Category Archives: Canada

by Joel | 21 March 2025 · 5:56 am

South China’s Gold Rush Diaspora

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 32-36:

THE VAST MAJORITY OF Chinese gold diggers in California and Victoria hailed not from Shanghai but from southern China, especially the Siyi, or four counties, that lay on the western side of the Pearl River delta in Guangdong province. Remarkably, the vast majority came from just one county, Xinning [= Taishan]. Xinning was a poor place, owing to its rocky soil and hilly terrain, its cycles of drought and flood, and its relative isolation from the market. The land produced only enough rice to feed its people for half the year, so farmers grew sweet potatoes and peanuts on the hillsides to supplement their crops. Instability from British economic penetration and local political violence made conditions worse. Families sent sons and brothers to nearby cities for seasonal work as laborers, peddlers, and factory workers. No one knows who were the first Chinese from Xinning to venture to California, but they had probably already migrated from their home villages to Guangzhou or its environs. What is clear is that they established a classic pattern of chain migration to California and Victoria and, soon afterward, to the goldfields of Canada and New Zealand. Gold seekers from the Siyi founded the Chinese diaspora in North America and Australasia.

…

THE GOLD RUSHES BROUGHT large numbers of Chinese and Euro-Americans into contact with each other on an unprecedented scale, far surpassing the limited experience of European colonial enclaves in Chinese port cities or the occasional Chinese visitors to the United States and England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The San Francisco Customs Office noted 325 arrivals from China in 1849 and 450 in 1850; in 1850 Chinese comprised only one percent of the California mining population. But 2,700 Chinese arrived in 1851 and 20,000 in 1852. Chinese comprised about 10 percent of the total population of California by the late 1850s, and upward of 25 percent in the mining districts. A similar pattern exists in Australia. By 1859 there were at 40,000 to 50,000 Chinese in Victoria, roughly 20 to 25 percent of the mining population. Historians of the Australian rush have remarked that many Britons had never “mixed so freely with foreigners, especially the Chinese.”

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by Joel | 10 March 2025 · 3:12 am

First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 52-54:

The failure in 1865 to lay the Atlantic cable hardly deterred the directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. With the bitter learning experience of the earlier failed attempts, the engineers improved both the cable’s design and manufacture and made modifications to the gargantuan cable-laying ship, the Great Eastern, which sailed on June 30, 1866, from the Thames Estuary. Day after day, for the most part in calm waters, the Great Eastern steamed west, steadily paying out its cable. The ship anchored in late July in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, in sight of the wildly cheering inhabitants of the flag-draped hamlet of Heart’s Content. The Great Eastern trailed two thousand miles of undersea cable, which was spliced into undersea lines that ran to mainland Canada. “All well. Thank God, the cable is laid and is in perfect working order,” went the telegraphed message from Heart’s Content, which set off worldwide celebrations.

With the benefit of hindsight, some newspapers criticized Western Union for spending millions of dollars based on the “mere conviction” that the Atlantic cable would never be successfully laid. For a time the Western Union directors insisted publicly that they would not abandon the overland route through Siberia, but they had every incentive to do just that. The month before the Great Eastern reached Heart’s Content, Western Union had hedged its investment in the Russian-American telegraph line by merging with the American Telegraph Company, one of the backers of the Atlantic cable. If the cable was successfully laid, Western Union would receive a share of the profits. In effect, Western Union had put down a bet against its own men in the Siberian wilderness.

Almost as an afterthought, Western Union dispatched a company ship to Siberia, the Onward, which arrived off Gizhiga on July 15, 1867. “We have come up to carry all the employees home,” said the captain. Kennan found it heartbreaking to close a project to which he had devoted nearly three years of his life and endured all possible hardships, but his thoughts were also of home. Maj. Abaza went by an overland route to St. Petersburg, where he hoped to persuade the Russian government to complete the line through Siberia. Kennan spent August cruising along the Siberian coast aboard the Onward to gather up the telegraph line working parties. In September the Onward put in at Okhotsk, where a letter from Maj. Abaza directed Kennan to come to St. Petersburg. The Onward, with almost all the American telegraph workers on board, prepared to sail to San Francisco. On the day of the Onward’s sailing, Kennan and Dodd were both on the edge of tears. “He could only wring my hand in silence.”

