Category Archives: military

by | 2 September 2024 · 6:22 am

Omai’s Little Pretani in Huahine

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. 185-187, 191-192:

ON OCTOBER 26, when the house was nearly finished, Mai started bringing his English treasures and souvenirs ashore from the Resolution: the regiments of tin soldiers, the metal helmet and suit of armor, the mechanical Punch and Judy, the serpent jack-in-the-box, the barrel organ that could be cranked by hand. The globe of the earth, the portraits of King George and Queen Charlotte, the illustrated Bible, the “electrifying machine” that could give unsuspecting parties a jolt. The compasses and beads, the mirrors and looking glasses, the menagerie of toy animals. The kettles and crockery, the mugs and cutlery, and case after case of port wine. The saddles and bridles and horse tack. The wardrobe of English clothing—riding boots, velvet jackets, satins and linens, and numerous hats. Last but not least, the swords and cutlasses, the muskets and pistols, the fowling piece, the cartridges and pistol balls, and additional kegs of gunpowder.

Mai had wanted far more of these last items; he had originally asked for enough war implements to outfit an entire army. But Cook feared that the guns would do Mai more harm than good. “I was always of [the] opinion,” said Cook, that “he would have been better without firearms than with them.”

Mai took up residence in his new digs and seemed happy with them. The house was a piece of Britain, smelling of fresh-hewn wood, with a Latin carving over its door meant to signify that its occupant was under the protectorship of King George III: GEORGIUS TERTIUS REX. (The locals began to call that part of the island “Pretani,” and the name would stick for generations to come.) Whenever Mai left his cottage—to visit the ships or to ride his horse down the beach—he locked the front door and dropped the key in his pocket, just as he had done with the key to his apartment when he went out on strolls around London.

In the final days, as Cook and Clerke readied their ships for departure, Mai threw a succession of torchlit parties for the officers, dining under the stars beside his English house. They drank port and gorged themselves on fresh-caught fish and barbecued pork. Some of the chiefs, including the boy king Teri‘i-tari‘a, joined in the festivities, while Mai leaped among his guests, grinding his barrel organ. The Huahine people were astonished by the contraption and smiled in wonderment at the treacly mechanized melodies that issued from it.

Mai had a modest assortment of animals penned around his house—a stallion and a mare that was believed to be with foal, four sheep, a pair of ducks, a pair of rabbits, a pair of peafowl, and some cats, among other species that the Huahine people had never seen before. Mai also had a monkey—presumably he had brought it aboard while in Cape Town, but the accounts are vague on this point. The locals were delighted by the nimble creature, which they called “Hairy Man.”

On those last nights, members of Cook’s crew brought out their bagpipes, flutes, and fiddles. Mai set off fireworks, and there was much “mirth and jollity,” said Bayly. “We have nothing but good humor subsisting among us.”

…

Local lore concerning Mai is practically nonexistent, so nearly everything that is understood about him comes to us through the anecdotes of English sailors, the descriptions of English observers, and the brushstrokes of English painters. One thing is glaringly missing from the record: Mai’s own voice.

Like so many cases of cross-cultural transplantation, Mai’s odyssey led him, in the end, to an ambiguous place. His journey served as an allegory of colonialism and its unintended consequences. England, by showing off her riches and advancements and sending Mai back with a trove of mostly meaningless treasures, had doomed him to a jumbled, deracinated existence. Like the tiare apetahi flower of Raiatea, Mai, after all his travels, couldn’t take root in other soils.

Polynesian scholars recently located the spot where Mai’s house stood and where his remains were buried. It’s set back from the shore, on the outskirts of Fare. A modest yellow church called Iehova Saloma, with a corrugated roof of galvanized metal, had been built on the site. In back of the chapel, thickets of tropical trees, laden with fragrant flowers, swayed in the salt breeze.

This would have been Mai’s vista from the front door of his house, the only door in all of Polynesia that had a lock. Gazing west past the lagoon and the waves smashing on the reef, he would have had a perfect view of Raiatea, the sacred isle, a snaggy mountain on the horizon, just twenty-five miles away.

Mai had sailed around the world and back again in the hope of returning there, to build a life on the shores of his “faraway heaven.” And in his last days, there it stood, right in front of him.

