Tales of the Unconnected

Behind The Galleries:

Blog Archive Posts: #14; #13; #12

Aberdyfi: What is the story behind 'The Bear of Amsterdam'?; How Bilbao was transformed by Frank Gehry's masterpiece; If ever an animal needed a PR makeover, it's the Hyena.

25 April 2021

#14 Aberdyfi: What is the story behind 'The Bear of Amsterdam'?

Perhaps, like me, you have been to the charming Welsh coast village of Aberdyfi (Aberdovey) and, in your quest for fish and chips, have come across a small seafront restaurant called 'The Bear of Amsterdam'. Despite selling a fine version of this great British dish, you'd be forgiven for not identifying it as part of the culinary family whose members include 'The Codfather', 'Plaice Station' and 'For your fries only'.

The Bear of Amsterdam? What on earth does that have to do with our sacred national institution?

Well, you'll have noticed from the sign above that 'The Bear of Amsterdam' was a seagoing vessel. The restaurant's name is a historical reference. No obscure fishy puns here. Not only that, but it's a reference peculiar to Aberdyfi.

To shed light on the mystery of this galleon toiling on the high seas, we have to travel back in time to 1597, when staunch Catholic Phillip II of Spain, with the help of his mighty armada, was making a third attempt to invade England.

He was nothing if not persistent.

His first attempt, in 1588, had ended with a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the English navy, with Sir Francis Drake as its second in command. After the armada had sailed into the English channel and docked at Calais, Drake sent in fireships to disperse the fleet. He capitalised on the ensuing panic by chasing the Spanish with nimbler ships, manned by more experienced gunners and inflicted heavy losses on them at the Battle of Gravelines, off the coast of Flanders.

A few of the remaining Spanish warships escaped and fled north, but many sank off the coast of Scotland and Ireland in treacherous storms, as they attempted to limp back to Spain. Philip's anticipated conquest had ended in disaster.

The second Spanish Armada was launched in 1596. The plan this time was to conquer England by invading Ireland, but the fleet hit another storm which annihilated it. Phillip's hopes sank along with 5000 men and 38 ships before they had even left Spanish waters. The second armada never reached the English channel at all.

By the time another year had elapsed, Phillip II loathed Queen Elizabeth I of England with a blistering passion. She had abandoned the Catholic faith through the Act of Supremacy, threatened Spanish interests in the New World and supported the Dutch, who were rebelling against their Spanish occupation.

Most egregious of all was Elizabeth's decision to have her bitter rival, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots beheaded for treason after she had been held in captivity for 19 years.

Elizabeth had many Catholic enemies who wanted to see her replaced by Mary Queen of Scots, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret. The Catholics believed that because Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate in 1536, Mary’s challenge to the throne was stronger than Elizabeth’s.

In 1586, Mary was judged to be complicit in a major plot to assassinate the Queen of England. With heavy heart, Elizabeth sentenced Mary to death.

Her execution was carried out with a breathtaking lack of skill by the executioner. It took him four attempts to sever Mary's head from her body. Finally holding it aloft to display his imagined prowess, he realised too late that Mary had been wearing a wig, whereupon her head, dripping with blood, fell away from his grasp, clattered across the floor of the scaffold and tumbled over the edge.

Falmouth at the time of the attempted invasion by the Third Armada.

In a final, Herculean effort to subjugate the English, the humiliated Phillip gave the order in October 1597 for 136 ships to set out from Spain with 8,634 soldiers, 4,000 sailors and 300 horses.

This time the aim was to to surprise the English fleet in the English Channel as it returned from a failed expedition to the Azores, whilst another part of the Armada would land an invasion force in Falmouth or, if this proved impossible, Milford Haven, both of which were important Elizabethan ports.

Pendennis Castle, Falmouth, built 1540-42

So was Phillip destined to taste glory at long last?

Of course not.

He should perhaps have guessed that his ambitions would be scuppered by...yes, that's correct...another storm. It dispersed the Spanish fleet, several ships were captured by the English and although a few Spanish troops did manage to land on English soil, the third Armada was defeated.

