Category Archives: Mexico

by Joel | 22 January 2025 · 5:32 am

Finding the North Pacific Way East

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 189-192:

Not everything, however, was against the San Lucas expeditionaries. By paralleling the coast of Japan, they were riding the most powerful current in the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese call it Kuroshio, or “Black Current,” owing to its characteristic cobalt-blue color. An integral part of the North Pacific Gyre, the Kuroshio Current is an enormous ribbon of warm water that starts in the Philippine Sea, brushes against the coast of Taiwan, and moves rapidly up the eastern side of Japan, snaking and pushing against the cold waters coming from the Bering Sea. After veering off from Japan, the current continues eastward for about a thousand miles as a free jet stream known as the Kuroshio Extension, eventually feeding into the larger North Pacific Gyre. This explains why historically some Japanese ships disabled in storms have washed up in North America. This may have occurred prior to 1492, although no hard evidence has surfaced. More convincingly, scholars have estimated that between the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, more than a thousand Japanese vessels were swept out to sea. Among them, a handful are known to have made landfall in the Americas. A rice cargo ship called the Tokujômaru, for instance, ran into a storm that broke its rudder, causing it to drift for sixteen months until running aground in 1813 near Santa Barbara, California, with only the captain and two crew members still alive. Nearly twenty years later, a similar incident occurred when a merchant ship bound for Tokyo, the Hojunmaru, was knocked off course by a typhoon, only to reappear after fifteen months, rudderless and dismasted, in Cape Flattery, the most northwesterly point in the continental United States.

…

The San Lucas voyagers reported an unexpected abundance of life in that part of the ocean, an observation that confirms their whereabouts. The collision of the warm Kuroshio Current with subarctic water produces eddies of plankton that are visible even in satellite images. In turn, the plankton attract a variety of animals. The Spanish expeditionaries saw “pig fish as large as cows” and marveled at the “dogs of the sea with their paws and tails and ears . . . and one of them came aboard and barked at us” (almost certainly sea lions, with external ear flaps and very vocal, in contrast to true seals). Quite fittingly, the men of the San Lucas also crossed paths with the greatest migratory species of all. “Black shearwaters followed us, shrieking all day and night,” Don Alonso recalled, “and their cries were very unsettling because no sailor had ever heard them like that.” Sooty shearwaters pursue a breathtaking figure-eight migration spanning the entire Pacific. As they range from New Zealand to Alaska and from Chile to Japan, these noisy birds dive for food in some of the most productive regions of the Pacific, including the plankton-rich eddies off the coast of Japan, where some must have spotted the San Lucas slowly making its way in a northeasterly direction.

Climbing to forty degrees and up to forty-three degrees of northern latitude, the pioneers overshot the warm waters of the Kuroshio Current. They had journeyed farther north into the great ocean than any other Europeans, sailing through frigid waters coming from the Bering Sea. Only Magellan’s Trinidad had plied this part of the Pacific more than forty years earlier, where a storm had dismasted it and forced the last survivors to turn back. Extreme cold—that old nemesis of previous return attempts—became a serious concern for the crew members of the San Lucas, especially because they were missing most of their clothes after the washing party had to abandon them in Mindanao months earlier.

The San Lucas voyagers now faced “the greatest cold of winter,” as the captain put it, “even though it was the middle of summer in June and July.” For thirty days the sky turned so dark and stormy that they were unable to see the Sun or the stars. On June 11, snow fell on the deck and did not melt until noon. Lamp oil became so frozen that the bottle in which it was kept had to be warmed over a fire, “and it still came out in pieces like lard.” Modern historians have sometimes seized on such unlikely details to discount the veracity of Don Alonso’s account. “Porpoises as big as cows present no difficulty,” wrote one of these skeptics, “but it is unlikely that cooking oil would freeze in mid-summer.” Lamp oil freezes at around fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and the process can start even at higher temperatures. Sailing by the Aleutian Islands in June, especially during the Little Ice Age, would force such doubters to amend their opinions.

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Filed under Japan, Mexico, migration, North America, Pacific, Philippines, science, Spain

by Joel | 21 January 2025 · 5:12 am

Micronesia and the North Pacific Gyre

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 120-121:

The second arrow shot across the Pacific, the Villalobos expedition of 1542–43, essentially retraced the previous track and confirmed that the best way to sail from the Americas to Asia was indeed via a straight path across the ocean just north of the equator. Wind maps of the North Pacific show a broad westward-moving band of winds (and currents) between five and twenty-five degrees of northern latitude, connecting Mexico and the Philippines. Wide, continuous or nearly so, and quite regular all year round, this portion of the North Pacific Gyre amounts to a veritable highway across the ocean, far easier to locate and navigate than the northern portion for the return trip, as we shall see.