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by Joel | 4 February 2025 · 3:48 am

Indigenous Slavers in North America

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 172-177:

NATIVE AMERICANS WERE involved in the slaving enterprise from the beginning of European colonization. At first they offered captives to the newcomers and helped them develop new networks of enslavement, serving as guides, guards, intermediaries, and local providers. But with the passage of time, as Indians acquired European weapons and horses, they increased their power and came to control an ever larger share of the traffic in slaves.

Their rising influence was evident throughout North America. In the Carolinas, for instance, English colonists took tens of thousands of Indian slaves and shipped many of them to the Caribbean. In the period between 1670 and 1720, Carolinians exported more Indians out of Charleston, South Carolina, than they imported Africans into it. As this traffic developed, the colonists increasingly procured their indigenous captives from the Westo Indians, an extraordinarily expansive group that conducted raids all over the region. Anthropologist Robbie Ethridge has coined the term “militaristic slaving societies” to refer to groups like the Westos that became major suppliers of Native captives to Europeans and other Indians. The French in eastern Canada had a similar experience. They procured thousands of Indian slaves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but as they moved away from Quebec and Montreal and into the Great Lakes region and upper Mississippi basin, they encountered a world of bondage they could scarcely comprehend, let alone control. Indians preyed on one another to get captives whom they offered to the French in exchange for guns and ammunition and to forge alliances. Throughout North America, Natives adapted to the sprawling slave trade and sought ways to profit from it.

…

The most dramatic instances of Indian reinvention occurred in what is now the American Southwest. Multiple factors propelled Indians of this region to become prominent traffickers. The royal antislavery activism of the Spanish crown and the legal prohibitions against Indian slavery dissuaded some Spanish slavers of northern Mexico, leaving a void that others filled. Moreover, the Indian rebellions of the seventeenth century that culminated in the Great Northern Rebellion [of the 1680s and 1690s] restricted the flow of Indian slaves from some regions and led to the opening of new slaving grounds, creating new opportunities. Most important, the diffusion of horses and firearms accelerated at this time, giving some Indians the means to enslave other people. Thus new traffickers, new victims, and new slaving routes emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some Native communities experienced a process of “deterritorialization,” as Cecilia Sheridan has called it, becoming unmoored from their traditional homelands, fusing with other groups, and reinventing themselves as mobile bands capable of operating over vast distances. They made a living by trading the spoils of war, including horses and captives.

…

Comanche captive taking introduced Apaches from the east, Navajos from the west, and Pawnees from the north into New Mexico. The Comanches’ radius of action was astonishing. In 1731 a New Mexican friar asked one of the Comanches’ captives to which nation he belonged and how far it was to his country of origin. The slave responded that he was a “Ponna” (quite possibly a Pawnee, whose traditional homeland was along the North Platte and Loup Rivers in present-day Nebraska). The Indian also said that he had traveled with his captors for “one hundred suns,” moving at a rate of about ten leagues (thirty miles) for each one. The friar estimated that in the course of a year, Comanches might travel “more than one thousand leagues [three thousand miles] from New Mexico,” a distance that may have been entirely possible, considering that Pawnee country was eight hundred miles away from northern New Mexico and that the Comanches traveled to and from these lands, making various detours along the way.

The Comanches sold their first slaves in New Mexico sometime in the first decade of the eighteenth century. By the 1720s, they had become well-established traders. And by the 1760s, they were acknowledged as the preeminent suppliers of captives in the region.

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by Joel | 7 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Capt. Cook’s Americans

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle p. 345-347:

WHILE IN MACAU, Captain Gore learned the distressing news that not only was the American Revolution going badly for the English, but both France and Spain had declared war on Britain. Consequently, for the voyage home, facing the danger of seizure or attack, his two ships would remain on a war footing. The Resolution and the Discovery left Macau in January 1780, stopping briefly south of Vietnam and then in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, not far from the seething volcano on Krakatoa. By April, the vessels were anchored in False Bay, near Cape Town. In early August, as the two ships approached England, contrary winds forced them far to the west. Gore had to make a long, awkward circuit around Ireland and over Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The vessels plied down the east coast of Britain, finally arriving in London on October 7, 1780. The Resolution had been gone from England for 1,548 days. At the time, it was believed to be the longest exploratory voyage—in terms of both miles and duration—ever undertaken on the high seas. And yet, despite the odyssey’s historic length, once again, not a single person on either ship had died of scurvy.

