Some 230 years after its flat pastures were wrested from the waters, the de Feijters' farm -- their home for 33 years -- is to be reflooded to reverse the disappearance of Zeeland's mudflats and salt marshes.
For the family -- raised in a province that owes its very existence to dike systems dating from the Middle Ages -- the plan is "un-Dutch."
Breaching dikes is behavior associated with invading armies, Mr. de Feijter said.

One of the world's earliest printed documents, Christopher Columbus's account of his first voyage to discover the New World, will come up for sale in London this month with a price tag of £500,000.

The Columbus Letter, or Epistola Christofori Colom, is the explorer's remarkably humane description of his first encounters with the natives of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands early in 1493.

He wrote it on his return voyage to Spain for his sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile, and it was rushed into print so that the news could be disseminated around Europe, notably to demonstrate Spain's expansionist superiority over Portugal.

It had been 84 years since a tomb was unearthed here in the scorching desert burial ground for pharaohs, and the hope, of course, was for mummies. What else could be inside the seven coffins, at the bottom of a shaft that until February had been sealed off from all but termites for over three millenniums?

Very nice pillows, for starters.

"No idea, I'm sorry," Elsie van Rooij, an expert on ancient textiles, said, when asked why it was that some burial worker had stuffed five pillows into the child-size coffin she was examining. Coffins usually hold bodies. She had never seen anything like it. Naturally, that pleased her.

"A tomb should be mysterious," she said.

A state-appointed commission is urging North Carolina to provide reparations for the 1898 racial violence that sparked an exodus of more than 2,000 black residents from Wilmington.

The 500-page report that was produced after six years of study also said the violence, which killed as many as 60 people, was not a spontaneous riot but rather the nation's only recorded coup d'etat.

"There is no amount of money that can repair what happened years ago and compensate for the loss of lives and the loss of property," said vice chairman Irving Joyner, a professor at N.C. Central School of Law.

The commission did not provide any cost estimates, although compensation advocate Larry Thomas of Chapel Hill estimated that the economic losses calculated today are "probably in the billions of dollars."

Along with compensation to victims' descendants, the commission also recommended incentives for minority small businesses and help for minority home ownership. It also recommended that the history of the incident be taught in public schools.

State Rep. Thomas Wright, a Democrat who helped establish and chair the panel, said the next step is to file a bill in the Legislature with the recommendations. That won't happen before 2007 because the filing deadline for this session has passed.

The 1898 violence began when white vigilantes, resentful after years of black and Republican political rule during Reconstruction, burned the printing press of a black newspaper publisher, Alexander Manly.

Violence spread, resulting in an exodus of 2,100 blacks, the commission concluded. Then the largest city in the state, Wilmington flipped from a black majority to a white majority in the months that followed.

Before the violence, which led to a Democratic takeover from Republicans and Populists, black men in North Carolina had been able to vote for about three decades. But Democrats quickly passed voter literacy tests and a grandfather clause, which disenfranchised black voters until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

"The growth of Wilmington was stunted as a result of what happened in 1898," Joyner said. "Wilmington has never recovered economically, socially or politically."

Wilmington likely became a "catalyst" for the violent white supremacist movement around the country, with other states taking note, said Lerae Umfleet, the state's lead researcher.

"Jim Crow had passed in a few other states," Umfleet said. "But the whole white supremacy campaign in North Carolina was watched around the country. People built on what happened in Wilmington."

Some previous historical accounts had portrayed the incident as spontaneous, although more recently, historians have described it as a coup d'etat.

"This sets the record straight," Wright said. "Now there is an official document confirming this part of North Carolina's -- and America's -- history. Nowhere in the United States has a legitimate government ever been overthrown."

Zebulon Pike wasn't the first person to see the towering peak that would bear his name. He never reached the 14,110-foot summit. And after a miserable time in the Rocky Mountains, he was captured by the Spanish and carted off to Mexico.