Just as earlier Atlantic navigators had used the Sargasso Sea to orient themselves, the Saavedra and Villalobos expeditions began identifying some of the Micronesian—that is, tiny—islands on the way to the Philippines. To get a sense of the difficulty, we need to consider that all the Micronesian islands add up to 271 square miles, or a quarter of Rhode Island, the smallest state in the United States, but are scattered over a patch of the Pacific that is roughly the size of all the contiguous states in the Union. Still, the Saavedra expedition was able to sight a group of low-lying atolls they grandly called “las Islas de los Reyes,” or “the Islands of the Kings” (probably the present-day Faraulep Atoll at 8.6 degrees of northern latitude). More promisingly, the Villalobos expedition spotted a small island with many coconut palms and thickly inhabited (likely the present-day island of Fais at 9.7 degrees of northern latitude). The captain called it Matalotes because, as they passed, some of the islanders paddled toward the vessels and called out in cheerful Spanish, “Buenos días, matalotes,” or “Good morning, sailors.” Somehow they had interacted with Spaniards before.

The Legazpi expedition pursued the same direct trajectory across the Pacific as the previous two voyages and benefited from the knowledge acquired up to then. The four vessels in Legazpi’s squadron remained safely inside the band of favorable winds and currents of the North Pacific Gyre, covering the six thousand miles between Mexico and the first Micronesian islands in record time. At every stage of the journey, the pilots—the very best in all the Spanish Empire—knew their precise location relative to the North Pacific Gyre because they estimated their latitude (north-south distance) every day.

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Filed under language, Mexico, Micronesia, migration, Pacific, Philippines, Spain

by Joel | 18 January 2025 · 6:56 am

New Spain Demographics, 1500s

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 89-91:

Those who remained reasonably healthy and curious would have been immediately struck by Navidad’s sheer diversity. As the port’s population swelled from a few dozen to several hundred, it turned into something of a Babel of races, nationalities, classes, and occupations. Native Americans were ubiquitous. Coming from nearby towns such as Tuxpan and Xilotlán, they had been compelled to abandon their families, homes, and fields and go to Navidad to work for token compensation according to a system of corvée labor known as repartimiento. For these Indigenous peoples, service at the port was yet another labor sinkhole that they had to endure, like the silver mines or the road construction projects. Also common were African slaves, purchased by the viceroy and dispatched to Navidad to aid in the building effort. Some had been Christianized and spoke Spanish, but many others, the so-called negros bozales, had been imported directly from Africa. Particularly visible was a team of Black slaves constantly moving cargo from various towns into Navidad and managing a train of twenty-seven mules and two horses.

Spaniards constituted the largest share of the expeditionaries, as one would expect. The catchall appellation español, however, masked yet more diversity. Friar Urdaneta and Commander Legazpi were both from the Basque Country, so a disproportionate number of voyagers hailed from that region. As Basque is a non-Indo-European language, they enjoyed a private means of communication completely impenetrable to all other Spaniards—far more so than, say, English, German, or Russian. Galicia in the north of Spain, Castile in the middle, and Andalusia in the south were also well represented at Navidad. Although these historic kingdoms were linguistically and culturally closer to one another, the differences between them were greater in the sixteenth century than today and inevitably led to cliques and divisions within the crew and the two companies of soldiers.

A fixture of all early voyages of exploration was the high proportion of non-Spaniards. They could account for as many as a third (according to some regulations) and up to half (as in the case of Magellan’s expedition) of all crew members. The Navidad fleet was no different. The documentation mentions a Belgian barrel maker, a German artilleryman, an English carpenter, Venetian crew members, a French pilot, two Filipino translators, and so forth. Portuguese mariners made up the largest and most conspicuous foreign group: at least sixteen could be counted at Navidad. Spaniards regarded them as rivals but also valued their nautical skills. The Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín, our protagonist, was among them.

Lope Martín was from Lagos, an old port near Portugal’s southwestern tip that had historically served as a stepping-stone from Europe to Africa. In the summer of 1415, a powerful fleet had gathered there before crossing the Mediterranean to capture Ceuta. In later years, Lagos had turned into Prince Henry the Navigator’s base of operations. Famous local pilots included Alvaro Esteves (who charted the “gold coast” of Africa) and Vicente Rodrigues (one of the foremost pilots to India). As Portuguese fleets had traced the contours of western Africa, Black slaves had flowed back into Lagos, giving rise to a sizable slave and free population of African ancestry. This contingent did much of the work around the city, in the harbor, and aboard the ships of exploration. Many of the apprentices and sailors in Lagos were Black slaves whose salaries were pocketed by their masters or free Blacks engaged in the harsh life of the sea.

