GoodReads metadata is 435 pages, rated 3.74 by 8858 litizens.
Genre: period krimi.
Verdict: Trying too hard.
Ex-communicate Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548 – 1600) became a peripatetic scholar, staying a few steps ahead of the Inquisition through Italy, Rhineland, Burgundy, Belgium, Nederlands, France, and then England. His travels took him to Oxford in 1583 where he found Lincoln College to be a mares nest of intrigue and backstabbing. So little has changed I shouldn’t wonder. As an enemy of the Pope, he was a welcome visitor to Anglican England, however as a born Catholic he was suspect at the same time.
In seeking refuge in England in these pages, Bruno accepts a commission to work for, that is, spy for Sir Francis Walsingham to ferret out enemies of the realm – Queen Elizabeth I. There are plenty of likely candidates in Oxford. If Bruno will merely keep his eyes open he may discern intelligence of value to Sir Francis. The arrangement suits Bruno for it secures his patronage in England and puts coins in his purse, and all he has to do is observe. Well, he is a scientist at heart, and observing is what he does. All the better to be paid to do so.
That commitment is the thin end of the wedge, and soon enough he is mired in detailed descriptions of gory murder(s) and bloody sacrilege. He is driven by his Holmesian curiosity and lust for the Lincoln dean’s daughter to dig ever deeper into comings and goings. He thwarted every step of the way by one-dimensional characters who are conjured on the page only to harass him and he stumbles under the weight of pages and pages of descriptions of woodwork, chandeliers, stone walls, floor boards, and guttering candles – all to evoke the time and place, and to bore this reader to mechanical pages thumbing on the Kindle.
B
Bruno did not want the life of a visiting professor, but his efforts to secure a tenured appointment failed each place he went. He was, perhaps, just too controversial to make a fixture. Allowing him to lecture for a few months, while he used the local library, could be branded as a sign of open-mindedness and even toleration, but to sign him up was going too far beyond the pale of conventionality. For he said in his tactless way what he believed: that the Earth orbited the Sun, that the universe was boundless, that Deism did not require an established Church, that…. Well, that is enough to kindle the fires.
A practical skill that made Bruno welcome in some princely courts was memory. He developed mnemonics to stimulate and structure memory, and devised a set of shorthand symbols to teach them. But to Republicans of the day these very symbols conjured the devil, like Arabic numbers today, and made him a devil. Idiocracy is nothing new.
Before MI5 and MI6 began their turf war, there was Walsingham (1532-1590). Wikipedia has a surprisingly informative and dispassionate entry on him right now. Read it before it gets edited again to satisfy a troll’s ego.
S J Parris
This is the first title in a series featuring Bruno. Having started it ages ago, this time I finished it but only thanks to perseverance not pleasure. After compiling a massive amount of research on the time and place, the author crams every last iota of it on the page at the expense of pace, momentum, interest, movement, character, balance, or plot. To liven the dead pages up that result, there are punctuations of fights and flights likewise described in numbing detail which I find even more boring. The result is indigestion as in a fifty-course degustation menu.
Despite the overheated tripe on the Amazon web page I downloaded and read this title out of morbid interest in the setting at Oxford University during the religious war(s) in 1585. Because Bruno was such a fascinating character I might try the second volume in the hope that the writer has gained confidence and no longer needs to force-feed the reader pointless descriptions. But not just yet.
Lee (1935 and 1958) by Douglas S. Freeman and Richard Harwell.
GoodReads meta-data is 648 pages, rated 4.27 by 1644 litizens.
Genre: biography, hagiography.
Verdict: Ineffable.
Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) is a storied figure in American history and the definitive biography is a massive four-volume work by Freeman which I read in its entirety years ago. Freeman took twenty years to complete the biography and a Pulitzer Prize crowned the result. Yet at the time I first read it I felt I knew nothing more about Lee the man after I finished the two thousand pages than I did before I started on page one. To double check on that recollection I recently skimmed through the one-volume abridgement cited above. My earlier conclusion stands: Lee eluded the biographer. There is a blizzard of detail but in the ensuing white-out no overall picture of the man is to be seen.
In the abridgement the focus is nearly exclusively on a day-by-day account of Lee’s war after a few short chapters on his early and late life.
The treatment of Lee after the end of the Civil War is itself an historical study, I am told. While he was revered throughout the South and respected throughout the North, at the end of the war he sought seclusion free from the terrible times he had endured and became a very private citizen.
Then the survivors began re-writing history with a fury. Many of his subordinates found ways in their autobiographical works, and there were many such works, to blame their shortcomings and failures on Lee. Each book was peppered with unerring hindsight. I read a couple: one by James Longstreet and another by Jubal Early. Both took full credit for their successes, some fictional, and sheeted home full responsibility for failures to Lee. It was a litany repeated ad nauseam in the Reconstruction period as Confederate memoirs gushed out from every officer desperate to earn a living by the pen in those hard times. Lee himself, by the way, did not publish a word about the war, turning down considerable interest from publishers willing to pay him a fortune. He had no wish to profit from the blood of followers to paraphrase something Dwight Eisenhower once said. That reticence remained firm, while others had verbal diarrhoea.
Yet this flood of self-righteous libel between covers mattered not one whit to the public as statues of Lee proliferated, like that in New Orleans, where he never set foot during the War, with an inscription bearing historical errors. Nonetheless up it went up along with a forest of others. He became a demigod to the wider public even as he was a whipping boy for those colleagues disconsolate and desperate in defeat. That none of this mud ever stuck to him and the proliferation of statues led one biographer, Thomas Connelly, to refer to him as The Marble Man (1978).
Regrettably these statues have recently been caught up in the political tornados, but I rest content in recalling Robert Penn Warren’s observation (discussed elsewhere on this blog) that Lee would have spurned the strutting, fulminating segregationists of the 1960s as he had the firebrands of the 1860s. By the way, before the war began he personally freed the slaves he had inherited from his wife’s family, herself a distaff relative of George Washington.
The abridgement, like the original work, is a hostage to its sources. There are so many extant letters, reports, telegrams, diaries, logs, inquiries that a mountain of primary material exists, and it overwhelms any insight, meaning, or lesson in the biography. More yields less in this case.
Douglas Southall Freeman
Lee was an intensely private man all of his life and the pressures of command exacerbated that centripetal force. His most outstanding social characteristic was silence. He had iron self-control and even in the face of disaster brought about by an inept subordinate, he would strive to rectify the situation as best as possible with a nary a word of rebuke. He left it to subordinates in respite, if they lived that long, to see the errors of their ways. As the war went on he also realised that he had to make do with the officers available, whatever their limitations, because so many of their predecessors had been killed.
