Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Page 17

  Washington was acclaimed as a hero in his own time for leading the colonial army to victory over the better-equipped and better-trained British forces, ultimately winning independence for the new nation. After serving his country so patriotically, he settled into well-deserved retirement at Mount Vernon near the end of 1783. At Mount Vernon Washington personally made adjustments and repairs to his dentures, and made specific suggestions for their improvement to his dentist. With most of his teeth gone by now, he was obliged to eat soft foods. His breakfast staple, according to his granddaughter Nelly Custis was hoecake with butter and honey.

  In the spring of 1789 Washington was notified at Mount Vernon that he had been elected president. Although tired after years of serving his country in strenuous endeavors and hesitant to take on the political leadership of the new republic, he selflessly agreed to serve once more. By then there were only two natural teeth in his mouth: a molar and a bicuspid in his lower jaw. Soon to take office, he desperately needed a set of wearable dentures that would give him an acceptably pleasing appearance. He had already consulted several dentists in Philadelphia, Maryland, and Virginia, including Baker, but his favorite was John Greenwood of New York.

  Greenwood, a former furniture apprentice and Revolutionary War scout, was descended from a line of dental practitioners and was a skilled ivory turner. He was only twenty-nine at the time he embraced the prestigious assignment of making the first president a set of false teeth.

  Greenwood constructed a dental prosthetic appliance for Washington out of hippopotamus ivory. He carved a mandibular base to hold eight human teeth, affixed with gold pins that held each of the teeth at a right angle to its axis. One of them was Washington’s penultimate tooth, the right molar, which was removed shortly after he was inaugurated. An aperture was made in the fitting to accommodate the president’s last tooth, his lower second bicuspid. The upper and lower plates were connected posteriorly by gold spiral springs, and pink sealing wax was applied to the bases of the dentures to make them look like gums.

  Wearing the mechanism was a challenge. Unless the lip and facial muscles were continually exerted to keep it in place, the dentures would shift around. Such a device not only caused discomfort but could result in a strained or unnatural countenance. “The Father of America” was not known as a great orator—there isn’t any record of his making any long speeches—and this may have been due, in part, to his ill-fitting dental appliances (he wore other ill-fitting appliances while president). Despite the shortcomings of Greenwood’s mechanism, however, Washington apparently used it for eight years.

  After the president’s death, inscriptions were carved by Greenwood on the lower plate. He wrote “the tooth” and “under jaw” in appropriate places and added, “This was Great Washington’s teeth.”

  Similar dentures were made for Washington that now exist either as a set, a single plate, or a fragment. These include a mandibular fragment in ivory at the London Hospital Medical College (it was taken to England during the Civil War by a daughter of Chapin A. Harris, one of the founders of the first dental school, the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery; the maxillary appliance was apparently taken to South America and lost); a full set with bases of lead alloy and ivory and cow teeth weighing four ounces that is stored at Mount Vernon (this set has traditionally been attributed to the artist Charles Willson Peale, but there is no documentary evidence contemporary with Peale to support this claim); and a 1795 lower prosthesis made of hippopotamus ivory by Greenwood at the National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore (while on loan to the Smithsonian in 1981, the upper was pilfered for its gold).

  Wooden dowels were used by Greenwood to repair the 1795 appliance, but never were the appliance’s teeth fashioned of wood. The wooden dowels were used to refasten the teeth to the lower plate after Greenwood had sawed them off to achieve a different inclination and make Washington’s lips appear less pouty and swollen.

  Even in Washington’s time, health-care services were expensive. To repair his dentures, Greenwood once billed the president fifteen dollars. The 1795 set Greenwood made cost Washington sixty dollars. Both were hefty sums in early American times.

  Washington's rough-fitting false teeth were uncomfortable to wear. In Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Washington, the mouth is puffy and the lips are tight, creating a pouting expression.