Lope Martín was, as we have seen, a free mulatto, that is, a person of mixed Afro-Portuguese descent. Although little is known about his early years, he must have cut his teeth aboard Portuguese and Spanish ships of exploration, carrying sacks of flour and climbing ratlines to the top of the mast. The fleets outfitted all along the southwestern coast of Iberia, on both the Portuguese and Spanish sides, constantly required fresh recruits like him. Towns like Huelva, Moguer, and Palos de la Frontera had supplied Columbus with a crew willing to risk their lives across the great ocean in 1492. Less than one hundred miles in length, this stretch of Portuguese-Spanish coast was at the time the preeminent maritime region in the world. Somewhere in this exploited and often brutal milieu, where knife fights could erupt over insignificant incidents, Lope Martín went from page (children of eight to ten) to apprentice (older and more experienced) to mariner (twenty and older and in possession of a certificate), all the while voyaging to Africa, the Americas, and perhaps as far as Asia. Lope Martín’s passages likely ended in different Portuguese and Spanish ports. These comings and goings must have taken him away from his native Lagos, well inside Portugal, toward the Spanish border, and finally to Seville, the only Spanish port open to trade with the New World.

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Filed under Africa, language, Mexico, migration, Philippines, Portugal, religion, slavery, Spain

by Joel | 29 October 2023 · 3:09 pm

French Bishop, Indian Guide

From Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (Project Gutenberg, 2023; Knopf, 1927), Book 3, Chapter 2:

TAKING leave of Isleta and its priest early in the morning, Father Latour and his guide rode all day through the dry desert plain west of Albuquerque. It was like a country of dry ashes; no juniper, no rabbit brush, nothing but thickets of withered, dead-looking cactus, and patches of wild pumpkin—the only vegetation that had any vitality. It is a vine, remarkable for its tendency, not to spread and ramble, but to mass and mount. Its long, sharp, arrow-shaped leaves, frosted over with prickly silver, are thrust upward and crowded together; the whole rigid, up-thrust matted clump looks less like a plant than like a great colony of grey-green lizards, moving and suddenly arrested by fear.

As the morning wore on they had to make their way through a sand-storm which quite obscured the sun. Jacinto knew the country well, having crossed it often to go to the religious dances at Laguna, but he rode with his head low and a purple handkerchief tied over his mouth. Coming from a pueblo among woods and water, he had a poor opinion of this plain. At noon he alighted and collected enough greasewood to boil the Bishop’s coffee. They knelt on either side of the fire, the sand curling about them so that the bread became gritty as they ate it.

The sun set red in an atmosphere murky with sand. The travellers made a dry camp and rolled themselves in their blankets. All night a cold wind blew over them. Father Latour was so stiff that he arose long before day-break. The dawn came at last, fair and clear, and they made an early start.

About the middle of that afternoon Jacinto pointed out Laguna in the distance, lying, apparently, in the midst of bright yellow waves of high sand dunes—yellow as ochre. As they approached, Father Latour found these were petrified sand dunes; long waves of soft, gritty yellow rock, shining and bare except for a few lines of dark juniper that grew out of the weather cracks,—little trees, and very, very old. At the foot of this sweep of rock waves was the blue lake, a stone basin full of water, from which the pueblo took its name.

The kindly Padre at Isleta had sent his cook’s brother off on foot to warn the Laguna people that the new High Priest was coming, and that he was a good man and did not want money. They were prepared, accordingly; the church was clean and the doors were open; a small white church, painted above and about the altar with gods of wind and rain and thunder, sun and moon, linked together in a geometrical design of crimson and blue and dark green, so that the end of the church seemed to be hung with tapestry. It recalled to Father Latour the interior of a Persian chieftain’s tent he had seen in a textile exhibit at Lyons. Whether this decoration had been done by Spanish missionaries or by Indian converts, he was unable to find out.

The Governor told him that his people would come to Mass in the morning, and that there were a number of children to be baptized. He offered the Bishop the sacristy for the night, but there was a damp, earthy smell about that chamber, and Father Latour had already made up his mind that he would like to sleep on the rock dunes, under the junipers.

Jacinto got firewood and good water from the Lagunas, and they made their camp in a pleasant spot on the rocks north of the village. As the sun dropped low, the light brought the white church and the yellow adobe houses up into relief from the flat ledges. Behind their camp, not far away, lay a group of great mesas. The Bishop asked Jacinto if he knew the name of the one nearest them.

“No, I not know any name,” he shook his head. “I know Indian name,” he added, as if, for once, he were thinking aloud.

“And what is the Indian name?”

“The Laguna Indians call Snow-Bird mountain.” He spoke somewhat unwillingly.

“That is very nice,” said the Bishop musingly. “Yes, that is a pretty name.”