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by | 1 September 2024 · 6:15 am

Capt. Cook’s Cruelty, 1777

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. 173-174:

Several months earlier, when Cook was passing through islands in the Tonga group, he had shown a taste for cruelty that some of his officers found both surprising and alarming. In the face of what he called the “repeated insolence” of the Natives—jackets, shoes, and a pewter basin had gone missing, as had daggers, bayonets, and muskets—Cook’s fury smoldered. On Tongatapu and its nearby atolls, he took to flogging Natives far past the daily limit of twelve lashes per man allowed by navy rules; in one instance, he had a Native whipped a sadistic seventy-two times. He cut off the ears of some of the most egregious thieves, and in at least one case, on his orders, a cross was carved into a Native man’s shoulder, all the way to the bone.

Yet Cook had never visited on anyone the kind of widespread retribution that he was now unleashing on the people of Moorea—punishing the many for the misdeeds of an individual. It seemed Cook had taken leave of his senses. The wanton destruction of the homes of people he had no proof were actually connected to the theft—this was a first. Although some of his men threw themselves into the vandalistic acts with gusto, most were appalled by the harshness of their captain’s orders. They understood Cook’s initial frustration over the theft, but his lust for retaliation had grown into something terrifyingly toxic, with no sense of proportion.

“I doubt not,” thought one lieutenant, “but Captain Cook had good reasons for carrying his punishment to these people to so great a length, but what his reasons were are yet a secret.” It was “all about such a trifle as a small goat,” wrote Midshipman George Gilbert. Cook’s reprisals “were so different from his conduct in like cases in former voyages.”

Later in the day, for good measure, Cook had members of his party stalk down to the water’s edge and rip apart every canoe they could find. This was much more than a passing insult. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of a canoe in Polynesian society—the labor and craftsmanship it entailed, the utility it provided, the livelihood it advanced. Canoes were transportation, but they were also art. What the horse was to the American West, the canoe was to the Society Islands. To destroy canoes was to strike at the people’s independence, their means of sustenance and of getting about, their sense of aesthetics—and, to some extent, their sense of identity, too.

Cook, who surely understood this, persisted through the day, and the day after that: He sent teams of men along the coast to smash up every outrigger they encountered. Some Mooreans filled their beloved vessels with heavy rocks and sunk them in the lagoon shallows, thinking this might deter Cook. It didn’t. “The Captain,” wrote Lieutenant John Rickman in horror, “ordered the canoes that were sunk to be weighed up and destroyed.”

It is extraordinary that the islanders didn’t rise in defiance and kill these white-skinned invaders. The Native weapons may have been no match for muskets, but the Mooreans outnumbered Cook’s small party by a thousandfold. They could have made quick work of the Englishmen, but for some reason they remained pacific, even as parts of their island were consumed in flames.

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by | 26 August 2024 · 6:41 am

Capt. Cook & the Earl of Sandwich

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. 33-34:

IN EARLY FEBRUARY of 1776, Cook received an invitation to have dinner at the London home of one of the most powerful men in England: John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty. It must have been clear by the nature and timing of the invitation that something very important was to be discussed. Cook promptly accepted and a date was set.

Lord Sandwich was a shrewd, cynical, and sometimes ruthless politician, adroit in the power games of London. He and his fellow lords presided over an institution that was the largest organization in Britain and indeed in all of Europe. But Sandwich was much more than a Machiavellian bureaucrat; he was an intellectual of sorts, interested in the science of the day, and an advocate for exploration—probably the staunchest advocate, in fact, behind Cook’s second voyage of discovery.

Sandwich was lanky and tall, with such an odd, shambling, lopsided gait that people liked to say he could walk down both sides of the street at the same time. When at the Admiralty, he was known to be a workaholic. He was, one critic said, a man of “limitless ambition to which he has sacrificed everything,” and he kept such fiendish hours that he would often forsake his meals, opting instead to place a piece of beef between slices of toasted bread, which is how he came to be known as the “inventor” of the sandwich. He was a competitive card player and gambler, and the handy snack he had devised is said to have sustained him through many a long night at the gaming table. Lord Sandwich was a man in a hurry, in other words, and so perhaps it’s fitting that he should be known for a food architecture that can be gobbled quickly—for, through his relentless advocacy of exploration and global cross-pollination, he had accelerated many a timeline.