  Washington was self-conscious about his dental ailments and felt they were a matter of private concern. In 1755, when he was twenty-three, he covered up in his ledger book a payment of almost fifteen pounds to his dentist to settle what he referred to as a “hat bill.” And he couldn’t have been very pleased when a letter he wrote to a dentist in 1778 was captured by the British. General Washington’s missive: “A day or two ago I requested Colonel Harrison to apply to you for a pair of pincers to fasten the wire of my teeth. I hope you furnished him with them. I now wish you would send me one of your scrapers, as my teeth stand in need of cleaning and I have little prospect of getting to Philadelphia.”

  Whereas Washington was embarrassed about his dental problems, John Greenwood apparently enjoyed the notoriety and prestige he gained from serving as the first president’s dentist and unabashedly capitalized on it. Before Washington died in 1799, Greenwood, in a public notice, quoted a compliment Washington paid him earlier that year in a letter: “I shall always prefer your services to that of any other in the line of your present profession.” After the chief executive’s death, Greenwood continually promoted himself as “Dentist to his Excellency, Geo. Washington, late President of the United States of America,” “Dentist to the Immortal Washington, the Father of his Country,” or some such statement.

  Greenwood may even have had another claim of distinction: making the dentures with which Washington was laid to eternal rest. Although there seems to be no evidence from Washington’s time to support this claim, Greenwood’s son, Isaac John Greenwood, wrote in a letter dated November 3, 1860, “There is a pair of false jaws with human teeth on now in the head of President Washington, ‘in the tomb at Mt. Vernon,’ made by my father, John Greenwood, in 1799, and they are made with the bone gums—I think of the elephant’s tooth ‘ivory,’ and made from molds of beeswax.”

  A legend in his own time, Washington was a favorite subject of artists. Portraits of him consistently reflect the consequences of tooth loss and inadequate prosthodontics restoration, evident in a stern and tight-lipped expression. Cotton was sometimes used to fill out his lower face, but this actually made his lips look puffy. Gilbert Stuart is said to have commissioned a dentist to make a set of dentures for Washington; one of his Washington portraits appears on the U.S. one-dollar bill (as a mirror image).

  George Washington is such a revered figure of American history that the display of his dental prostheses has been controversial. When Greenwood’s 1789 plate was exhibited at a New York City museum in the 1920s, it was swiftly removed after the Daughters of the American Revolution complained that his dentures were “indelicate, personal and sacred.” Mount Vernon, which acquired its set from a descendant of Martha Washington, has never exhibited it on the estate.

  In the fall of 1796, as Washington was nearing the end of his second administration, his remaining tooth, alas, had to be removed. Greenwood kept it, and eighteen years later had a jeweler set it in a gold-and-glass locket, which he linked to his gold watch chain and carried until the day he died. Today, Washington’s last natural tooth reposes under the same roof as the lower denture that Greenwood created for him in 1789.

  LOCATION: New York Academy of Medicine, New York, New York.

  THE CRYPT OF JOHN PAUL JONES

  DATE: 1792

  WHAT IT IS: The coffins containing the remains of John Paul Jones.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: John Paul Jones’s corpse is in its original leaden coffin, which is inside a 1905 oak coffin with silver handles and a lid secured with silver screws, and the two coffins themselves are enclosed in a 1913 black-and-white Royal Pyrenees marble sarcophagus. The sarcophagus
is supported by sculpted bronze dolphins and decorated with bronze seaweed on top. It measures 94 inches high by 69 inches wide by 108 inches long.

  The saga of the search for John Paul Jones’s coffin might be appropriately titled, in modern-day pop parlance, “Raiders of the Lost Crypt,” because it is a tale fraught with suspense, archaeological mystery, and even eerie special effects, so to speak. But this is a true tale, with the buried treasure being the “Father of the American Navy,”* a heroic figure in his own time who fought brilliantly and indomitably in the name of freedom but whose remains became lost somewhere in a foreign land. An American went to the rescue, and like any worthy cinematic adventure, this one has a happy ending, not to mention an astonishing, hair-raising finale.