“Oh, Indians have nice names too!” Jacinto replied quickly, with a curl of the lip. Then, as if he felt he had taken out on the Bishop a reproach not deserved, he said in a moment: “The Laguna people think it very funny for a big priest to be a young man. The Governor say, how can I call him Padre when he is younger than my sons?”

There was a note of pride in Jacinto’s voice very flattering to the Bishop. He had noticed how kind the Indian voice could be when it was kind at all; a slight inflection made one feel that one had received a great compliment.

“I am not very young in heart, Jacinto. How old are you, my boy?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Have you a son?”

“One. Baby. Not very long born.”

Jacinto usually dropped the article in speaking Spanish, just as he did in speaking English, though the Bishop had noticed that when he did give a noun its article, he used the right one. The customary omission, therefore, seemed to be a matter of taste, not ignorance. In the Indian conception of language, such attachments were superfluous and unpleasing, perhaps.

They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of intercourse. The Bishop sat drinking his coffee slowly out of the tin cup, keeping the pot near the embers. The sun had set now, the yellow rocks were turning grey, down in the pueblo the light of the cook fires made red patches of the glassless windows, and the smell of piñon smoke came softly through the still air. The whole western sky was the colour of golden ashes, with here and there a flush of red on the lip of a little cloud. High above the horizon the evening-star flickered like a lamp just lit, and close beside it was another star of constant light, much smaller.

Jacinto threw away the end of his cornhusk cigarette and again spoke without being addressed.

“The ev-en-ing-star,” he said in English, slowly and somewhat sententiously, then relapsed into Spanish. “You see the little star beside, Padre? Indians call him the guide.”

The two companions sat, each thinking his own thoughts as night closed in about them; a blue night set with stars, the bulk of the solitary mesas cutting into the firmament. The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn’t think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him. A chill came with the darkness. Father Latour put on his old fur-lined cloak, and Jacinto, loosening the blanket tied about his loins, drew it up over his head and shoulders.

“Many stars,” he said presently. “What you think about the stars, Padre?”

“The wise men tell us they are worlds, like ours, Jacinto.”

The end of the Indian’s cigarette grew bright and then dull again before he spoke. “I think not,” he said in the tone of one who has considered a proposition fairly and rejected it. “I think they are leaders—great spirits.”

“Perhaps they are,” said the Bishop with a sigh. “Whatever they are, they are great. Let us say Our Father, and go to sleep, my boy.”

Kneeling on either side of the embers they repeated the prayer together and then rolled up in their blankets. The Bishop went to sleep thinking with satisfaction that he was beginning to have some sort of human companionship with his Indian boy. One called the young Indians “boys,” perhaps because there was something youthful and elastic in their bodies. Certainly about their behaviour there was nothing boyish in the American sense, nor even in the European sense. Jacinto was never, by any chance, naïf; he was never taken by surprise. One felt that his training, whatever it had been, had prepared him to meet any situation which might confront him. He was as much at home in the Bishop’s study as in his own pueblo—and he was never too much at home anywhere. Father Latour felt he had gone a good way toward gaining his guide’s friendship, though he did not know how.

The truth was, Jacinto liked the Bishop’s way of meeting people; thought he had the right tone with [rich] Padre Gallegos, the right tone with [poor] Padre Jesus, and that he had good manners with the Indians. In his experience, white people, when they addressed Indians, always put on a false face. There were many kinds of false faces; Father Vaillant’s, for example, was kindly but too vehement. The Bishop put on none at all. He stood straight and turned to the Governor of Laguna, and his face underwent no change. Jacinto thought this remarkable.

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by Joel | 28 October 2023 · 1:34 pm

The Bishop Meets Kit Carson

From Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (Project Gutenberg, 2023; Knopf, 1927), Book 2, Chapter 2:

St. Vrain and his friend got together a search-party at once. They rode out to Scales’s place and found the remains of four men buried under the corral behind the stable, as the woman had said. Scales himself they captured on the road from Taos, where he had gone to look for his wife. They brought him back to Mora, but St. Vrain rode on to Taos to fetch a magistrate.

There was no calabozo in Mora, so Scales was put into an empty stable, under guard. This stable was soon surrounded by a crowd of people, who loitered to hear the blood-curdling threats the prisoner shouted against his wife. Magdalena was kept in the Padre’s house, where she lay on a mat in the corner, begging Father Latour to take her back to Santa Fé, so that her husband could not get at her. Though Scales was bound, the Bishop felt alarmed for her safety. He and the American notary, who had a pistol of the new revolver model, sat in the sala and kept watch over her all night.

In the morning the magistrate and his party arrived from Taos. The notary told him the facts of the case in the plaza, where everyone could hear. The Bishop inquired whether there was any place for Magdalena in Taos, as she could not stay on here in such a state of terror.

