4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL August 5, 2015
O PINION
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Nice baskets
Thank you all so very much
for the beautiful fl ower baskets
on Main Street. Whoever made
them up and, most especially,
to whoever watered and main-
tained them, especially dur-
ing our hot spell, are all to be
congratulated. We have several
eyesores like canopies on Main
Street, but the trees and fl ower
baskets make up for a lot.
Sujo Tryk
Cottage Grove
CONTACT YOUR
ELECTED OFFICIALS
Cottage Grove City Hall: 942-
5501. www.cottagegrove.org/
Lane County Commissioners:
Faye Stewart, East Lane Com-
missioner
Lane County Public Service
Building
125 East 8th Street
Eugene, OR 97401
Phone: (541) 682-4203
Fax: (541) 682-4616
Cottage Grove Mayor Tom
Munroe: 942-5501.
Cottage Grove City
Councilors:
Mike Fleck, At Large:
942-7302
Oregon State House of
Representatives:
Heather Murphy, At Large:
942-3444
Rep. Cedric Hayden (REP)
District: 7
900 Court Street NE
Suite H-379
Salem, OR 97301
Phone: (503) 986-1407
Fax: (503) 986-1130
Email: rep.cedrichayden@state.
or.us
Jake Boone, Ward 1:
653-7413
Jeff Gowing, Ward 2:
942-1900
Garland Burback, Ward 3:
942-4800
Offbeat Oregon History
Navy schooner doomed by skipper’s
fear of skipping sailors
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
For the Sentinel
H
istory is not always made by the
“great.” Sometimes key points
in history turn on people like 25-year-
old ex-sailor John Tice.
Tice, according to the United States
Navy, “pretends to be a blacksmith, but
is a bungler at that or any other busi-
ness he undertakes.”
The offi cer who wrote those words
had no idea how much Tice’s “bun-
gling” would affect him personally.
There’s some reason to believe that
Tice and a half dozen of his fellow sail-
ors were ultimately responsible for one
of the most storied shipwrecks of the
1800s — and, incidentally, for putting
the “cannon” in Cannon Beach.
They did this by quitting — slip-
ping away from the U.S. Navy schoo-
ner U.S.S. Shark during its two-month
survey-and-exploration mission of the
Oregon country, during the summer of
1846.
Sailors deserting from that particular
ship at that particular time in the Or-
egon country posed a massive problem
for their skipper. They could not be re-
placed. The only non-Native American
men in the Oregon Territory in 1846
were people who had paid vast sums
and made enormous sacrifi ces to get
there. Nobody who had made the gru-
eling overland journey along the Or-
egon Trail would ever think of signing
onto a Navy ship for seaman’s wages
after arriving there. Especially not in
the summertime.
Moreover, the residents of Astoria
— where the men were believed to be
hiding out — showed no sign of re-
sponding to the generous bounties of-
fered for their recapture. It looked like
the deserters were home free, in a wild
new state full of freedom and opportu-
nity.
This fact was not lost on the other
sailors on the Shark, who were already
resentful of Navy’s offi cial policy on
ships in port — designed to prevent
desertion. The policy was, sailors were
denied any shore leave and had to re-
main on board the ship even when it
was securely anchored in the same
place for days on end.
As a result, on shore, sailors could
see the generous sunshine and scenic
beauty of a temperate northwest Or-
egon summer — but they couldn’t go
experience it.
Now they were beginning to see that
if they could but slip away in the mid-
dle of the night, their chances of get-
ting away clean were pretty good. And
if enough of them acted on that realiza-
tion, the Shark’s captain, Lt. Neil M.
Howison, stood a pretty good chance of
getting stranded there, without enough
crewmembers to sail back home.
And so, in the grand old tradition of
haste making waste, Howison wrapped
up his business in record time and or-
dered his ship out to sea with an almost
panicky urgency — when a delay of a
few days would probably have made
all the difference between success and
soggy, chilly, humiliating failure.
The hunter of slave
ships
The U.S.S. Shark may have been the
most historically signifi cant fl oating
object to enter the Columbia River in
the entire 19th century. It had been built
25 years before and still represented a
powerful threat as a Navy ship.
It was a small ship, just 86 feet long
and displacing 200 tons. It was designed
as a pirate hunter, intended to help
make the Caribbean Sea a less danger-
ous place for American merchant ships.
Its hull was that of a Baltimore clipper,
and it was rigged as a topsail schooner,
with aggressively raked masts and a
colossal square topsail on the main, all
of which made it extraordinarily fast
while keeping its draft shallow.
The Shark also was endowed with a
particularly hefty load of fi repower for
such a small warship: a pair of rifl ed
long guns throwing nine-pound can-
nonballs, and eight beefy, short-range
carronades throwing 32-pound charg-
es.
This combination would have been
a deadly one in a fi ght with any pirate
ship of the day. But its fi rst assign-
ment, in 1821, was to operate against
a different kind of pirate: slave traders.
