Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century
Yüklə 463,42 Kb.
|
- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- THE CAROLINES
- Sea Cucumbers for Stone Money
- William Furness (1910): The Island of Stone Money Lawrence Klingman Gerald Green (1952)
- THE CANAL ZONE
- A Siberia in the Caribbean
- Georg Brochmann (1948): Panamakanalen Noel Maurer Carlos Yu (2011)
- HEJAZ
- Stamps with a Bitter Strawberry Taste
Solomon Plaatje (1990): The Mafeking Diary Hope Hay Hewison (1989): Hedge of Wild Almonds: South Africa, the Pro-Boers & The Quaker Conscience, 1890-1910. Free feeding and old age pensions, strike pay, cheap beer and indiscriminate charity do not make for the hardening of the nation or the building up of self-reliant, energetic manhood ROBERT BADEN-POWELL
Sea Cucumbers for Stone Money On the island of Yap just north of New Guinea in the western Pacific Ocean, people had been using a very special monetary system for more than a thousand years. The monetary unit itself was a so-called fei wheel, a kind of flattened doughnut made of grey-white limestone, which varied in size from seven or eight centimetres to several metres in diameter. Their value was primarily reflected in their size, with the smaller stones corresponding to a small pig and the largest as much as a whole village. But it wasn’t always all that simple. If there was a good story attached to the stone, preferably one involving misfortune and death, the value increased dramatically regardless of the size. And this applied to many of the stones. The big challenge was that the raw material could only be found on the island of Palau, more than 400 km across the open sea to the southwest, and this distance had to be covered in sometimes fragile outrigger canoes and rafts. Things often went wrong. But if the transport met with an accident and the stone sank to the bottom in the breakers off the coral reef, it wasn’t the end of the world. The sunken stones would also, in fact, be accepted as valid tender.122 Everybody on the island knew roughly where they were and this knowledge was passed down from one generation to the next. The stone wheels that eventually did arrive safely were placed around the terrain, apparently at random. And all subsequent trade took place by verbal agreement, without the stones being moved again. Yap was part of the archipelago called the Carolines, which consisted of around five hundred islands scattered in a slightly ragged half-moon shape across an area of ocean twice as large as the North Sea. The combined land mass was slightly larger than the Faroe Islands, and consisted principally of low coral islands, along with a few scattered volcanic islands, such as Palau and Yap in the west and Ponape in the east. The Spanish had already colonized the Carolines by 1686, calling them the New Philippines, but hadn’t made much use of them. The local population was aggressive, and the missionaries who tried their luck there were either killed or thrown into the sea. Yap was deemed the most impossible island. It actually consists of four islands separated by narrow channels, all of it surrounded by a green lake ringed in turn by a broad reef. The largest island, Rul, is fish-shaped, 16 km long and 5 km across at its widest point. To the north lie the Burra Hills, whose red clay slopes rise to a height of 200 m and are overgrown with dense brush. The southern part is a fertile plain, which rises steadily up to the foot of the hills. Rul together with the next-largest island, Tomil, provides a sheltered harbour, and this is where most of the eight thousand inhabitants of the island live. They live off fishing and gardening, and have divided themselves into villages, observing an internal ranking system that is strict yet constantly shifting as a result of small wars, marriages and changes in holdings of the fei wheels. It is a patriarchal society, in which many of the men have their own harem. And the island’s shamans are at the top of the heap.123 In 1872, the island is ruled by Shaman Fatumak. One day while he’s out looking for a few extra-fat lizards for the regular sacrificial ceremony, he meets the American captain, David Sean O’Keefe, who has just washed ashore after being shipwrecked. He is of Irish stock, tall and muscular with wiry red hair and a full beard. Fatumak takes him under his wing. It isn’t long before the enterprising Irishman realizes that the use of fei wheels offers some commercial opportunities. He gets himself first one, then several more schooners, which he uses to transport the locals and their wheels to and from Palau. The transport is both quicker and safer than before, and the wheels can also be made larger: up to 4 m in diameter, with weights of up to five tonnes. Overwhelmed, the locals make him their king.124 O’Keefe makes sure he is paid in copra – dried coconut flesh – and sea cucumbers, delicacies that he dispatches to Hong Kong and sells to Chinese merchants who can pay well. Within a few years, he’s rolling in money. He sets up a harem for himself and builds a white house in European half-timber style, with a colonnade leading down to the harbour and a roof of gleaming corrugated iron. The shining building is visible from all the islands and looks like jewel, like a message: this is the very centre of the universe. On one of his trips to Hong Kong, O’Keefe meets a younger fellow-countryman, Johnny O’Brien. When it turns out that both of them were born in Cork on the south coast of Ireland, O’Keefe makes him an offer.