A man dressed in buckskin hunting-clothes stepped out of the crowd and asked to see Magdalena. Father Latour conducted him into the room where she lay on her mat. The stranger went up to her, removing his hat. He bent down and put his hand on her shoulder. Though he was clearly an American, he spoke Spanish in the native manner.

“Magdalena, don’t you remember me?”

She looked up at him as out of a dark well; something became alive in her deep, haunted eyes. She caught with both hands at his fringed buckskin knees.

“Christobal!” she wailed. “Oh, Christobal!”

“I’ll take you home with me, Magdalena, and you can stay with my wife. You wouldn’t be afraid in my house, would you?”

“No, no, Christobal, I would not be afraid with you. I am not a wicked woman.”

He smoothed her hair. “You’re a good girl, Magdalena—always were. It will be all right. Just leave things to me.”

Then he turned to the Bishop. “Señor Vicario, she can come to me. I live near Taos. My wife is a native woman, and she’ll be good to her. That varmint won’t come about my place, even if he breaks jail. He knows me. My name is Carson.”

Father Latour had looked forward to meeting the scout. He had supposed him to be a very large man, of powerful body and commanding presence. This Carson was not so tall as the Bishop himself, was very slight in frame, modest in manner, and he spoke English with a soft Southern drawl. His face was both thoughtful and alert; anxiety had drawn a permanent ridge between his blue eyes. Under his blond moustache his mouth had a singular refinement. The lips were full and delicately modelled. There was something curiously unconscious about his mouth, reflective, a little melancholy,—and something that suggested a capacity for tenderness. The Bishop felt a quick glow of pleasure in looking at the man. As he stood there in his buckskin clothes one felt in him standards, loyalties, a code which is not easily put into words but which is instantly felt when two men who live by it come together by chance. He took the scout’s hand. “I have long wanted to meet Kit Carson,” he said, “even before I came to New Mexico. I have been hoping you would pay me a visit at Santa Fé.”

The other smiled. “I’m right shy, sir, and I’m always afraid of being disappointed. But I guess it will be all right from now on.”

This was the beginning of a long friendship.

On their ride back to Carson’s ranch, Magdalena was put in Father Vaillant’s care, and the Bishop and the scout rode together. Carson said he had become a Catholic merely as a matter of form, as Americans usually did when they married a Mexican girl. His wife was a good woman and very devout; but religion had seemed to him pretty much a woman’s affair until his last trip to California. He had been sick out there, and the Fathers at one of the missions took care of him. “I began to see things different, and thought I might some day be a Catholic in earnest. I was brought up to think priests were rascals, and that the nuns were bad women,—all the stuff they talk back in Missouri. A good many of the native priests here bear out that story. Our Padre Martinez at Taos is an old scapegrace, if ever there was one; he’s got children and grandchildren in almost every settlement around here. And Padre Lucero at Arroyo Hondo is a miser, takes everything a poor man’s got to give him a Christian burial.”

The Bishop discussed the needs of his people at length with Carson. He felt great confidence in his judgment. The two men were about the same age, both a little over forty, and both had been sobered and sharpened by wide experience. Carson had been guide in world-renowned explorations, but he was still almost as poor as in the days when he was a beaver trapper. He lived in a little adobe house with his Mexican wife. The great country of desert and mountain ranges between Santa Fé and the Pacific coast was not yet mapped or charted; the most reliable map of it was in Kit Carson’s brain. This Missourian, whose eye was so quick to read a landscape or a human face, could not read a printed page. He could at that time barely write his own name. Yet one felt in him a quick and discriminating intelligence. That he was illiterate was an accident; he had got ahead of books, gone where the printing-press could not follow him. Out of the hardships of his boyhood—from fourteen to twenty picking up a bare living as cook or mule-driver for wagon trains, often in the service of brutal and desperate characters—he had preserved a clean sense of honour and a compassionate heart. In talking to the Bishop of poor Magdalena he said sadly: “I used to see her in Taos when she was such a pretty girl. Ain’t it a pity?”

The degenerate murderer, Buck Scales, was hanged after a short trial.

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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.

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Filed under Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, nationalism, philosophy, Romania, USSR, war

by Joel | 4 May 2023 · 2:31 pm

Pueblo Revolt and Aftermath

From Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Liveright, 2022), Kindle pp. 185-186, 188-189:

Like the wars waged by the Powhatans and Wampanoags in the East, the 1680 Pueblo insurrection was at once an act of self-preservation, cultural revitalization, and spatial reimagination. Attesting to strong intergroup attachments that transcended Spanish-imposed boundaries, many Apaches and Navajos fought alongside the Pueblos. The allied Indians killed nearly four hundred colonists and twenty-one friars, and they routed a thousand Spanish soldiers, sending them to El Paso, the colony’s southernmost town. The leaders of the rebellion set out to restore the physical and sacral landscape of the pre-Spanish era. Churches were to be demolished, their bells were to be shattered, and images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary were to be destroyed. Alien crops were to be torched, and corn and beans planted in their stead. Not one Spanish word would violate the restored Indigenous soundscape. Even horses began to vanish from the Rio Grande valley. Repulsed by horses’ tendency to trample cornfields and by their elevated power, which symbolized Spanish might, the Pueblos embarked on vigorous horse trade with the outlying nomads and pastoralists. It had to be as though Spanish colonialism had never happened.