To find relief from the general toil of his job, Lord Sandwich had cultivated a deep affection for the voyages of exploration that the Admiralty periodically supported. He was perhaps the country’s greatest admirer of James Cook, and everything that had emanated from Cook’s two expeditions to date. Sandwich had been a catalyst, a patron, a sponsor. As far as he was concerned, Cook could do no wrong.

Politically, Sandwich was the gray eminence behind the proposed expedition to North America’s “backside.” In advocating for the voyage, he had confronted considerable resistance within government circles. Mounting tensions in the American colonies had caused the Royal Navy to shift its already strained resources. In a time of imminent war, yet another expedition to the far side of the world seemed a luxury England could not afford. Yet the ever crafty Sandwich had managed to circumvent the naysayers to win official approval.

This was the voyage in which Cook “discovered” the Hawaiian Islands and named them after his sponsor.

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by | 25 August 2024 · 4:24 am

Capt. Cook’s Shipboard Hygiene

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. 15-17:

DURING HIS TWO voyages, Cook had shown himself to be a benevolent though strict leader of his own men—sparing with the lash and solicitous of his crew’s happiness, comfort, and health. These should be attributes for any good naval officer, but so many ship captains of the era could be unimaginably brutal in their punishments, tyrannical in their command style, and indifferent to conditions belowdecks. The Royal Navy, it was famously said, was “manned by violence and maintained by cruelty.”

Cook, however, was a different sort of captain. He constantly experimented with schemes for shipboard hygiene and diet. He knew that prolonged dampness and darkness were eternal enemies that worked in concert and must be mercilessly fought. Many diseases killed sailors on long voyages, but most of them, Cook found, could be prevented by maintaining strict cleanliness, especially in the galley.

Germ theory was only a nascent and controversial concept among medical scientists at the time, but Cook intuitively seemed to grasp its essence. Ever at war against grime, he kept his men scrubbing the decks with soap and vinegar, and often ordered smoking fires, set in pots, to be lit deep within the ship. His perpetual campaign against cockroaches, rats, weevils, and other vermin was resourceful, almost scientific, in its approach. “To cleanliness, as well in the ship as amongst the people, enough attention cannot be paid,” Cook insisted. “The least neglect occasions a putrid and disagreeable smell below.”

Then there was the most dreaded maritime disease of all: scurvy, a ghastly disorder that was considered an almost inevitable occupational hazard of long ocean voyages. During the Age of Sail, it was generally assumed that scurvy would kill off half the crew members on any lengthy expedition. The malady’s progression was all too well known: spongy gums, fetid breath, protuberant eyes, scaly skin, a breakdown in the tissues and cells of the body, convulsions, and, eventually, death.

But amazingly, during his two odysseys, it seemed that Cook had beaten scurvy. On his second voyage, the Resolution was at sea for three years, but not a single one of his men died of the disease—or even, it seems, developed advanced symptoms. This was a historic breakthrough. He didn’t understand scurvy’s true cause, its etiology; that it resulted from a deficiency of vitamin C would not be determined until the 1930s, when scientists deduced the compound’s chemical structure.

But Cook, following his own hunches while building on a host of older theories, had put in place an astoundingly efficacious system of prevention. A Scottish surgeon named James Lind had demonstrated as far back as the 1750s that scurvy could be treated by consuming citrus fruit, but it took decades before his ideas were aggressively adopted. Building on Lind’s findings, Cook insisted that whenever possible, his sailors—accustomed to a diet of salted meat and stale biscuits—consume fresh fruits, vegetables, and greens. On the Resolution he kept some strange-sounding supplementary items on the menu as well, such as carrot marmalade, wort of malt, rob of orange, inspissated lemon juice, and a concoction known as saloop, which was steeped from the root of a common meadow plant, Orchis mascula.