The slave trade had been outlawed for
American skippers and traders in 1808,
but that hadn’t ended the practice, and
American, Portugese and French smug-
glers continued hauling unfortunate
Africans across the sea to plantations
of sugar and cotton in the Caribbean
and the American South.
Of course, the rescued slaves had to
be taken somewhere. So in 1821, the
year it was launched, the Shark brought
Dr. Eli Ayres to Sierra Leone to acquire
land in West Africa for what would be-
come the nation of Liberia — where the
former slaves were resettled after being
rescued from their hellships (and, in
most cases, nursed back to health).
Later the Shark’s captain, Matthew
Perry — the same man who famously
visited and “opened” Japan some years
later — found and formally took pos-
session of a Caribbean island that he
dubbed Thompson’s Island, after the
U.S. Secretary of the Navy. Thomp-
son’s Island is, today, better known as
Key West.
Then in 1839, the doughty little
schooner became the fi rst U.S. Navy
ship to ever pass through the notori-
ously stormy and dangerous Strait of
Please see OFFBEAT, Page 5A
Ten best and worst foods for health and longevity
BY JOEL FUHRMAN, MD
For the Sentinel
ents, phytochemicals and other
health-promoting compounds.
People want to know which
high-nutrient foods provide the
keys to optimum health and lon-
gevity. They are searching for a
simple answer to the question,
“What should I eat to reach my
ideal weight, achieve immunity
to disease and feel my best ev-
ery day?”
It is diffi cult to squeeze all
the nutrient-dense, health-pro-
I
a
m
often
asked for
my list of
the
best
foods to eat
— the foods
that contain
the
most
micronutri-
$ PUUBHF ( SPWF 4 FOUJOFM
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moting foods into a list of the
10 best. The foods on my list
however, are the foods that I
believe everyone should include
in their diet on a regular basis.
They strongly protect against
cancer and favor longevity.
They contain the most vitamins
and minerals and powerful phy-
tochemicals including allium
compounds,
glucosinolates,
aromatase inhibitors, fl avonoids
and lignans. Of course, not all
of my favorites could make
my top-10, and the runners-up
include many other vegetables
and fruits.
Ten Best Foods:
Green Leafy Vegetables (e.g.
kale, collard greens, mustard
greens, spinach, lettuce)
Non Leafy Cruciferous Vegeta-
bles (e.g. broccoli, caulifl ower,
Brussels sprouts, cabbage)
Berries
Beans
Mushrooms
Onions
Seeds (e.g. fl ax, chia, hemp,
sesame, sunfl ower, pumpkin)
Nuts (e.g. walnuts, pistachios,
pine nuts, almonds)
Tomatoes
Pomegranates
It is almost just as challenging
to take all the bad foods in the
world and condense them down
to the worst of the worst. Foods
have the power to heal but also
have the power to harm. Our
leading causes of death, includ-
ing cancer, diabetes, and heart
disease are primarily the result
of the foods we eat. The wrong
foods can be as addictive as
drugs and alcohol and can cause
us to lead lives that provide only
a fraction of our potential for
health, energy level and physi-
ological well-being.
Foods such as dairy and other
animal products are rich in sub-
stances that scientifi c investiga-
tions have shown to be associat-
ed with cancer and heart disease
incidence: animal protein, satu-
rated fat, cholesterol and ara-
chidonic acid. The high animal
protein content of dairy increas-
es levels of IGF-1 in the blood,
which increases cancer risk.
The combination of dairy with
insulin-raising sugars is even
more dangerous when it comes
to cancer risk. Processed foods
containing refi ned white sugar,
refi ned white fl our, salt and oil
comprise over 60 percent of the
calories in the American diet
but provide little if any of the
antioxidant nutrients or phyto-
chemicals that are essential for
preventing chronic disease and
premature death. Salt consump-
tion has been linked to both
stomach cancer and hyperten-
sion. Needless to say, I advise
people to avoid the foods on my
“worst” list entirely.
Ten Worst Foods:
Sweetened Dairy Products (e.g.
ice cream, low-fat ice cream,
frozen yogurt)
Trans Fat Containing Foods
(e.g. stick margarine, shorten-
ing, fast foods, commercial
baked goods)
Donuts
Sausage, Hot Dogs and
Luncheon Meats
Smoked Meat, Barbecued Meat
and Conventionally Raised Red
Meat
Fried Foods including Potato
Chips and French Fries
Highly salted Foods
Soda
Refi ned White Sugar
Refi ned White Flour
It is clear that unrefi ned plant
foods should make up the bulk
of your diet and that fruits and
vegetables score highest on the
nutrient density scale in terms
of concentration of nutrients
per calorie. It is also obvious to
anyone who has studied the re-
search and looked at the trends
in recent years, that a diet based
on refi ned processed foods and
animal products cannot sustain
optimum health and protection
against disease.
Dr. Fuhrman is a #1 New York
Times best-selling author and a
family physician specializing in
lifestyle and nutritional medi-
cine. Visit his informative web-
site at DrFuhrman.com. Submit
your questions and comments
about this column directly to
newsquestions@drfuhrman.
com. The full reference list for
this article can be found at
DrFuhrman.com.
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