  Paris, 1899. Horace Porter was troubled, unable to contain his sense of shame any longer. For the two years he had been the U.S. ambassador to France he had been haunted by the memory of John Paul Jones, one of the greatest American naval commanders, who, he suspected, had lain forgotten for the last century under Paris, an abandoned corpse in a deserted cemetery. To Porter, it was a disgrace that no real effort had ever been made to recover Jones’s body and return him to the country he had served so heroically when it was just a fledgling republic fighting for its freedom and survival. General Porter, the son of a former governor of Pennsylvania and a Civil War veteran—he was on the staff of General Grant—could tolerate the ignominious neglect no longer. He was going to go after the commodore.

  John Paul Jones looked out across the North Sea from the deck of the Bonhomme Richard . It was the twenty-third of September, 1779, a clear, bright day. Jones beheld forty-one British merchant vessels coming from the Baltic, carrying cargo for Her Majesty’s fleet. They were less than a dozen miles away, off Flamborough Head, traveling north-northeast. A magnificent quarry, a chance to strike back at the British who were raiding America’s shores, a chance to show the might of the young republic’s navy. Jones was going to go after the convoy. *

  Ambassador Horace Porter's search for the body of John Paul Jones spanned six years and had workers burrowing under the streets of Paris.

  Horace Porter’s mission to find a single corpse somewhere, anywhere, in or under an entire city was a long shot. Did Jones’s corpse in fact still exist? If so, where was it and how could it be located? If it was suspected to be under a certain location in Paris, how would the massive excavation be carried out? And if a body suspected to be Jones’s was indeed found, how could it be positively identified? Any lesser man might have cast off the idea of finding Jones’s body as an admirable but fanciful and impossible quest, but Porter was tenacious, resolute, and dedicated to public service, not unlike the man whose remains he sought.

  Porter knew a good deal more about John Paul Jones’s life than about his afterlife. In 1790, after serving in the Russian navy, Jones went to Paris, where he lived for two years until his death from pneumonia and nephritis (kidney disease) at the age of forty-five. It was known that Jones was interred in the French capital, but it could have been in any number of locations. Porter hoped that locating Jones’s death certificate might yield the name of the cemetery where he was buried.

  Sadly, the death certificate no longer existed, Porter learned. It had been incinerated in a fire twenty-eight years earlier. Porter found a reproduction in a Protestant historical journal, but unbeknownst to him some key words had been omitted. Ambassador Porter was off to a bad start.

  A shot was fired from the Bonhomme Richard , a signal for its armed pilot boat to stop chasing the brigantine and come in. A flag was hoisted, a call for its companion ships to get ready for a general chase.

  It wasn’t until Porter, in his search for as much information as he could get on John Paul Jones, came across an 1859 publication that he was set straight—or at least had a substantial clue. An antiquarian named Charles Read included the text of Jones’s death certificate in an article he had written. The certificate stated that John Paul Jones was buried at eight o’clock in the evening of July 20, 1792, “in the cemetery for foreign Protestants.” Aha! These key words had been omitted from the other document Porter had read, and he realized he had been led astray. In his article Charles Read seemed to think the cemetery for foreign Protestants was the old St. Louis Cemetery, which was later abandoned and ultimately covered by urban development.

  Various leads turned up in other publications. The Boston Journal printed the letter of Samuel Blackden, a close friend of the late admiral. Blackden announced in his letter the death of Jones and reported, “The American minister has ordered the person at whose house the Admiral lodged to cause him to be interred in the most private manner and at the least possible expense!!!” Because of formalities relating to the burial of Protestants, the landlord went to the appropriate public official, a man by the name of Simonneau, who was not only amazed but angered, asserting, “A man who has rendered such signal services to France and America ought to have a public burial.” If America would not pay the expense, he added, he would pay it himself.

