Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Stamps from the Bakery
- Beef and cassava flour empanadas (10 empanadas)
- Preparation of the dough
- Joseph Criscenti (1993)
- Binge-drinking in a Seedy South Sea Paradise
- Stephen R. Evans, Abdul Rahman Zainal Rod Wong Khet Ngee (1996): The History of Labuan Island Emilio Salgari (2007)
- Scandinavianism and Martial Music
Alexander Monro (1855): New Brunswick: With a Brief Outline of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Their History, Civil Division, Geography and Productions M. H. Perley (1857): A Hand-Book of Information for Emigrants to New-Brunswick Wilson D. Wallis and Ruth Sawtell Wallis (1955): The Micmac Indians of Eastern Canada The naked cliffs or shelving shores, of granite or other hardened rocks, and the unvarying pine forests, awaken in his mind ideas of hopeless desolation, and poverty and barrenness appear necessarily to dwell within the iron-bound shores. M.H.PERLEY
Stamps from the Bakery The Norwegian author and journalist Øvre Richter Frich travelled through the Province of Corrientes in Argentina at the beginning of the 1900s, and later used it as a setting for several of his thrillers. In The Condor, he describes the rippling, flowery carpet of grass on the pampas, overshadowed here and there by thistles. They grew like small trees, and could be several metres high, advancing across the lush, uncultivated land like armoured warriors that nothing can harm…and the viscacha, the prairie dog, burrows its pitfalls beneath the earth. And the apes, the vampire bats and the small tropical crocodiles that prefer not to grapple with anything but the very smallest Indian children roam the vast swamps of Corrientes.18 A suitable backdrop for a thriller, then, but also the atmosphere that fellow-Norwegian Georg Wedel-Jarlsberg experiences after being robbed on his travels through the region ten years later. When he goes to report the situation at the town hall, he is discreetly taken aside by the governor who admits, forehead beading with sweat: ‘The inhabitants of Corrientes are the worst in the republic. Most of them belong to the Roman race: they are cowardly but treacherous and vengeful.’19 Local rebellions and wars of emancipation in the early 1800s left Argentina close to independence after three hundred years as a Spanish colony. The period that followed was anything but harmonious, though, with major internal clashes and civil war. The provinces of the interior and those along the coast had come into particularly severe conflict over the exploitation of the rivers and the distribution of the lush, bright-green pastures of the pampas. These clashes continued even after the Argentine constitution was signed in 1854, ultimately resulting in a loose conglomeration of relatively autonomous provincial states. One of these was Corrientes, inland and in the far northeast. Here the landscape formed gently sloping terraces suitable for the cultivation of tobacco and cotton, but not so suitable for cattle farming owing to the high temperatures and copious rain. Corrientes was named for the largest city in the area, founded as far back as 1588 on a ridge on the eastern bank of the Paraná River. The name was short for San Juan de Vera de las Siete Corrientes (San Juan de Vera of the Seven Currents), so called for the severe currents around the seven small peninsulas that projected there. At one time, the city thrived on the traffic created by Jesuits travelling to and from the mission fields towards the Andes in the West and the sources of the Amazon River in the north. Over the course of the 1800s, it grew to a respectable size, with a couple of churches and several blocks of pastel-painted brick houses, which were rarely more than one storey high – all in the familiar Spanish colonial style. The sole remarkable feature must have been the abundance of trees, mainly jacarandas and orange trees: a matchless experience when they came into bloom. As early as 1856, Corrientes issued its own postage stamps – the first Argentine province to do so. A fresh feud had blown up with the coastal province of Buenos Aires over trading rights on the rivers, and Corrientes wanted to demonstrate its integrity by having its own postal system. At the same time, there was a shortage of paper money and coins with values of under eight centavos. So the decision was taken to issue stamps that could be used for two purposes: both as postage and as a means of payment. The task was assigned to Pablo Emilio Coni, who had taken over as the director of the provincial printing press a couple of years earlier, but he had no experience producing printing plates. And that is when the bright baker’s assistant, Matías Pipet, comes forward and announces that he served as apprentice to an engraver in Italy.20 A glance at the later results suggests it is just as likely that he was simply sick and tired of baking empanadas from cassava flour. It isn’t entirely clear what prompted the decision to copy the first French stamp from 1849, bearing the profile of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility. But there is reason to believe that the provincial government wanted to underscore its kinship with the enlightened French Republic. At any rate, the resemblance was a very rough one: the clusters of grapes in her hair are largely simplified away, the goddess’s nose runs in a straight line from her forehead, and her gaze gives the impression of an acute headache rather than divinity. It is true that the quality improves somewhat from one engraving to the next on the hardwood