DESPITE THE PUEBLOS’ DESIRE to erase Spanish colonialism from their memory, it had, of course, happened, and its legacy proved sticky. As frail as Spanish dominance over the Pueblo world had been, Spanish colonists had profoundly altered Indigenous life in the Rio Grande valley. To reinstate the old cultural order—to turn back time—the Pueblo leaders issued sweeping decrees that bound all Pueblos. In order to purge Spanish influences, the Native leaders claimed all-encompassing dominion over the Pueblo world. But a single Pueblo world was a foreign fiction. Before the Spanish invasion, the Pueblos had lived in more than 150 communities that shared a general cultural outlook but possessed no central governing structures. When the colonial edifice dissolved, local identities resurfaced. In the 1680s, the Spanish built a buffer region of presidios and missions to keep European rivals away from the abandoned colony. They called it Tejas, a Spanish spelling of the Caddo word taysha, meaning “friend.”

Four generations of colonial presence had left a deep imprint on Pueblo life, and many had grown to see certain Spanish imports as natural. Renouncing the Franciscans and colonists roused little controversy; pigs, sheep, woolen textiles, metal tools, and spouses taken in matrimony were another matter. When droughts spoiled harvests, the already delicate Pueblo coalition began to disintegrate. Civic leaders, medicine men, and soldiers competed for authority within communities that soon descended into civil wars. Towns fought over diminishing resources and raided one another for grain. The Apaches, incensed by the collapse of trade relations, took what they needed through force.

While the Pueblo people struggled with lingering colonial legacies, the Spanish struggled with the legacy of Pueblo resistance. The Pueblo uprising had proved contagious, triggering a series of rebellions against Spanish rule from Coahuila to Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya. Janos, Sumas, Conchos, Tobosos, Julimes, and Pimas attacked colonists and destroyed missions, towns, and farms, rolling back Spanish colonialism across a vast area. The Spanish seemed paralyzed in the face of this explosion of Indigenous hatred and power. Colonial officials sentenced four hundred Native rebels to ten years of forced labor.

…

Vargas extinguished the second rebellion with a focused war of attrition, but the rebellion proved crucial for the future prospects of the Pueblo people. Vargas reinstated colonial rule in New Mexico, but it was not the colonial rule of old. Traumatized and exhausted by the latest rebellion, the Spanish accepted smaller landholdings than before, and they replaced the slavery-like encomienda labor system with the repartimiento system, under which the amount of required work was regulated. They appointed a public defender to protect the Pueblos against Spanish abuse, and Franciscans turned a blind eye to the previously banned Pueblo ceremonies—a concession that was made easier by the Pueblos’ token acceptance of Catholic sacraments. The colony had shrunk conspicuously.

The administrative apparatus of the Spanish colonial state remained in place, but the social distance between the Spanish and the Pueblos narrowed through intermarriages, quasi-kinship institutions such as compadrazgo—co-godparenthood—and multiethnic towns. The Spanish and the Pueblos remained distinct people separated by sharp disparities in power and privilege, but unwavering Pueblo resistance had forced the Spanish to enter a shared world where the colonists were allowed to reestablish only a drastically reduced version of their grandiose imperial project. Like Juan de Oñate a century earlier, Vargas had tried to create a bounded colonial state with carefully regulated commercial channels, and like his predecessors, he had encountered an Indigenous world that refused to bend to a rigid imperial logic. The Pueblo resistance proved contagious, igniting a series of rebellions that spread across northern New Spain. The terrified governor of Nueva Vizcaya insisted that all captured Indian rebels should be sentenced to ten years of enslavement.

The Pueblo Revolt—also known as the Great Southwestern Rebellion for its virulence and scale—changed the history of the region irrevocably. It cut the Spanish colonists down to size and emboldened the Indians—not just the Pueblos but also many other Indigenous nations—to challenge Spain’s imperial claims. During the decade after the rebellion, numerous uprisings and wars broke out between the Spanish and the Indians: Tarahumaras, Conchos, Pimas, Sobaipuris, Sumas, Jocomes, Janos, Opatas, Apaches, and many others fought to contain, punish, and kill the Spanish, and keep their territories inviolate. Their systematic mobile guerrilla war had confined the Spanish to their northwestern frontier.

