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editor
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 Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2007 1:49 pm Post subject: Caribbean Gambles |
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Caribbean Gambles:
Empire of Blue Water
Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army,
the Epic Battle for the Americas,
and the Catastrophe
That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign
Hardcover
By Stephan Talty
| Quote: | ... Boston still considered itself a city on a hill. Port Royal had no such illusions about itself. The town that Cromwell and Gage had dreamed of had never materialized. Instead it had become the first Wild West town, fabulously on the make.
For the brahmins there were balls for the king's birthday, masquerades, "strolling puppet players" on a swing through the island; there was family life as well, because many of the richest men brought out their families, dressed as if they were strolling along the Thames on Sundays. Below them swirled the life of the priates and their ilk; few of them had families or long -term plans. There weren't many activities that did not revolve around drinking. At the Bear Garden, bearbaiting and bullfighting were popular; cockfights drew a crowd, as did gambling and shooting games (though the games got more dangerous as the night progressed). Drinking was the national pastime. "The Spaniards wondered much at the sickness of our people," wrote Modyford, "until they knew the strength of their drinks, but then wondered more that they were not all dead." The local rum was fermented from crushed sugarcane and was famously potent; its nickname, "Kill Devil," accurately described a liquor that could knock riders from their horses. ... (From Rich and Wicked, pgs. 131-132) |
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Last edited by editor on Mon Dec 31, 2007 11:30 am; edited 1 time in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 11:22 am Post subject: |
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The Sack of Panama
Captain Morgan and the Battle for the Caribbean
Hardcover
By Peter Earle
| Quote: | | For a few weeks Port Royal belonged to the crews of the privateer ships. It was no place for the squeamish. Respectable citizens counted up their profits and pretended not to notice as the town earned its reputation s the Sodom of the New World. Such a reputation was a small price to pay for the riches of the Spanish Main, riches which soon changed hands. Some of the privateers were really wild men, hunters of beasts and Spaniards, men who never saw a city except when they were sacking it or in the course of such a spree as this at the end of a cruise. Most were plain, unlettered, unvarnished soldiers and sailors with all the tastes that their kind have satisfied on leave throughout history. They drank, they whored, they fought, they gambled, they swore, they boasted and eventually they passed out into oblivion. But there was one difference here in tropical Port Royal in Spetember of 1668. Each of these men had more money to spend than the common sailors of their day could earn in several years. And spend they did. By the time the stories trickled down to Charles Leslie, who wrote a history of Jamaica some eighty years later, the privateers' debauch had taken on an element of fable. 'Wine and women drained their wealth to such a degree that, in a little time, some of them became reduced to beggary. They have been known to spend 2 or 3,000 pieces of eight in one night; and one of them gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They used to buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street, and oblige every one that passed to drink... (footnote omitted) (From 'Our Portobello Men', p. 92) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2008 11:55 am Post subject: |
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The Republic of Pirates
Being the True and Surprising Story
of the Caribbean Pirates and the
Man Who Brought Them Down
Hardcover
By Colin Woodard
| Quote: | | Up until now (Charles) Vane had been in the background, one of the hundreds of low-ranking pirates who caroused in the streets of Nassau, drinking, gambling, fighting, and womanizing. He had been living off his earnings while serving with Henry Jennings, particularly his shares of the plunder stolen from the Spanish wrecks in 1716. He may have gone on short cruises with other pirate captains, but it seems that he spent most of the intervening year and a half as Jennings had: resting on his laurels ashore and appreciating the freedoms offered by the existence of the Bahamian pirate republic. The news of the pardon threatened to put an end ot the pirate's nest, as did rumors that King George had appointed a new royal governor for the Bahamas. Vane, who had Jacobite sympathies, could not have been pleased when he read King George's proclamation. He was furious when he saw his less-committted colleagues celebrating atop the fort beneath the newly raised British flag. (From Begging Pardon, pgs. 229-230) |
| Quote: | ... On November 18, 1720, the day of his (Calico Jack Rackham's) execution, Anne Bonny was allowed to see him one last time. "I'm sorry to see you here," she is said to have told him, "but if you fought like a man, you need not have hanged like a dog." Later that day he and four other men were executed at Gallows Point in Port Royal. His body was later placed in a gibbet on a small island in the harbor now known as Rackham's Cay; he and Vane may have been hanged separately, but their corpses swung within sight of each other across Port Royal Harbor.