…

AFTER RETURNING TO London, the Americans on board the ships had to face the difficult decision whether to cast their loyalties with Britain or find their way back to their native-born colonies and take up the cause against the mother country under whose flag they had been sailing for the past four years. Because he was still a member of the Royal Marines, John Ledyard was promptly sent to Canada to fight for the British in the waning actions of the American Revolution. He deserted, returned to his native New England, and in 1783 published an unauthorized account of his travels with Cook that became the first written work protected by copyright in the United States. In 1786, not done with epic traveling, Ledyard embarked on a trek of more than six thousand miles, mostly on foot, across Europe and Russia in an attempt to reach Alaska, but he was arrested in Siberia under orders from Catherine the Great. Ledyard died in Cairo in 1788, aged thirty-seven, while preparing an expedition to search for the source of the Niger River.

Ledyard’s fellow countryman John Gore, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the land of his birth. The Admiralty appointed him as one of the captains of the Greenwich Hospital, the same position Cook had vacated when he embarked on his final voyage. Gore served ten years at Greenwich. He was a popular figure among the old salts and died there in 1790.

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by Joel | 4 September 2024 · 5:26 am

Capt. Cook & Sea Otters

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 244-246:

COOK’S MONTH AT Nootka Sound would have far-reaching impacts—and not only in terms of establishing England’s early presence in the region that would eventually become British Columbia. Of the many ripple effects emanating from Cook’s visit here, perhaps the most consequential had to do with a single vulnerable creature: Enhydra lutris, otherwise known as the sea otter. These marine mammals, affectionate and mischievously cute, flourished here, feasting as they did on the huge populations of urchins and shellfish found throughout this extensive waterway. Sea otters appeared to lead a charmed existence, most of it spent cavorting on their backs.

But the trait that made them so beautiful, their thick, glossy coat, was also their curse, for in certain parts of the world—Asia, especially—the pelts were considered “soft gold.” Affluent Chinese men coveted sea otter cloaks as a status symbol and would pay astronomical sums for them. The lustrous fur was soft but also resilient, and it could be brushed in any direction, a result of its incomparably high fiber count—sea otters produce upwards of six hundred thousand hairs per square inch, twice the density of the fur seal.

During those heady days of the Manchu Dynasty, the market for pelts was becoming frenzied, akin to the tulip mania that gripped Holland in the 1630s. The potential profits staggered the imagination. Up until that time, most of the sea otter pelts that found their way into Chinese ports came from the Russian Far East and from the first, tentative Russian forays into Alaska. But stories from Cook’s visit here would lure crass armies of European and American fur hunters to Nootka and nearby locales, setting in motion a brutal industry that became so wildly competitive it would nearly ignite a war between England and Spain to control access to the sound.

Relentless hunting of sea otters, combined with the fact that they are slow breeders—typically producing only one pup every other year—meant that within a few decades of Cook’s arrival they would become virtually extinct. The fur trade springing up around Nootka Sound would doom the sea otter and cause enormous dislocations among the Mowachaht and other tribes living here—for the Europeans brought the deadly triad of alcohol, guns, and disease, which in short order would cast the Native cultures into a tailspin.

In their trading with the Mowachaht, Cook’s men procured many hundreds of sea otter pelts. The sailors called them “sea beaver,” and they well understood, as Midshipman George Gilbert put it, that their fur “is supposed to be superior to any that is known.” At the time, though, the men were not scheming to earn fortunes in Asia. They simply thought the velvety furs would come in handy in the Arctic—and, indeed, they would fashion the pelts into handsome greatcoats, caps, and gloves that would see them through many an Alaskan cold front. “To us who were bound for the North Pole,” said Samwell, the pelts “were extremely valuable articles and every one endeavored to supply himself with some of them.”

The Resolution and the Discovery, thoroughly refurbished, were towed out of the cove on April 26, 1778. Mowachaht men, keening songs in their canoes, accompanied the two ships almost to the mouth of the sound. As a parting gift, a chief bestowed upon Cook a handsome cloak made of “soft gold,” a fur raiment that nearly reached down to Cook’s ankles. In return, the captain presented the chief with a fine broadsword with a brass hilt—which, Cook thought, “made him as happy as a prince.” The Mowachaht implored the Englishmen to return soon. “By way of encouragement,” Cook wrote, the chief promised that he and his people would “lay in a good stock of skins for us, and I have not the least doubt but they will.”

The two ships, their sails rapidly filling, turned out of the sound and into the open sea.