By shaking up ancient traditions and practices, the war changed the Pueblo world from within by giving Pueblo women new avenues to express their religious ideas and spirituality; they began to explore Catholicism more deeply and to question ancient traditions. The most important geopolitical change came when the Pueblos started selling Spanish horses to neighboring nomads in the plains and the surrounding mountains. The horse trade ignited a technological revolution that reconfigured several Indigenous worlds within a generation. An ancient trade corridor in the Rocky Mountains became a conduit for the spread of horses far to the north. The Shoshones acquired horses in about 1690 and, emboldened by their suddenly supercharged capacity to move about, hunt, and fight, they pushed into the bison-rich northern plains. Others even farther away traced the flow of horses back to the source in the upper Rio Grande valley. In 1706 the residents of Taos Pueblo in the northeastern corner of New Mexico reported the arrival of strange people from the north. These newcomers, Nu–mu–nu–u–—“the people”—were rumored to be preparing an attack on the town. The Comanches had entered the Spanish consciousness as a shadowy frontier menace.

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Filed under economics, labor, language, Mexico, migration, military, nationalism, North America, religion, slavery, Spain, war

by Joel | 21 January 2023 · 5:45 am

U.S. View of the Great Plains c. 1850

From Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen (The Lamar Series in Western History; Yale U. Press, 2019), Kindle pp. 211-212:

Viewed from Washington, Mexico seemed a natural addition to a nation that was exploding toward the Pacific by way of Louisiana and Texas; the question was the exact size of the appendix. There was a broad consensus that the Nueces strip and San Francisco Bay should be included, and 37° N was quickly established as a new northern boundary. But opinions differed widely on the southern one. Most in the room insisted on a direct line from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the Pacific along 26° N—a thousand-mile-wide chunk of land that would have turned ten Mexican states into U.S. soil. Some argued that they should simply take the whole of Mexico. In the end cooler heads prevailed, and the United States annexed only New Mexico and Alta California. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred half of Mexico to the United States.

There was a direct mental strand between the Indian Removal Act and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, between the debates over the Indian Removal and the debates over the Mexican annexation. Key U.S. policymakers had developed an imperial mindset, a collection of attitudes, convictions, and habits that allowed them to see humans, nations, and entire societies as pawns on an immense geopolitical chessboard. Jackson, Polk, and their officials poured over maps and drew new lines on them, rearranging the world into a new shape. Indian Territory in the West was now the home of removed southern Indians and El Paso was now a U.S. town because they had drawn the lines so. It was in many ways but a reiteration of the centuries-old European imperial ethos which had pushed Spain, Portugal, France, and Britain to carve up the world into empires, but it was new to Americans, and many of them reveled in it. Washington’s dream of an expanding empire of liberty, Jefferson’s utopian schemes for Louisiana, and Monroe’s famous doctrine had been early versions of the imperial mindset, but it was only in the 1840s that Americans possessed the means—sufficient administrative capacity and an ability to borrow money on a vast scale—to start turning imperial abstractions into reality through state-sanctioned violence.

The continental grasslands figured only marginally in these designs. Policymakers in Washington looked straight through the plains nomads into New Mexico and California where the imperial stakes were highest. Seemingly devoid of extractable wealth (except for furs) and securely embedded within U.S. borders, the Great Plains became a kind of halfway house where the Natives could learn the arts of civilization in splendid isolation under the tutelage of a select group of missionaries and government agents. A line of forts running down from Fort Snelling to west-central Louisiana marked a “permanent Indian frontier,” demarcating a sizable reserve in the heart of the continent where the Indians could safely modernize themselves.

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by Joel | 5 January 2023 · 7:14 am

Smallpox Epidemics of 1775, 1779

From Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen (The Lamar Series in Western History; Yale U. Press, 2019), Kindle pp. 94-96:

The smallpox epidemic began in late 1775 in Quebec and spread down the eastern seaboard with the peripatetic British and Patriot armies. The epidemic’s most significant intrusion into the war came in 1781, when it caught up with the loyalist African Americans who had joined the British Army in a march across the South. In September General Charles Cornwallis was besieged in Yorktown, his black allies dying in masses and his soldiers succumbing to malaria. When Cornwallis surrendered, his army had nearly melted away under the double pathogenic assault. The first British Empire had come to an end.

While smallpox was thriving in the war-ravaged East, it found another opening some fifteen hundred miles to the west. This epidemic originated in Mexico City in August 1779 and moved from there to New Orleans, San Antonio, and Santa Fe by December 1780. There trade became the principal vehicle for transmission. Comanches, who dominated the lands amid those colonial capitals, were infected and seem to have passed on the pestilence to their trading partners, some of whom transmitted it into the Missouri Valley. Carried by equestrian Indians, the malady could travel far during its long incubation period, and a trading expedition may have reached the Missouri with the virus before succumbing to it.