printing plate, which is divided into eight. Even so, Pablo Emilio Coni is reluctant to approve the work, but has no choice owing to pressure of time. There is also a severe paper shortage in Corrientes, and the stamps are printed on small sheets in pale variants of blue, grey-blue and greenish-blue – cut out of packaging paper. This paper, made from sugar cane, is originally used for shipments of imported goods. On the first issues, the value is printed in a field at the bottom of the stamp, but this will be scraped off the printing plates later, in 1860. The task is done roughly, using a sheath knife. At the same time, it is decided that the colour will now indicate the value, and the choice of colour is expanded to include pink and pale yellow. My stamp is one of these types, and its pink colour probably represents a value of three centavos. Stamp production continues until 1878, when the Argentine postal system is nationalized. Both before and after this time, many counterfeits are produced, all of which share the common trait that they are almost always of higher quality than the original. So it is definitely not beyond the bounds of possibility that my stamp is genuine. Over the course of the 20th century, the province of Corrientes became an increasingly important agricultural region. Nonetheless, it was considered one of the poorest areas in Argentina, in which two per cent of the population owned fifty per cent of the land area. This was because several large land-owning families had always fought to block even the most modest land reforms. The most powerful of these was the Romero Feris family, which had controlled most of the tobacco industry since the end of the 1800s, and had managed the province pretty much like a private business.21 [1860: Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility, copied from France’s first postage stamp, from 1849.] After a series of disputed election results in 1991, both the local population and more central politicians in Argentina have had enough. The then governor, ‘Tato’ Romero Feris, is removed, accused of embezzling public funds and sent to prison. Beef and cassava flour empanadas (10 empanadas) Dough: 500g cassava root 180g corn flour Salt Filling: 50g green pepper 100g onion 1 clove of garlic 25g butter 250g mince 1 hard-boiled egg ½ teaspoon of cumin Salt and pepper Preparation of the dough: Peel the cassava root, cook it in salted water and mash it into a puree. Knead in the corn flour and a little salt until you have a firm dough. Preparation of the filling: lightly fry the green pepper, onion and garlic in butter. Add the mince. Season with salt, pepper and cumin. Chop the hard-boiled egg. Empanadas: mould the dough into circles with a diameter of around 13cm. Add the filling and top it off with the chopped egg. Fold into a half-moon and seal, then fry in oil until golden brown. Joseph Criscenti (1993): Sarmiento and his Argentina Øvre Richter Frich (1912) Kondoren. En Landfligtigs roman Georg Wedel-Jarlsberg (1913) Da jeg var cowboy The inhabitants of Corrientes are the worst in the republic. Most of them belong to the Roman race: they are cowardly but treacherous and vengeful. GEORG WEDEL-JARLSBERG
Binge-drinking in a Seedy South Sea Paradise Some kilometres off the northwest coast of Borneo lies the island of Labuan. Apart from Bukit Kubong, a hill that creeps up to a modest height of 148m in the north, Labuan is quite flat. When the British were sniffing out the possibility of taking possession of this almost uninhabited island, it was overgrown with rainforest and practically impenetrable – unless one could find some system in the labyrinth of swamps. But it had good harbour conditions and its location by the shores of the South China Sea offered a good base from which to challenge the many pirates who were causing havoc in the area. And once coal deposits were found on the surface near Bukit Kubong, the British ceased to doubt. Just before Christmas 1846, Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin II of Brunei signed the treaty granting the British dominion over Labuan and the adjoining small islands. Although the otherwise mighty sultan did not consider Labuan an especially great loss, we may assume he came under a certain amount of pressure. It is later claimed that British men-of-war threatened to bombard the sultan’s palace if he refused to sign. The correct version is probably that this was an advance payment on ‘protection money’ – the same as in your average Mafia story. An administrative town was rapidly established on the east coast. It was given the fairly unimaginative name of Victoria, already in use in countless other places in the British Empire. From here, you could just about see the waves breaking on the coast of Brunei and make out the mountaintops even further inland, rising to heights of 4,000m. Settlers were invited and came – some admittedly less willingly than others, such as convicts from Hong Kong and Singapore. Soon there were more than nine thousand inhabitants on the island. It rapidly transpired that Labuan had some weak points. Many of the buildings in Victoria had to be relocated after the monsoon had repeatedly sent tidal waves through the residential districts. The climate was unexpectedly humid and unalleviated by drier periods. And it was, above all, hot. During the summer months, the temperature held steady at over thirty degrees. The whole thing was tailor-made for malaria mosquitoes. Many people fell ill and died. The only effective cure was quinine, made from the bark of the cinchona tree diluted in