead to studying settlement and its fantasy of legitimacy hori-
zontally across time and space instead of vertically as a phase in a nation’s
development, or as Patrick Wolfe recommends in “Settler Colonialism
and the Elimination of the Native,” as a structure, not an event—a
phrase that has become a touchstone of settler colonial studies and one
that grounds this study. And as a structure and not an accomplished
event, settlement as it continues must be reasserted, defended, and legit-
imized, even hundreds of years after its initial acts, since those of us liv-
ing in the nations that evolved from settler colonies are still existing in
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY xvii
this structure and are thus still settlers. Recognizing that settlement must
still be asserted, however, positions it as a structure that can be inter-
rupted or dismantled in the service of indigenous survivance, not as an
inevitability.5
By signing our name to this book we are recording our regret for the
injustice suffered by Indigenous Australians as a result of European settle-
ment; In particular the effect of government policy on the human dignity
and spirit of Indigenous Australians. We are recording our desire for rec-
onciliation and for a better future for all our peoples. By signing this book
we are demonstrating a commitment to a united Australia, which values
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, and provides justice and
equity for all.
Over one year, half a million Australians signed the over five hundred
Sorry Books and wrote further statements.6
Most of the statements added to the Sorry Books express regret and
communal guilt, like:
To be Australian is not to deny our history, which has shaped our Nation.
To be Australian is to accept what has happened in the past and to learn
from past events, in an effort to grow and develop our nation. I am
extremely ashamed and sorry for the mistreatment of Aboriginal people
and I would not only like to express my shame but also my hope that such
events will never again occur.
Indeed, much of the novel involves Thornhill dealing with the psy-
chological conundrum and the resulting guilt from settling already
inhabited land. When Thornhill sees evidence of indigenous crops, for
instance, he convinces himself that the plants grow wild. Then, when he
sees that “some other man had set foot here, worked it with his pick,” he
denies that fact, telling his son that animals had dug the dirt (140). But
indigenous ownership of the land Thornhill covets keeps being asserted.
He discovers rock paintings of a fish and his boat, evidence of contin-
ued indigenous habitation, since the paintings portray his own recent
arrival. Thornhill has an epiphany: “It came to him that this might look
an empty place, but … this place was no more empty than a parlour in
London, from which the master of the house had just stepped into the
bedroom. He might not be seen, but he was there” (206). Yet Thornhill
continues to pretend to himself and others that the indigenous claim
does not exist. And, when he cannot deny it any longer, he participates
in a communal massacre of the indigenous people, in an attempt to erase
them from “his” site—and psyche. The book’s ending shows, however,
that Thornhill’s guilt over these actions haunts him the rest of his life.
By imagining the thoughts of settlers, Grenville resurrects a nineteenth-
century settler guilt that has remained largely unrecorded. Similar efforts
have been made in the work of historians like Henry Reynolds, who have
labored to include the erased and denied violence of colonization in
Australia’s historic record.9 Grenville’s work to understand how “taking
land” became recast as “taking up land” parallels the work of this “sorry
book,” the one you are now reading; for Frontier Fictions takes as its aim
the recovery of the (often) unexpressed settler guilt of settlers and the
unpacking of the stories they and their descendants tell to sanitize colonial
violence. My argument is that we need not rely on contemporary novelists
like Grenville to imagine nineteenth-century settler guilt; instead we can
read the nineteenth-century literature itself for evidence, through the nar-
ratives that emerge as tropes across the settler corpus.
My third reason for interest in The Secret River concerns how it func-
tioned within early twenty-first century Australia’s wrestling with its own
continued settlement. The Secret River sparked the public’s imagination,
becoming a critically acclaimed best seller, adapted into a successful play
and film. The novel provided a cultural touchstone for a nation that
needed to have a conversation post-Mabo and work through its settler
guilt. Marguerite Nolan and Robert Clarke, in fact, show in “Reading
The Secret River” how it encouraged public debate about postcolonial
xxii INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
reconciliation. The Secret River is not alone in this work. The American
Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Canadian Thomas
King’s Green Grass, Running Water, and South African JM Coetzee’s
Disgrace all examine contemporary culpability and reoccurring narratives
of legitimacy.10 In some cases, as with the DVD of the Australian film
Rabbit Proof Fence (from Doris Pilkington’s book), which includes mate-
rials for discussion groups, the spurring of public debate about reconcil-
iation seems deliberate. Frontier Fictions argues that these texts, through
these conversations, aided the management of settler guilt not only of
writers but also of readers, who—through the novels—confronted,
explored, and sometimes denied their own settler guilt.