As for Mary Read and Anne Bonny, they were tried on November 28, 1720, found guilty, and sentenced to death. They had a surprise for Governor Lawes and the other officials at the Spanish Town courthouse. They "plead their bellies," claiming to be "quick with child" and, thus, ineligible for execution, as it was illegal for the court to take the lives of their fetuses. Lawes ordered that the women be examined, whereupon their claim was found to be true. Their sentences were postponed and the women were presumably returned to prison. Mary Read died there from a violent fever and was buried in St. Catherine's church in Jamaica on April 28, 1721. Anne Bonny's fate is unclear, though she was apparently not executed. During her pregnancy, her long-estranged father, a South Carolina planter of some means, may have been able to obtain her release. If she died on Jamaica, the records of her burial have been lost.
With the execution of Rackham and Vane, the Golden Age of Piracy was all but over. While ships would continue to be attacked - particularly off West Africa - the pirates never again had the upper hand. With few exceptions, the pirates of the 1720s spent their time playing cat-and-mouse games with the authorities; there were to be no more threats to the colonies themselves. British authorities estimated the worldwide pirate population at approximately 2,000 between 1716 and 1718, but less than 200 by 1725, a collapse of 90 percent. After 1722, most pirates had abandoned any hope of carving out their own republic or helping overthrow the Naoverian kings of England and spent most of their time fighting for mere survival. (From Piracy's End, pgs. 319-320) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 11:19 am Post subject: |
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Deadeye Dick
Paperback
By Kurt Vonnegut
| Quote: | Now that I have known Haiti, with its voodooism, with its curses and charms and zombies and good and bad spirits which can inhabit anybody or anything, and so on, I wonder if it mattered much that it was I who was in the cage in the basement f the old courthouse so long ago. A curiously carved bone or stick, or a dried mud doll with straw hair would have served as well as I did, there on the bench, as long as the community believed, as Midland City believed of me, that it was a package of evil magic.
Everybody could feel safe for a while. Bad luck was caged. There was bad luck, cringing on the bench in there. See for yourself. (From Chapter, um, er, 13, p. 91) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 11:44 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
Deadeye Dick
Paperback
By Kurt Vonnegut
| Quote: | His way up the stairs to the hotel proper was blocked by a Haitian painter, who had fallen asleep while waiting for a tourist, any tourist, to come back from a night on the town. He had garish pictures of Adam and Eve and the serpent, and of Haitian village life, with all the people with their hands in their pockets, since the artist couldn't draw hands very well, and so on, lining the staircase on either side.
Felix did not disturb him. He stepped over him very respectfully. If Felix had seemed to kick him intentionally, Felix would have been in very serious trouble. This is no ordinary colonial situation down here. Haiti as a nation was born out of the only successful slave revolt in all of human history. Imagine that. In no other instance have slaves overwhelmed their masters, begun to govern themselves and to deal on their own with other nations, and repelled foreigners who felt that natural law required them to be slaves again.
So, as we had been warned when we bought the hotel here, any white or lightly colored person who struck or even menaced a Haitian in a manner suggesting a master-and-slave relationship would find himself in prison.
This was understandable. (From Chapter 15, pgs. 118-119) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 12:33 pm Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Fidel’s Heir
The influence of Hugo Chávez
By Jon Lee Anderson
June 23/08
| Quote: | ... In May, 2007, Chávez ordered the nationalization of pumping and refining facilities in La Faja owned by foreign oil companies. The move was one of a series of measures that Chávez had taken to increase Venezuela’s share of oil revenues, including increases in royalty payments from 16.6 per cent to 33.3 per cent, and its ownership stake from around forty to at least sixty per cent. (As recently as 2004, these companies were paying royalties of one per cent of the oil’s value.) Most of the oil companies, including Chevron and B.P., agreed to the terms; ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil did not, and pulled out.
ExxonMobil had been pumping as many as a hundred and twenty thousand barrels a day out of La Faja. Seeking compensation, the company secured injunctions from judges in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands that froze up to twelve billion dollars in overseas assets of Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or P.D.V.S.A. Chávez, decrying “imperialist aggression,” threatened to cut off all oil sales to the United States. Analysts estimate that if he should ever make good on that threat the price, which has already risen vertiginously, would spiral even farther upward. (A London court later overturned the British injunction, in what was seen as a major victory for Chávez, but the legal fight continues. ExxonMobil will not say publicly how much it asked for, except that the sum is “multiple billions of dollars.”) ... (emphasis added)
Five years ago, Chávez took direct control of the state oil company, P.D.V.S.A., after sitting out a two-month strike by its union. He fired more than eighteen thousand employees, replacing many of them with his supporters. Since then, he has used P.D.V.S.A.’s revenues to fund his most revolutionary schemes, which include the so-called missions to Venezuela’s poor. Rafael Ramírez, the P.D.V.S.A. chief, told me that Chávez intended to use P.D.V.S.A. as the vehicle for transforming Venezuela from an “oil sultanate to a productive society within a socialist framework.” Like a state within a state, the oil company has begun to replicate or supersede many of the functions of the national government. New P.D.V.S.A. branches oversee everything from agriculture to shipping, construction, and food distribution. “The plan is to make P.D.V.S.A. like Gazprom,” Ramírez told me, referring to the Russian energy giant, “but with a social role.” ...