It is spring 1901. The German colonists have already introduced German stamps, with the usual symbol of the eagle, overprinted with Karolinen. Letters and packages are picked up by smaller steamers on their way from New Guinea to Hong Kong, where the mail sacks are transferred to ships bound for Europe. My stamp is postmarked 29 March and was almost certainly stuck on a letter describing the menacing situation, sent either from the island’s administration or by one of the marines stationed there. Some days later, O’Keefe is released but he feels unsafe and decides to flee the island. He takes a couple of his sons with him and sets out in one of his schooners in early May. But a severe typhoon catches him by surprise, and he is shipwrecked and drowns.
All that remains of O’Keefe’s villa, it seems, is the foundation wall. Many of the island’s inhabitants still firmly believe that he did not die in the hurricane in 1901 but travelled onwards to a distant island elsewhere in the Pacific. There, he established a new dynasty, which flourishes to this day.126 William Furness (1910): The Island of Stone Money Lawrence Klingman & Gerald Green (1952): His Majesty O’Keefe His Majesty O’Keefe (1954): Script by Lawrence Klingman and Gerald Green, Director, Byron Haskin
a half interest in all that I own, including my harem, and if I should pass on, I will have arrangements made for you to take my place as King of Yap DAVID SEAN O’KEEFE
A Siberia in the Caribbean As early as the 1500s, the Spanish were already fantasizing about a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This wouldn’t just provide the ultimate short cut to expansion and trading links further west, but would also make the perilous journey around Cape Horn unnecessary. The project was first launched by the French in 1880, but collapsed nine years later. By then more than 20,000 workers had lost their lives, most of them victims of yellow fever and malaria. Every single engineer had fled back to France. It’s difficult to see how things could have gone otherwise. With its waterlogged rainforests and endless swamps, the place was a veritable paradise for malaria mosquitoes. When, in addition, they were offered unlimited access to thinly clad, sweaty male bodies, they took it as an invitation to out-and-out gluttony. The victims didn’t even know what had hit them. The mosquitoes’ ability to spread deadly illnesses was still quite unknown. Just after the turn of the century, the Americans decided to try their luck. In the meantime the Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, had discovered the mosquitoes’ talent. This made it possible to take countermeasures, such as draping mosquito nets over hammocks, and putting oil in the water in the hatching areas. At that time, Panama was a province of Colombia, and the Colombian government refused to grant the USA the rights it wanted. The USA then changed tactics, offering its active support to groups that had long been working for Panamanian independence. At the same time, the American navy was sent south. Only a few days after the uprising broke out, the Colombian government army was forced to beat a retreat. In 1903, the newly formed state of Panama signed an agreement giving the USA a long-term lease on the Canal Zone, with a 20 km-wide corridor from coast to coast. When Colombia started sabre-rattling again, President Roosevelt was careful to pacify it with cash, in one of the first cases of the dollar diplomacy that the USA has used with great success so many times since. It therefore became clear that the USA would both build and administer the canal. The works were launched in 1904, and were completed ten years later. The canal is 80 km long, with a height difference of 26m, which is dealt with via three locks at either end on the way into Gatun Lake, through which most of the shipping passes. Gatun Lake was the largest manmade lake of its day, and when the water level was established in 1913, it was enough to flood an area around the size of Sheffield. The old twists and turns of the Chagres River remained upon the bed of the canal. The river had previously been the quickest route over the Panama Isthmus and became especially popular after gold fever took hold in California in the mid-1800s. Along its banks, there had been a row of villages built of bamboo and planks, with roofs of banana leaves or corrugated iron, ‘where bongo-loads of California travellers used to stop for refreshments on their way up the river, and eggs were sold four for a dollar and the rent for a hammock was $2 a night’.127 In those days, the rainforest pressed in densely on all sides, and it still does. The flooded mahogany trees simply do not rot. The Canal Zone issued its own stamps as early as 1904. Mine is from 1931 and shows the passage through the Gaillard Cut,128 named after Major David Du Bose Gaillard, who led