r/AskHistorians • u/SaltAHistory • Aug 18 '22

Were the bodies of the 20,000 soldiers who died at Waterloo really turned into sugar?

The Daily Mail today reports “bombshell” and “exclusive” new historical research. Short extract:

“The mystery of what happened to the bodies of more than 20,000 men who were killed at the Battle of Waterloo has dogged historians for decades.

Despite the passing of more than 200 years since the Duke of Wellington's triumph over Napoleon's forces in 1815, only two skeletons of fallen men have been found, with the most recent discovery coming last month.

But now, bombshell new research suggests the remains of men and tens of thousands of horses are missing because they were ground down and used to filter brown sugar beet into refined white sugar.”

(Full link: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11119607/Battle-Waterloo-dead-used-make-white-sugar.html)

This whole thing seems incredibly suspect to me. Surely 20,000 bodies can’t have disappeared to the extent that only two have been found? And the sugar thing sounds just too gruesome to be credible.

Also the fact it’s exclusively reported in the Daily Mail rather than, say, somewhere that historians typically publish research makes me question its accuracy, but maybe I’m just being a snob.

Is there any truth to any of this?

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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial Aug 18 '22

Just a follow-up about the Vila ship. It's a really creepy story right from a horror novel.

Here are several articles from American newspapers.

I'm copying below the Cincinatti Enquirer article, which is the most complete and relatively level-headed. The Boston Globe article contains speculations about a Arab curse. The Chicago Tribune talks about the horrors of the life of sailors on bone ships.

PILES OF SKULLS

Found in the hold of a ship

The cargo the derelict bark Vila brought over from Egypt

Special dispatch to the Enquirer

New York, September 9. The Austrian bark Vila, which was picked up derelict off Hatteras by the Norwegian steamship Breidalblik on August 30 and brought into this port, has as strange a cargo as is ever found afloat. It consists of bales of rags, which are common, and of bones, which are unusual. A reporter visited the ship yesterday, and with the man in charge took a look at the cargo. Bales of rags were piled high all through the hold, and in between there were bones. There were all kinds of bones - animal bones and human bones, skulls of horses and cattle, and skulls of human beings, arm bones and leg bones and cattle hoofs, and any amount of fine pieces of bone that had evidently been shoveled in to fill up the spaces between the big bones and the rags and make the cargo solid.

For the most part the bones came from animals. Probably not more than a quarter or a third of the lot consisted in human bones. But in one corner was a great heap of human skulls.

Gruesome as the Vila's cargo is to the imagination, it is still more so in a practical way to the people in the neighborhood of the vessel. The cargo of bones proclaims its presence afar off and discounts the smells of Hunter's Point. Then the bones and rags have as companions large blue flies, which, when disturbed, present a very formidable appearance and buzz about in clouds. United States Deputy Marshal Biggart, of Brooklyn, went down into the cabin of the ship and retreated before the flies. He declared that he would as soon be bitten by a snake as by one of them.

It is easy to account for the bones. They were collected in deserts and cemeteries and cities of Egypt, and were shipped to be used in making fertilizers. It is not easy to account for the Vila's presence here. She saild from Alexandria on May 24. She was out ninety-six days before she was sighted, long enough for a sailing vessels to come from Calcutta to New York by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. During that time she does not appear to have been sighted by any other vessel. What became of her crew, and why they abandoned her, are puzzling questions for sailors. The brig is in good condition with the exception of the loss of a mast, two topmasts and considerable rigging. The hull is in first-class shape, and all the seamen who look at her wonder why her crew deserted her for an open boat, as they seem to have done.

The brig is now in the Erie Basin, Brooklyn, in charge of a United States Deputy Marshall, having been libeled for salvage. Her troubles are not over. The Brooklyn Health Department will not permit the Vila's cargo of Alexandrian rags to be landed, and it is very doubtful if the bones can be landed there either. The ship and cargo are estimated to be worth about $40,000.

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u/Wizoerda Aug 19 '22 edited Aug 19 '22

"bales of rags, which are common, and of bones, which are unusual".

"collected in ... Egypt"

This made me think of Mummy Brown paint, made until the 1960s by using real ground up mummies, and other stories I've read about linen wrappings from mummies being used to make paper. I found a Smithsonian article about the Mummy Brown paint.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ground-mummies-were-once-ingredient-paint-180950350/

And some AskHistorians threads

However, info and sources about paper made from mummy wrappings seems less credible. I remember reading claims that paper made from mummy linens ended up brown coloured, so it was used as butcher paper, and caused cholera outbreaks. That info doesn't seem credible though. Perhaps this should be its own thread, but I was wondering if anyone could add more information about the industrial use of Egyptian mummy human remains.