At war’s end surviving subordinates would list this forbearance as a fault, though they benefited from it. Likewise, his famous reluctance to give a direct tactical order to a subordinate became in hindsight a fault. Lee’s approach was that once a strategy had been set, he would not interfere in it, leaving it to the officers on the spot execution as the circumstances dictated.
His campaigns in Maryland and Pennsylvania have long attracted the most fire from armchair generals, yet each has a perfectly obvious albeit mundane explanation. The Army of Northern Virginia was a gigantic locust swarm that stripped the land of food, forage, provender, shoe leather, horses, grease, lead, firewood to say nothing of the impact on hygiene. Not even the bountiful Shenandoah Valley could sustain it indefinitely and also supply the civilian population. To stay in Virginia meant ever more stripping down to the roots, whereas to move north his army could live off lands as yet untouched by the needs of 80,000 mouths, 40,000 equines, and other camp followers. These incursions suited the Confederate government, too, which dreamed that these offensives would threaten Washington D.C., throwing the North on the defensive and weaken the will to fight, and might also win European support. Pipe dreams to be sure, but we have all been misled by dreams.
I used the word hagiography above because the treatment is almost reverential. The modest Lee would have blushed to see how his every move is parsed, exalted, and praised. Though I hasten to add that the author(s) does acknowledge that Lee made mistakes, but insists that he always learned from them and never repeated them. Ergo, the treatment is not completely blind but close to it.
There are two minor incidents that struck this reader. The first is Judah Benjamin’s noble lie. For those who missed Plato’s Republic — shame on you! — a noble lie is a one told in order to secure a greater good for the community. When after the crushing Confederate victory at the battle of Second Manassas, the Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia did not pursue the defeated Unionists an outcry went up in the Southern newspapers, whose writers saw in this victory a great opportunity to crush the North. What could explain the treasonous failure to capitalise on it?
Indeed, what could?
The simple facts were that the Confederacy had not one ounce of reserves left to chase down its enemy. There were no more horses, nor horse shoes, nor forage for the horses. No rations for the men. There was no ammunition for the muskets. No shot or shell for the artillery. Nor wagons to carry the ammunition. No leather for marching shoes. Everything had been expended at Manassas; nothing was left in the locker. But to admit that fact of complete martial impoverishment at this stage would be to encourage the North and depress the South, and cause European powers to withdraw interest in the Confederacy.
So instead the Confederate Secretary of War, Judah Benjamin (a biography of whom is treated elsewhere on this blog) proposed to take publicly the blame. Though he was surely the most competent, persistent, industrious, creative, and conscientious member of the the Confederate cabinet he was never popular with elite or mass for the simple reason that he was a born Jew. So the word was leaked to the Confederate free press and they hastily and happily hung Benjamin in effigy in their pages. Once a scapegoat was to hand, no further inquiries were made by the investigative journalists of the day because if the media sharks have blood, they are sated. Rien ne change jamais.
In this case the Confederacy did not have to admit how ill-equipped it was for war. Just blame the Jew. Thus the near fatal weakness of the Confederacy was concealed from the North, from the Confederacy itself, and the European powers.
I also noted that in 1869 when Lee, then president of Washington College in Lexington Virginia, was soliciting funding for the college at a reception, a youth of thirteen wormed his way through the crowd to see and meet the demigod. This spout was Woodrow Wilson. This incident by the way is not mentioned in the biography of Wilson discussed elsewhere on this blog. In that strange way that history connects the living and the dead, nearly a century later Wilson’s aged widow attended Jack’s inauguration which I watched on television in the auditorium of junior high school, and so the shadow of Lee fell even there, though I did not know it.
Lee did some post-war travelling and attended events to honour the fallen and veterans as well to promote the college and wherever he appeared a crowd gathered to catch a glimpse of him, and usually did so in church-silence. He might then, at the urging of his host, step onto the porch to bow in acknowledgement and then retreat. At most he might say, ‘Thank you.’ He, unlike his biographers, was a man of few words.
Finally, a minor incident recorded in these pages says it all. In 1870 Lee, while walking in Richmond, encountered John Mosby, a one-time colonel in the CSA Army, and they stopped, shook hands, and then, observed by another who reported this occasion, stood in silence. After some minutes Lee said, ‘The War.’ Mosby nodded and walked on. Nothing more can or need be said. This Colonel commanded Mosby’s Rangers of legend.
GoodReads meta-data is 273 pages, rated 4.19 by 901 litizens.
Genre: nonfiction, popular science
Verdict: Hive mind.
In this beguiling, informative, and elegant study, the author tells us much about the bees and a little about himself and other bee-ologists.
All that buzzing, flitting, and waggling that bees do is purposive behaviour and the more closely it is studied the more the purpose(s) are revealed. While hearing someone speak Cantonese sounds like gibberish to the uninitiated when one learns to hear, speak, and write it, the meanings encoded within it gradually appear. So it is with language of bees in their activities.
While the main focus of the book is on site selection for a new nest when a hive swarms (i.e., divides), there is much about how the hive comes to that juncture. An important part of that story is the division of labour among bees. Among the 10,000 bees in a typical hive in upstate New York where most of the research underlying this study was done, a certain percentage are foragers who leave the hive’s nest each morning with the first light on dry days to harvest from sources of food to carry back to the nest.
At certain times some of the emeritus foragers become scouts for a new nesting site. The number is not a great. maybe 50-100 in a hive of 10,000. This is highly specialised role and only a few undertake it. When each single bee finds a potential spot she examines it and then reports back to the hive, which absorbs the input from all of the several scouts. One spot may be scouted by many bees, but another will be scouted only by a few. Yet the ultimate selection may be that latter which only a few scouts initially reported. But as it gains favour, more scouts will visit it and report back.
The bees’ decision is not clouded by history, ego, institutions, or ideology. Site selection shows no preference for doing what they did last time or the time before. Swarms do not try to return to areas used previously. History is not a determinate. Nor does ego enter into it. Even scouts who continually brought back data about a reasonable site, go along with the swarm when it opts for an alternative. Nor are there institutional constraints like a fixed calendar or an electoral college. Still less is there an ideology (or religion) that takes precedence.
It is all so unlike human decision-making where history is always a factor: we keep repeating what we already did (even when it no longer works). Ego which is all for many of us: my way or the highway (for you or me). The fixed calendar prevails in the timing of elections. And ideology: god told me this is THE tree. Compared to much human decision-making, the bees are rational.
