We learned a lot in history class in our formal educations.
And we still hear a lot of stories about the history of our country or the history of the world.
But sometimes, these occurrences are not quite right. In fact, they might have been totally false or at least highly embellished.
I’ll start with the rats. Because I like mice and rats, on the whole. And rats have been present at almost every significant historical event.
Like this. Way back when.
The terrible plague of the Black Death spread through Europe. And guess who got blamed? The rats. But they didn’t actually spread the Black Death. That’s right. Recent studies have discovered that rats were not to blame for that nasty devastating plague that wiped out a third of Europe. During the 14th century.
Those good scientists at the University of Oslo conducted an experiment.
They assessed the potential transmission routes for the deadly pandemic. They discovered that the parasites that carried the disease were much more likely to have come from humans than rats.
So for all these years, we’ve been pinning the blame on those little cheese-loving rodents. I think we owe them an apology. Or two.
Rats are everywhere, though. For one thing, they are found in all 50 states in the U.S. The most common species are the Norway rat and the Roof rat. But, mostly, they are prevalent in urban and suburban areas, where food and shelter are abundant.
Which brings me to this. They even travel on boats. And ships.
Like on the boat that Columbus came to the Caribbean in.
But here is another fib about Columbus.
The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria weren’t the names of Christopher Columbus’s ships.
When it comes to Columbus, the only fact that the history books really have right is that he sailed in 1492. We all know he didn’t “discover” America. Besides, people had already been living on the continent for thousands of years, after all.
But then there is the old poem. The Nina. The Pinta. The Santa Maria. Even the oft-repeated names of his three ships aren’t historically accurate. In the 15th century, most sailing ships were named after saints, so while the Santa Maria is probably the real name, the Niña and the Pinta were probably just casual sailor nicknames for more piously named vessels. According to History.Com, the Niña’s real name was most likely “the Santa Clara,” while the Pinta’s real name is unknown. The Pinta translates to “paint” so it was probably brightly painted, hence the nickname. And there were more rats on the Pinta than on the other two ships because they liked the colors. Stylin’ Rats.
I could talk about any event on our history timeline, but I’ll end with this.
An apple never fell on Isaac Newton’s head. And there was a rat there to witness it.
You see, the story that the famous mathematician had an epiphany about gravity after being bonked on the head by a piece of fruit is most likely an embellishment of what really happened. Isaac never told the story. The first time the apple story appeared was in a biography of Newton written by his friend William Stukeley in 1792. The account says, “the notion of gravitation came into his mind…. occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.”
Instead, Isaac was sitting under the apple tree working. He brought along his pet rat John William, who was his faithful companion and helper with experiments. Historians believe that he may well have seen an apple fall because John William was up in the tree, picking apples to eat and letting them drop to the ground. So Isaac began pondering why the apple would fall and not just float around up in the air.
But be sure of this. Nowhere in any records of Newton’s life does it say it hit him on the head. Add the apple to the list of the biggest lies that made history. And John William was there to prove it.
So, that is a brief overview of Rats in History.
I’ll tell you later about the rats at the Salem Witch Trials and at Marie Antoinette’s whole “let them eat cake” thing. Oh, and then there is the big debacle with Van Gogh cutting off his ear, which was also falsely reported. Yep, a rat was the cause there too.
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“Rats are the most important animals on the planet.” – Bill Gates
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“The mouse is a good animal; he does not want to be heard; he doesn’t want to be seen.” – E. B. White
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“Mice are the most successful species on the planet after humans.” – David Attenborough
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“The mouse, to be brave, must be wise enough to know when to hide.” – Ruth Gendler
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The history. The wrong. The rats who were there.