…

Cook hadn’t really conquered scurvy, though—the particular lessons he’d learned through hard and patient experimentation would be unlearned and then learned again, dismissed and revived in piecemeal fashion, over the next several decades. But for now, the Admiralty viewed Cook’s apparent mastery over the disease as possibly an even more consequential achievement than proving the Southern Continent’s nonexistence. So many sons of England, so many sons of so many countries, had died of this horrible malady. It has been estimated that nearly two million European sailors perished from scurvy between 1600 and 1800. The notion that a thousand-day voyage could be undertaken without the disease’s appearance represented a radical shifting of the possibilities; it meant that His Majesty’s ships could range wider and longer, extending the reach of the Crown to the world’s most distant nooks and corners, to complete the maps of the globe.

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by | 23 August 2024 · 3:36 pm

Kauaʻi, 1778: Aliens Arrive

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. 3-4:

On the night the ships appeared, some fishermen were out on the ocean, working by torchlight. One of them, a man named Mapua, was bewildered by what he saw: An enormous silhouette approached, rising high above the surf, fire burning at its top. It had holes on its side, Mapua noticed, and a long spear in front like the sharp nose of a swordfish. Then a second creature appeared, much like the first. Mapua had no idea what they were, but he was sure they were something malevolent.

Mapua and his fellow fishermen paddled hurriedly to shore. According to oral accounts assembled by the Hawaiian historian Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau, they were “trembling and frightened by this wonderful apparition.” When they reached the village, Mapua immediately informed the high chief, Kaeo, about this strange and disturbing sight.

By the next morning the two leviathans had drawn closer to shore. What were they? Where had they come from? What did they want? An onlooker, thoroughly astonished by them, is said to have wondered, “What are those branching things?” (Probably the ships’ masts, sprits, and spars.) Another replied, “They are trees moving about on the sea.”

No, the local priest countered, they were the floating heiaus, or temples, of the gods. “This is not an ordinary thing,” the kāhuna insisted. He said the branches must be steps reaching toward heaven.

As the vessels moved still closer, wrote Kamakau, the villagers were captivated by this “marvelous monster,” and “great wonder came to the people.” A large crowd began to assemble on shore, “shouting with fear and confused thought.” Judging by the way the ships had appeared, silent and ghostly, the edges of their sails furling and fluttering, backing and filling, they seemed to some like giant stingrays that had emerged from the sea.

A few canoes were dispatched to investigate, and the brave paddlers crept just close enough to catch glimpses of humanlike creatures walking upon the decks of the ships. Never having seen tricorne hats before, they thought these strangers’ heads must be deformed. They mistook the odd, close-fitting uniforms for an epidermis. “Their skin is loose and folding,” one said. Unacquainted with pockets, the paddlers imagined they were little doors that opened into the men’s bodies. “Into these openings they thrust their hands, and take many valuable things—their bodies are full of treasure!”

As the ships edged closer to shore, the watching crowds on the beach grew larger and larger, the anticipation building to a frenzy. The people were full of fear and dread, but also a kind of rapture. They sensed something ominous was happening, that their island world was about to change forever.

“The harbor resounded with noise,” wrote Kamakau. “And louder grew the shouting.”

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by | 15 August 2024 · 2:20 pm

Spanish Caribbean Havana vs. San Juan

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 185-188:

As large stretches of the Greater Antilles were falling into general decline and had begun to look inward, giving rise to the peculiar creole cultures one associates today with the Hispanophone Caribbean, one city—Havana—was experiencing unparalleled growth and prosperity. In effect, one of the few Spanish Caribbean success stories of the long 17th century was Havana’s conversion into a major maritime outpost, a dynamic, multicultural center where goods and people from distant lands built an emerging mercantile capitalism. With this change, the economic and demographic epicenter of the Spanish Caribbean moved decisively from the old colonial capital of Santo Domingo to western Cuba. Havana’s growth, laggard at best until about 1590, would be unstoppable after that year. Historians have often remarked how, in economic prowess and cultural achievement, western Cuba became more like a continent than an island. By the end of the 18th century, Havana, this capital of “continental Cuba,” was the third most populous city in the Americas and a crucial link connecting the main elements of Spain’s dispersed overseas empire. The demographic and economic growth that fueled its ascent began around the middle of the 16th century and continued in spurts throughout the long 17th century.