There are rare occasions when a hive mind cannot decide. In such instance the hives may (1) stay where it is too long and suffer the fatal consequences or (2) the swarm leaving the hive may itself divide, dawdle, and dither and likewise suffer the consequences delivered by the changing seasons. In these two cases all members of the swarm perish.
To explain the bees’ hive mind the author makes analogies to human decision-making, particularly the fabled New England town meetings, but I fear he has seen few of those or he would have seen history, ego, and ideology driving out assessment, fact, and science. Perhaps he was influenced at a remove by Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961), which rather idealised these meetings. (Dahl changed his mind later in How Democratic is the American Constitution? [2001].)
The methods this author uses to study bee decision-making are ingenious, labor intensive, amusing, and fruitful, yielding a plethora of data as well as stings! The location of a new nest is a life-or-death decision for the members of a swarm and it may take several days for it to be determined. And sometimes the site is not adequate and the swarm dies. This failure is not due to mistaken decision-making so much as the intensity of the elements. The swarm may have chosen the best available site, but not even that site could not withstand the depth of that particular winter. Sad to say, a surprising high percentage of swarms dividing off from a hive, die as hostages to climate and weather. Perhaps a third of them meet this fate. The mortality rate among bees is surprisingly high to this neophyte.
I did find much of the exposition too technical for this layman.
N.B. Many bees were killed in the course of this study. Many.
All these buzzing bees remind me of Dutchman Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705 [1714]). In it Mandeville implies that private vices lead to social benefits, and that conversely private virtues may lead to social collapse. That is, society is an aggregation of self-interested individuals bound by convention and regulated by law who are more interested in themselves than anyone else. Social cohesion results, paradoxically, from competition and conflict. All benefit from a rules-of-the-game cooperation which constrains the competition and conflict. Hobbes’s war of all against all is brought constrained by baselines with a rulebook and some referees.
If, however, competition and conflict are replaced by a rule of singular virtue, the result will be ruin. The effort to regulate every aspect of life according to (someone’s idea of) virtue will strangle productivity, cooperation, and more. Think of a society ordered by Pat Robertson! Or Rush Cancer. Thomas More. George Pell. Fred Nile. Alan Jones. Bernie Sanders. A monocular society weakens itself.
While the metaphor of the bees may bring to mind Adam Smith’s invisible hand, that is more focused on economic production and distribution, while Mandeville’s remit is more social than economic.
Inspired by this book I read a sample of José Luis de Juan’s Napoleon’s Beekeeper (2019) but found it so convoluted and cryptic it made no sense to me, probably destined for a Booker Prize. However, at the time it rated a respectable 3.25 from 8 litizens on GoodReads.
I have been reading my way through a krimi series by Michael Pearce. The touch is light, the locale exotic, and the treatment respectful and affectionate, as the Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police strives to keep order in an essentially disordered Cairo (and beyond) in the 1900s. This fearsome Head is the Mamur Zapt to give the job its Arabic name. He is one Gareth Owen, a Welsh captain in the British Army that occupied Egypt to secure repayment of loans, as the French once tried to do in Mexico and the Germans in Venezuela.
The legal fiction at the time was that Egypt was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire at the indulgence of the Sultan in distant Constantinople who appointed the local governor, the Khedive. This arrangement came about in the aftermath of the construction of the Suez Canal which had led to vast investments and speculation in Egypt with attendant boom, corruption, and bust, occasioning ever greater tax increases to repay loans. The Khedive liked the high life and had soon sold all the Suez Canal shares assigned to Egypt to pay for his pleasure. French and British financial interests in Egypt reduced the Ottoman Empire’s sway over the region and that suited the Khedive to get away from the Sultan’s taxing reach.
The high life was very expensive because it included hundreds of pashas and their extended families who also got on the gravy train; in 1882 the party ended. A British Army intervened and the Khedive agreed to an arrangement that made Egypt a protectorate of Great Britain but still nominally associated with the Ottoman Empire so it was not coloured British pink on maps. None of this was easy. There was at least one pitched battle in 1882 before the Khedive went to the table, where he and the pashas were guaranteed British support in return for inviting the British to stay and stay and stay over the protests from the Sultan. That the Ottoman Empire could not resist this arrangement was one sign of its own decline.
Pearce was born in Sudan, educated in Cairo, and obviously knows the lands and peoples well, and holds them in high esteem. Most of the violence occurs off stage and in some titles there is no violence at all, but a mystery of a theft or — in one — a strange reappearance. Some of the events occur in what was then called Egyptian Sudan, a vast area, larger than India and nearly as diverse though not densely populated.
In these pages Cairo is a living museum of humanity with its myriad of races, ethnicities, nationalities, hundreds of religions, thousands of sects, alongside remnants of ancient histories (Pharaonic, Greek, Roman), and the endless variety among the Arabs themselves. All are dominated and much is determined by the relentless Sun and the life-giving Nile. Then there are the interlopers — Russian, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Mingrelian, French, American, English, Montenegrin — who come to steal ancient artefacts or to build casinos or railroads for maximum profit and generally exploit the region.
The author is in no hurry to crowd in his encyclopaedic knowledge of Egypt but includes some title by title. Nor he is in any rush to give Owen a long and tiresome back story. We learn more about Owen as each title unfolds as the sequence continues.
Michael Pearce. Chapeaux!
One of the nationalities that is growing in awareness among Cairenes is Egyptian Nationalism: Egypt for Egyptians, and all that, but as many characters note, it is no easy matter to say who is and who is not an Egyptian. The Greek Christian Copts entered Egypt long before the Muslim Arabs and have a claim to historical priority. The Sudanese in the south were native to the region since before time. Religious conflicts among Jews, Copts, and Muslims are common as are conflicts among sects within each of these religions. Ottoman intrigues to undermine the Brits are daily. And in some of the later titles, the women of the burka become restive. Tourists are also a factor for good when the spend money, and bad when they overstep the mark or are victims of crimes.
In this swirl Owen goes about his business, censoring the local press every night and frequenting coffee houses to keep in touch with the vast network of informants he inherited when appointed. The Khedive liked a Brit in the job so that he could distance himself from any acts of the Secret Police, while being sure the acts occurred to keep his regime stable. In same spirit of McKinsey management, the Brits can also disown the Mamur Zapt, if need be, as an agent of Khedive. Thus Owen could be stabbed in the back twice. However, sometimes two masters can be played off against each other.
