News From The Dark Side Of The Moon

The Illustrated London News August of 1864 was an action packed edition, from which I could have created many posts .... but in this series of blasts from the news past, I will create just one more post from that edition. So after a post from Ceylon, and one from North America, I have created a post from the Pacific area - New Zealand, Australia and Japan.

The first story is from New Zealand where there was a simple story on the arrival of news from England - an event which was a very important for a people who were months away from news from home. They may as well have been on another planet or the dark side of the moon.
 

News From The Other Side Of The World

.... it took a month for the packet ship to arrive from Sydney alone, and months for the ships from England to get to Australia.

The Main Post Office In Auckland 1864

This is particularly interesting as there was brief mention of military actions in New Zealand, which must have been wars with the native Maori's .... so the news from home and family would have been even more wanted.

Fighting In New Zealand

Then there was a report on the building of the Tarradale railways viaduct completing the Melbourne to Sandhurst line. This was in Victoria Colony, the richest in Australia at the time ....

A Big Achievement In Australia.

And the arrival of flat bottomed schooners in Sydney New South Wales having sailed 16,000 miles to get there was big news. Its easy to forget how many ships were sunk on trips of those distances in 1864 ...

The West Hartley - One Of Two Flat Bottomed Schooners

Finally, The Illustrated London News reported on a land, so strange and exotic that it had been closed to westerners up until 1853, when Admiral Perry from the US Navy had forced it to open up. So this was only a decade after that opening up ..... Japan really was a foreign land.

Report From Osaca in Japan

Osaca Street Scene in 1864

The Japanese Army Modernised Quickly After This Scene in 1864

Shermans March To The Sea

In another from the blast from the past series of posts, 'The Illustrated London News August 1864' continues to provide some interesting material .... of course the American Civil War was still raging, although the South was losing by now (but perhaps wasn't fully aware of this fact). 'The Illustrated London News' was reporting on the events as 'foreign' or 'other news'.

So the first report is underneath a story about Greece, in which an 'Admiral Canaris' formed part of the government .... by a strange coincidence that was also the name of the Nazi German Admiral who was killed for plotting against Adolf Hitler (Apparently the German Admiral Canaris believed that his family was related to the Greek admiral, freedom fighter and politician Constantine Kanaris, which influenced his decision to join the navy).

So back to the the Civil War .... General William T. Sherman is reported to be encircling Atlanta after his march to the sea, with shock and awe tactics, with repeated clashes between the armies, creating causalities in the order of 10,000 dead, and occurring on almost a daily basis as General Robert E Lee desperately tried to prevent the cities encirclement. There are also reports on other theatre's of the war .....

Reports On Sherman's March To The Sea

The news also included reports from Imperial India which interestingly show how much latitude was allowed to local leaders .... with reports of battles between an Ameer and his brother Afzul Khan over a succession. This also carried an update on General Grant destroying the Confederate fort of Petersburg.

And finally, finishing other US news was a report from the US Customs in San Francisco which illustrates that even in a civil war, life goes on and also that nothing is new under the sun. Opium smuggling was just as big a problem then as now, with the smugglers using false eggs to bring in the drugs ......   

I hope you have enjoyed the postings on the US in August 1864. 

Please note that for the purposes of the post, I have cleaned the newsprint up, and joined the latest news section to the main posting images. 

Elephant Catching In Ceylon

As part of my blast from the past series from the old newspapers that I own ... 

The Illustrated London News - 13th August 1864

I thought that you might be interested in how to capture an elephant in Ceylon. Not a story that we see in the newspapers of today, but the sort of subject matter of abiding interest to our ancestors of even just sixty years ago, let alone those of 150 years ago, when much of the world was fearful, heathenish, exotic and mysterious in about equal measures.