Any
group of malcontents can dress up like American Indians and toss tea
into a harbor to protest unfair taxation. But how many armies have
actually mobilized over food? Real food—as in, “Leggo my Eggo … or I’ll
send in the troops!” The answer? Not that many. Nevertheless, here are a
few of history’s greatest culinary-based conflicts.
First Course: The Bovine Brouhaha
Grab a fork and a knife (and a rifle, if you’ve got one). First up on
the menu is The Grattan Massacre, a bloody clash between American
Indians and U.S. troops that played out in 1854 in the Nebraska
Territory, just east of what is now Laramie, Wyoming.
If you thought Mrs. O’Leary’s cow was bad news, consider what the cow
that wandered away from a Mormon pioneer train on the Oregon Trail
started. The rabble-rousing bovine clomped its way into a camp inhabited
by the Lakota Indians, one of seven tribes that made up the Great Sioux
Nation. Not being ones to turn down a free lunch, the Lakota promptly
killed the presumably abandoned cow and ate it.
That might not seem like a big deal, but in the mid-1800s, few peace
pipes were being passed between American Indians and new settlers. So,
when the cattle owner realized the fate his cow had met, he immediately
went to tattle his tale at the Territory’s nearest outpost of
officialdom, Fort Laramie. In response to the incident, U.S. officials
dispatched an eager young second lieutenant and recent West Point
graduate named John L. Grattan to bring the cow thieves to justice.
What happened next underscores the downside of history’s insistence
on naming events only after they happen. Had John L. Grattan known he
was riding off to The Grattan Massacre, it seems likely he might have
conducted himself more civilly with the Sioux. Instead, Grattan’s
approach would later prompt a fellow Fort Laramie officer to comment,
“There is no doubt that Lt. Grattan left this post with a desire to have
a fight with the Indians, and that he had determined to take the man at
all hazards.”
With nearly 30 men in tow, Grattan met with the Brule Lakota chief,
Conquering Bear, and demanded the surrender of the guilty parties. By
most accounts, Conquering Bear was open and reasonable during the
negotiations, and it was Grattan’s behavior that escalated tensions. At
some point, Conquering Bear stood up, and nervous U.S. soldiers—thinking
the chief was making a move—opened fire, killing Bear and his brother.
Warfare quickly broke out on both sides, and Grattan’s entire party
perished.
When news of the event reached the U.S. War Department, officials
sought swift revenge on the Sioux. A little more than a year after the
Grattan Massacre, on September 3, 1855, General William S. Harney and
roughly 600 soldiers caught up with the Lakota tribe. Harney ordered his
men to open fire, and nearly 100 Lakota men, women, and children were
shot dead in what became known as the Battle of Ash Hollow. (Apparently,
30 Army men being killed equals a massacre, while 100 Sioux being
killed equals a battle. Ain’t history grand?)
Second Course: The Breadfruit Battle Royale
History often depicts the infamous mutiny on the
Bounty as a power struggle between Captain William Bligh and his crew. But it wasn’t about that at all. It was about breadfruit.
On August 16, 1787, 33-year-old Lieutenant William Bligh was named commander of the
Bounty.
Two months later, the ship was commissioned to sail to Tahiti, pick up
some breadfruit plants, and deliver them to the West Indies, where it
was hoped they would provide a cheap food source for slaves. It was a
simple shopping trip, but one that seemed to go awry almost immediately.
Weather conditions around Cape Horn were so bad that the
Bounty
was forced to detour across the Indian Ocean, prolonging the journey
nearly 10 months. Once the ship finally arrived in Tahiti, the dastardly
breadfruit were no longer in season. Bligh and his crew had no choice
but to hang out there for five months and await the harvest. Of course,
there are worse places to get stuck than Tahiti, and the boys of the
Bounty
took full advantage of the delay. Bligh allowed his men to live
onshore, where they tended the breadfruit plants and “mingled” with the
native ladies. Needless to say, discipline lapsed, and when it came time
to set sail again, much sulking occurred.