Owen takes a softly, softly approach that at times irritates the offstage Khedive, but he is usually more interested in the harem than anything else. Most of the Brits accept softly softy but there is an Army in occupation and sometimes it takes all of Owen’s growing skill to keep the soldiers in the barracks and out of trouble. His job is to prevent problems more than solve them and once the soldiers appear to keep order, inevitably disorder follows. There is an iron law in that.
Owen has a shambling multi-lingual Greek as his number one legman, who has the uncanny ability to get people talking to him from market porters, to hotel maids, to slumming tourists. The office is run with Prussian efficiency by Nikos, a Copt, who worships the files and who is always there with the files. Owen has speculated that he sleeps in an empty drawer with the name Nikos on it, but since Nikos keeps everything, including his door, locked Owen has never been able to confirm this suspicion. Selim provides the muscle when that is needed.
Then there is Paul, the aide-de-camp of the Consul-General, who is in fact the military governor of the protectorate. Paul is a master of never saying ‘no’ when insuring that things do not happen and likewise of never saying ‘yes’ but insuring the right things do happen. He is the consummate master of committee meetings who agrees with everyone, never commits himself, and yet the outcome is always what he wants.
Owen also has a good friend in the Egyptian judiciary with whom he works ever more closely on cases. Mahmoud el Zaki, an Egyptian nationalist, who aspires to see a modern Egypt make its own way in the world free of British suzerainty, but who himself remains wedded to many of the old ways where women are concerned.
Owen has a mistress, an Egyptian named Zeinab, who is a force of nature in her own right. No burka and veil for her. She can be counted on the stimulate Owen in many ways. She has even bamboozled that master of spin Paul more than once.
Other characters include the operational commander of the uniformed police, a tall, pudgy, pink Scots named McPhee who was a school headmaster back in the Highlands, but who wanted a job in Egypt because he loves the cultural mélange in Cairo. If ever Owen needs to trace a fragment of a tile, McPhee may be able to tell him where it was made. Though to tell him, McPhee may first try to explain the place of tiles in Egyptian culture at great length. And don’t get him started on mosques about which he knows everything and more: Sheiks have been known to consult McPhee on such matters. Windbag though he is, McPhee is an excellent organiser, having learned from unruly Scots schoolboys, and he can be relied upon in the crunch to turn out the uniforms when necessary.
No one is a cartoon in these stories. Even some pretty unlikely and unlikeable characters finish as rounded individuals like the dissolute riding’, huntin’, and shootin’ Egyptian prince who at the eleventh hour saves Owen’s life. In an earlier title Owen was rescued from an assassination attempt by some smugglers thanks to a village watchman, who was in fact a twelve-year old girl.
A word of warning for those who start at the beginning. Each of the novels, no doubt at the insistence of the publisher, is stand-alone. The result is that basic information about the Egyptian legal system, Owen’s place in Egypt and his personal life, and the basics of the context are repeated in each novel. It is like those cooking shows where in each episode the chef says heat the wok first or boil the water first. Got it. By volume fifteen below readers are jaded by this repetition and I expect it dissuades some from continuing.
1.The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet. Collins Crime. 1988.
2.The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog. Collins Crime. 1989.
3.The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous. Collins. 1990.
4.The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind. Harper Fontana. 1991.
5.The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in the Nile. Collins. 1992.
6.The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt. Collins Crime. 1992.
7.The Mamur Zapt and the Camel of Destruction. Collins Crime. 1993.
GoodReads meta-data, 576 pages, rated 4.45 by 40 litizens
Gerne: Biography
Verdict: Visionary
Lachlan Macquarie (1762 – 1824) was the longest serving early Governor of the New South Wales Colony (1810-1821), and without a doubt the one who did the most to shape Sydney and beyond. Today the Hospital, Mint, Barracks, and Parliament House still standing proud on Macquarie Street are his testament. He was a visionary and a reformer who gave convicts a second, and at times, a third chance at redemption. He battled the Colonial Office to develop New South Wales, while dealing with the many local conflicts. To anticipate what follows, the Colonial Office did not want New South Wales to prosper, while the locals were more interested in undermining each other than laying the groundwork for the future.
How did he come to these qualities and why was he chosen for New South Wales? Those were the questions that prompted me to read this biography. Below are the inferences I drew from it. They are not questions pursued explicitly by the author who concentrates on the day-by-day record.
Macquarie grew up poor but proud and made a second home in the British Army. Long before he arrived in Sydney Town he was well travelled and much experienced. He had served in the Army in North America during the last stages of the American Revolutionary War, the West Indies, India, and Egypt and between these postings had traveled through Persia, Russia, and South Africa.
He recurrent dream was to prosper in the Army and retire to the life of a Scots laird back home. At times to secure that prosperity he cut corners with some very creative accounting. In the fullness of time this sin came to light and he managed to live it down, though it blotted his chances for promotion for years.
He often idled away the hours sketching how he, as a highland laird, would lay out a property of crofters in Scotland for the benefit of both master and men. These thoughts and jottings were the seeds that later fell to earth in Sydney. When they did, they were nurtured by the great cities he had seen on his travels, Bombay, St Petersburg, Alexandria, and London.
That the Army, albeit reluctantly, gave him a second chance seared into him and he tried thereafter to live up to it. That second chance was largely due to the circumstances for it was during the Napoleonic Wars when experienced officers were at a premium. If he had been dismissed, then someone else would have to be found to take his place and responsibilities.
In the grounds of Hyde Park.
He was a correspondent who wrote many letters, often keeping copies of his own, and he retained, as one did in those days, the letters he received. In the stereotypical manner of a thrifty Scot he also kept careful records of his incomes and expenses. This penchant for keeping notes and records made him an unofficial accountant many times where he weakened to the temptation to fiddle the books. This penchant also left behind an extensive archive mined in these pages.
During more than a decade in India where he saw combat and did a great deal of organising and marching, he married an Anglo-Indian woman, Jane Jarvis, who subsequently died young there. He was also in the last battle at Alexandria in Egypt to expel the French. At the time, democracy was identified with the excesses of the French Revolution and, ironically, Napoleon, and so Macquarie reviled it.
New South Wales was roiling with the Rum Rebellion against Governor William Bligh when Macquarie was dispatched to put oil on the waters. He had spent years managing-up, that is, stroking his superiors in the hope of promotion, and had become something of the patient and persistent diplomat. He needed those qualities when he got to Australia.