Historian Alejandro de la Fuente and his collaborators (2009) have narrated in great detail the story of Havana’s emergence as the most important of Spain’s Caribbean maritime cities, initially rivaled in importance only by Cartagena [Colombia]. Beginning in the second half of the 16th century, Havana emerged as the crossroads of three key trading circuits in the Spanish Atlantic: the transatlantic trade, the intercolonial trade between various ports in the Spanish circum-Caribbean region, and the intracolonial trade connecting various Cuban ports with the island’s principal commercial hub. The first of these trading circuits funneled large amounts of silver from the continental colonies and some American staples such as sugar, tobacco, indigo, and hides toward Europe in exchange for manufactures, foodstuffs, wine, and enslaved Africans. The second circuit, the intercolonial, grew in importance as Spain’s fleet system of transatlantic navigation (the so-called Carrera de Indias) became more developed. It connected the more marginal ports in the Caribbean, usually bypassed by Spanish ships, with the Atlantic routes. The third circuit, to and from the Cuban interior, linked Havana to the outside world as both supplier and market. Because the forces that made up Cuba’s great maritime city were so far-flung and diverse, and because the people who built the city also hailed from diverse corners of the Atlantic world, referring to Havana as one of the few “Atlantic communities” seems justified.

The three mercantile systems that converged in Havana interconnected with each other in the city’s harbor, a large, deep, well-protected port capable of accommodating dozens of vessels at a time. It was one of the two or three best harbors in the Caribbean and, considering its proximity to the Gulf Stream, easily the best located. During the second half of the 16th century, Havana’s window to the sea would be made virtually impregnable by the construction of three forts (one at each side of the bay’s entrance, and one closer to the main docks) as well as an underwater chain at the harbor’s entrance to interrupt traffic whenever necessary. This defensive complex was highly successful and—as the English corsair Francis Drake found in 1586—could be so formidable that it discouraged even the most daring aggressors from attacking the city.

…

As an Atlantic city, Havana gradually became a Spanish Caribbean anomaly in several ways. First, it became a thriving port that drew strength from Spain’s increasing presence as a precious-metal producer in the European system at a time when other port cities in the region were becoming more inward-looking and less cosmopolitan. It also bred a social order more hierarchical than those of smaller cities: Havana’s elite was ethnically more diverse, economically more dynamic, and in its business orientation more akin to other Atlantic hubs like Seville, Cartagena, and Veracruz. As its prosperity grew, Havana’s elite drew more resources from the agriculturally rich hinterland, from which it obtained goods, including sugar, that later were sold via Atlantic networks. Local fortunes grew enough in the 17th century so that some habanero families purchased titles of nobility and imitated in the Caribbean the lavish lifestyles of the Spanish aristocracy. The habanero elite stood at the pinnacle of a society profoundly stratified by class, status, and race—a socioracial hierarchy that in its well defined and protected social spaces was not quite replicated in any other Spanish Caribbean city.

If, in its vitality amid the relative poverty of the 17th-century Spanish Caribbean, Havana occupied one extreme, San Juan stood at the opposite end of the spectrum. A heavily fortified bastion governed by military men, it was the only port in Puerto Rico authorized to engage in direct trade with the metropole. When contacts with the mother country were frequent, as in the final quarter of the 16th century, this arrangement had worked relatively well. After 1625 or so, however, the monopoly trading system collapsed and Puerto Rico was thrust essentially to the margins of Spain’s Atlantic trading circuits. Between 1651 and 1675, reportedly only nine ships left Seville, the Spanish peninsula’s single designated port for colonial trade, for San Juan. As commercial relations with Spain came to a virtual halt, the colonists in Puerto Rico were forced to rely on contraband. These contacts, illegal but commonplace, drew them into a web of trade relations that was centered in the Danish and British islands to the east and south. Thus, contrary to Havana, the Atlantic port city par excellence, San Juan had become a regional port city where life centered on the contraband relations that thrived at the imperial margins and in proximity to foreign colonies.