These recent texts present an apt analogy for the work of settler stories
in the nineteenth century, which also aided the confrontation, explora-
tion, and denial of guilt. However, evidence of the cultural and psycho-
logical work being performed by the nineteenth-century novels is not
always as clear with contemporary texts like The Secret River. Some texts
this book examines, like Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, were widely
read in their own time, but many were not. So the evidence is subtle and
elusive, as I attempt to recover reader responses without book reviews
of the day, historical studies of readership, or evidence that settlers were
reading each other’s work.11 Thus my focus on nineteenth-century texts
is often on what these stories of settler contact tell us about authors
struggling with feelings about settlement instead of on readers who I
can only suppose existed. My exploration, then, relies, as I will explain,
on the texts themselves and the repeated tropes they contain—stories
of heroic settlers, “doomed” natives, coveted land, allegorical animals,
and lost children—which repeat across four settler cultures, over two
centuries and beyond, because of the emotional release they provided and
continue to provide.
Spaces of Settlement
My explication of common tropes in nineteenth and twentieth/
twenty-first-century settler tales in order to better understand the
Anglophone settler experience demands that I cut a broad swath in
my analysis. Like James Belich in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler
Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939, I am fasci-
nated by the explosion of Anglo-settler colonies across the globe. And
like other texts of settler colonial studies, this project is comparative.12
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY xxiii
cultures and chronologies but also across various forms of media, includ-
ing print media but also paintings, book illustrations, television shows,
films, advertisements, monuments, museum exhibits, and tourist sites.
Such crossover is warranted, for, as Tanya Dalziell aptly explains in Settler
Romances and the Australian Girl, “the role popular texts played in the
production of settlers’ consent to colonial projects cannot be underesti-
mated” (6).
Frontier Fictions furthers the discussion of the settler experience by
looking at similarities in expression across time and space in order to
better understand the ambivalences of the settler psyche horizontally
as a continued experience of colonization, not vertically as a teleologi-
cal completed phase in a nation’s development. As such, the line of this
book’s argument tends to be more triangular than linear, as I compare
what a particular literary text says, what its author wrote and said else-
where, and the historical and cultural context in which the text was pro-
duced. Only by looking at a text as part of an interconnected triangle can
one see what it leaves out, alludes to, represses, denies, or deflects.
that the harmful act one committed was not justified” (“Collective Guilt”
2–3); but, in contrast, collective guilt, Branscombe and Doosje explain in a
related publication, “stems from the distress that group members experience
when they accept that their ingroup is responsible for immoral actions that
harmed another group” (Collective Guilt: International Perspectives 3). That
is, collective guilt need not involve participation in harm-doing; one only
needs to feel allegiance to or membership in the group responsible for the
harm-doing. As already introduced, Frontier Fictions further expands the
idea of collective guilt to “persistent collective guilt,” as a state of ontologi-
cal and moral guilt for an ancestor’s actions.
To better discuss this range of individual emotional responses to collec-
tive guilt, I propose a typology of four categories: Sensitivity, Ambivalence,
Disavowal, and Blindness, which can be seen in the expressions in the
Sorry Books already referenced as well as in the texts Frontier Fictions
will analyze. The first category, Sensitivity, is evident in articulation of
emotional guilt (and shame about oneself and culture in response to that
guilt). History is full of examples of Sensitivity and of texts written with
political aims or as part of benevolence movements, by intellectuals, activ-
ists, and abolitionists of slavery and colonization, including well-stud-
ied writers like Thomas Pringle and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The second
category, Ambivalence, can be characterized as the experience of emo-
tional guilt without full awareness and articulation of it. Guilt emerges
in Ambivalent writing as authors struggle with feelings they cannot quite
understand or admit, some denying these feelings, and others expressing
them in indirect ways. Many ordinary settlers, like Thomas Need, with
whom I began this introduction, display Ambivalence. My third category,
Disavowal, comes from the recognition that guilt exists with others but
the denial of it in oneself. Narratives of Disavowal are often bombastically
nationalistic, evoking indigenous people who are either absent or simplis-
tically evil. And the fourth category, Blindness, comes from the absence of
awareness of guilt in oneself or others and thus a lack of contemplation or
writing about it (though I might argue that we find hints of guilt in the
conspicuous absence of some topics). Distinction between being Blind or
Disavowing in relationship to guilt comes through a person’s response to
the issue of guilt. The Blind person would be confused (Why would they
feel guilty?) while a Disavowing person would be overly assertive of a lack
of guilt, indicating strong defensive feelings behind the denial.