In Sydney he found there a three (or more)-sided conflict among the free settlers (sometimes called squatters), the irascible Governor Bligh and his supporters (mostly his own family and appointees) and the convicts (who had revolted earlier at Castle Hill, and among whom there were further divisions between criminal and political). The rebellious free settlers wanted to use the convicts as flexible slave labour in a gig economy avant le mot. In the absence of McKinsey managers, the egregious Reverend Samuel Marsden provided the bellicose but shallow justification for that. Bligh did not care about the convicts but he did care about his authority to tax, especially rum to reduce the rampant alcoholism he found there. Psst, he also got a cut of the taxes he collected.
The accounts of this conflict read like today’s news when members of the elite spent most of their time securing their prerogatives from each other, sometimes through litigation which brings it out into the open, rather than doing their jobs. One reviewer recently noted of a Commonwealth regulatory agency that it was unlikely much work got done considering the volume of suits and countersuits among its directors over the intemperate remarks arising from arguments over car spaces, leave allowances, salary increases, name plates, and so on. Sounds like a university department where within every tea cup there is a storm.
Macquarie proved tenacious and held on against the Marsden-MacArthur gang for a decade but in the end, they were many and he was one, and they wore him down. Having slowly risen in the ranks to Major General, he resigned, and to please the Colonial Office his successor Thomas Brisbane undid much of Macquarie’s efforts at emancipating convicts. Brisbane wanted the job because he wanted to study the southern sky and built the Observatory on the hill today near the Harbour Bridge where it still stands.
The Colonial Office wanted transportation to Australia to be a fearsome prospect that would deter criminal from offences. Stories of Macquarie’s efforts to build a comfortable life and redeem convicts, so many of whom were petty thieves with a single offence committed in dire straits, were expensive and also counter-productive to the Colonial Office. Nor should we forget the many Irish political prisoners who got swept up in a round-up to meet the KPIs of the day.
Macquarie tried to make peace with the aboriginal people but not very hard or consistently, and yielded all too quickly to the demand of free settlers for a military response. It almost seems to this reader that he used the occasion to show the settlers he was indeed a soldier and the Appin Massacre of natives followed. Neither women nor children were spared to the cheers of the Pox News of the day. Relations between the new comers and natives never recovered thereafter when gun powder become the arbiter of the civilising Christians, though it pleased Marsden and his cronies.
Though the author is coy about it, Macquarie contracted syphilis in the usual way while in India and it blighted much of his subsequent life. His second wife, Elizabeth, for whom Lady Macquarie’s Chair was carved in the Botanic Gardens where it remains today, had at least six miscarriages that might have been the consequence of that disease and its treatment with mercury.
A few years ago we saw an exhibition at the State Library about Macquarie and at the time I wondered what his inspirations and sources had been. Hence, I was primed for this biography when the tide brought it to my notice.
Macquarie was not a reader, it seems, not even the Bible. There is nary a mention of a book in this study of the man. Note also that he spelled his name in a variety of ways (as have I).
However it was spelled, he liked seeing his name on things, hence the many places and features in Eastern Australia and Tasmania bearing his name. He travelled around the realm far more than any of the predecessors and most of his successors, bestowing his name as he did so. It would please him, I am sure, to note that a university now bears his name.
The lighthouse on South Head was another of his buildings.
In the middle 1970s I boned up on Australian history reading Stalinist Manning Clark’s turgid six-volume A History of Australia (1962+) which recounts much of Macquarie’s story. Clark identified with Marsden, whom I found as objectionable as recent churchmen who want to tell others how to live. Not knowing when to quit, I also read Herbert Evatt’s rehabilitation of Bligh, The Rum Rebellion (1943). It was another instance where the author seemed to identify with the subject. Neither of these titles is recommended.
Back to the book at hand, there are nits to pick. First is the editorial decision to parallel much of Macquarie’s early biography with developments in New South Wales. No doubt this is one way to show the context that Macquarie found when he arrived in 1810, but this reader found it distracting and padded before 1810 was reached. Moreover, much that is included in this parallel, is never mentioned again and so is hardly background. After all Macquarie himself did not have the benefit of all this background and hit it head on.
Second, much of the expression is clichéd. There are references to ‘higher ups,’ ‘sent off in scores,’ ‘bigwig,’ ‘put up his hand for,’ ‘splash his cash,’ ‘top brass,’ ‘heart of gold,’ ‘mojo,’ ‘gunned down,’ ‘two sidekicks,’ ‘the cut of his jib,’ ‘on the nose,’ ‘never going to fly,’ ‘leading lights,’ and so on and on. Lazy and vague are these uses. No doubt someone thought they were lively and would attract readers like Alan Jones’s listeners. As if!
There are also plenty of anachronisms, but my favourite is a reference to a ‘slide rule.’ Its original conception dates to 1622 when tables of logarithms were combined in handbooks. Its modern form emerged in latter Nineteenth Century in France for military engineering and artillery plotting. It is just possible, though unlikely, someone in Macquarie’s Sydney had a nascent equivalent, but unlikely, and in any event it just clangs as a metaphor. Might as well refer to jet flight. By the way, I still have the slide rule that got me through the required science courses in high school and Physics in college, and which I used a lot in graduate school in the study of voting and elections. It was a great day when I learned to use it. Trivial fact, the engineer cum novelist Neville Shute called his autobiography Slide Rule (1954); he wrote two landmarks in Australia literature: A Town like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957).
Grantlee Kieza
While picking away I also note the propensity of the author to read Macquarie’s mind as in: ‘he glanced down to admire his patent-leather dress boots,’ he was ‘reminded of the wild country he had been born into,’ and more.
Finally, a declaration of interest. We live in a well-defined area of Newtown that was once called O’Connell Town, the first street of which was O’Connell Street named by Sir Maurice O’Connell who was Macquarie’s 2-i-C and then married Bligh’s daughter Elizabeth. We walk around park a block away in what was once called the Bligh Estate, which Elizabeth had – after years of litigation with crown authorities and competing relatives – inherited from her father.
Most Unexpected Twist award goes to…. [drum roll, Maestro].
Robin Bailes for The Vengeance of the Invisible Man (2019)
I didn’t see the coming but I should have.
Robin Bailes
Razor Tongue of My Dark Corner of This Sick World (on You Tube) has written three novels in homage to the Universal horror film series. This one is the latest and features a corker of an ending, which I will not spoil. I have discussed it elsewhere on the blog with equal restraint for those seeking more intel.
GoodReads meta-data is 672 pages, rated 4.1 by 865 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: Genius at work.
