How to Survive History

Praise for How to Survive History

‘… An insightful and entertaining look at 15 of the most catastrophic events in world history… A crisp blend of humour, history, and science, this is a crowd pleaser.’

Publishers Weekly

‘Highly entertaining… Graphs, graphics, and other images make fun, invaluable additions to the text. Not only will this be perfect for those interested in history, humour, and popular science, its highly conversational tone and handy graphs and images will highly appeal to teen readers.’

Booklist

For Mom and Dad

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

HOW TO SURVIVE . . .

THE DINOSAUR AGE

THE CHICXULUB ASTEROID

THE ICE AGE

ANCIENT EGYPT

POMPEII

THE SACK OF ROME

THE DARKEST YEAR OF THE DARK AGES

THE BLACK DEATH

THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE

THE FIRST CIRCUMNAVIGATION

A VOYAGE WITH BLACKBEARD

THE DONNER PARTY

THE 1906 EARTHQUAKE

THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC

THE WORST TORNADO IN AMERICAN HISTORY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

RESOURCES AND FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

Afew years ago I read a study written by a team of paleontologists that seemed to suggest I could outrun the most powerful predator in the history of our planet.

I found this surprising.

I consider myself a mediocre example of an athletically pedestrian species, with a top speed well below that of nearly every predator, never mind the deadliest. Yet the evidence that I could outsprint the formidable Tyrannosaurus rex appeared convincing. By measuring the size, musculature, balance, bone strength, and stride length of the great saurian, along with the application of an obscure formula originally developed to design boat hulls and ingeniously repurposed to determine running speeds, these paleontologists produced an estimation of the T. rex’s top speed that appeared surprisingly attainable.

Clearly, I had to experiment.

I stepped outside, paced off a reasonable distance, timed myself—and I just edged it out.*¹ Barely. And when I accounted for the added motivation provided by a T-Rex’s breath on the back of my neck, I gave myself a reasonable chance. That confidence only grew when I dug further. I studied the evasion strategies employed by prey animals and found they allowed these athletically outclassed animals to escape predators far faster than themselves. If I applied these techniques to my own life-and-death chase, the numbers suggested I would survive an encounter with the greatest hunter in the history of our planet.

The surprising discovery that I could use the latest research to conceivably survive an afternoon in the Late Cretaceous era with a starved tyrannosaurus nipping at my heels inspired further questions. With the benefit of hindsight and modern science, could a time traveler visit Pompeii and survive the eruption of Mount Vesuvius? Could they buy a third-class ticket on the Titanic and find their way off the sinking ship? Could they survive the Black Death? Could they escape the path of the most powerful tornado in history, ride alongside Magellan on his horrifically dangerous circumnavigation, or haul up stones to build Khufu’s Great Pyramid?

In the process of discovering how a person could possibly survive these catastrophes and adventures, I found myself learning about these events in a far more granular way than a general history could ever provide. By focusing on hours, not eras, I felt the distance between the modern day and ancient history shrink to the proximity of a pursuing tyrannosaurus. Focusing on the individual’s experience as the Gothic hordes poured into Rome or as an earthquake rocked San Francisco’s peninsula during 1906, and then determining whether one should turn right or left, fight, hide, or flee, not only intensified and enlivened these bygone events, but delivered the kind of tangible information often neglected in vast-reaching histories.

The result is How to Survive History: a detailed, practical manual for surviving the greatest catastrophes and adventures in this planet’s history. It’s a how-to for finding food, shelter, and warmth in the face of history’s most spectacular disasters. I’ve scoured every resource to come up with the likeliest way to survive each destination. I’ve read the diaries of the survivors, studied the accidents, and read the postmortems. I’ve looked at old maps or made my own when there weren’t any, and I’ve published them here where applicable. I’ve asked the world’s leading experts what they would do if they found themselves at the center of these great apocalypses, and report their answers, illuminating their disagreements and explaining their reasoning.

I’ve taken no speculative liberties save those necessary when history has obscured the precise details. There’s no way to know, for example, the timing and path for every ejected lava bomb during the Pompeii eruption, and therefore it’s possible the path I recommend would place you directly beneath a falling hunk of smoldering rock. I can only tell you the path where that is least likely to happen. In other words, survival is not guaranteed.

This guide is not a work of fiction or fantasy (save, of course, for the time-traveling reader’s presence). It remains as faithful to actual events as the historical record allows. I have not fictionalized any of the events, nor have I conjured any dangers. I have not skirted any uncomfortable truths, nor conveniently ignored any threats.

I have, however, made a few assumptions. I have assumed that, like any good traveler, you’re familiar with the local language, customs, and dress, where applicable. Xenophobia runs deep in human history. In many of these locations, eras, and cultures, assimilation isn’t just useful or courteous. It’s lifesaving.

I have also assumed you’re up-to-date on your vaccinations. The whooping cough vaccine may seem like an annoying anachronism now, but in many times and places you’re going to have a bad time if you neglect it.