Still, this poor, underpopulated city on the eastern edges of the Spanish empire, surrounded by impressive walls and guarded by a massive fort (San Felipe del Morro) at the entrance to the bay, was racially stratified and hierarchical in ways reminiscent of Havana, although it was less residentially and socially segregated. Whites (whether rich or poor), free people of African descent, and enslaved persons cohabited in many of the barrios into which the city’s small footprint was divided. San Juan’s landholding and commercial elites were clearly poorer than those of Havana or even Santo Domingo, although many foreign observers remarked on their aristocratic aspirations and claims to racial purity.

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by | 13 August 2024 · 6:06 am

The Sugar Revolution in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 139-142:

Initially, the character of British settlement in Barbados resembled the first successful British colonial experiments on the North American mainland. As in Virginia, the first group of Barbadian colonists had been sent out by a charter company that intended to “plant” them there in the sense discussed above. Little is known about the first years in Barbados, but it seems as if the colony almost failed. As in Virginia, the British policy was to give out land grants to settlers and to employ the labor of indentured servants (Barbados had no indigenous population). The first commercial crops in Barbados were tobacco and, to a lesser extent, cotton—largely because the Barbadians tried to emulate the tobacco-driven success story Virginia had experienced in the 1620s. But tobacco cultivation in Barbados turned out to be a failure. Although the European tobacco market remained good until the late 1630s, the Barbadian product was considered vastly inferior to that of Virginia.

Nevertheless, in the 1630s the population of Barbados grew rapidly. As in Virginia, a majority of its inhabitants arrived as servants hoping to acquire land after the expiration of their term. Quite a large number of them, however, came involuntarily: they had been rounded up in British cities as vagrants, criminals, or seditious agitators and sentenced to “transportation.” This practice of deporting surplus populations from the metropole became so common that the phrase “to Barbados someone” (meaning to spirit away innocent people to servitude in the Caribbean) entered the lexicon of everyday English speech at the time. Many of the Irish defeated by Cromwell, followers of dissident sects, and royalists sentenced by Parliament during the English Civil War likewise found themselves aboard ships bound for the West Indies.

Temporary servitude was not uncommon in England at the time. As in the North American mainland colonies, most settlers to Barbados were attracted by the promise of eventually acquiring freehold status, but the margin of opportunity gradually shrunk as wealthier planters increased their holdings through purchase. Land available to ex-servants or free newcomers to Barbados virtually ran out at the end of the 1630s, and, unlike in Virginia, there was nowhere else to go. Also unlike the situation in England, where servants and apprentices enjoyed a certain amount of legal protection, was that Barbadian masters exercised almost unrestrained control over their servants and often abused them in ways entirely unprecedented in the mother land. As early as 1634, white servants rebelled on Barbados: and, as in the case of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1675), there are good indications that these servants, particularly the Irish, repeatedly tried to join forces with similarly maltreated Africans.

…

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1630s, Barbados still had not developed into a genuine plantation society. Although demographic data for this period are notoriously unreliable, toward the end of the 1630s the island had a population of almost 6,000; of these, some 760 held land—a proportion comparable to that in the European countryside, which is especially noteworthy because Barbadian landholdings still greatly varied in size. Some of the larger planters held tracts of several thousand acres, but the majority of freeholders farmed small parcels between 10 and 50 acres each. This situation changed drastically in the 1640s. Within less than a decade, most members of the white yeomanry on Barbados were squeezed off their land: servants were replaced by African slaves, and the social organization of the island irreversibly switched from that of a society with slaves to that of a society organized around the legal institution of slavery.

…

The reason for this dramatic transformation was sugar. Understanding the Barbadian “sugar revolution” requires stepping back to look at the development of sugar planting in the Americas after the decline of the early Spanish experiments. Both figuratively and literally, sugar arrived in Barbados from Brazil and aboard Dutch ships. It took hold there not because of British metropolitan intentions, but in spite of them.

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by | 12 August 2024 · 6:22 am

Redefining “Plantation” in 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 131-133:

At least in the British case, the very word “plantation” offers a clue to the continuities between Old and New World histories of violent expansion, for it entered the English language during the Tudor period, in the context of the English conquest of Ireland. When the English broke up the previous social and political structures of the Celtic Irish, installed themselves as lords of the land, and pressed their new subjects into agricultural service, they called the result “planting.” To the 16th-century English, planting meant improving the land—in the sense not just of planting crops, but of implanting a social order they thought superior to what had been there before. The phrase speaks to migration and agriculture, but also to political domination. This is the sense in which Francis Bacon used it in his “Essay on Plantations” in 1625. Some 30 years later, Thomas Hobbes was even more precise in referring to a plantation as “numbers of men sent out from the commonwealth, under a conductor, or governor, to inhabit a foreign country, either formerly void of inhabitants, or made void then by war.”