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by Joel | 3 September 2024 · 9:02 am

Capt. Cook & the Americans, 1778

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 226-227:

On the other side of North America, the revolt against England had deepened into a bitter war that showed no signs of abating. At that very moment, British troops were occupying Philadelphia, while George Washington’s bedraggled army was beginning to stir from its winter quarters at Valley Forge. The war was taking on an international flavor. Shortly after the Resolution and the Discovery left the Hawaiian Islands, Benjamin Franklin and two other American commissioners had signed a treaty in Paris that intimately bound France to the rebellious colonies. With the stroke of a pen, France became the first nation to recognize the United States as a sovereign country. An outraged Britain would soon declare war on France, thus fully bringing the French into the American conflict.

Despite all of this, Benjamin Franklin would later make a point of lobbying among his colleagues for Captain Cook and the Resolution to be granted special immunity not afforded to other British ships. Should American vessels encounter Cook anywhere on the high seas, they were to give him leeway and clemency. Cook was on an assignment of transcendent importance for humanity, Franklin’s proclamation asserted, one too important to be detained by squabbles between nations. Franklin made his remarks in what he called a “passport” addressed to the captains and commanders of all American ships. In case Cook’s vessel should “happen to fall into your hands,” Franklin advised, “you should not consider her as an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England.” Americans, he said, should “treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness, affording them as common friends to mankind, all the assistance in your power which they may happen to stand in need of.”

The Spanish, who would soon be joining France in declaring war against England, were already well aware that Captain Cook was supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific, headed for the northwest coast of America—and they were highly displeased with England’s encroachments upon the region. They had informed officials in Mexico to keep a lookout for Cook and, if possible, to intercept and arrest him. Spanish shipwrights were constructing two new vessels—one in Mexico, another in Peru—for a voyage that aimed to halt and overtake Cook while reasserting Spanish claims in the Pacific Northwest.

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by Joel | 19 April 2024 · 6:02 am

Effects of the Arandora Star Sinking

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 178-179:

THROUGHOUT THE WARM WEEKS OF July [1940], as Hutchinson’s internees appointed their leaders and cooks, drew up the schedule of lectures and entertainments, and learned to paint, a pile of suitcases sat in a corner of another internment camp in Devon, a few hundred miles away. Rescued from the wreck of the Arandora Star, these unclaimed effects were the somber luggage of the recently deceased. It was a smaller pile of belongings than those left at the doors to the Holocaust’s shower rooms, but still emblematic of injustice. As the swollen bodies of the dead began to wash onto Irish and Hebridean beaches, so fresh details about the tragedy continued to emerge, casting further doubt on the official version of events.

On July 30, in the House of Commons, the secretary of state for war, Anthony Eden was asked whether the government had known for sure that, as previously claimed, everyone aboard the Arandora Star had been a Nazi sympathizer. By now, Eden knew for certain that this had not been the case.

“Fifty-three [Germans and Austrians aboard] were or claimed to be refugees, but had nevertheless been placed in category A,” he conceded.

In Whitehall, the impersonal statistics were now clothed with the intimacies of story. Politicians learned that, among the dead, there was a German sailor who came to Britain as an anti-fascist, only to be interned with a “mélange” of Nazi sympathizers; there was a metalworker who, after spending four years imprisoned in Nazi camps, escaped to Britain, was interned, then killed in the sinking; there was the blind pensioner who had been separated from his wife for the first time in his life.

The admission that refugees of Nazi oppression had been aboard the ship caused widespread outrage and called into question the wider policy of mass internment, which had begun to seem less like a rational security measure and more like victim-blaming on an industrial scale. The Jewish Chronicle, which just a few months earlier had defended a wartime government’s “right to interfere drastically with the freedom of the individual,” now likened the “disgraceful hounding of refugees” to “Gestapo methods.” Readers agreed. “It seems strange that in order to defeat the Gestapo abroad, it should be considered necessary to introduce their methods at home,” wrote Moya Woodside in a typical letter published in the Northern Whig. The public’s attitude had changed. Policy would duly follow.

While still far from secure, Britain’s general position in the war had shifted enough that, as Churchill put it to his cabinet, it was now possible to “take a somewhat less rigid attitude in regard to the internment of aliens.” Arrests, which had continued at a rate of around 150 per day throughout July, were suspended. If a so-called enemy alien had thus far managed to avoid being apprehended, they would most likely remain free for the remainder of the war. Mass internment was finished.

“That tragedy may… have served a useful if terrible purpose,” said Lord Faringdon of the Arandora Star in a speech to the House of Lords later that week. “For it may have opened the eyes of those responsible, and of members of the public, and of His Majesty’s Government.” It would take months and years to unpick the tangled mess of internment. Politicians’ efforts to justify and distance themselves from the episode were, by contrast, immediate.