The last Spanish ship to be captured was a 120 ton caravel called 'The Bear of Amsterdam'. This had overshot Milford Haven and ended up stranded in the middle of the river Dyfi, where it weighed anchor. The nearby village of Aberdyfi comprised of just a few houses which served the ferry across the estuary to Ynyslas, near Borth.

Local militia gathered on both sides of the estuary in anticipation of hostilities. There were no suitable boats with which to board The Bear of Amsterdam and no cannons with which to hole it. A fireship sent out into the estuary to set the Spanish ship ablaze missed its target when the wind direction changed.

The Bear of Amsterdam did manage to land six men ashore in a rowing boat, but these were ambushed by the Merionethshire Militia, with two killed and four captured.

However, when the winds changed, the ship left without challenge. A contemporary document describes how the Militia "could do nothing except helplessly watch the Spaniard swinging to his anchor in midstream. Of little avail were the plans of the Merionethshire men.”

Dartmouth as it is thought to have looked around the year 1550. (Source: English Heritage.)

The Bear of Amsterdam headed south from Aberdyfi, but she didn't make it back to Spain. As she rounded the Cornish peninsula, The Bear of Amsterdam suffered damage in yet another storm and surrendered to an English squadron on the 10th November. She was led into Dartmouth with no ammunition on board and almost no supplies. The crew comprised 62 Spanish sailors, 3 Flemish and 2 English (one a pilot, the other a known pirate who was immediately jailed).

In 1953 both the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the Elizabethan story of The Bear of Amsterdam were celebrated in Aberdyfi by transforming a local ship to represent the Spanish caravel. She was moored mid-river and set on fire.

The seafront at Aberdyfi.

Unlike other Welsh establishments like 'O my Cod!' and 'A Fish called Rhondda', christened with puns, 'The Bear of Amsterdam' chose instead to memorialise the tale of a Spanish ship on its ill-fated mission and now looks out over the very spot where she ran aground over 400 years ago.

24 February 2021

#13 How Bilbao was transformed by Frank Gehry's masterpiece

The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

"I have always felt," said architect Frank Gehry, " if you know what you're going to do in advance, then you won't do it."

He always starts with a simple block model "to see where that goes."

"As an artist, I've got constraints. Gravity is one of them! But within all those constraints, I have 15% of freedom to make my art."

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, perhaps Gehry's most sublime achievement, not only houses great works of art over 19 galleries, but is a great work of art in itself.

In 1991, Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, was approached by the autonomous Basque government with a proposal to construct a museum in Bilbao, a city in the throes of urban decay and in urgent need of regeneration.

In a lightning flash of inspiration, Krens honed in on the area of Abandoibarra, once home to factories, shipyards and the train freight station, all now imperilled or shut down altogether.

He invited the revolutionary American architect Frank Gehry to work on a daring and innovative design for the museum to be bring this derelict area of the city, beside the Nervión river, back to life.

Gehry forged a close link with the Basque people; their word was their bond and he greatly admired that.

He set to work to design and create a monument that would enable the people of Bilbao to reclaim their city and their civic pride.

Gehry's extremely complex creation began with semi-automatic writing, laying his ideas out on paper below the level of conscious thought (see above.)

From this genesis, he constructed a multitude of cardboard models of the many sections of the building, developing, enlarging and refining them until he felt further improvement of his fluid, mercurial design was impossible.

A computer program, CATIA, used in aviation design, helped to solve the constructional problems. A technician digitally recorded 56,000 points on the surface of the models and the cardboard boxes became virtual.

A system of metal girders served as the curved skeleton. Every girder was different, each one made to the precise specifications generated by the computer program.

"I'm always trying to express movement," said Gehry of his work. "I was fascinated with the fold; it's so basic to our first feelings of love and warmth.”

He wanted to clothe the skeleton in folds of a single building material to enhance this impression of motion.

“I spent a lot of time trying to understand the light in Bilbao," said Gehry. "The steel that I was meant to use in the beginning gave off nothing at all in the light of that region. The metal seemed to be dead under a grey sky."

“ By accident, I found a small piece of titanium in my shop and I pinned it on a telephone pole outside my office….it rained that day and I looked at this titanium and it turned gold, like it does here. I thought, ‘My God - that’s so beautiful.’”

Most buildings can't afford this sort of metal because it's very expensive.