These categories are not necessarily discrete or fixed. People can shift
relationship to guilt within their lifetime and even within the same nar-
rative. Though all are important, this book focuses on Ambivalence and
xxx INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY
Disavowal, where the writing provides the most insight into the com-
plicated settler position. Frontier Fictions does not focus on Sensitive
texts that obviously express guilt and have been the focus of much liter-
ary criticism already or Blind texts that omit discussion or even recogni-
tion of guilt. Ambivalent and Disavowing texts are both more revealing
and representative of the larger society as it debates and weighs its
conscience.
Unpacking expressions of guilt in settlement narratives and under-
standing how they function for individuals and the larger culture requires
the psychoanalytic concepts of defense mechanisms. Psychologists and
psychoanalysts explain that people respond to feelings of guilt by tell-
ing themselves stories that defend against or release psychological and
emotional discomfort. The repeated, cross-cultural narratives threaded
throughout settler literatures function as defense mechanisms, allow-
ing an individual and a culture to recast the violence of settlement into
something else.
As one might expect, this book draws upon the work of Sigmund
Freud and other psychoanalyts, but my use here, is, as Anne McClintock
explains in Imperial Leather, a “situated psychoanalysis.” That is, Freud
was able, better than anyone, to recognize and theorize the complexities
of the modern condition because he was both an analyst and product
of his time (nineteenth-century colonial-era Europe). I, like other critics,
find his work useful for describing the tangled thoughts and emotions
that grow out of the complicated self/other dynamic that was exacer-
bated by the empire.22 Certainly, as this book argues, inherent in impe-
rial expansion is underlying ontological and emotional guilt; and Freud’s
theories of responses to guilt, though he doesn’t make this connection
himself, make sense as a product of deeply ambivalent colonialism as well
as descriptor of it.
It was Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, however, who fully
theorized defense mechanisms in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense
(but again not connecting the behavior she witnessed to the impe-
rial world in which they lived), arguing that defense mechanisms must
operate on the subconscious level to be effective in reducing anxiety.
Psychologists since then have identified scores of defense mechanisms;
but the mechanisms that most show up in the literature Frontier Fictions
examines nevermind repression (trying to keep an unpleasant occurrence
from conscious thought), denial (manipulating perceptions to exclude
something unpleasant), identification (attributing to oneself the desired
INTRODUCTION: “SORRY BOOKS” AND THE GUILT THAT NEVER GOES AWAY xxxi
The petrol motor, which to-day is busily engaged all over the world in
driving thousands upon thousands of self-propelled vehicles or
automobiles, belongs to the important class of internal-combustion
engines. Combustion means the operation of burning, and an
internal-combustion engine is one in which the motive power is
produced by the combustion of a highly explosive mixture of gases.
In the ordinary petrol motor this mixture consists of petrol and air,
and it is made by means of a device called a “carburetter.” By
suction, a quantity of petrol is forced through a jet with a very fine
nozzle, so that it is reduced to an extremely fine spray. A certain
proportion of air is allowed to enter, and the mixture passes into the
cylinder. Here it is compressed by the rising piston so that it
becomes more and more heated, and at the right point it is ignited.
Combustion takes place with such rapidity that it takes the form of an
explosion, and the energy produced in this way drives forward the
piston, which turns the crank-shaft and so communicates motion to
the driving-wheels.
The part played by electricity in this process is confined to the
ignition of the compressed charge of petrol and air. This may be
done in two ways; by means of an accumulator and a small induction
coil, or by means of a dynamo driven by the engine. At one time the
first method was employed exclusively, but to-day it is used as a rule
only for starting the car engine, the second or magneto method
being used when the engine has started up.