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by Joel | 11 February 2024 · 6:49 am

Colonial American Convict Labor

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 19-21:

A brief overview of earlier British convict transportation practices is relevant here. In 1717, the British Parliament passed the Act for the Further Preventing Robbery, Burglary, and Other Felonies, and for the More Effective Transportation of Felons, etc. (4 Geo. I cap. XI), which established penal transportation to America with a seven-year convict bond service for minor offenders, and a fourteen-year convict bond service for more serious crimes. Between 1718 and 1775 an estimated 50,000 convicts were transported to the British-American colonies. This represented about a quarter of all British migrants to the North American colonies at a time when they were desperately short of labour. The American colonists saw convict transportation as beneficial socially, politically and economically. It disposed of minor criminals at a cost that was less than gaoling them and a boon to the colonies by providing cheap labour. This was, in effect, and indeed in fact, a slave trade under a different guise. From its inception, transportation to the American colonies was a private business enterprise. Shipping contractors managed the movement of the convicts, obtained contracts from the sheriffs and in the colonies recouped their costs by selling the prisoners at auctions. Colonists would buy a convict as an indentured servant for the duration of their sentence. During an indenture the living and working conditions imposed on convicts differed little from those of slaves.

However, by the mid 18th century, convict labour had become less attractive to American colonialists and, moreover, in the 1770s the prospect of antislavery laws in England spelled the end of this practice. Maryland was the last colony to accept convicts and by 1775 the American Revolutionary War ended the trade of imported British goods and convicts. On 11 Jan 1776, the London Gazetteer reported ‘there will be no more convicts sent to America whilst the country remains unsettled.’ The article suggested that transportation would resume just as soon as peace was restored. This never took place.

With the loss of the American colonies, the systematic disposal of convicts to places beyond the seas came to a halt. Nevertheless, most judges consistently refused to apply capital punishment to relatively minor crimes and, where it was applied, capital sentences were often commuted to transportation. Consequently, the land gaols in the 1770s and 1780s overflowed with prisoners awaiting the imposition of a sentence that could not be enacted and, importantly, could not be altered. It was a serious judicial stalemate.

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by Joel | 5 February 2024 · 6:13 am

Dilemma of Imperial India in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 212-214:

For [Viceroy] Wavell, a respected general with a reflective mind – his collection Other Men’s Flowers is one of the most entertaining of all English verse anthologies – Britain ‘made an entirely wrong turn in India twenty-five years ago.’ He thought that if the Indians had been seriously offered the kind of Dominion status within the Commonwealth that ‘white’ territories such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa had obtained around the time of the First World War, there would have been a good chance of keeping India united. In the early 1930s Gandhi and other Congress leaders went to London for talks and were assured that soon India would gain a kind of self-government – but not yet. No date was given, and all goodwill with the nationalists was lost when in 1939 Wavell’s predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on Germany ‘on behalf of India’ without consulting any Indians at all. The Australian and Canadian governments, for example, were asked beforehand and made the decision for themselves. The British expected a million Indians to fight against the Germans.

Nehru, who loathed fascism and the Nazis rather more than some of Britain’s ruling elite did, said that it was hard for the people of India to fight for the freedom of Poland when they themselves were under foreign occupation. ‘If Britain fought for democracy she should…end imperialism in her own possessions and establish full democracy in India. A free and independent India would gladly co-operate…with other free nations for mutual defence against aggression.’

The British establishment tended to believe the dictum of the most magnificent of all the imperial grandees sent to oversee the smooth running of the empire: Lord Curzon. As Viceroy at the turn of the century, Curzon had declared, ‘As long as we rule in India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straightaway to a third rate power…The rest is redundant.’ Few believed this as instinctively as did Winston Churchill, the most romantic of imperialists, who had battled all his political life to maintain British rule in India. Yet Churchill probably did as much as anyone to hasten its end.

When he was Prime Minister he had no intention of ever giving up the Jewel in the Crown. He told the War Cabinet that even if he was forced by the Indian nationalists into making some concessions, ‘I would feel under no obligation to honour promises made at a time of difficulty.’

Churchill regarded any notion of Britain leaving India, or even India being granted Dominion status, as ‘criminally mischievous’. He retained the sentimental attachment to the idea of the Raj that he had held as a junior cavalry officer on the North-West frontier in the 1890s. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India during the war, said, ‘Winston knew as much about India as George III did of the American colonies…He reacts instinctively and passionately against any government for India other than the one he knew forty years ago.’