All of these details are simply part of the lore surrounding Pikes Peak, discovered 200 years ago by the Army captain's expedition.

"Pikes Peak is an American icon," said Carol Keenness, public programs coordinator at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. "Everybody has heard of Pikes Peak."

For the people who haven't heard enough, the museum and organizations throughout southern Colorado have scheduled lectures, exhibits, re-enactments and hikes over the next year, showcasing everything from Pike's 1806 journey to images of the mountain in art and advertising.

Pikes Peak climbs swiftly from the Colorado plains just west of Colorado Springs and dominates the landscape along the eastern slopes of the central Colorado Rockies. On clear days, it is visible for 100 miles, far out into the plains toward Kansas.

The peak isn't Colorado's tallest mountain, or its hardest to climb. But beginning with Pike, explorers, thrill-seekers and miners have flocked there looking for pristine views, breathtaking risks and easy money. The views at the summit inspired Katherine Lee Bates in 1893 to write the lyrics to "America the Beautiful."

"It's like a beacon on the plains," said Barb French-Pfeifer, an interpretive park ranger on Pikes Peak. "It still has that mystic and that allure to attract people."

Pike's mission in 1806 was to explore the headwaters of the Arkansas River. He traveled from Kansas and was in southern Colorado in November of that year when he first caught sight of Pikes Peak from near present-day Las Animas.

Later, Pike set out from what is now Pueblo -- 40 miles south of Colorado Springs -- with three men, little gear and linen army uniforms, believing they could summit the "Grand Peak" and return to camp in two days.

"He was quite an optimist," said Clive Siegle, manager of the Santa Fe Trail Association, which is coordinating bicentennial activities.

It took two days just to reach the base. After two more days of climbing and a long, awful night on a nearby peak, the team turned back to Pueblo.

Underwater archeologists have identified the partial remains of the youngest known pirate to ply U.S. waters, a 9-year-old boy who eagerly joined Capt. Black Sam Bellamy's crew on the infamous Whydah.

Teenage pirates were quite common during the early 18th century, but "this is the youngest one I have ever come across," historian Ken Kinkor of the Expedition Whydah Sea-Lab & Learning Center in Provincetown, Mass., said Wednesday in announcing the discovery.

The young pirate's idyll aboard the Whydah did not last long. The ship foundered in a storm off Cape Cod only three months after he joined, crashing to the sea floor with all but eight of its 180-man crew. Six of the eight survivors were tried and hanged in Boston. The other two escaped punishment, thanks to the efforts of famed lawyer Cotton Mather.

The tale of the pirate, identified as John King, was then pretty much lost to history until explorer Barry Clifford used court documents and an early salvage map to locate the Whydah in 1984 -- the first time that an authenticated wreck of a pirate ship had been discovered.

In the subsequent 20 years, Clifford and his crew of divers have recovered more than 100,000 artifacts from the wreck, bringing them to the surface, conserving them and putting them on display at their museum on the end of a Provincetown pier.

The wreck "was like a 300-year-old Wal-Mart on the bottom of the ocean," Clifford said, with an unusually broad variety of artifacts stolen from other ships. Despite the quantity of materials recovered, he added, "we've never really discovered the mother lode of the ship."

One thing they did discover was a small shoe, a silk stocking and a small fibula, or lower leg bone. The items had been in storage unremarked for nearly 20 years before Clifford and Kinkor recently made the connection to young John King.

John King's fragmentary story is found in a deposition filed with the governor of Antigua on Nov. 30, 1716, by Abijah Savage, commander of the Antiguan sloop Bonetta. As was the usual practice, Savage reported to the governor the details of a pirate attack on his ship.

On Nov. 9, the Bonetta was attacked by Bellamy's ship and held for 15 days. The pirates took all of their valuables, including "a Negro Man and an Indian Boy belonging to Mr. Benjamin Wicker" before releasing them.

