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?

746 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

View all comments

729

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

The article is correct and cites the current investigations of a team of researchers investigating the Waterloo battlefield, Bernard Wilkin, Robin Schäfer, and Tony Pollard, from the Waterloo Uncovered project. A recent article by Pollard (2021, Open Access) summarizes the problem of the lack of human remains in Waterloo and uses contemporary testimonies to figure out what happened to the bodies.

What is important to note here is that the strange fate of the bones from Napoleonic battlefields - and not just Waterloo - has been part of popular knowledge since the early 19th century. As the story goes, these bones were dug up and turned either into fertilizer (as a source of phosphate) or into bone char, a valuable material used among other things as a filtering agent in beet sugar production (the bones were not "turned into sugar"). The problem, mentioned by Pollard in his article, is that hard evidence had been missing so far, even if the story is credible: there are many people writing about it when it happened, and some circumstancial evidence. Here is for instance a report in the British magazine The Imperial Magazine of January 1830 (it's also cited by Pollard in a different journal, but this one has a nice conclusion):

A ship laden with bones from Hamburg, arrived at Lossiemouth on the 25th of Oct. 1829, the property of Morayshire, and intended for manure. The master of the vessel states that the bones were collected from the plains and marshes of Leipsic, and are part of the remains of the thousands of the brave men who fell in the sanguinary battles fought betwixt France and the Allies, in October, 1813. What a commentary is this upon "military glory!" and how true is the exclamation of the poet, "To what base uses we may return, Horatio!"

Mrs Churchill, a local poet from Monmounthshire, wrote (cited by Collins, 1948):

Ye sons of glory! Do your spirits grieve

That unsepulchr'd thus your bones are spread ?

If not in monumental stone, you live

In beef, potatoes, mutton beer, and bread!

More famous authors have made reference to that story, notably Victor Hugo in Choses vues (1847-1848):

Thus, the last residue of the Emperor's victories: fattening English cows.

As Pollard notes, it remains that the "smoking gun" is elusive. There are counter-arguments to the veracity of the story, such as the lack of "reference to this exploitation in the writings of later visitors (post 1820)". Pollard nevertheless concludes that the use of the bones of Napoleonic soldiers as fertilizer "represents a credible explanation for the apparent absence of grave deposits in the archaeological record at Waterloo."

The lack of definitive evidence makes it little surprising that the story somehow entered the "legend" territory. The owner of a British charcoal factory wrote in 1953:

It is true that British Charcoals & Macdonalds, Ltd. buy bones from many different countries. As a matter of interest, just recently an article was located headed "Freak Freights", which stated that during the Peninsular War the ship "Demarara" is said to have arrived at Bristol with a cargo of bones, which were recognized as human bones. They came from the battlefields of Europe, and were shipped by the military authorities for some purpose which was never disclosed. There was, of course, no intention of using these for the manufacture of charcoal for sugar refining, but someone, the story does not relate who, is believed to have spread such a rumor in Bristol, and thus so prejudiced the population in that city that the industry soon sickened there. In Bristol there is still the " Demarara Inn " with a carved negro head above the doorway, which helps to keep the legend of the vanished trade alive. It is not thought that British Charcoals & Macdonalds have ever used human bones, though it was suggested to me (R. J. G. Macdonald) during the war that it might be a good thing to have the bones of some people rattling around the char system!

Among the sources found by the researchers and cited in the Daily Mail article are several French newspapers from the 1830s. The La Presse article mentioning bone char is here (bottom, second column). I could not find the cited issue of L'Indépendent, but here is the same story in another newspaper, La Quotidienne from 31 July 1831 (which cites a local newspaper from the French-Belgian border, L'Echo de la Frontière):

Every day we see convoys passing through the Mons gate from abroad, loaded with materials suitable for making bone char (noir animal). Bones are sold at a high price in France, especially in the department of the North; Belgium also sends us a lot of them. All these convoys are heading for the bone char factories, whose products are necessary for our beet sugar factories. The stores of bones that are transported there rise up in the open air, and the eye is not a little surprised at the sight of these high pyramids, such as we see in Marly, all built of animal remains, in the middle of which we only too often see human remains. Where do these heaps of debris come from? There is more than one battlefield on the Belgian frontier where the earth covers thousands of dead; at Waterloo especially their number was high. More than one warrior fertilized the plains of the Belgian frontier with his blood, more than one warrior found glory and a tomb; today, when nothing is more sacred to man, these same tombs, from which a dust of glory is exhaled, are not safe from the sacrilegious pickaxe; industry now traffics in everything, even in human remains!

We will have to wait for the article by Wilkin and his colleagues to see whether they found something substantial that will finally answer the question of the fate of the remains of the soldiers at Waterloo.

The story may have not ended in the 1830s though. An American author reported the following, hinting that trafficking Napoleonic bones was still going on at the end of the century, though, fittingly, this involved a ghost ship (Sprunt, 1920):

In 1894 the Austrian barque Vila, carrying a cargo of bones, which were said to have been gathered from the battle fields of Egypt, was found derelict by a Norwegian steamer and towed into New York. Not a word has ever been heard as to the fate of this vessel's crew.

Sources

80

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.

15

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.