bitter tonic water. And the stuff was much easier to wash down mixed with gin. Consequently, Labuan was never popular in the British navy, which opted to find other places to stock up on coal and take shore leave. The island fell off the beaten track. If there are tigers on Labuan at this time, they belong to the now-extinct species of Java tigers. And they almost certainly lie at the edge of the forest, watching the colonial administration slowly succumb to inner decay. Those who are not entirely debilitated by alcohol or illness argue about everything from membership of the English Club to improbable strategies for enabling the local businesses to make inroads into Borneo. And the first English governor James Brooke is as active in this respect as he is talentless, according to colleagues: ‘My friend Brooke has as much idea of business as a cow has of a clean shirt.’22 But as so often on other occasions, the English still manage to keep up appearances when a Swedish expedition led by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld docks at the harbour in the converted whaler, the Vega, in 1879. It is on its way home after becoming the first ship to navigate the Northeast Passage. And Nordenskiöld finds everything in perfect order. He is enthusiastic about the coal-mining operation and believes the island is perfect as a base for closer investigation of Borneo’s geology. He travels along the coast and on a couple of occasions finds abandoned fishermen’s houses on stilts out in the water. They were surrounded at flood tide by water, at ebb by the dry beach, bare of all vegetation. In order to get inside these huts, one must climb a ladder two to two-and-a-half metres high, standing towards the sea. The houses have the same appearance as a warehouse by the seaside at home, and are built very slightly. The floor consisted of a few rattling bamboo splints lying loose, and so thin that I feared they would give way when I stepped upon them.23 He is surprised by their location, but has some theories: ‘It is probable also that the mosquitoes are less troublesome along the sea-shore than farther into the interior of the country.’24 If Nordenskiöld was seduced by the Englishmen, the Italian writer Emilio Salgari went much further beyond reality a few years later in his pirate adventure, Sandokan. It evolved into a blockbuster of a series that sold millions of copies, and there is little doubt that it greatly contributed to European perceptions of the South China Sea towards the turn of the century. Salgari, who can, at his best, be seen as an Italian Jules Verne, used detailed maps and had built up a solid knowledge of the region. However, his writing tends to be sprinkled with overly large doses of drama, set in stormy seas and awe-inspiring jungles, where, among others, we are taken along on an improbable tiger hunt in the interior of Labuan. But the central theme of the series is love. In the first chapter of book three, we meet The Pearl of Labuan. She is described as follows:
Subsequent developments in real-life Labuan are anything but romantic, though. The buildings decay, the coal company closes down and soon only three people are left serving in the colonial administration, including the governor himself. On 1 January 1907, the end comes and Labuan is placed under the authority of the much larger British colonial region, the Straits Settlements. This regime lasts until 1963, when the island is finally handed over to Malaysia and made part of the state of Sabah. Stephen R. Evans, Abdul Rahman Zainal & Rod Wong Khet Ngee (1996): The History of Labuan Island Emilio Salgari (2007): Sandokan: The Tigers of Mompracem My friend Brooke has as much idea of business as a cow has of a clean shirt. CAPTAIN KEPPEL, OF THE BRITISH GOVERNOR
Scandinavianism and Martial Music Just before Christmas 1863, Henrik Ibsen wrote the poem ‘A Brother in Need’: ‘A people doomed, whose knell is rung / Betrayed by every friend / Is the book closed and the song sung? / Is this our Denmark’s end?’27 He wanted to fire the Norwegian people up in support of Denmark, which risked losing part of its realm to the German Confederation in the south. The area in question was Slesvig (now Schleswig), the country between the seas, with its lush meadows and sheltered bays in the east, across wide-open heaths and marshes to the windswept mudflats along the North Sea in the west; a landscape the artist Emil Nolde portrayed again and again in the years that followed, in rough horizontal strokes of blue, pink, red and dark green: no people, always desolate. Like many other Nordic intellectuals of his day, Ibsen was a Scandinavianist, alongside Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in Norway. And in Denmark, Scandinavianism was led by the poets N. F. S. Grundtvig and Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger. The movement emerged in the 1840s as a national romantic homage to shared historical heritage, languages and ethnicity. The goal was for the Scandinavian countries to be joined in a common union. The poet Johan Welhaven had formulated the essence of this in a speech to the students of Christiania in 1846: ‘We recall the image of ancient times, because there we are closer to the life source of our people.’28 The landscape in Slesvig was open and ideally suited to warfare. Over a couple of thousand years, it had vegetated, a kind of political no-man’s-land and a buffer zone between the Danes and whatever might come from the south: Germans, Franks, Saxons or the Holy Roman Empire. At some points, the region seemed like a patchwork quilt of Danish-, Frisian- and German-speaking zones. Nonetheless, during the Great Nordic War at the beginning of the 1700s, the Danish managed to conquer the area as far south as the Elbe. In addition to Slesvig, this also included the province of Holstein. Both would remain duchies, but now under Danish rule. This resulted in that rarest of things: a period of peace that would last more than a hundred years. In the meantime, a liberal and national movement was growing in Europe that culminated in the February Revolution in Paris in 1848. It also kindled the hopes of the German-speaking inhabitants of Slesvig and Holstein. They assembled in ever-growing numbers, firing themselves up with polyphonic renditions of the anthem: ‘Schleswig-Holstein, embraced by the sea, guard of German custom.’ And soon the States Generals in Slesvig and Holstein sent delegations to the king in Copenhagen, demanding full autonomy. Their demands were rejected by an otherwise indifferent Frederick VII, who opted instead to tighten the reins through measures that included imposing Danish as the language of instruction in schools throughout the are. This resulted in the First Schleswig War, which lasted from 1848 to 1850. Large Prussian forces marched in on the German side, but had to call a halt when the Russians threatened to take Denmark’s side. Tsar Nicholas didn’t want to risk the possibility of the Prussians increasing their influence around the Baltic Sea and, in the worst of cases, growing into a major power. To cool tempers, King Frederick agreed to slightly more autonomy in both Slesvig and Holstein. But his heir, Christian IX, who had been born at Gottorp Castle in Slesvig, abruptly went back on this and decided, in late autumn 1863, that Slesvig should be fully integrated into Denmark through a common constitution – the November Constitution. That prompted the Prussians to declare war again, this time with mighty Austria as their ally. The Second Schleswig War was under way. In Norway, Ibsen’s initiative met with a positive response, and many people started speaking out in support of Denmark, but this didn’t alter parliament’s decision to stay out of the conflict. Even so, some volunteers left. One of them was the young theologian, Christopher Bruun. The Prussians were many, and they were better equipped than the Danish. And they advanced fast, helped by an extra-cold winter that froze the large stretches of marshes, making it easier for them to press forward. When Christopher Bruun reached the battlefield at Düppel halfway through April 1864, the Danes had recently retreated from the Viking fortification, Danevirke, a 30 km-long earthwork that crosses Jutland at its narrowest point. In Düppel, the fortifications were more modern. Barely a day goes by without Bruun sitting down to write a letter to his mother in Lillehammer. But he keeps quiet about the fact that the battlefield around Düppel is soon drenched in blood. He assumes a humorous tone.
The bulk of the action lasts only a few hours before the Danes admit defeat and flee the battlefield. Christopher Bruun is so frustrated that he immediately writes to his mother after arriving at a provisional camp on one of the Danish islands: ‘Is this a people “battling for its existence”, as we are told in all the speeches?’31 He travels back home to Norway, where he takes up his priestly duties. He eventually becomes one of the more liberal theologians and is instrumental in establishing Norway’s Folk High School movement. The fact that the Prussians advanced onwards until the whole of Jutland was occupied was primarily a demonstration of might. They soon withdrew to the borders of the old Slesvig, just south of Kolding. The duchy was declared free and sovereign, and the spelling was changed to Schleswig. [1865-1867: Copy with oval motif inscribed with the value, from the Duchy of Schleswig] Shortly afterwards, the duchy issues its own stamps. The Danes have already issued two generations of stamps in the region, the first a shared issue for Slesvig and Holstein and the second, regular Danish stamps. The new series bears simple coin-like motifs, with the value given in schillings. Archetypically German, they are uncluttered and unfussy, containing no more than is absolutely necessary. There is no need for anything more. There’s no need for bombast. Nobody is posing a threat. Denmark has been beaten once and for all. My crimson stamp is postmarked 1867. Later in the same year, the postal services in Holstein and Schleswig are merged and switch to shared stamps. These are only valid for a year before the two duchies become part of the North German Confederation, requiring yet another new generation of stamps. And after the formation of the German Empire in 1871, regular German stamps come into use. The seventh generation of stamps comes in 1920. These are issued ahead of a plebiscite on allegiance after Germany loses the First World War. The Danes set the premises. In Holstein and South Slesvig, both with German-dominated populations, their chances are small. The Danes choose to divide rest of the voting area in two: Central Slesvig and North Slesvig. In Central Slesvig, eighty per cent of the inhabitants vote to remain in Germany. In North Slesvig, seventy-five per cent vote to become part of Denmark. As a result, the southern part of Jutland, down to Flensburg, returns to Denmark. If the voting areas had been counted as a single unit, Denmark would have lost the entire region. Yüklə 463,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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