Finally, to avoid redundancy, I have skipped over some dangers inherent to nearly all eras past. For example, don’t drink the water, do assume your doctor has little idea what they’re doing, and when meeting a stranger, remember that historical rates of interpersonal violence approach war-zone-like levels.

In short, this book should be read as an entirely serious attempt to guide a visitor through our planet’s greatest catastrophes and adventures using the benefits of hindsight and modern science. It’s written for the modern time-traveling reader who wants to witness the most dramatic, destructive, and dangerous events in history—and come back alive.

Good luck!

*¹ See page 7 for the formula, if you would like to see if you, too, could almost outrun a T-Rex.

HOW TO SURVIVE

THE DINOSAUR AGE

Let’s say you want to visit the era when the most powerful predators in history attacked the largest land animals the planet has ever seen. You want to see eighty-ton reptiles, carnivores with jaws comparable to a car shredder, and an animal the size of a giraffe take flight.

So you travel back 70 million years to the Mesozoic era—back to the Dinosaur Age. In the warmed climate, you’ll feel the sticky heat of the Louisiana bayous as far north as Montana. You’ll notice the changed geography: the absence of Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, the sea covering the midwestern United States, the island of India.

Grass will have only recently evolved. So you’ll see a few blades, but no grasslands—only ferns, ficus, figs, cycads, and ginkgoes, along with large trees and dense forests. You’ll also see the famous Tyrannosaurus rex.

Unfortunately, it will see you too.

You might think your only chance would be to hide, stand still, play dead, or climb. But surprisingly—shockingly—recent evidence suggests that you might be able to run from the most powerful predator to ever walk this planet.

At least, if you know how to use your biggest advantage: your size.

If a mouse fell down a 1,000-foot mine shaft, the renowned evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane once proposed, the mouse would rise, shake the dust off, scurry away, and maybe even get right back up to do it again. If a rat fell from the same height, however, it would die. A horse would splash, Haldane writes, and a human would break.

Haldane does not provide a colorful verb in his 1926 essay "On Being the Right Size" for what would occur if a nine-ton Tyrannosaurus rex fell into that mine. But the giant predator would scream down the shaft at 172 miles per hour, hit the ground with 120 tons of force, and . . . shatter? Dismember? Detonate? Erupt?

Regardless of the proper descriptor for the T. rex’s disturbing demise, the purpose of Haldane’s gruesome thought experiment was to demonstrate the dramatically different relationships that large and small animals have with gravity. This relationship, and the differing fates of the mouse and the rat, are explained by the square-cube law, which states the simple fact that, as an object expands, its volume cubes while its surface area merely squares.

Because a falling animal’s surface area increases its air resistance while its mass determines the force of its impact, the falls of various animals can be thrilling, tragic, or messy, depending on small differences in size. This may be a simple concept, but because a cubed number grows so much faster than a squared one, it is exceedingly difficult to intuit what the effects of small differences in size will be. That’s particularly true with regard to the largest land animals to have ever walked the earth, especially if you have to outrun them.

When the T-Rex takes an interest in you, you may see its long legs and powerful muscles and think you should hide. Don’t. You have the disproportionate effects of size on your side. The T-Rex’s eruptive demise at the bottom of the mine shaft illustrates the most important factor to consider when facing this giant saurian’s pursuit. In the run for your life, its awe-inspiring, terrifying, stupefying size would be, in fact, your greatest advantage.

A full-grown Tyrannosaurus rex was absurdly huge and absurdly powerful. It had rows of teeth it could push through triceratops bone. It could toss human-sized chunks of meat sixteen feet into the air with its jaws. It was as tall as a giraffe and, at nine tons, as heavy as an elephant. "Tyrannosaurus rex had proportionally more muscles devoted to its movement than nearly any animal that’s ever lived," says Eric Snively, a biologist at Oklahoma State University who studies the biomechanics of dinosaurs. And yet if you see one, you should be only mildly concerned, because a tyrannosaur couldn’t run.

I asked John R. Hutchinson, lead author of a 2002 paper published in Nature titled "Tyrannosaurus Was Not a Fast Runner, what a tyrannosaurus’s performance in a race would look like. A short-distance jog is about the best we’d expect, he said. And not with a fast start, either."

The incredibly powerful, long-legged tyrannosaurus was slow for the same mathematical reason its demise in the mine shaft would be so eruptive. Like surface area, bone strength only squares as volume cubes. The result is that, as an animal increases in size, it requires proportionally more muscle and leg bone to stand, move, and run. Beyond a certain size, running becomes physically impossible, which is why giants and King Kong only exist in fairy tales. For all its muscular bulk, the Tyrannosaurus rex’s leg bones would have shattered under anything more than the stress of a brisk walk. Judging by its mass, muscle, and bones, Snively doesn’t believe an adult tyrannosaurus could have moved faster than 12 or 13 miles per hour. Though 12 miles per hour approaches the top speed of a typical human depending on their conditioning—it equates to a twenty-second 100-meter dash—the T. rex’s slow acceleration would give the average runner a good chance of outsprinting or outmaneuvering the lumbering predator.*¹

Of course, the Tyrannosaurus rex would hardly be your only concern in the Mesozoic era. Numerous other meat-eating dinosaurs of various sizes might take an interest in snacking on you. Once again, whether you could outrun them or not depends on their weight.