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by Joel | 17 September 2023 · 5:43 am

Cold War Gymnastics

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 46-48:

More than two decades later, in 2001, Nellie Kim was to recall the Montréal Games and her clash with Nadia Comăneci in an interview with Jean-Christophe Klotz, the presenter of Les Grands Duels du Sport on the Franco-German Arte channel. Even after so many years the disappointment Kim had felt at the time obviously still rankled when she said that while Nadia was a great gymnast and almost perfect, she was by no means superior to anybody in the Soviet team. ‘I can’t say that she was better than we were. Her routines were as difficult as those of Turishcheva, Korbut and myself. On a few apparatuses she was better than Turishcheva and Korbut, but on others, not quite. But the press turned her into the “goddess of gymnastics”,’ she said, suggesting that it was not so much Nadia’s performance that had counted, but the influence of Western journalists, who deliberately exaggerated her prowess.

Kim’s opinion is only partly justified. Given that the Cold War was still at its height, Western journalists must have felt a bias towards anybody able to rock the myth of Soviet sporting invincibility. This had been the case of Olympic, World and European champion Věra Čáslavská, who at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics was done an injustice by the judges: the Czechoslovak gymnast had been forced to share the top of the podium with Larisa Petrik of the U.S.S.R. and had bowed her head and turned it to the right when the Soviet national anthem was played. Čáslavská was protesting not at the unfairness of the scoring to which she had fallen victim during the competition, but at the fact that her country had fallen victim to an invasion by the Soviet army just weeks before.

And the Western journalists loved her for it. But four years later, they also fell in love with little Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut at the Munich Olympics, recognising even then the decisive rôle she was to play in gymnastics. They dubbed her ‘the darling of Munich’, so captivating was her performance, which gives us to believe that regardless of political circumstances or personal sympathies, the international press was still able to preserve its objectivity in the face of obvious talent.

By the time of the 1976 Montréal Olympics, Romania had indeed gained its own separate image internationally, as Czechoslovakia had in 1968. The country was part of the Communist bloc, but a number of past political gestures on the part of Nicolae Ceauşescu had created the impression that Romania distanced itself from and sometimes even defied Moscow, an impression that was also bolstered by Bucharest’s closer and closer ties with Washington and other Western capitals. Which is why the sympathy towards Nadia Comăneci on the part of both press and public could be viewed as all the more genuine.

But political circumstances could have no influence on how Nadia’s performance was judged, where technique and artistic elements that were all that counted, and journalists could not award points in place of the judges. It was the fullness of Nadia’s performance that was her secret, and it distinguished her from the Soviets, as Cathy Rigby remarked in her commentary for ABC: ‘Oh look at that amplitude!’ Nadia controlled her body in a way that stood out, without any tremor to betray hesitation, and with the ambition to control her balance to the utmost degree. She was fast, but at the same time elegant and certain, which made some of her movements seem unreal. The elements in the routines that won her scores of ten were achieved with flawless poise, seamlessly combined, in a style that Nadia was to make uniquely her own.

The International Gymnastics Federation’s scoring code for the uneven parallel bars now includes the Comăneci Salto and Comăneci Dismount, named after the moves Nadia pioneered at Montréal. In the first, ‘the gymnast begins in a support position on the high bar. She casts away from the bar and performs a straddled front somersault and regrasps the same bar’ – an element deemed to be of an extremely high level of difficulty. In the second, the ‘gymnast begins in a handstand on the high bar and then pikes her feet onto the bar and does a sole circle swing around the bar. She then releases the bar first with her feet and then with her hands as she performs a half-twist immediately into a back somersault dismount.’ Such moves are only a few of those that were to inspire future generations of gymnasts, leading them to tackle elements of increasing complexity and even risk. In Munich in 1972, Olga Korbut had done the same thing. Likewise, Japanese gymnast Mitsuo Tsukahara revolutionised gymnastics with the spectacular vault that now bears his name. To this day, each generation of gymnasts takes inspiration from the daring of their predecessors.

The impact around the world of Nadia Comăneci’s achievements at Montréal was remarkable. The popularity of the sport suddenly increased, and Nadia became an inspiration not only for younger gymnasts and even those of her generation, but also for countless little girls who dreamed of becoming like her. Some of those little girls went on to become champions, such as Mary Lou Retton, who watched Nadia at Montréal on television and was electrified by her refinement and natural grace.