SEE the couch on eBay. 

How a couch from the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth got to Illinois is anyone’s guess. But there it was on Ebay at a suggested bid of $25,000. The only problem was the title of the auction read "Roosevelt’s Couch". As local students of history know, that just couldn’t be. Although President Theodore Roosevelt got the Nobel Peace Prize for initiating the end to the Russo-Japanese War, Teddy never came to Portsmouth.

The auction web page indicated that, not only was it possible that President Roosevelt had used this empire-style sofa, but that he was probably sitting there with the Emperor of Japan and the Czar of Russia.

"This is where the main political figures would sit," the web page read, "while their negotiators sat at the conference table."

The mistake was easy to make. Propaganda pictures from the Treaty do show the three world leaders standing together, even though they never met and none of them came to Portsmouth. All the work was done by skilled negotiators who hammered out a treaty in 30-days, ending the bloody war and putting Portsmouth, Kittery and New Castle on the map. Still, it’s funny to imagine three of the most powerful men in the world sitting back on a striped sofa together as dignitaries at the conference table did the heavy lifting.

It is quite possible that this piece of furniture did attend the conference along with a number of well-known chairs and a famous wooden table. A plaque on the back of the couch says so. I was unable to find a picture of the sofa among any of the scores of published treaty photos. When I wrote to the auctioneer asking for evidence of his claim, he sent back a picture from this web site as proof. That picture is posted below. When I mentioned the historical errors, the auctioneer quickly adjusted the wording on the auction to read "Rare Couch from Portsmouth Peace Treaty 1905". References to world leaders sitting on it were deleted.

No harm done, I guess, since no one actually bought the item under false pretenses. In fact, the auctioneer noted, that he purposely listed the item for 10 days hoping that he might get emails from people who had accurate information on the historic couch.

"I put the item out on a 10-day listing, with the main purpose of obtaining info, as I've had it for several years in my possession, but ran into difficulty finding more info. I thought this would be the best way to research it," the owner wrote to me.

Think about that for a minute. Thanks to the Internet, we have become so interconnected, that one way to learn the truth is to publish something false – and wait for the world to correct it. This was not, according to the seller, a potential case of fraud, but merely a dry run based on the best available information. That is, in a nutshell, how web sites work these days. When Wikipedia, the online user-defined encyclopedia is wrong, it is technically only waiting for the accurate information to arrive. Writers who write factual books filled with lies are not liars, they are simply waiting for an opportunity to make corrections once the errors have been spotted.

We all do it, of course. This web site is filled with stuff that I thought was true 10 years ago, and is turning out to be less true today. When readers send updates, most of the time they are right, and I am wrong. History changes too. We don’t know where Jimmy Hoffa was buried one day, and the next day we do. Facts rest tentatively on the tectonic fault lines of history. Currently we are liberating Iraq. Tomorrow we may have invaded.

I’ve written more than once that eBay is my favorite history web site. Millions of daily items flow through telling us things about history that could never have been discovered through libraries, archives and museums. And when mistakes are made, they can be repaired. History has been transformed from a lecture into a conversation. That has to be a good thing. People who know can find people who don’t in seconds all across the world. Yesterday this was couch to a czar, a president and an emperor. Today, it is just a place for the guys who couldn’t get a seat at the big table.

THANKS to SeacoastNH reader Sean Rafferty for spotting this item on eBay.

OUTSIDE LINK: Treaty of Portsmouth web site