Dying began in 1781—just as the British Army was wasting away at Yorktown—among Arikaras and Mandans. Lakotas contracted the disease around the same time, possibly while raiding. Oglala and Sicangu winter counts record two successive years of smallpox. They depict human figures in agony, their faces and torsos covered with red spots, documenting the infection’s aggressive spread from small blood vessels in the mouth and throat across the body until sharply raised, pus-filled blisters covered the skin; they capture the ineffectiveness of traditional healings methods in the face of an alien organism. There is no way of knowing how many died. Lakotas’ migratory way of life and dispersal into small hunting bands gave them a measure of protection against the pestilence, but cold and erratic weather around the outbreak must have compromised their ability to fight off the virus.

While the epidemic ravaged Lakotas, it nearly ruined the villagers. The virus found in the crowded villages an auspicious setting to spread. Arikaras may have lost more than three-fourths of their people, and they abandoned all but seven of their thirty-two villages. Mandan losses were similarly catastrophic. Their eight villages were reduced to two, and their thirteen clans became seven. The Hidatsa population was cut by half. An ancient political geography collapsed in a matter of months as the combined villager population of tens of thousands was reduced to roughly eight thousand. Thick clusters of Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa villages melted into thinly sprinkled nodes; permanent settlements no longer governed the riverscape. Cheyennes, too, were afflicted. Most of them abandoned their Missouri villages, making an abrupt and uncertain leap to a nomadic existence in the open plains to the west. Only one band, the Masikotas, stayed along the Missouri, attaching themselves to Lakotas.

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by Joel | 17 August 2022 · 3:26 pm

Logistics of Early Sidewheel Steamships

From The Civil War at Sea, by Craig L. Symonds (Praeger, 2009), Kindle Locs. 78-97:

Despite their self-evident logistical limitations, the tactical superiority of paddle steamers in the Mexican War led Congress in 1847 to approve three new side-wheel steamers (the Susquehanna, the Powhatan, and the Saranac), and one with a screw propeller (the San Jacinto), all of which would play prominent roles in the Civil War. Like all steamers of that era, each of these ships carried a full suite of masts and spars and were labeled “auxiliary steamers” because they were expected to navigate under sail at least as often as they did under steam. They were, in fact, transitional vessels that straddled the age of sail and the age of steam. The principal reason for including the San Jacinto in the program was to compare a screw-driven vessel against a paddle-wheel vessel, a comparison that was marred by the fact that the San Jacinto had a number of engineering flaws-including a propeller shaft that was 20 inches off the centerlines.

Despite that, it very soon became evident that the side-wheel steamers were inferior to screw steamers. When the Susquehanna was dispatched to the Far East by way of Capetown and the Indian Ocean in 1851, it took eight months to steam 18,500 miles, and it burned 2,500 tons of coal en route. Simple division shows that this yielded an average of 7.4 miles of forward progress for each ton of coal burned. Because coal cost an average of about $10 a ton in 1851, it cost the government about $1.35 (more than a full day’s pay) for every mile that passed under the Susquehanna‘s keel. Moreover, the lengthy transit time was a product not only of its relatively slow speed (8-10 knots) but also of the fact that the Susquehanna had to stop eight times en route to refuel, spending 54 days in port recoaling. Finally, all of those coaling stops were necessarily at foreign ports because the United States had no overseas bases in the mid-19th century. Even after the Susquehanna arrived-finally-on station at Hong Kong, it remained dependent on foreign sources of fuel to stay there. Obviously, for a navy with far-flung responsibilities and no overseas coaling bases, steam power continued to have significant limitations.

A second problem with side-wheel steamers like the Susquehanna was that those enormous paddle wheels on each side obscured much of the ships’ broadsides, thus limiting the number of guns they could carry, and those big paddle wheels made very inviting targets. If one of the paddle wheels was damaged by enemy fire, the ship’s mobility would be dramatically affected, and the helmsman would need great skill to prevent the ship from yawing off course or even steaming in a circle. Navy Lieutenant W. W. Hunter suggested that the solution was to turn the paddle wheels on their sides and place them below the water line, thus putting them out of the line of fire and restoring storing an uninterrupted broadside. Dubbed the Hunter’s Wheel, this seemed to offer a technological and tactical solution. But in practice the Hunter’s Wheel proved stunningly inefficient. In 1842 the USS Union was engineered to operate with Hunter’s Wheels, but while they dramatically churned up the water and burned extravagant amounts of coal, the ship made no better than five knots, and in 1848 its engines were removed and it was employed as a receiving ship. In the end, the best solution proved, after all, to be Ericsson’s screw propeller, and in the mid 1850s, during a burst of naval expansion, the U.S. Navy returned to it for a new generation of warships.