  As the afternoon wore on, the American warships Bonhomme Richard, Alliance , and Pallas were heading for the British at top speed. The sailors were a fighting crew, eager for action. By this time the convoy was retreating for the coast. Their two escort ships, Serapis and Countess of Scarborough , were waiting to intercept the enemy.

  As it turned out, young America let Jones down in death. No money was forthcoming, and Simonneau paid the total cost of the funeral himself, 462 francs. As Horace Porter wrote in his thorough and endearing report of his search for John Paul Jones, “This brought to light for the first time the mortifying fact that the hero who had once been the idol of the American people had been buried by charity, and that the payment of his funeral expenses was the timely and generous act of a foreign admirer.” Porter himself was so upset by this that he sought out any living relatives of Simonneau to reimburse them with accrued interest, but no one could prove him- or herself to be a legitimate descendant.

  The 462 francs paid by the French commissary Simonneau was considerably more than an interment of this nature usually cost. The higher price indicated a special coffin might have been used. Jones’s body, Porter learned from a letter written by Blackden to the admiral’s sister, “was put into a leaden coffin on the 20th, that, in case the United States, which he has so essentially served and with so much honor, should claim his remains they might be more easily removed.”

  It was seven o’clock. Darkness was creeping in. The Americans were closing in on the British. Jones’s ship was flying the colors of the Royal Navy. From the Serapis came a demand for identification. The British flag came down, the Stars and Stripes rose. Then the Richard responded with a cannon blast.

  While Charles Read in his article had opined that John Paul Jones was buried in the St. Louis Cemetery, before any excavation could commence Porter had to be absolutely sure, or as sure as possible, that this was the place of burial. Other writers had made suggestions to the contrary. Although it seemed improbable that Jones could have been buried in other cemeteries mentioned—one wasn’t in existence at the time of Jones’s burial; another did not permit interment of Protestants—Porter duly checked the records of these cemeteries and found no indication of John Paul Jones being buried in any. Porter even pursued a tip that Jones was buried in his native Scotland, but was informed by a local pastor that the grave in question was that of the admiral’s father, John Paul, Sr., who had died in 1767. Still, there were additional possibilities, and each was pursued by the thorough Porter until he was convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that John Paul Jones was buried in the St. Louis Cemetery.

  The battle had begun! Eighteen-pounders, nine-pounders, six-pounders—a barrage of fire was furiously exchanged between the two ships. The Serapis had fifty guns and was a superior frigate. The British captain, Richard Pearson, knew it, and so did John Paul Jones. Already there had been several deaths and injuries on the Richard . Jones knew his only chance was to come in clo
se to the Serapis , board her, and engage her crew in hand combat.

  It now became necessary to examine the ground of the old cemetery, which had become buried beneath the streets. The once-sacrosanct burial ground was located beneath an undesirable area of Paris, a section known as “le Combat.” Porter wrote, “This name was not chosen, however, on account of the burial there of the most combative of men, but history attributes the term to the fact that this section of Paris was long ago the scene of all the fights in which animals figured—bulls, cocks, dogs, asses, etc.”

  As his investigation of Jones’s interment and what happened to the cemetery in which Jones was buried continued, Porter became more disheartened. In his report he wrote:

  After having studied the manner and place of his burial and contemplated the circumstances connected with the strange neglect of his grave, one could not help feeling pained beyond expression and overcome by a sense of profound mortification. Here was presented the spectacle of a hero whose fame once covered two continents, and whose name is still an inspiration to a world-famed navy, lying for more than a century in a forgotten grave, like an obscure outcast, relegated to oblivion in a squalid quarter of a distant foreign city, buried in ground once consecrated, but since desecrated by having been used at times as a garden, with the moldering bodies of the dead fertilizing its market vegetables, by having been covered later by a common dump pile, where dogs and horses had been buried, and the soil was still soaked with polluted waters from undrained laundries, and, as a culmination of degradation, by having been occupied by a contractor for removing night soil.