Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-04-24/Jay Robert Nash

Flaws in Encyclopaedia

I've started to collect the flaws, fake entries and every other tidbits of false facts present in JRN's litterature so that we can prove that his papers aren't of any encyclopaedic importance and utility. You can see it at Flaws. Lincher 15:18, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

WP article

Could whoever dug up the facts on JRN's background add them to the article or at least provide the sources so someone could expand it? Gamaliel 16:51, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

The appeals court decision is Nash v. CBS, Inc., 899 F.2d 1537 (7th Cir. 1990). --Michael Snow 17:27, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Tagging

The pages that cite Nash as a reference should probably all be tagged as unverified so that readers and editors are alerted to potential errors and can fix them.--nixie 07:01, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Further checking

After looking through the bibliography of Darkest Hours, I was able to track down another source Nash apparently used for his account of the earthquake and aftermath. This is They Went to Portugal, a book in which writer Rose Macaulay collects a number of narratives from British visitors to Portugal throughout history. She devotes a section to the earthquake and reprints or retells the accounts of several contemporaries.

One of these is the British envoy, Abraham Castres, whose tale Macaulay mostly summarizes in her own words. She only mentions one thing remotely relevant, which is that "Rapine and murder were all about, though being firmly dealt with". The general tale suggests that people were fleeing the city and the streets of Lisbon may have had criminality running rampant, but no indication that Catholic priests or the Inquisition were involved.

Macaulay also provides a letter from Thomas Jacomb, a merchant who wrote a diary/letter covering several weeks from the earthquake onward. He has more specific information relevant to the issue. For December 3 he mentions friars burying the dead, as well as a general pardon of prisoners (which may not have helped the crime situation, but perhaps one must also wonder who would have stayed to guard them otherwise). Also, Jacomb gives the most relevant account yet relating to the Inquisition: "The Jews who were in the Inquisition and in a few days an Act of Faith was to have been published for them so suffer now tyed on Horses and sent with a guard to Coimbra, several of whom I saw pass the Ferry Boat at Sacavem."

Not a pretty picture, but I don't think it supports the characterization Nash seems to have turned it into. First of all, the idea of "priests rov[ing] through the debris looking for heretics to burn" doesn't square with the account. This is not talking about the Inquisition picking people up after the earthquake; it's about dealing with the problem of those who had already been taken into custody prior to the earthquake (from Jacomb's account, my interpretation is that the civil and ecclesiastical authorities elected to take contrasting approaches here). As to the auto da fe, there are several issues. One is that burning at the stake (or hanging, or other capital punishments) was not necessarily the sentence to be imposed, as even the Jewish Encyclopedia notes. Another is that we do not know how well Jacomb understood what was behind the things he saw. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives the date of the last auto da fe in Portugal as 1739; if that is correct, Jacomb may have interpreted what he saw based on an anachronistic understanding of the Inquisition's practices. I'm not sure if it can be sorted out whether this was to have been an auto da fe, but I would expect in any case that at such a late date historically, executions were not going to be the outcome.

There were, as has been discussed elsewhere, executions related to the criminal activity after the earthquake. Jacomb relates on December 13 that several people were hanged "for Robbing and Plundering" and mentions someone confessing to arson. In general, it seems the contemporary accounts are consistent that such measures were being taken for law enforcement, but there's no indication yet that perceived heretics were targeted or somehow blamed for the earthquake.

So it appears that Nash's colorful story is still misleading and inaccurate. Carpinelli has indicated that Chase didn't feign unconsciousness to avoid roving priests. It would seem Nash may have put Chase together with Jacomb's account, misinterpreted both, and taken the literary license of turning this into battalions of priests on the hunt. With such a tenuous basis in reality, Nash's version is better described as a work of fiction. --Michael Snow 05:42, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Nash connected to Lisbon earthquake misinformation