"By some miracle, the price of titanium suddenly dropped lower than the price of stainless steel. That has never happened again since, so I've never been able to use it anywhere else.”

Thanks to this twist of fate, it is the 24,000 square meters of titanium plates that give the Guggenheim Museum its unearthly beauty.

Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum was officially opened in October 1997 by King Juan Carlos 1 of Spain.

It comprised 20 galleries on 3 floors in a concentric figuration, with order borne from chaos by its visionary architect. Architect Philip Johnson described it as "the greatest building of our time", while critic Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker, characterized it as "a fantastic dream ship of undulating form in a cloak of titanium."

In this photograph, we can see some of the organic elements Gehry included in his design. To the right of the blue Iberdrola Tower beyond the museum, Gehry has included a metal flower with silvered petals. On the left, there is a shape suggesting a fish with its head and tail chopped off.

“Fish and their movements have always been part of my architectural vocabulary," said Gehry. "I think that it goes back to my childhood: every Thursday my grandmother took me to the Jewish market. We bought a live carp and took it home, where we put it in the bathtub. I played with the fish all day until my grandmother killed it to make fish balls.”

The ground floors of the building are linked by a gigantic Atrium, christened 'the flower' by Gehry, which one enters from below the level of the city between titanium folds. Swooping curves and smooth rounded stone, all bathed in light from above, mirror the river beyond and make this space the organising centre of the museum. One of the ground floor galleries is 130 metres long to house monumental works, like Richard Serra's gigantic 'The Matter of Time', which fills the entire space.

On Sundays walkers have rediscovered the Nervión River that had formerly been neglected by the city. Thanks to a concrete ramp, they can rise above the water as they stroll between the legs of Louise Bourgeois' epic 'Maman', which stands at 9m tall.

A pond alongside gives the impression that the river washes the walls of the museum.

As well as transforming Bilbao into a city welcoming 1.17m visitors in a normal year to marvel at the Guggenheim Museum...

Gehry has designed at least 25 world-renowned, iconic buildings. I've also delighted in visiting the Neuer Zollhof in Düsseldorf...

the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago...

and the mind-bending Dancing House in Prague.

The man is a genius. When you can, go and see the products of his extraordinary mind!

If you enjoyed this blog, please leave a comment via my Contact page by clicking on the photo of Frank Gehry (left or above.)

10 February 2021

#12 If ever an animal needed a PR makeover, it's the Hyena

"Do you know what they say about us?!"

"Hyenas are stupid."

This reputation was hardly helped by their portrayal in Disney's 'The Lion King', especially that of Ed, with his lolling tongue, googly eyes and predilection for gnawing on his own bones.

In fact, they are highly intelligent creatures. Spotted hyena expert Kay Holecamp of Michigan State University has passed dozens of hyena skulls through a CT scanner to create virtual images of their brains. Her research showed that spotted hyenas have notably enlarged forebrains, the region involved with complex decision-making.

Hyenas’ large brains have evolved to memorise the identity and rank of each of their clan mates. They also appear to be able to remember each member’s voice and status throughout their lives . This impressive cognitive ability means that they can differentiate between friend and foe in a single call and instantly find their place within their strict social hierarchy, without constant conflict.

(Photograph by Frans Lanting for National Geographic. )

It has also been revealed that hyenas respond differently according to whether they hear the whoops of one, two or three individuals.

This means the spotted hyena can accurately assess the number of intruders in their territory and will only take them on if they outnumber the other side.

Rival hyena clans will use both their numeracy and communication skills to band together and fight off a common enemy, such as the lion.

"Hyenas are sad loners."

Far from it. Spotted and brown hyenas live in highly-socialised clans, ranging in size from ten for the desert-dwelling groups to 120 to those living in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater and Kenya's Masai Mara, where prey is more abundant.

The clan is a matriarchy led by the 25% larger, considerably more aggressive, testosterone-fuelled alpha female. They are excellent mothers and give their cubs more time and attention than most other carnivores.

The males are ranked lowest and are frequently reminded of it with a vicious snap from a female, especially at feeding times, when the male is the last to feast on a kill. Resident males rank even lower than immigrant males.