the works in this area. The Gaillard Cut, the very bottleneck of the excavation work, ultimately formed an artificial valley more than 14 km long, which crossed the watershed between east and west. The project had been started by the French. The Americans put six thousand men to work. Between the two large daily dynamite blasts, one trainload of excavated material left every minute. But constant mudslides almost forced them to give up. Gaillard described the soil as: ‘a tropical glacier – of mud instead of ice’.129 It was too soft to be moved with diggers and had to be flushed away laboriously instead. The work was tough and demanding, with constant accidents. Still, the mortality figures were lower than for the French. By the time the canal was ready in 1914, 5,609 people had died in all, most of them West Indian workers. Cristobal on the Atlantic side was the main port of the Canal Zone, while the administrative functions were assigned to Balboa on the Pacific side. By 1940, the population had climbed to 51,000 and was ethnically diverse. All had attended an induction course that gave them guidance on acceptable behaviour in the colony. If they still proved unable to hold themselves in check, Panama had its own police, justice system and judges to hand to deal with them. Maintenance and stevedoring work were carried out by hired hands from other countries in the West Indies. Americans filled the posts higher up in the system. Posts such as governor went straight to retired senior officers in the American Engineer Corps, without any democratic fuss and nonsense. The governor also automatically became the president of the state-owned Panama Canal Company. And the company ran everything, including the shops, where food could be bought at cost price. There was a prohibition on taking lodgings in private homes. Bachelors were placed in motel-like complexes, with shared domestic help, while families were assigned to standard-issue four-family buildings painted grey with corrugated iron roofs. The size of the apartment varied according to income: one extra dollar per month gave you an extra square foot of living space.130 All in all, the Canal Zone bore a remarkable resemblance to the many industrial cities Soviet Russia was building in Siberia around this time. This was how it was planned, and probably executed too, in the early years. But it had all probably become slightly more laid back by the time I sailed through as a first-time sailor on the slightly aging cargo ship MS Theben in 1973. This was before the days of containers. The cargo was packed on open pallets with nets lashed around them, and there were piles of bright blue plastic owls between the bulkheads from a pallet that had tipped over during bad weather a few days earlier. We were heading for Venezuela and entered the canal from the Pacific side. The passage through the canal would take ten hours. As a greaser, I spend my days down in the machine room, doing maintenance work on the pistons and washing the cast-iron floor. It had been boiling hot for several days. We did all our work in shorts. I was knocking back salt tablets to keep myself going and my belly was already bloated from all the iced water I’d been drinking. My downy cheeks were brown and lumpy with eczema from the oil and I’d tied a dirty bandanna around my head. [1931: Motif from the stretch through the Gaillard Cut] First-timers in the machine room are allowed to come up on deck when the boat enters the Miraflores Locks. It’s towed in by small locomotives, and the rainforest closes in tightly along the banks. The second engineer from Østfold tells us about an island in there so full of snakes that when an ox was lowered down from a helicopter, it was stripped clean to the bone before it even hit the ground. ‘Ah, damn it, lads. Back to work. There’ll be time enough to rest in the grave.’ The same year, Panama and the USA agreed on a transition to shared administration of the canal. The division of Panama had long been a source of diplomatic conflict. This escalated into disturbances in 1964, in which twenty-one Panamanian civilians and four American soldiers lost their lives. Even so, Panama was not granted full control of the region until 1999, and there is still a significant American presence there. The hot topic of the day is future competition with the Northwest Passage, which is highly likely to become free of ice in a few years. The route will not only be free but also much quicker. Georg Brochmann (1948): Panamakanalen Noel Maurer & Carlos Yu (2011): The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal A tropical glacier—of mud instead of ice DAVID DU BOSE GAILLARD, ABOUT THE SOIL 1915
TO 1925
CAPE JUBY EASTERN KARELIA ALLENSTEIN DANZIG
CARNARO AND FIUME TRIPOLITANIA SOUTH RUSSIA BATUM
HEJAZ FAR EASTERN REPUBLIC