Once more aboard the
Bounty, the crew became further upset
when they discovered how much room the breadfruit required. The ship
carried some 1,015 potted plants in a large cabin beneath the deck,
creating crowded conditions that caused an already percolating situation
to boil over. On April 28, 1789,
Bounty mate Fletcher Christian and nine supporters staged a mutiny.
Although bloodless, the incident was far from friendly. Bligh and 18
others were forced into a tiny 23-foot launch boat and abandoned at sea.
The group first landed at nearby Tofua, but the island’s inhabitants
didn’t take kindly to strangers. One of Bligh’s launchmates was stoned
to death by natives, and the exhausted band had to set sail again on May
2. Making like MacGyver, Bligh captained the launch through a harrowing
43-day, 3,600-mile voyage to Timor using only a sextant and a
pocketwatch. There, they finally found safe harbor.
Bligh and crew eventually made their way back to England and reported the mutiny on March 16, 1790. Eight months later, the
Pandora sailed to Tahiti to find the mutineers and the
Bounty
(a pursuit that supposedly spawned the term “bounty hunting”).
Unfortunately, that mission didn’t go so well, either. After the ship’s
crew rounded up 14 stragglers from the
Bounty and imprisoned them in a cell (cleverly named “Pandora’s Box”) on the top deck of the ship, the ill-fated
Pandora sank on the Great Barrier Reef.
Bligh was eventually tried and acquitted for losing his ship, and he
went back to work. In 1791, he received another commission—to collect
breadfruit plants. This time, he succeeded in bringing the fruit to the
West Indies, but—irony of ironies—the slaves didn’t like the taste and
refused to have anything to do with them. Today, breadfruit growers of
the world unanimously consider this the funniest thing ever to happen.
Third Course: Fishy Fisticuffs
At first blush, cod don’t seem like provocative creatures. And yet,
these bulbous, fleshy fish have brought NATO allies Iceland and Great
Britain to the brink of war no fewer than three times in the past 50
years. Unimaginatively, these incidents are popularly known as The Cod
Wars.
The root of the problem in all these tiffs has been Iceland’s
enormous surplus of nothingness. The frosty island nation has no real
fuel, minerals, or agricultural prospects. What they do have is the
world’s oldest functioning legislative assembly—the Althing, first
convened in 930. But, as anyone who’s tried to eat or sell a functioning
legislative assembly will tell you, they bring little to the party.
With nowhere to turn but offshore, Iceland turned to fish. In fact, it’s
estimated that fish and fish products have long accounted for more than
90 percent of the country’s exports.
The first two Cod Wars (one in 1958 and the other from 1972 to 1973)
were sparked when Iceland unilaterally decided to expand its fishing
boundaries, arguing that it should be allowed to cordon off any areas
deemed fit to protect its chief resource. Great Britain’s
counterargument was, in essence, “Hey, we like fish too!” Ultimately,
these “wars” were about as mild as cod itself, consisting mostly of
threats, net cutting, and lots and lots of salty language.
A ramming incident during the Third Cod War.
The third Cod War, however, got a bit nasty. In 1975, Iceland
deployed 16 ships to enforce control over its fishing territories. In
response, Britain floated its own armada of nearly 40 vessels to the
area to protect its trawlers as they continued to fish the contested
waters. All the while, shootings, sabotage, and rammings were had by
all. After seven months of skirmishes, Iceland finally got so bent out
of shape it threatened to close its NATO base at Keflavik—a measure that
would have compromised NATO’s ability to defend the Atlantic from
Soviet incursion. That’s when NATO Secretary General Dr. Joseph Luns
stepped in. On June 2, 1976, he brokered an agreement between the
nations that limited the British fishing fleet to 24 ships and granted
Iceland the right to halt and inspect British trawlers suspected of
violating the agreement. In response, the British threatened an embargo
on all Icelandic goods, but then remembered there were no Icelandic
goods to embargo. Then they all had tea.
So
how did it happen? Hartley and colleagues suggest that this continent
rose out of the water on what some geologists call a "thermal anomaly,"
and others call a "
Here
you can see a map of the Icelandic Plume, which is probably what set
this weird geological story in motion. Commenting on the discovery of
the lost continent, 
Greta Garbo