From 7 December 1941 the bad news began and continued: Pearl Harbor, Guam, Wake, Attu, Manila, Bataan, Corregidor, Malaya, Singapore, Puna, HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse with more everyday. In that context Doolittle’s Raid in April 1942 was a welcome harbinger of things to come.
While the man had a PhD he was not that Dr Dolittle. Get that, and get it straight!
James Doolittle (1896-1993) caught the flying bug as a child and went to Ohio as a teen to learn to fly where his teacher was Orville Wright. He signed up for the US Army Air Corps in 1917 but did not make it to Europe, however, he stayed in the Air Force because that was where the airplanes were and at the time the Air Force was trying to establish itself.
He became a test pilot avant le mot and soon was a celebrity, making and breaking flying records of speed, distance, endurance, and complexity. Much stemmed from his reckless, devil-may-care attitude in the air but as he matured he earned an undergraduate engineering degree from the University of California, and then a PhD from MIT. He began to rely on homework, stress tables, meteorological reports, wind tunnel tests, vector analysis, and pounds per square inch measurements while devising new instruments to fly further, faster, and in impossible circumstances.
If Antoine Saint-Exupéry was the poet of the sky, Doolittle was the scientist. Among the developments to which he contributed are the barometric altimeter, the aerial gyroscope, and avgas. When he married and children came he needed more money than the Air Force could pay so he sold himself to Shell Oil where he developed avgas for the burgeoning airline industry. It boosted power on existing aircraft by 35% and sold itself almost overnight.
He also pioneered the hood, that is, flying blind on instruments alone. To do this he designed and built prototype instruments and controls and then did demonstrations, taking off, flying a fixed course, and landing exactly back at the point of departure. He did not patent any of his innovations and so had no financial reward. That was not the point. The point was to fly.
By 6 December 1941 he was certainly the most famous aviator in the country, succeeding Bill Mitchell who had died and Charles Lindbergh who had gone into politics. He had proven three things: he was an innovator, he could do things with an airplane no one else could, and he could teach others to do them, too.
Now add the insight of a naval staff officer that medium range bombers might conceivably take-off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. The seeds were sown for an attack on Japan.
There were many technical problems to overcome: the bombers need twice the length of the deck to take off, their flight range was half the minimum required to get to safe place in China. To get the bombers to Japan the aircraft carrier would have to be within 400 miles of Target Tokyo, well within the range of Japanese patrols. With its deck crowded with bombers, the carrier would be defenceless. To protect it with escorts would add ships and increase the chances of detection and risk even more precious assets. And so. For every solution there was a catch.
There were also strategic objections to overcome. Did the US Navy want to risk one of its few aircraft carriers and its crew of two thousand salts on an untried mission of no lasting importance? Could such a complex plan be kept secret? Would the Army Air Corps give up scarce bombers to such a cockeyed mission? What was the weather like in the North Pacific? Who had maps of Tokyo? Most of all, could take-off even be done?
From the start one thing was obvious: it was a one-way mission. Taking off from a flight deck might be possible with modified aircraft, but landing a B-25 on one was impossible.* The arresting gear used for deck landings would rip the tail off the bombers turning them into cannon balls which would then topple into the sea at best, or crash into the command island killing the crews and more.
Aircraft designed to land on carrier have reinforced tails to accommodate the jerk of the arresting line. To manufacture B-25s with that kind of reinforcement would take months, and then with the reinforcement they would be then too heavy to lift off the decks. Always a catch.
More homework followed when Doolittle got the job. He studied the weight of fuel versus the gain of thrust on takeoff and range in the air, factoring in the weight of the fuel tanks themselves, the ship’s speed on launch from the deck. He also considered the body weight of the flight crew and the instruments. He set a maximum weight for the crew members, and stripped the planes of armour, weapons, padding, and much else, including transmitters since radio silence was to be the rule.
He also lobbied hard to get the operational command on the grounds that to train and motivate the crewmen they had to know he was coming with them. This appointment proved to be the hardest sell because General Hap Arnold of the USAF thought Doolittle’s genius was too valuable to risk on what, when all was said and done, was a demonstration. The decisive factor was Doolittle’s reputation. When volunteers were solicited for a secret and perhaps fatal mission there were few takers until his name was mentioned, and then other flyboys were ready to go with the great Doolittle and volunteers flooded in for the unknown. Once that happened, he had to go.
There are many more details about the engineering, logistics, and planning with the attendants SNAFUs. These are best read. Some are a sad reminder that McKinsey management has been with us for a long time. Stories about foot powder and carburettors are reminders that even in war, even in a top priority most secret project, even in a rigid hierarchical chain of command there is scope for individuals to gum up the works by putting process before product, which in this case surely lead to the death of the members of at least one crew. I particularly liked the instance of Doolittle, in a rush, refusing to fill out a feedback questionnaire after the planes were poorly serviced at the Alameda Naval Air Station, and then being threatened with court martial for not providing customer feedback. McKinsey management at its best.
He was in a rush because a host of considerations, chief among them was that the weather in the North Pacific yielded a window over Tokyo of about ten days. It was do it then or miss the chance for months and who knows how far the Japanese might have advanced by then.
While the purpose of the attack was to bolster American morale it had two strategic results that had not been fully anticipated arising from the Japanese conclusion that the B-25s had taken off from barren Midway Island. First, the Imperial Navy was pulled back many hundreds of miles to patrol more intensely the home waters to prevent another attack. Second, Midway became a goal, and attacking it, long on the cards, was rushed with the resulting Japanese defeat because preparations were hastily executed.
Thus, the raid, first, softened the perimeter of Japanese advance making possible the US build up around Midway to be undetected by the Japanese and, second, precipitated a rash Japanese attack that led to a major defeat leaving the Imperial Navy unable to take the offensive again. That latter result meant the Japanese plan to occupy Fiji, Noumea, and Tonga to cut the seaway from Australia and New Zealand to the United States was abandoned.
The book has nearly minute-by-minute details of the flight, bombing, fate, and survival of the crew men. It bulks the book out.
The most difficult task was the takeoff of a fully loaded bomber with vast amounts of extra fuel (see 5 below). None of the pilots had ever taken off from a carrier before. Such was the secrecy that this had not been practiced. The USS Hornet steered into the wind with mountainous heavy seas rolling at it. When the Flight Controller gave the green light to each plane at launch, the prow of the ship was down and at the end of flight deck the forthcoming wave filled the pilot’s cockpit screen. The aim was to time each takeoff so that the aircraft reached the end of the deck as the Hornet rose from the trough. Note also that many of the flight crewmen had been seasick for days.