The plantation was thus not simply a type of agricultural enterprise, but a political institution deployed in organizing colonial social space. It also welded a model of political domination to one of economic enterprise. As sociologist Edgar Thompson (1935) argued, at least since Tudor times, planting had come to signify “a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital; and it looked to a profitable return from capital.” Planting meant colonizing, but in a rather specific sense: it involved capital investment and the anticipation of profit. A plantation colony is one established not for military purposes, or as a place where individuals from overpopulated areas migrate to gain access to land (although it may come to serve such purposes as well). It is a planned enterprise geared toward generating return on capital by transplanting people who are expected to produce commercially valuable crops in a colonized territory.

This is what the British charter companies so important in the colonization of North America were about: their goal was to transplant people for profit. It just so happened that the settlers in Virginia found the right kind of crop (tobacco), whereas those in New England did not—which is part of the reason why the term “Plymouth plantation” sounds quaint to us. The Puritans certainly “planted,” and quite violently so; but the result was something rather different from a plantation colony as generally understood today. The intriguing historical semantics of the English term “plantation” notwithstanding, the forms of violent, agriculturally based settler colonialism it implied did not set the precedent for the institution that would leave its indelible imprint on the history of the Caribbean: the agro-industrial complex of the slave labor–based sugar plantation and its tri-continental economic articulation that linked New World colonial production sites with markets for commodified human labor from Africa and networks of capital, credit, distribution, and consumption in Europe. The origins of the institution arguably lie in the very first phase of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean.

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by | 1 August 2024 · 10:15 am

Cambodian Liberation Day, 1979

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 605-607:

The sun has set over the horizon, leaving behind scattered patches of light in the gaps between the trees, and a red light in the western sky. As we walk along, dragging our feet, carrying our bundles of rattan on our shoulders, trudging sluggishly along the sandy path, we are still about a kilometer away from Moung Thmey. Suddenly a cloud of dust rises before us and moves closer, growing larger and blocking out the rays of light from the sun. It is a group of several oxcarts galloping and racing one another, as though celebrating some joyous occasion.

The riders cry out, “Hooray! We are free! Hooray! We are free! Hooray! Hooray!”

When the oxcarts draw near to us, some motherly women shout out, “Boys! The Front [see note below] has liberated us! Drop your rattan, boys, and go back to your home villages! We are free!”

This is an odd message that we have never heard before, that we have never even imagined. These several oxcarts appear to be returning from the rice-harvesting worksite. They drive past us with sounds of laughter, while we are left puzzled, wondering if there is really anything to be happy about. We return to camp, eat our food, and go to bed quietly. Nobody seems to know anything about freedom as the villagers seemed to.

…

10 January 1979

Today we have to remain in camp and work, twisting ropes and weaving bangky baskets. Starting at dawn, on Route 68, a strange thing happens that we have never seen since arriving here: a sporadic stream of vehicles is driving north, sometimes one, sometimes two or three, at fairly slow speeds. As we weave baskets, we glance at the vehicles driving along the road. I see a bus painted red from the windows down and white from the windows up, which I used to ride from Phsar Daeum Thkov to Phsar Thmey [Phnom Penh’s domed, art deco “New Market” built in 1937]. Men and women dressed in black sit quietly on the bus with serious, somber faces. Where are they going? Perhaps they are going to attend a meeting in Samraong.

…

11 January 1979

We rise in the dark and eat our porridge, as usual. After eating, the economy team informs us that the situation is tense, and the unit leaders and brigade chairman have all fled the camp. We all divide up the remaining uncooked rice, salt, and prahok [fermented fish paste] to go our own separate ways.

