QI The Book of the Dead

Serene Highness. His Napoleonic fantasy was complete. Writing to a former ally he made his position quite clear:
    For a hundred years to come, my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them, but there is no reason why it should not be a wise and virtuous one .
     
    Unfortunately, Santa Anna was incapable of being either wise or virtuous. Back in power, he sold another chunk of territory to the Americans so they could build a railway, making sure that some of its $15 million price tag found its way into his pockets. Even his conservative allies finally decided he was a liability and, in 1855, he was deposed for good, exiled to Cuba and tried and convicted in his absence for corruption.
    The late 1860s found him living in exile on Staten Island in New York. Here, inadvertently, he made his most significant and lasting contribution to world history. He had become friendly with an American inventor, Thomas Adams. Adams was intrigued by the General’s habit of chewing chicle, the gum from the evergreen Manilkara tree, something Mexicans had been doing since the times of the Mayan Empire. Adams hoped tomake it into a cheap rubber substitute and bought a ton of chicle from Santa Anna, just in case. He failed to make rubber, but discovered that, by adding sugar, he had a terrific new confectionery product: chewing gum. In 1871, he launched it as ‘Adams New York No. 1’. His company later merged with Wrigley’s. In 2006 the chewing-gum giant had a turnover of $4.6 billion and a 63 per cent global market share.
    Santa Anna didn’t make a peseta from his role as father of American chewing. In 1874 he was finally allowed back into Mexico. In the two decades since he had left, the country had been plunged into civil war and had had an Austrian puppet emperor imposed on them by the French. Now the liberals were back in power. President Benito Juárez was the first indigenous Amerindian (and the first civilian) to govern Mexico. He ignored Santa Anna’s return: there was to be no re-entry to political life for him this time. The ‘Napoleon of theWest’ died, almost blind and penniless, stripped of property and honours, in Mexico City in 1876. His wooden leg remains in exile. Several attempts to return it have foundered: the last received a frosty response from a historian at the National Museum in Mexico. Santa Anna, he said, was a theatrical opportunist who only looked out for himself: ‘Returning the leg wouldn’t mean much. We do not want the leg returned.’
    Did the loss of a leg profoundly alter the course of Santa Anna’s life? Probably not. Was it a defining moment? Without doubt. The lost limb was the symbol of his self-appointed role as saviour of his country, a kind of visual proof of his canonisation. At the same time, as with Stuyvesant, it became a national joke. Santa Anna’s life, with its vanity, cruelty and lack of integrity, nonetheless has a compelling quality: rather as if Casanova hadput his energy into politics instead of sex. Though the immortal national hero status he lusted after was ultimately denied him, how many people have ever inspired a sea shanty?
    O! Santianna had a wooden leg
Heave away, Santianna!
He used it for a cribbage peg
All on the plains of Mexico
     
    O! Santianna’s day is o’er ,
Heave away, Santianna!
Santianna will fight no more .
All on the plains of Mexico!
     

     
    There are no songs dedicated to the ‘surprising Corpulency’ of Daniel Lambert (1770–1809), but for a while his name was the universal cliché for anything big. London was ‘the Daniel Lambert of cities’ and any especially erudite scholar, the ‘Daniel Lambert of learning’. There have been heavier men since – but not many, and none as fondly remembered. Perhaps for this reason he has kept an honourable mention in the Guinness Book of Records . When he died, aged thirty-nine, he weighed almost 53 stones (335 kg) and his waist was 9' 4" (284 cm) in circumference. In today’s terms that would give him a Body Mass Index of 104 – three times the level at which obesity kicks in. Quite how he got so large was as much a puzzle to him as to others. He didn’t eat to excess and drank only water. He just kept getting bigger.
    Obesity is not a modern phenomenon, although it has become a modern obsession. Today, in Britain and America, one in four adults is obese