Stamps with a Bitter Strawberry Taste It is summer 1916 in Cairo. The First World War has already been raging in Europe for two years. Egypt has also been touched by these events. The year before, Ottoman forces on the German side made an attempt to capture Suez, but gave up after an effective British pushback. The two officers, Thomas Edward Lawrence and Ronald Storrs, are on their way up the steps of the red building that houses Egypt’s history museum. They’re looking for motifs for the stamps of the brand-new Kingdom of Hejaz. Just a couple of months earlier, it declared its liberation from Ottoman rule, and took Sayyid Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, as its king. But, as so often elsewhere, the British have been pulling the strings. The people of Hejaz aren’t even allowed to choose their own stamps. Still, the British do accept the ground rule that no portraits must be used: Islam forbids the depiction of people. Hejaz lay on the western side of the Arabian Peninsula, and stretched from the Gulf of Aqaba in the north, along the shores of the Red Sea all the way to Yemen. On the seaward side of the kingdom, the coastal plain of Tihama quickly rose up into ridges and plateaux, then into a chain of mountains more than 2,000 m high that served as a barrier against the Arabian Desert to the east. Through the hills wound a caravan trail linking the spice growers in Yemen to Syria and the Mediterranean. It was also used by pilgrims on their way to Mecca and Medina, two of the most important holy sites in the Muslim world. Including the harbour town of Jedda, Hejaz was a populous country of more than 850,000 inhabitants. The area is hot, sometimes baking hot in the summer half of the year. The townhouses, built of carved coral stone from the Red Sea, are four to five storeys high in order to cast as much shade as possible onto the narrow streets. They are generally placed at a slight distance to one another to allow a little air to circulate freely around the outer walls. And the exteriors are covered in rows of wooden balconies, to reduce direct sunlight. Even the streets are twisted into angles designed to capture the most possible shade. Its winding, even streets were floored with damp sand solidified by time and as silent to the tread as any carpet. The lattices and wall-returns deadened all reverberation of voice. There were no carts, no shod animals, no bustle anywhere. Everything was hushed, strained, even furtive. The doors of houses shut softly as we passed. There were no loud dogs, no crying children.131 The Ottoman Empire had been present in the area since the early 1500s. But the Ottomans only took direct control in 1845, and retained power until the First World War. Towards the end of the period, a railway was built between Damascus and Medina. It was called the Hejaz Railway and was used to transport troops and strengthen positions in the south. The occasional well-heeled pilgrim could hitch a ride too. The Arabs in the Ottoman areas were on the German side when world war broke out. The British dealt with this by starting secret talks with selected Arab leaders, including Sayyid Hussein bin Ali. This is where the so-called Arab Revolt was planned. The aim was to drive the Ottomans out of the Arabian Peninsula. For their part, the British also wanted to tie up the Ottoman army to prevent it from increasing its presence on the European battlefields. The strategy was guerrilla attacks, particularly on the Hejaz Railway. Britain’s leading representative in these secret talks was Thomas Edward Lawrence, who would later be involved in the stamp production too. He was both an officer and an archaeologist, spoke fluent Arabic and, also had great sympathy for the Arabs and Arabic culture in general. He was somewhat androgynous in appearance, with thinning hair, a large, hooked nose and dove-like eyes – quite unlike Peter O’Toole, who later played him in the film Lawrence of Arabia. On the other hand, his upper lip was not quite as stiff as that of many other British emissaries. He was good at collaborating. During the early years, Lawrence played an active role in the guerrilla warfare, and made such an impact that the Turks put a price on his head. By then, though, the king of Hejaz had already given him the status of a son and nobody dared touch him.
Lawrence also oversees the final printing work. The story goes, although this is not fully documented, that he mixed strawberry flavouring into the gum. One slightly unexpected effect of this is that many people buy the stamps just to lick them, especially the cheapest ones with a face value of half a piastre. I’ve checked my own stamp, but the aroma probably vanished after the first lick; still, the motif is the one Lawrence found at the railway station in Cairo. The text enclosed in the circle reads makkah al mukarrama: Venerable Mecca.132
Yüklə 463,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|