The sun rises over the trees, and we have finished dividing up the food supplies, and now we pack up our clothing bundles to leave camp. We walk to Moung Thmey, then suddenly we hear the sounds of gunfire. The villagers conclude that there must be fighting at Spean Moung. I am not familiar with the place, but by the sound of the gunfire, it is maybe only two or three hundred meters from the village.

The sound of gunfire increases in frequency and volume. The villagers run in panic to find hiding places. We start to scatter. Some of us are trying to find a way back to Region Five because their parents and siblings are there. Some seek refuge with the villagers to await an opportunity to continue their journey to Region Five. I have no doubts: we will not be returning to Region Five; my brother and I are going to get away. Four or five young men from the mobile brigade travel with us. We escape into the forest area, toward the villages in the forest, where surely there is no fighting going on.

Farewell, Moung Thmey, Srey Snom! Farewell, collecting camp!

Farewell, criminal prison! Farewell! Farewell!

[Note, p. 729:]

The Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (a.k.a. Salvation Front), a politico-military organization formed of Khmer Rouge defectors that united with the Vietnamese army to overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime. The Vietnamese army, along with the Salvation Front, invaded Cambodia on 25 December 1978, reaching Phnom Penh and driving out senior Khmer Rouge leaders on 7 January 1979 (a day now celebrated as a day of national liberation.) These forces continued to advance through the rest of the country in the following days, gradually taking over the country and driving the Khmer Rouge out of populated areas and into the jungles along the Thai frontier. The Salvation Front’s members would form the core of the post-Khmer-Rouge government in Phnom Penh, and the Vietnamese army would continue to occupy Cambodia for another decade.

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by | 30 July 2024 · 9:15 am

Mind Control Under Khmer Rouge

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 507-508:

Living among the general population is quite different from living in the society of young people. The youth are not very heavily influenced by the corruption of the old society. They are purer and more in harmony with one another. In general-population society, everything that used to happen in the old society still happens, and it is vicious. The youth engage in the Revolution for the sake of the Revolution, while the general population engage in the Revolution to get away with things. Oppression, extortion, and exploitation, the soul of a corrupt regime, occur in the general population from the top down to the bottom. The cadres don’t just exercise their influence over us to fulfill our revolutionary work; they dominate us even in the petty things of this rice-by-the-can life, and we live without freedom. Although, as for those who have little fear of death; who are willing to react, willing to object and resist; who are stubborn and defiant of procedure: they don’t dare to oppress or compel them as much.

Comrade Mol is a young-man-in-hiding, like me. He is older and more knowledgeable than me. He is a man of few words, and always accepts every task the group leader gives him without question, complaint, or objection. We are on Comrade Dy’s team together. Comrade Mol once tells me, “Anybody who doesn’t steal from me can live with me.”

We have similar sentiments, but I have a different philosophy from Comrade Mol’s: I can live with any type of person, but it is rare to find a person who can live with me.

Because we talk little and carry out our tasks diligently, Comrade Mol and I are instructed by the team leader to mind the oxen nearly every day, whether it is our turn or not. The others spend only an hour or two fishing and foraging for frogs, crabs, and edible plants, and then return to camp to take a nap. We cowherds, on the other hand, can only sit or walk around collecting and counting the oxen, protecting them from getting lost, and preventing them from mixing with other herds or eating cooperative crops—without ever daring to take a rest or lie down for a nap or even close our eyes a moment, from noon until near sunset, when we have to collect the oxen and herd them back into camp.

While it’s true that I am a man of few words like Comrade Mol, unlike him I am a person who tends to react. I try to control myself and suppress my emotions to avoid pain, turmoil, and a preoccupation with the worthlessness of living.

Oh, my eyes! Don’t see anything that is crudeness or exploitation or oppression!

Oh, my ears! Don’t hear anything that is disdain, contempt, or reproach.

Oh, my heart! Remain neutral and don’t give in to feelings of hatred, love, sorrow, or joy. If you can’t restrain yourself, if you can’t take it, if your chest is too tight, then go head and explode; explode now, while out herding the oxen, while far away from everyone else. Explode in the fields, under the sky. No matter how upset you feel, however agitated by hatred toward this person, or in love with that person, you are completely free to unfurl it and release it from your head and your chest. All of nature will never condemn you, nor hold these things against you, nor use them to stir up trouble with anybody else.

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