crooked paths

On January 1 1858 two hundred and sixty-eight convicts arrived at the Swan River colony at Fremantle, Western Australia, after a 100 day voyage on the sailing ship Nile. One oval-faced middling stout prisoner with light brown hair, grey eyes, and bearing a "round lump on crown of head", his convict record notes, a labourer five-foot six and a quarter inches, married with one child, was exiled from England forever.

Transported for life, Edward Agar was a master criminal in his forties. With his common-law wife, Fanny Kay, "a respectable-looking female", London newspapers reported, "about 26 years of age whose parents reside at Margate", Edward was a supergrass and minor London celebrity whose evidence solved the sensational Great Train Robbery of May, 1855. Ninety-one kilograms of gold was stolen from a South Eastern Railway Train between London and Bologne. Most of the haul was never seen again. But Agar was ensnared in a sting and sandbagged by a tangle of forged documents and police informers, convicted unfairly and sentenced unjustly, some said. Fanny Kaye and the child remained in England, in the care of Detective Inspector Thornton, of the London Metropolitan Police.

Railways were like the Internet of the Victorian era; Edward Agar and his associates were skilled technology hackers and social engineers. Edward was a friend of London Barrister James Saward, the original Jim the Penman, a master forger who practised the trade from chambers in Temple Bar at the Royal Court of Justice.

The year of the Great Train Robbery, 1855, a hundred-mile long set of hoof-like footprints, impressed in light overnight snow, appeared in rural Devon on the morning of February 9. Rumours of a Devil-like appirition raging along the English coast swept London, and few were surprised. All eyes turned to the Thames, and the devilish fog that stalked the river and its banks in old London town, bringing cholera and death, and the odour of hell itself, to the heart of Victorian Empire.

Three million people lived packed on the banks of the Thames alongside slaughterhouses, tanneries, shops, breweries, wagoners, hostelries, fullers, stables, dyers, metal works, soap factories, saddlery's, tenement apartments, people four, eight and sixteen to a room. The river itself was so polluted by human, animal and industrial waste that it "was an opaque pale brown fluid", scientist Robert Faraday wrote, and "A Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror" to the more classically inclined George Hamilton-Gordon, English Prime Minister and fourth Earl of Aberdeen.

1855 was the year the London Metropolitan Board of Works was established for the "merciful abatement of the epidemic that ravaged the Metropolis". It assumed the task of eliminating London's miasma, a noxious invisible vapour or mist synonymous with pollution, or "stink".

"The smell was of the most horrible description, the air being so foul that explosions and choke damp were frequent. We were very nearly losing a whole party by choke damp, the last man being dragged out on his back through two feet of black fetid deposit in a state of insensibility."

It was an established scientific fact of the day that miasma caused contagions of cholera, though opinion divided on the question of how. There were miasma skeptics, the contagionists, who believed disease was spread by touch. But the orthodox airists generally prevailed, along with Robert Boyle's Suspicions about the Hidden Realities of the Air .

…this is not as many imagine a simple and elementary body, but a confused aggregate of 'effluviums' from such differing bodies, that, though they all agree in constituting by their minuteness and various motions one great mass of fluid matter, yet perhaps there is scarce a more heterogeneous body in the world (1674)

The London summer of 1858 was much warmer than usual. And the smell from London's fouled river and sewers grew far worse than normal to spread, jeered some, as far as Paris, carried on hot winds to Vienna, even Rome. Chemicals by the barrel and gallon and cartload and ton: chloride of lime, chalk lime, slaked lime, and carbolic acid, were mixed and dumped and poured on the river and did nothing to relieve the stink at all. The Thames was prayed over, and some whispered sacrificed to in the dead of night, all to no avail. Parliament retired, the law courts closed, and those who could fled the city. After a fortnight it rained.

By the time of London's Great Stink of 1858 six separate inquiries and commissions, kind of the Australian Multiparty Committee on Climate Change of their day, had examined one hundred and thirty and more proposed solutions to the miasma problem without achieving a single thing. But in a few months following the Great Stink the English Parliament endorsed Metropolitan Board of Works engineer Joseph Bazalgette's three million pound plan, already partly underway, to integrate thousands of miles of underground sewers. And build enormous rotative beam engines, triple-expansion steam propelled pumps named Victoria, Albert, Alexandra, and Prince Consort, after the Queen and her family. The powerful pumps rotated and lifted and belched eleven times a minute, nearly sixteen thousand times each day, push-pulling London's waste and effluviums and unbearable horrors through cavernous outfalls and lifts to emerge and spew out in the Thames River Estuary by Barking and Crossness.

The airists and the contagionists continued their ferocious debates over cholera and miasma that failed to abate as the epidemics did, by 1865, after Bazalgette's massive pumps began their grisly work. It turns out that neither Boyle's airists or the modern and skeptical contagionists got it right. Microorganisms, bacterium Vibrio cholerae which contaminate water and food, do all of cholera's dirty work instead. London's royal family of pumps sucked them all out to sea anyway.

Progress. Never a straight line.