In accumulator ignition the low-tension current from the
accumulator passes through an induction coil, and is thus
transformed to high-tension current. This current goes through a
sparking plug, which is fixed in the head of the cylinder. The sparking
plug contains two metal points separated by a tiny air gap of from
about 1/30 to 1/50 inch. This gap provides the only possible path for
the high-tension current, so that the latter leaps across it in the form
of a spark. The spark is arranged to take place when the piston is at
the top of its stroke, that is, when the explosive mixture is at its
maximum compression, and the heat of the spark ignites the
mixture, the resulting explosion forcing down the piston with great
power. In practice it is found better as a rule to cause the spark to
pass very slightly before the piston reaches the extreme limit of its
stroke. The reason of this is that the process of igniting and
exploding the charge occupies an appreciable, though of course
exceedingly small amount of time. Immediately on reaching the top
of its stroke the piston begins to descend again, and if the spark and
the top of the stroke coincide in time the explosion does not take
place until the piston has moved some little distance down the
cylinder, and so a certain amount of power is lost. By having the
spark a little in advance of the piston, the explosion occurs at the
instant when the piston begins to return, and so the full force of the
explosion is utilized.
In magneto ignition the current is supplied by a small dynamo.
This generates alternating current, and it is driven by the car engine.
The current is at first at low pressure, and it has to be transformed to
high-tension current in order to produce the spark. There are two
methods of effecting this transformation. One is by turning the
armature of the dynamo into a sort of induction coil, by giving it two
separate windings, primary and secondary; so that the dynamo
delivers high-tension current directly. The other method is to send
the low-tension current through one or more transformer coils, just
as in accumulator ignition. Accumulators can give current only for a
certain limited period, and they are liable consequently to run down
at inconvenient times and places. They also have the defect of
undergoing a slight leakage of current even when they are not in
use. Magneto ignition has neither of these drawbacks, and on
account of its superior reliability it has come into universal use.
In the working of quarries and mines of various kinds, and also in
large engineering undertakings, blasting plays a prominent part.
Under all conditions blasting is a more or less dangerous business,
and it has been the cause of very many serious accidents to the men
engaged in carrying it out. Many of these accidents are due to the
carelessness resulting from long familiarity with the work, but apart
from this the danger lies principally in uncertainty in exploding the
charge. Sometimes the explosion occurs sooner than expected, so
that the men have not time to get away to a safe distance. Still more
deadly is the delayed explosion. After making the necessary
arrangements the men retire out of danger, and await the explosion.
This does not take place at the expected time, and after waiting a
little longer the men conclude that the ignition has failed, and return
to put matters right. Then the explosion takes place, and the men are
killed instantly or at least seriously injured. Although it is impossible
to avoid altogether dangers of this nature, the risk can be reduced to
the minimum by igniting the explosives by electricity.
Electrical shot firing may be carried out in different ways,
according to circumstances. The current is supplied either by a
dynamo or by a battery, and the firing is controlled from a
switchboard placed at a safe distance from the point at which the
charge is to be exploded, the connexions being made by long
insulated wires. The actual ignition is effected by a hot spark, as in
automobile ignition, or by an electric detonator or fuse. Explosives
such as dynamite cannot be fired by simple ignition, but require to be
detonated. This is effected by a detonator consisting of a small cup-
shaped tube, made of ebonite or other similar material. The wires
conveying the current project into this tube, and are connected by a
short piece of very fine wire having a high resistance. Round this
wire is packed a small quantity of gun-cotton, and beyond, in a sort
of continuation of the tube, is placed an extremely explosive
substance called “fulminate of mercury,” the whole arrangement
being surrounded by the dynamite to be fired. When all is ready the
man at the switchboard manipulates a switch, and the current
passes to the detonator and forces its way through the resistance of
the thin connecting wire. This wire becomes sufficiently hot to ignite
the gun-cotton, and so explode the fulminate of mercury. The
explosion is so violent that the dynamite charge is detonated, and
the required blasting carried out. Gunpowder and similar explosives
do not need to be detonated, and so a simple fuse is used. Electric
fuses are much the same as detonators, except that the tube
contains gunpowder instead of fulminate of mercury, this powder
being ignited through an electrically heated wire in the same way.
These electrical methods do away with the uncertainty of the slow-
burning fuses formerly employed, which never could be relied upon
with confidence.
Enormous quantities of explosives are now used in blasting on a
large scale, where many tons of hard rock have to be removed. One
of the most striking blasting feats was the blowing up of Flood Island,
better known as Hell Gate. This was a rocky islet, about 9 acres in
extent, situated in the East River, New York. It was a continual
menace to shipping, and after many fine vessels had been wrecked
upon it the authorities decided that it should be removed. The rock
was bored and drilled in all directions, the work taking more than a
year to complete; and over 126 tons of explosives were filled into the
borings. The exploding was carried out by electricity, and the mighty
force generated shattered nearly 300,000 cubic yards of solid rock.
CHAPTER XXVIII
ELECTRO-CULTURE