In 2017, biologist Myriam Hirt and colleagues, studying animal movement at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, asked a simple question: Is there an optimum size for speed? And the surprisingly simple answer, they discovered, is yes. When Hirt plotted the weight and speed of every running, swimming, and flying animal on earth, she found that, regardless of mode of movement, size and speed follow a parabolic curve. Both the smallest and the largest animals are the slowest. She concluded that if you were designing an animal for speed, it should weigh approximately 200 pounds. A bit heavier for a swimmer, a bit lighter for a flyer.

Hirt’s discovery not only suggests that you should fear the midsized dinosaurs most, but, perhaps even more important, that you don’t need to fear the largest at all. Regardless of strength or design, it would be physically impossible for the largest dinosaurs to outrun a human in good physical condition. The reason, Hirt tells me, is a result of the interplay between power, acceleration, and the metabolism that fuels both.

An animal’s top speed is the meeting point of two factors. The first is its total muscle power, which scales proportionally with its mass. The second is its ability to accelerate that mass, which does not scale proportionally. Acceleration relies on anaerobic muscle, which uses a stored fuel called ATP to power its rapid contractions. These so-called fast-twitch muscles produce the rapid, powerful contractions needed for acceleration. But ATP capacity is finite, it quickly depletes, and its capacity is determined by metabolism.

For reasons that aren’t totally understood, an animal’s energy production—metabolism—decreases proportionally to its mass (more precisely, it decreases to the power of 0.75). This reduction makes larger animals more energy efficient than smaller ones. If humans had a metabolism proportional to that of a mouse, for example, we would have to eat around twenty-five pounds of food per day. Larger animals are thus more efficient, but the cost of this efficiency is proportionally less ATP energy to accelerate.

By creating a simple formula that represents the balance between strength and acceleration, Hirt predicted the speeds of animals based upon nothing but their weight.

Thanks to the limits of metabolism and mass, we can eliminate every dinosaur weighing more than 6,000 pounds as a predatory threat. There is likely no animal of that size or larger—neither today, nor at any point in history—that a young, well-conditioned human couldn’t outrun.

Unfortunately, there are numerous predatory threats that weigh substantially less. Hirt’s discovery reveals a speed limit on the largest dinosaurs, but beneath that limit an animal’s size is not the only determinant for its speed. Clearly, two species of roughly the same weight—such as, say, the human and the cheetah—can run at dramatically different speeds depending on their body design. So before you lace up your running shoes, you need to know the precise speed of your foe. You need to know if you’re betting your life on a race against a reptilian roadrunner.

But how does one determine the precise speed of an extinct species based upon nothing but bones and a few fossilized footprints?

Fortunately, in 1976 British zoologist Robert McNeill Alexander made the remarkable observation that all animals—from ferrets to rhinos—run with a dynamically similar gait. Dynamic similarity is an engineering term used to refer to motions that can be made the same simply by changing their scale—like swinging pendulums of different sizes. Alexander’s discovery enabled paleontologists to estimate a dinosaur’s running speed based on nothing but its hip height and stride length for the same reason the swinging frequency of a pendulum can be predicted by knowing only its length and swing angle.

Unfortunately, it’s no more than a rough formula with the possibility of serious error, Hutchinson tells me. For example, Alexander’s formula suggests that the carnivorous three-ton Albertosaurus ran 22 miles per hour. That would give you some possibility of escape. But there is a chance it ran more like a cheetah. In which case . . . good luck.

In 2020, the paleontologist Alexander Dececchi combined Hirt’s and Alexander’s formulas, along with recent archaeological discoveries of dinosaur fossils, to estimate the speeds of seventy-one different dinosaurs. And though there are too many medium-sized, fast, and dangerous carnivores to make a complete compendium, we can look at a few species as examples. If the dinosaur you see has similar body dimensions to one shown below, expect a comparable athletic performance.

Note: Obviously, your level of concern should vary depending on your running speed. To determine mine, I used a simple formula*² and found I can sprint around 15 miles per hour. I would suggest you do the same. But as a rough guide to human speed: A gold-medal contender in the 100-meter dash can run 27 miles per hour, a good high school sprinter might run 22, the average person like myself could hope to reach 15 given proper motivation, and a brisk jog is around 7.

Unless you’re in contention for a gold medal or are, at the very least, a fast amateur sprinter, each of these dinosaurs will athletically outclass you. Still, all is not lost if one should attack. Studies of the chases between cheetahs and impalas and between lions and zebras prove that a prey animal like you has a few significant advantages.

Alan Wilson, a professor at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London who studies locomotor biomechanics, attached accelerometers to these predators and their prey to calculate their exact speed, agility, and tactics—and came away with encouraging results. His