Savage wrote that one John King, who was sailing with his mother as a passenger from Jamaica to Antigua, "deserted his sloop, and went with the Pirates and was so far from being forced or compelled thereto by them as the deponent could perceive or learn that he declared he would Kill himself if he was Restrained, and even threatned his Mother who was then on Board as a Passenger with the Deponent."

Such depositions are usually very brief and record only the most striking things that happened, Kinkor said. "It was pretty unusual for Capt. Savage to have recorded it."

Kinkor added there were "a variety of reasons why a pirate's life would have appealed to a youngster -- a free and easy lifestyle, and a classless democratic subculture."

Spurred by this account, Clifford showed the short fibula to expedition archeologist John de Bry and Smithsonian Institution expert David Hunt. Both agreed that the fibula belonged to a child age 8 to 11.

The stocking is of woven French silk, Kinkor said, and the shoe -- which is only 2 inches in width at its widest point -- is of upper-class design and craftsmanship, consistent with it belonging to John King.

The shoe and fibula were found adjacent to a large concretion of artifacts that is now on display at the museum. Such concretions occur when iron objects electrolyze in seawater, catalyzing the formation of stone-like materials that bind artifacts together.

X-rays of the concretion show that it has many other bones, a possible skull and hundreds of other artifacts buried deep inside. "It's a 300-year-old time capsule," Clifford said.

Eventually they may drill into it and use fiber optics to determine if the other bones represent the rest of the boy's skeleton, he said.

But they are unlikely to take it apart, he added. "It's much more interesting seeing the X-ray and the bones protruding."

The great grandson of the Apache leader Geronimo has appealed to the big chief in the White House to help recover the remains of his famous relative - purportedly stolen more than 90 years ago by a group of students - including the President's grandfather.

The story that members of Yale University's secret Skull and Bones society took the remains - including a skull and femur - from the burial site in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, has long been part of the university's lore. But a university historian recently recovered a letter from 1918 that appears to supportthe storythat members of the society did indeed take the remains while serving with a group of army volunteers from Yale, stationed at the fort during the First World War.

The students - among them, Mr Bush's grandfather Prescott -apparently returned with the remains and kept them in their society's headquarters at the university in New Haven, Connecticut. The society's initiation rite reportedly involves kissing a skull, referred to as "Geronimo", usually held in a glass case.

The letter from society member Winter Mead to fellow member F Trubee Davison, made public earlier this month, said: "The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club ... is now safe inside the [tomb] together with his well worn femurs, bit and saddle horn."

The famous Indian chief's great-grandson is appealing for President Bush's help in recovering the remains. Speaking from his home in Mescalero, New Mexico, Harlyn Geronimo said: "I am requesting his help in getting the remains - the skull and the femur - returned, if they were taken. According to our traditions the remains of this sort, especially in this state when the grave was desecrated ... need to be reburied with the proper rituals. To return the dignity and let his spirits rest in peace... is important in our tradition." The letter was discovered by the Yale historian Marc Wortman and published in the Yale Alumni Magazine. Mr Wortman said there was still scepticism as to whether the remains were those of Geronimo - something that could probably only be proved by carrying out DNA tests.

"What I think we could probably say is they removed some skull and bones and other materials from a grave at Fort Sill," he said.

"Historically, it may be impossible to prove it's Geronimo's. They believe it's from Geronimo." Geronimo, a leader of the Chiricahua Apache, is remembered as one of the last Native American leaders to hold out against the forces of the US government. He eventually surrendered in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, in 1886 and was moved first to Florida and then Oklahoma. He died of pneumonia at Fort Sill in 1909, and was buried at the fort's Apache Indian Prisoner of War cemetery.

The White House yesterday did not return calls seeking a comment. A Yale spokeswoman, Dorie Baker, said the university could not comment because the Skull and Bones was a separate entity and that because it was a secret society "we don't know anything". The society has not commented on the issue.