p>Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 731 / December 29, 1877
THE ROMANCE OF ACCIDENT
Many of our most important inventions and discoveries owe their origin to the most trivial circumstances; from the simplest causes the most important effects have ensued. The following are a few culled at random for the amusement of our readers.
The trial of two robbers before the Court of Assizes of the Basses-Pyrénées accidentally led to a most interesting archæological discovery. The accused, Rivas a shoemaker, and Bellier a weaver, by armed attacks on the highways and frequent burglaries, had spread terror around the neighbourhood of Sisteron. The evidence against them was clear; but no traces could be obtained of the plunder, until one of the men gave a clue to the mystery. Rivas in his youth had been a shepherd-boy near that place, and knew the legend of the Trou d'Argent, a cavern on one of the mountains with sides so precipitous as to be almost inaccessible, and which no one was ever known to have reached. The Commissary of Police of Sisteron, after extraordinary labour, succeeded in scaling the mountain, and penetrated to the mysterious grotto, where he discovered an enormous quantity of plunder of every description. The way having been once found, the vast cavern was afterwards explored by savants; and their researches brought to light a number of Roman medals of the third century, flint hatchets, ornamented pottery, and the remains of ruminants of enormous size. These interesting discoveries, however, obtained no indulgence for the accused (inadvertent) pioneers of science, who were sentenced to twenty years' hard labour.
The discovery of gold in Nevada was made by some Mormon immigrants in 1850. Adventurers crossed the Sierras and set up their sluice-boxes in the cañons; but it was gold they were after, and they never suspected the existence of silver, nor knew it when they saw it. The bluish stuff which was so abundant and which was silver ore, interfered with their operations and gave them the greatest annoyance. Two brothers named Grosch possessed more intelligence than their fellow-workers, and were the real discoverers of the Comstock lode; but one of them died from a pickaxe wound in the foot, and the other was frozen to death in the mountains. Their secret died with them. When at last, in the early part of 1859, the surface croppings of the lode were found, they were worked for the gold they contained, and the silver was thrown out as being worthless. Yet this lode since 1860 has yielded a large proportion of all the silver produced throughout the world. The silver mines of Potosi were discovered through the trivial circumstance of an Indian accidentally pulling up a shrub, to the roots of which were attached some particles of the precious metal.
During the Thirty Years' War in Germany, the little village of Coserow in the island of Usedom, on the Prussian border of the Baltic, was sacked by the contending armies, the villagers escaping to the hills to save their lives. Among them was a simple pastor named Schwerdler, and his pretty daughter Mary. When the danger was over, the villagers found themselves without houses, food, or money. One day, we are told, Mary went up the Streckelberg to gather blackberries; but soon afterwards she ran back joyous and breathless to her father, with two shining pieces of amber each of very great size. She told her father that near the shore the wind had blown away the sand from a vein of amber; that she straightway broke off these pieces with a stick; that there was an ample store of the precious substance; and that she had covered it over to conceal her secret. The amber brought money, food, clothing, and comfort; but those were superstitious times, and a legend goes that poor Mary was burned for witchcraft. At the village of Stümen, amber was first accidentally found by a rustic who was fortunate enough to turn some up with his plough.
Accidents have prevented as well as caused the working of mines. At the moment that workmen were about to commence operations on a rich gold mine in the Japanese province of Tskungo, a violent storm of thunder and lightning burst over them, and the miners were obliged to seek shelter elsewhere. These superstitious people, imagining that the tutelar god and protector of the spot, unwilling to have the bowels of the earth thus rifled, had raised the storm to make them sensible of his displeasure, desisted from all further attempts to work the mine.
A cooper in Carniola having one evening placed a new tub under a dropping spring, in order to try if it would hold water, when he came in the morning found it so heavy that he could hardly move it. At first, the superstitious notions that are apt to possess the minds of the ignorant made him suspect that his tub was bewitched; but at last perceiving a shining fluid at the bottom, he went to Laubach, and shewed it to an apothecary, who immediately dismissed him with a small gratuity, and bid him bring some more of the same stuff whenever he could meet with it. This the poor cooper frequently did, being highly pleased with his good fortune; till at length the affair being made public, several persons formed themselves into a society in order to search farther into the quicksilver deposits, thus so unexpectedly discovered, and which were destined to become the richest of their kind in Europe.
Curious discoveries by ploughmen, quarrymen, and others of caves, coins, urns, and other interesting things, would fill volumes. Many valuable literary relics have been preserved by curious accidents, often turning up just in time to save them from crumbling to pieces. Not only mineral but literary treasures have been brought to light when excavating mother earth. For instance, in the foundations of an old house, Luther's Table Talk was discovered 'lying in a deep obscure hole, wrapped in strong linen cloth, which was waxed all over with beeswax within and without.' There it had remained hidden ever since its suppression by Pope Gregory XIII. The poems of Propertius, a Roman poet, long lurked unsuspected in the darkness of a wine-cellar, from whence they were at length unearthed by accident, just in time to preserve them from destruction by rats and mildew. Not only from beneath our feet but from above our heads may chance reveal the hiding-places of treasure-trove. The sudden falling in of a ceiling, for example, of some chambers in Lincoln's Inn revealed the secret depository of the Thurloe state papers. Other literary treasures have turned up in an equally curious manner. Milton's essay on the Doctrines of Christianity was discovered in a bundle of old despatches: a monk found the only manuscript of Tacitus accidentally in Westphalia: the letters of Lady Mary Montagu were brought to light from the recesses of an old trunk: the manuscripts of Dr Dee from the secret drawer of an old chest: and it is said that one of the cantos of Dante's great poem was found, after being long mislaid, hidden away beneath a window-sill.
It is curious to trace how the origin of some famous work has been suggested apparently by the merest accident. We need but remind the reader how Lady Austen's suggestion of 'the sofa' as a subject for blank verse was the beginning of The Task, a poem which grew to formidable proportions under Cowper's facile pen. Another example of is furnished by Lockhart's account of the gradual growth of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The lovely Countess of Dalkeith hears a wild legend of Border diablerie, and sportively asks Scott to make it the subject of a ballad. The poet's accidental confinement in the midst of a yeomanry camp gave him leisure to meditate his theme to the sound of the bugle; suddenly there flashes on him the idea of extending his simple outline so as to embrace a vivid panorama of that old Border life of war and tumult. A friend's suggestion led to the arrangement and framework of the Lay and the conception of the ancient Harper. Thus step by step grew the poem that first made its author famous. The manuscript of Waverley lay hidden away in an old cabinet for years before the public were aware of its existence. In the words of the Great Unknown: 'I had written the greater part of the first volume and sketched other passages, when I mislaid the manuscript; and only found it by the merest accident, as I was rummaging the drawer of an old cabinet; and I took the fancy of finishing it.'
What great events from trivial causes spring,
Charlotte Brontë's chance discovery of a manuscript volume of verses in her sister Emily's handwriting led, from a mutual confession of the furor poeticus, to the joint publication of their poems, which though adding little to their subsequent fame, at least gives us another instance of how much of what is called chance has often to do with the carrying out of literary projects. It was the burning of Drury Lane Theatre that led to the production of The Rejected Addresses, the success of which, says one of the authors, 'decided him to embark in that literary career, which the favour of the novel-reading world rendered both pleasant and profitable to him.' Most of us know how that famous fairy tale Alice in Wonderland came to be written. The characters in Oliver Twist of Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy were suggested by some sketches of Cruikshank,