Doolittle went first.
Despite the meticulous planning much went wrong.
The weather was terrible for man, plane, and ship. Far worse than anticipated based on the sketchy history of weather in the area.
The plan was to launch the planes at 400 miles from Tokyo and to fly on to China. That was easily possible in the modified aircraft. It was even possible at 600 miles on Doolittle’s calculations. But when detected by Japanese patrols, the flotilla was 800 miles away. The naval commandeer did not want to risk his ships and ordered the launch. It was now or never. Doolittle gave the crewmen the chance to back out but none took it. (There were extra crews onboard.)
At that distance and in that weather, once airborne there was no fuel to waste in coming into a formation. It became every airplane for itself.
Nor was there fuel to hold in position and recalibrate compasses which had demagnetised on the steel hulled aircraft carrier. In addition, recalibrating would have required using radios to re-set with the aircraft carrier below, and that traffic would surely now be heard by the Japanese patrols. Once aloft each aircraft flew alone by dead reckoning.
The rough weather, the iffy takeoffs, and the untried nature of the fuel bladders crammed into every nook and cranny of the aircraft proved unequal to the test and many seeped fuel into the aircraft. They used field dressings to stem the leaks.
The iffy takeover led to cracks in the plexiglass nose on some aircraft which had been hit by flying debris on the deck. They stuffed flight jackets into the holes.
The result was that nothing thereafter went according to plan. Though the weather over Japan on the day was fine, the crews were lost, and only with luck found targets.
Because of the secrecy surrounding the plan they had done little bombing practice, and on the day seldom hit the targets they found. The Japanese public neither expected nor prepared for bombing and crowded the streets to watch what many thought was a drill. Civilian casualties mounted.
If they could not find the assigned targets in the day time over an orderly Japan, it was impossible to find the Chinese airfield hours later in flak-damaged aircraft in the dark with the fuel indicator on Empty. Some crashed landed on sandy beaches and pastures, while other crewmen bailed out. The only B-25 from the raid that remained whole went to Russia where the crewmen were imprisoned to honour Soviet neutrality with Japan.
Few of the arrangements in China for the flyers had in fact been made, and in any event they could not find the meeting points. Some were injured in the crashes or parachute landings. Again secrecy hampered the efforts that were made in China. To confuse the Japanese, secrecy remained the order of the day for a long time. Despite the efforts of the free press to reveal all to its enemies.
The Japanese reprisals in eastern China in the search for the downed flyers were extensive and brutal. One Red Cross estimate put the death toll at 250,000.
Plan versus reality.
Some of the crewmen were captured by the Japanese, one plane landed in Vladivostok in neutral Russia, and the rest crash landed or bailed out in China, as did Doolittle himself. When he made it t0 safety he bent every effort at recovering his crewmen and that continued throughout and after the war in recovering the bodies of the eight that perished.
Two things I had not appreciated before reading this book emerged. One, that interning Japanese-Americans on the West Coast probably saved some of their lives. The public reaction, outcry, and hostility to Japanese after 7 December 1941 was nearly out of control — and many local officials did not want to control it. Vigilantes were primed and ready to exact their vengeance on anyone whom they took to be Japanese. In the luxury of hindsight the internment is now pompously condemned.
Two, I had not realised just how popular in Japan was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The author amasses an extensive cross section of film and newspaper, as well as memoir material, to show that the Nippon public was delirious with joy at the destruction recorded by the gun camera on the Zeros, including the strafing of the Tripler Military Hospital (the other pink palace on Oahu). Just as earlier the Japanese movie-going public had been delighted by the rapine, murder, and destruction in China, where contests in bayoneting bound Chinese prisoners were filmed like sporting events and shown in Japanese theatres to the cheers of the audiences. Footage is on You Tube for those with strong stomachs. I expect that there are Chinese today who have not forgotten this fact.
Dr Dootlittle is front left.
Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle is easy to spot in the photographs of the time. He was invariably, at under 5’ 2” tall, the shortest man in any picture. Compared the shambling bear Antoine de Saint-Exupéry he was an elf, though their paths never crossed. Or did they, I discovered that Doolittle was in Algeria in 1943 and St Ex was there in February 1944. A lot of time and a big country to be sure.
I noticed that the release date of film I commented on earlier coincided with Doolittle’s Raid and that got me thinking about it and shopping on Kindle for some reading. Of the many titles available I chose this in the hope it would be dispassionate, informative, and explanatory. It is but the minute-by-minute detail was too too much information for this reader.
Author James Scott
*The B-25 is called the Mitchell after Billy Mitchell who was courtmartialed in 1925 and drummed out of the army for his endless advocacy of airpower in the next war. After his death all was forgiven. At the time it was the only Army Airforce airplane named for a person.
The Award for Best Old Friends Return is a tie this year! [Gasp!]
The judge in his wisdom could not distinguish between two returns. And what a two they are!
They are the pseudonymous Emma Lathen and the singular Michael Dibdin. The works of both are discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Lathen was two businesswomen Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart who wrote thirty or more novels together while maintaining their incognito working at day jobs. Their krimis are delightful. The books they produce are set in the world of high finance. The touch is light. The narrative is informative. Check the Wikipedia entry for more information.
It is surprising to see how few awards their books won. Perhaps they preferred to conceal their identities and discouraged such recognition. I suppose there are ways and means to do that. Not only are their individual titles some of the most entertaining and informative I have read, but they sustained that impetus for thirty years.
None of their titles has ever been mangled into a film. Maybe that is just as well when I consider the film adaptations of other novels, where the screenwriter evidently did not read the book beyond the title.
Their privacy remains because I could not find any pictures of either on the web.
And now for someone completely different, Michael Dibdin who published eleven krimis set in Italy, following the career, and sometimes the life, of Inspector Aurelio Zen. Each title is set in a different part of the country as the square peg Zen is moved around as his superiors try to fit him into round holes here and there.
Their is a travelogue element to what are otherwise pretty grim studies of crime, corruption, venality, and resignation. Wherever Zen goes he eats and drinks the local menu and speaks the dialect and all of that adds detail. Often these apparent diversions are in fact integrated into the story with a deft hand.
Over the sequence Zen’s backstory comes out slowly. But at no time is it the centre of attention, nor does it detract from the front story. So many krimis I start to read spend many clumsy pages near the start establishing the character by an elaborate backstory, none of which is ever relevant again, often calculated to make the reader feel sorry for (not just identify with) the principal. (Then there are the LLBean and Ikea krimis in which every stick of furniture in every room and article of attire of every character is described though irrelevant to plot or character.)
