CHAPTER I

PETROLEUM IN HISTORY AND LEGEND

While the petroleum industry is in the fullest sense modern, it has been known to, and casually utilized by mankind for centuries. It is named in the earliest annals of the race; and allusions to it are abundant in the literature of the East, from which much of our Western literature had its inspiration. It was applied to the service of religion, and was a subject of superstition in times which are enshrouded in legend. In the authorized Bible and in the Apocrypha there are more than two hundred allusions to it. The legend of Noah speaks of his having used pitch to tighten the seams of his ark, which certainly indicates a familiarity with the uses of fluid bitumen available in the East. In Deuteronomy there is mention of “oil out of the flinty rock;” and Biblical students could cite countless other instances where the meaning clearly indicates a common use of the surface deposits of Western Asia.

It is believed to have been a strong factor in trade between Ancient Judea and Persia, which latter country has again in the twentieth century become a factor in oil production. It played its part in the worship not only of the Hebrews but of other Eastern nations, and to the primitive minds of those peoples assumed miraculous characteristics. The burning wells of Baku were the objective of religious pilgrimages among the prehistoric peoples; and despite the colossal waste of past ages these wells still flow and are a factor in commerce. The Zoroastrians, or Fire Worshippers, a sect of Persian origin, which gained many adherents in ancient India also, regarded these wells as the manifestations of a great imprisoned spirit, who was supposed to breathe inflammable vapour from his nostrils. Zoroaster has a temple at Baku, and students of folk-lore hold that these burning wells helped to confirm the belief in a literal Hell of fire, common to races of Semitic origin. The Macedonian conqueror of Asia, Alexander the Great, witnessed the burning lake of Ectabana in his march to the east, centuries before the Christian era. Marco Polo, the Italian explorer of the middle ages, among many fables, revealed to Europe the truth about the oil resources in Baku, and had sufficient of the instincts of a trader to discern their commercial value. Well-founded belief in the medicinal properties of petroleum, common to all countries where it is found, was also prevalent among the ancient peoples.

The reference to its use in the construction of Noah’s ark shows that the utility of pitch, as a binding material in building operations, was recognized. It is clearly this material that is meant by the “slime” which is stated to have been used as mortar for the erection of the Tower of Babel; and it is supposed to have played its part in more definitely authenticated structures like the palaces of Babylon and Nineveh, and the Temple of King Solomon.

Less familiar are the Greek legends relative to petroleum. Plutarch, in his life of Alexander the Great, after recording some experiments of the Macedonian conqueror with petroleum, in the course of which he nearly burned a favorite slave to death, suggests that it was the fluid signified in one of the legends of Medea. The story ran that Medea, wishing to destroy a successful rival in love, the daughter of King Creon, gave her a wreath and crown anointed with some inflammable liquid. As her victim approached the altar flame during a religious festival, the wreath and veil became ignited and the unfortunate princess was burned to ashes.

The ancient Egyptians undoubtedly used petroleum for embalming and medicinal purposes, and filled the cavities of dead bodies with asphaltum, so that nomadic Arabs in later times have been known to use mummies stolen from Egyptian tombs for fuel. Petroleum in its more fluid form is also supposed to have been used to preserve the ancient papyrus against the boring of insects and the rust and rot of time. To this extent at least historians and archæologists are indebted to this gift to man.

Rome, in her gradual conquest of the Western world, made all known oil supplies her own. Consequently allusions which obviously refer to petroleum are frequent to the Roman historians; and here once more it was applied to the use of religion.

The early records of Russia, the Scythian nation of ancient history, are obscure, but it is quite clear that the properties of petroleum were known to them for ages. When Igor descended on Greece, his vessels were destroyed by a fire that burned on water; which has led some modern historians to believe that petroleum entered into the composition of “Greek Fire,” the secret of which is lost.

The Greeks, indeed, are said to have made ingenious use of petroleum at all times. Those who have read in Gustav Flaubert’s “Salammbo” the story of the rising of the mercenary troops of Carthage after the first Punic war will recall the tactics of one of the Greek captains who turned back the Carthaginian elephant corps, by sending among them swine smeared with petroleum and ignited.

In later days the greatest of Russian Emperors, Peter the Great, showed himself alive to the commercial value of the Baku wells. When in 1723 he obtained from Persia control of the Baku Khanate, he ordered the seizure of as much white petroleum as possible, and directed that a refining master be sent there. “This,” remarks a historian of petroleum, “is the first record of a vacancy for a manager of an oil refinery.”

As we go farther east history becomes less exact and legend more quaint. In Burma the story of a sweet-smelling deposit of petroleum is the subject of a tale more than a thousand years old. It is related that King Alsungsithu was making progress through his realms with his seven wives and on his magic raft. At one point the ladies went ashore and finding sweet-smelling earth, anointed themselves and delayed so long that they forgot the hour appointed for their return. The angered king issued the decree “let the queens who love scented earth more than me, their Lord, be put to death.” The doomed ladies replied “From too much love of this fragrant earth we must now die. Let it lose its fragrance and become an overflowing stream of foul-smelling oil, and let those who collect it pay us honour as their protecting deities.” They were executed and became Nats or guardian spirits and belief in them is still preserved among workers in the Burmese oil fields. But if the legend could be accepted as true the slain women assuredly took a sad vengeance, for the only offense that can be charged against so beneficent an agent as crude petroleum is its odour, which assuredly belies its virtues.

There are the remains of very ancient oil workings in Burma, Japan and China. Indeed, China, a pioneer in many arts, was undoubtedly one in oil production. Boring in the modern sense was unknown to most of the ancient peoples but it was practised in China centuries ago, a fact which will come under consideration when we take up the mechanical phases of oil production. They had some deep wells at a time when other nations were merely utilizing surface accumulations, and eruptions.

A natural substance which has played so considerable a part in the literature and legend of Europeans and Asiatics did not fail to appear in the beliefs and practices of the aborigines of this country. From time unknown the red man has gathered and made medicinal use of the surface petroleum of the Oil Creek region of Pennsylvania; and its utility in more than one respect was known to the Indians of California and Mexico. The Senecas imparted to the French Jesuit missionaries--who in the seventeenth century, explored not only Eastern Canada but the Northern States and the Mississippi Valley--the curative virtues of oil; and two hundred years later it was known to the settlers of Northern New York State, Pennsylvania and Ohio as “Seneca Oil.” The early Spanish missionaries to Mexico and California found the natives selling in their market places petroleum gathered from the surface of the water along the seashore, chiefly for burning purposes. Father Acosta, one of the early missionaries to Peru, noted petroleum floating in the water off Cape Blanco and, as early as 1692, the Spanish Government granted concessions for the collection of Peruvian oil.

In the years immediately prior to our war of Independence, allusions to the petroleum resources of what are now the United States became frequent; and the commercial value of the product was known to General Washington himself. Washington, who was a great believer in the future of the country, which was in his day called “the West,” acquired three large tracts of land on the Ohio River bottoms. One of these was at Point Pleasant, the birthplace of General Grant; a second at Round Bottom, later the site of the City of Cincinnati; and a third at the mouth of the Kanawha River, rich in coal and oil. The father of his country had a singular prescience with regard to the element which was to play so great a part in modern American industry; for in his will, speaking of this third tract, he says: “This tract was taken up by General Lewis and myself on account of the bituminous spring which it contains, of so inflammable a nature as to burn freely as spirits and is nearly as difficult to extinguish.” Certain of its immense future value, he requested his heirs not to dispose of this particular tract.