And when the alpha female dies...who takes her place? That's right - her daughter.

"Hyenas are hermaphrodites."

Not so, but in this case, the public can perhaps be forgiven for the confusion.

A female Spotted Hyena's clitoris extends almost eight inches and is shaped and positioned like a penis, hence it is known in polite biological circles as a “pseudo-penis.” They can even get erections.

Just in case you were thinking that nature had bestowed every possible blessing upon the female spotted hyena, just bear in mind that she is the only known mammal with no external vaginal opening. Instead, she must urinate, copulate and give birth through her multi-tasking pseudo-penis.

This is like forcing a melon out of a hosepipe and ten per cent of first-time hyena mothers die in the process. It's even worse for the cubs, as the umbilical cord is too short to stretch the length of a birth canal that is twice the length of a similar-sized mammal’s. Up to 60 percent of cubs suffocate on their way out.

To redress the balance, sex isn't much fun for the male. He is reduced to stabbing away blindly in an attempt to insert his erect actual penis into the female's floppy, half-foot pseudo-penis. It’s a bit like trying to have sex with a sock. Brute force alone simply doesn’t work, as it does in many other animals. The female hyena’s pseudo-penis may be acting as an “anti-rape” device, once more putting her in control.

Even after copulation, if the female decides the male wasn’t actually worth her while, she can take advantage of the fact that the long urethra and vaginal tract converge… and simply urinate to flush away unworthy semen.

A newborn wildebeest, a few minutes old, struggles to keep up with its mother...

...as a hungry hyena looks on.

"Hyenas are just scavengers."

Once again, the Hyena falls victim to bad press. Hyenas are excellent hunters whose prey are more likely to be stolen by lions than the other way around. In the Serengeti in the 1970s, zoologist Hans Kruuk discovered that when spotted hyenas and lion share a carcass, hyenas were responsible for the kill 53 percent of the time.

Pulverising jaws can pierce the toughest hide and splinter bones, leaving the hyena's highly acidic stomach to break down and dissolve the shards. They consume so much bone material that hyena droppings have a chalky white colour.

Nothing is wasted, so the hyena is good for the environment, accelerating decay and destroying toxic bacteria that could filter into the soil and water. And hyenas will not ignore available food they haven't killed, given the chance, like any self-respecting carnivore.

"Hyenas have a sick sense of humour."

The world-famous laugh, or giggle, is unique to the Spotted Hyena. A lower-ranking animal makes this laughing-like sound when it’s upset or stressed.

Their classic whoop is used to recruit more hyenas during a fight with lions, advertise a male’s fitness, or simply to communicate with other hyenas about location.

These 'vocalisations' help to cement bonds in hyena societies.

(Photograph by Yaron Schmid / Caters News)

"Hyenas are all the same - creepy, weird-looking dogs."

Wrong again (though they are undeniably unusual-looking animals.)

There are four species in the family. As well as the Spotted Hyena we've already met, there is the Brown Hyena, the rarest species, native to southern Africa...

...the Aardwolf, insect-eaters found in East and southern Africa...

...and the monogamous Striped Hyena, the smallest of the four, living in fragmented populations across Asia and northern Africa.

And these four species belong to their own family: Hyaenidae. Thus, they are not dogs, or even cats. They are most closely related to the Civet (above), a small, mostly nocturnal mammal native to tropical Asia and Africa...

...while a more distant relation is the Mongoose (above).

"Hyenas are facing extinction."

This isn't a myth.

Because of habitat loss and widespread hunting, Striped and Brown Hyenas are classified as near-threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the body that sets the conservation status of species. Spotted Hyenas are locally extinct throughout much of South Africa, as well as West and central Africa. Persecuted by farmers and poachers, their numbers seem to be declining outside of protected areas.

It is time to spread the word through the myriad channels of today's communication that hyenas aren't grave-robbers, witch-carriers or vampires, but as a animal prepared to take on lions and buffaloes, they are one of the bravest , most intelligent and and most socially advanced of all our wild predators. They really do deserve a bit more respect.

Have you changed your mind about hyenas?

Do let me know what you think about this latest blog by clicking on the jaws - you'll be taken to the right place!

Thanks Simon 😊 📷 ⌨️