Zen is a certain age and accepts his lot in life. He is not a snappy dresser. He does not drive an Italian stallion. His few lady friends are just that, few. The one concession to the stereotype of Italians is the ever present offstage of his mother. Oh, and he also smokes too much and drinks so much coffee that he could blast off to the Moon if he tried.
Some of his stories were made into a lavishly produced short series of three feature length films for televisions in 2011. They were reasonable facsimiles of the novels but made Zen much younger and emphasised sex in a way not found in the books which were much more focussed on Italian culture and its corruptions in the period.
There is a profile of this fine writer on Wikipedia and a list of his titles.
Another America: The Story of Libera and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It (2013) by James Climent
Genre: History
GoodReads meta-data is pages 336, rated 3.60 by 163 litizens.
Verdict: Quite a story well told.
Settling freed slaves in Africa started when the British Royal Navy began breaking up human trafficking. When the RN found a contraband cargo of slaves — termed recaptives — they were put ashore; the easiest place to land them was in what became Freetown of Sierra Leone. It was near the sea lanes the RN patrolled to interdict the traffic, it had a natural harbour with plenty of fresh water nearby, and the prevailing winds made it was easy to navigate there. It was easy for the Brits, but of course the enslaved individuals might be from anywhere. Certainly few originated from that area.
When the American Colonial Society (ACS) hatched the idea of exporting blacks to Africa, this British example offered a model of sorts, well the only available example. The ACS was a committee which included some heavy hitters like Henry Clay and James Monroe though they gave it only a little of their time. Its purpose was mixed. Some like Clay wanted to rid the South of free blacks, whose presence might inspire black slaves to seek freedom themselves. There were a surprising number of such freedmen for a time as the generation inspired by the rhetoric of the American Revolution, among them Monroe himself, manumitted slaves in their wills. As members of that generation died, black southern freedman (and women) increased.
Thus one area of Liberia is called Ashlands after Clay’s Kentucky estate, while the capital is called Monrovia after the President Monroe.
Yet Southerners did not want a mass exodus of slaves for two reasons, one political and one economic. The latter is the cotton business which rested to a lot of cheap labour. The political reason was the Three-Fifths clause of the U.S. Constitution. That is 3/5s to the illiterate. (Look it up and be informed.) Every few years some semi-literate journalist stumbles over the Three-fifths Clause and it appears in the media as a by-lined discovery of investigative journalism. I do not kid for I have seen same. Me, I learned about it in Civics in High School.
Likewise there were northerners who wanted to sweep freedman away from the streets of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York to protect their wives, daughters, and maiden aunts.
Then there were the abolitionists who supposed a black would never have a good life in the United States because of white animosity, regrettably concluding that they would be better off in their own society. There were other abolitionists who thought that was an immoral cop-out and opposed transportation.
Then there were evangelicals, then as now, never constrained by fact, logic, or sense, who urged transporting savage American blacks who can never be civilised to Africa where they will take Christianity to civilise the heathens. Tune in to so-called Christian TV for more the same twisted reasoning everyday.
In short, there were many interests who saw in the prospect what they wanted to see, including shipping companies in Boston who saw lucrative contracts for transportation.
The response of blacks was also varied. Their only social organisations were churches, and in the north church leaders liked the idea and set about cooperating with the nascent schema. When, however, their congregations learned of the prospect, they were far less enthusiastic about leaving behind the advances and achievements they had made in their own lives for an unknown new world.
In the south freed blacks were more enthusiastic than their ilk in the north for the scheme, perhaps because their lives were more precarious.
While the ACS initially relied on Federal fundings secured in a slow process by President Monroe, at least three states started their own schemes, Maryland, Mississippi, and Virginia. Each recruited by means fair or foul a shipload of blacks and sent them to Africa, accompanied by white overseers. Often a number of slaves would be freed on the docks so as to transport them.
No effort was made to recruit blacks with the experience or skills needed to start from scratch in the new environment. Nor was there any assessment of the likely new environment. Instead the ships began to sail toward Freetown and then tack south a bit to an area not claimed by any European power, because there was no harbour, and nothing to motivate a claim. This is the coast of what became Liberia.
A ship might have between fifty and eighty blacks, men, women, and children, and two or three white overseers who would land. Initial efforts to colonise islands rather than risk the rocks, sandbars, or shoals off the beaches were disastrous. There were few natives on the islands because there was little water, game, or land for agriculture and the islands were lashed by wind and rain.
Equally, the overseers were unprepared for what lay ahead.
When shore landings were made, the natives were not friendly. European traders had long been welcome for a week at a time, but not colonists who came to stay and who would compete with the natives for game, land, water, and trade with visiting Europeans. The natives referred to the incomers as ‘black white men’ because though their skin was dark, their ways — clothing, manners, attitudes, weapons, food — were white.
Even worse was the insects and the disease they bore: malaria. Between a third and half of all transported blacks died within twelve months, mainly due to this malady.
The differences among the transported: north and south, free and slave would be cemented into the gestating social structure. Equally the hostility between the natives and transported would also endure and be solidified over the years in the population. Of course there were divisions among the natives in the area but these recede in importance against the black white men. In short, the black white men reproduced the very society they had left. Skin colour was of paramount importance. The light-skinned dominated the dark settlers, and both enslaved the natives. Yes, in the 1920s there was slave labour in Liberia to make rubber for Firestone Tires.
A ruling caste and class emerged which carefully guarded its dominance in much the same way as occurred in the ante-bellum South. At the top were the descendants of the First Fleet, free emigrants (rather than an emancipated slaves), mulattos (only part Negro and part white), light-skinned, these people put the wagons in a circle that lasted well into the 1960s. Oh yes, elections occurred. In one instance an electorate of 5,000 cast 25,000 votes for the incumbent! Get the idea? Sounds like Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago, where miracles of miracles, the dead voted for years.
Ellen Sirleaf Johnson whose election turned a corner, it is to be hope.
The ruling caste was finally deposed in the latter Twentieth Century in a series of bloody civil and tribal wars. It makes gruelling reading. More than ten percent of the population died. A sitting head of state was found guilty of crimes against humanity during the course of these events, as one crazed tyrant replaced another. Exhaustion set in, leaving the country a wreck which has struggled to recover since then, and has had free elections and at least one peaceful transfer of power. These are hopeful signs, but the background of deep animosity among Liberians remains, I suppose, rather as it did in Tito’s Yugoslavia for forty years only to re-emerge whole when the amber melted.