Chávez began our conversation by asking, “Tell us, why didn’t Saddam put up more of a fight when the Yankees invaded?” Before I could reply, General Rangel said that the Americans had successfully degraded Iraq’s air-defense system in the run-up to the war. Chávez looked at me for confirmation, and when I agreed he smiled, and said that, just in case the Americans were thinking of doing anything similar to Venezuela, he had bought an air-defense system from Belarus. (In the past four years, Venezuela has spent four billion dollars on foreign arms purchases, mostly from Russia.) The Belarusian system probably wasn’t the most sophisticated in the world, Chávez said, but it was what Venezuela could get: “We do what we can to defend ourselves.” ...
Since 2001, Cuba has received shipments of subsidized Venezuelan oil, estimated to be worth $2.5 billion a year, in exchange for the services of thousands of Cuban teachers, sports instructors, and doctors, who work in Venezuela’s slums and rural areas. Thousands of Venezuelans are studying in Cuba, and more than a hundred thousand Venezuelans with eye problems have been sent to Cuba for specialized medical treatment. In 2004, Chávez and Castro signed a sweeping trade deal that eliminated tariffs between their countries, and simultaneously committed themselves to Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA, which means “dawn” in Spanish. ALBA is intended to counter the “neoliberal” trading bloc envisaged under the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas. (Bolivia, Nicaragua, and the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica have since joined ALBA.) Chávez has become Cuba’s primary benefactor while positioning himself as the inheritor of Fidel’s mantle. ...
Venezuela outspends the United States in foreign aid to the rest of Latin America by a factor of at least five. Last year, U.S. aid amounted to $1.6 billion, a third of which went to Colombia, mainly to fund Plan Colombia, a drug-eradication program administered by the U.S. security contractor DynCorp. Chávez, meanwhile, pledged $8.8 billion for the region. This included subsidized oil for Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia; the purchase of public debt in Argentina; and development projects in Haiti. (Chávez has, in addition, provided discounted heating oil to poor Americans through Citgo, the Venzuelan state oil company’s U.S. subsidiary.)
There is also evidence that Chávez has fostered a relationship with the Colombian Marxist guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. The FARC operates along Venezuela’s border with Colombia and holds hundreds of hostages—civilians, soldiers, and politicians—in secret camps. Chávez has, at times, publicly distanced himself from the FARC, most recently last week, but the group’s espousal of Bolivarian ideals, and its strategic position, appears to have tempted him into seeing the organization as a means, if only by proxy, of confronting the U.S.; Colombia is one of America’s closest allies in the region. ...
The summit (in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where some twenty Latin-American leaders were gathering to address the crisis between Colombia and Venezuela) began the next morning, in a convention center set among the
resort hotels and casinos on Santo Domingo’s seafront.
... The session seemed close to breaking down. Then Chávez spoke. He began by telling stories, goading the others and drawing them in. In the nineties, he said, he had been accused of giving arms to Bolivia’s President, Evo Morales, who was then a cocalero activist and a congressman, and to another indigenous Bolivian leader, Felipe Quispe. Chávez said to Morales, “Evo—I think Quispe’s even more radical than you.” Morales smiled modestly.
Chávez said he found ironic the accusation that he was providing three hundred million dollars to the FARC, since he had recently financed a three-hundred-million-dollar gas pipeline for Colombia—he and Uribe had attended the groundbreaking together. Chávez looked across at Cristina Kirchner, the President of Argentina, whose populist, left-of-center government is supportive of his. “Witness the infamy that was invented that I had sent suitcases full of dollars to Cristina.” (Last August, a Venezuelan-American businessman travelling to Buenos Aires was found to be carrying eight hundred thousand dollars in undeclared cash in his suitcase. Although Chávez has denied it, the widespread assumption is that he was secretly financing Kirchner’s Presidential campaign.) “And now it’s suitcases in the jungle!”
By now, many of the leaders were laughing. Chávez had created an atmosphere of entente cordiale, and momentarily blunted Uribe’s charges against him. “I could have sent plenty of rifles to the FARC,” Chávez said. “I could have sent them plenty of dollars—I will not do it, ever.” ... (--- pgs. 46-57) |
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