• I just wanted to bring to your attention that I have made some changes to the entry on Jay Robert Nash because it has come to my attention, and I have noticed some errors. Also, I want references to my articles removed, because my articles have been removed from the Internet. I made an assumption when I wrote my Parts 3 and 4 articles, which you have quoted from in this article, and I wanted to bring the matter to your attention, especially since the links won't work. Through mutual agreement between myself and Catholic Exchange, Catholic Exchange has pulled my articles off the Internet. I am not sure at this point if we are going to correct them and replace them, or just write a correction. Basically, when Jay Robert Nash wrote in his "Darkest Hours" on page 339 that "Battalions of priests roved through the debris of Lisbon, looking for heretics to burn, such as the previously mentioned Chase, who, to avoid their attention, pretended to be unconscious as he lay sprawled in the Terreiro de Paco;..." I made the assumption that Nash was referring to his previous mention of Chase on page 337, where he says: "An Englishman named Chase was quoted by 'Blackwood's Magazine' in 1860, a century after the catastrophe (upon the discovery of a letter he had written his sister)..." I therefore assumed that Nash's allegation about the priests was from Thomas Chase's eyewitness account, published in "Blackwood's Magazine." When I checked "Blackwood's," as well as "The Gentlemen's Magazine" and found Chase in the “Terrio do Paco,” and “…determined to feign insensibility…”, but no mention by Chase of an experience concerning priests, I wrote: "To imply this information came from Chase's account in the 'Blackwood's Magazine,' as Jay Robert Nash does, is simply false." Since I did not check every reference in his bibliography, and since Nash was not implying anything - I only assumed that - my editor and I have mutually agreed to remove what I wrote until corrections can be made. I also labeled Nash's claim, which I only assumed he was taking from "Blackwood's Magazine," "erroneous and misleading." I apologize to you for any inconvenience, but I wanted to let you know of my error.Polycarp7 19:06, 20 May 2006 (UTC)Polycarp7 19:12, 20 May 2006 (UTC)Polycarp7 21:46, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

• I also wanted to mention that I believe the original source for the Wikipedia nascent 1755 Lisbon earthquake article of October, 2003, was the book "The Astrology of the Macrocosm," which has an entry on the Lisbon earthquake. The entry from this book, published on the web at [[1]]is virtually identical to the nascent Lisbon article. I also obtained the book through interlibrary loan, in order to see if the book had a footnote. It did not. The book was published in 1991, has nothing in it's bibliography showing any scholarly secondary work on the Lisbon quake, or even any eyewitness accounts. Nothing in the bibliography by Jay Robert Nash, either. There are only 13 libraries in the entire country that have the book, so it too a couple of months to get. But I do believe the Lisbon entry from the book, published on the web, is where the information from the October, 2003 Wikipedia article on the Lisbon quake originated. Polycarp7 19:25, 20 May 2006 (UTC)Polycarp7 21:09, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

• • That may well have been an intermediate source, especially considering the shared mistake of 1775 as the year. Comparing the excerpt from McEvers and Rosenberg against Darkest Hours, though, it seems clear that they got the information from Nash. Not acknowledging it is in line with their sloppy work, but most everything in that excerpt matches up with Nash's account. Virtually every fact (30,000 dead in two minutes, all of the same cathedrals named - they say "six" where Nash uses "half-dozen" - 18,000 collapsed buildings, 70,000 library volumes, 10,000 dead in Morocco, a 60-foot tidal wave) is precisely the same in Nash. The parts that provide color, like the Cays de Prada, Vesuvius, and even the chanting of the Introit also come from Nash. The same three painters are mentioned, although 200 artworks is changed to "hundreds". They go into the same detail about the areas reached by the shock waves, although they say Finland where Nash actually has the Gulf of Finland. Basically, if you remove from Nash's version the passages quoting people like Chase as well as the discussion of what the king and Pombal did afterward, keep most of the rest, and give it a haphazard reorganization, the McEvers/Rosenberg version is what you might end up with. --Michael Snow 06:06, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

• This is very interesting! I had not compared the two works side by side, but as you have shown, it is highly probable that Nash may have been the source for the astrology book's rogue priests. I've been intrigued from the beginning as to how the "hanging" allegation began, since it was very unusual for the State to use that method of execution on individuals "relaxed" to them from the Inquisition. I was fairly convinced that it came from a misunderstanding of Voltaire's satire, "Candide," (which has Pangloss hanged for comically trivial offenses) as being actual fact, rather than satire. The other possibility for the "hanging" could, of course, be a reading into the images (I believe they are German, from shortly after the quake) showing priests present while some individuals are hanging. I suppose the different methods, "burning" (Nash) to "hanging" (McEvers) was why I didn't look seriously at Nash's book as a source, but your extensive comparison shows that it is more likely than I thought. It's entirely possible that McEvers just combined the King's hanging with Nash's priests burning, and came up with hanging priests. Another thing I find curious: the similarities between "priests roved the debris" and "priests roamed the city/streets." Roamed could have easily evolved from roved. Pure speculation, but interesting. Thank you for this insight, Mr. Snow!Polycarp7 13:37, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

• • I agree that the change from burning to hanging is probably a conflation of the executions that actually took place (hangings for looting and arson) with Nash's tale about priests looking for people to burn. Nash mentions hangings too, so I doubt that McEvers/Rosenberg looked very far beyond his book for this excerpt. --Michael Snow 16:14, 25 May 2006 (UTC)