Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century


Robert Hamill Nassau (1910)



Yüklə 463,42 Kb.
səhifə5/19
tarix28.07.2018
ölçüsü463,42 Kb.
#59403
1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   ...   19

Robert Hamill Nassau (1910):

Corisco Days. The First Thirty Years of

the West African Mission
Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1897):

Travels in West Africa. Congo Français,

Corisco and Cameroons
The worst enemy to the existence of the African

tribe, is the one who comes to it and says:

Now you must civilize, and come to school,

and leave off all those awful goings-on of yours

MARY KINGSLEY


PERIOD:




1849-1866




COUNTRY:




VANCOUVER ISLAND




POPULATION:

AREA:

30,000

31,285 km2

PACIFIC OCEAN

VANCOUVER ISLAND

Victoria

CLAYOQUOT SOUND

BRITISH COLUMBIA

USA






Wooden temples

He takes out a cigarette, slips the case back into his blazer pocket and leans back in his deck chair. He is astonished. The island really does look like one great rock, and from south to north it is covered in an enormous forest. Through his Zeiss binoculars, the young aristocrat, Charles Barrett-Lennard, has spied Vancouver Island – the largest Pacific island east of New Zealand.


Along with his fellow-officer, Napoleon Fitzstubbs, he has set out on a pleasure trip after an arduous stint as a dragoon in the Crimean War. They have brought along a spacious cutter as deck cargo, together with their dogs, including a pure-breed bulldog. It is late in the summer of 1860 and they are planning to sail around Vancouver Island, where Captain James Cook was the first European to set foot in 1778.

After rigging up the cutter outside the little collection of wooden houses that form the administrative centre of Victoria at the southernmost point of the island, they set out in an eastward direction. They plan to sail along the mainland side of the island first, through the Clayoquot Sound. There is a tailwind and blazing sunshine, and the ensign of the Royal Thames Yacht Club flutters on the stern. Soon they meet their first Indians, black-eyed and copper-skinned with broad faces and high cheekbones, thick lips and smooth black hair that is never cut. And without exception they are dressed in ‘bizarre, party-coloured garments’.48 One chief wants to barter for the bulldog, an offer Barrett-Lennard refuses in no uncertain terms. Instead, he offers him a pair of trousers, for which the chief shows little enthusiasm even though they were cut by Hills of Bond Street.

In the Clayoquot Sound, they quickly spy a number of Indian villages in clearings along the shoreline. And they are amazed by the building traditions: ‘The sight of these buildings produced the same effect of wonder on my mind as did the first visit to Stonehenge.’49

The houses are as large as railway stations and consist of coarse frameworks formed by posts measuring over a meter in diameter. The saddle roofs and walls are clad with broad planks split with wedges. And, unbelievably enough, the inhabitants are nomads. A tribe will generally make use of two or three villages, travelling between them. Each time they leave, they take the planking with them and leave the framework standing.


More than 30,000 Indians were living on Vancouver Island in the mid-1800s: the Kwakiutl, Nuu-chah-nulth and various groups of the Salish tribes. They lived as hunter-gatherers, also supplying the British Hudson Bay Company with the skins of otters, elks, beavers and squirrels. They were paid in knives, saucepans, needles and thread, but first and foremost in woollen blankets, which pretty much served as the island’s currency. The blankets were specially produced by the Hudson Bay Company and their value was reflected in their size and the amount of coloured strips woven into them.

The Hudson Bay Company was founded in 1670 and had since built up a monopoly on all fur-trading in the north of the American continent as far as the Arctic. The company had established the trading station of Victoria on Vancouver Island in 1846 and immediately secured a ten-year contract to handle all local exports and imports. The company’s local director, James Douglas, had worked his way up from the bottom. His powerful build, bushy eyebrows and long whiskers gave him the air of a man of authority. And he got on well with the Indians.

News that the company was scooping up massive profits soon made its way across the sea and in 1849, the British decided to formally designate the island a British colony. The 32-year-old aristocrat Richard Blanshard was sent over as the colony’s first governor. He was well educated and considerably more cultured than Douglas – in his own eyes at least. His mission was to establish an efficient administration. In addition, he was to pave the way for immigration from Great Britain. But the whole project was beset with major problems. The Hudson Bay Company didn’t want any changes. It didn’t want the island to be flooded with settlers, but preferred to preserve the huge, impenetrable forests and the hunting opportunities they offered. And it wanted to maintain its good relationship with the Indians who provided it with furs.

The stage was set for a classic feud between Douglas and Blanshard, between raw strength and formal power. Blanshard quickly came to understand that the company’s initials, HBC, could also be read as meaning Here Before Christ.50 He was ill equipped to combat the unanimous opposition he met at all levels, from the civilian population to government officials, and gave up in the first round.

It would seem that Blanshard then took his frustration out on the Indians. He had never attempted to conceal his disdain for Indian culture. He thought the Indians were undisciplined and irrational, and had to be kept under control to prevent ‘a sudden outburst of fury to which all savages are liable’.51 After a couple of minor episodes of violence involving Indians, he arranged a punitive expedition. And he didn’t waste any resources attempting to identify the actual culprits but instead subjected the tribes to collective punishment, burning down several of their villages. The result was fatal. For a while, all co-operation between the Indians and the whites on the island – including the Hudson Bay Company – hung in the balance.

We do not know whether Blanshard was ultimately pressured to leave or whether he simply got sick and tired of it all. After less than two years as governor he resigned and went back to England. And in the years that followed, he never wasted an opportunity to sulk and whine about the colony: ‘Nothing more than a fur trading post.’52

Unsurprisingly, James Douglas then took over as governor while remaining in charge of the Hudson Bay Company. He urged for renewed collaboration with the Indians, and continued develop his friendship with these ‘children of the forest’.53 The few new settlers who had come in the meantime despaired, and vanished over to the mainland. All the same, the atmosphere was much improved and the district recorded many fewer confrontations between Indians and whites than was usual elsewhere in North America in those days.
It was also James Douglas who wrote a letter to the colonial administration in London raising the need for stamps. To save money, he suggested a joint issue with the neighbouring colony on the mainland, British Columbia. One type would suffice, he thought, and enclosed his own sketch in the letter. A hundred sheets of 240 stamps should meet requirements.
[1860: Bust of Queen Victoria of England]
In 1860, the stamps are printed by La Rue in London. They are bright red, have a face value of 2.5 pence and bear a portrait of Queen Victoria – anything else would have been unthinkable. This time, however, she is portrayed as much more mature and professional than on the stamp from Van Diemen’s Land. Her white eyeballs and heavy eyelids give her the look of a Greek bust, making her appear haughty, unapproachable and cold: just the way we expect a monarch to be. Even so, I feel that my stamp may have lost a bit of its fire. It is much paler than it should be and may have spent a long time lying in the sunlight.
After gold was found on the mainland, all interest shifted there. And when Vancouver Island’s budget failed in 1865, the decision was taken to merge the colony with British Columbia from the following year, under the name of British Columbia. In 1871, the whole region was converted into a unified Canadian province.
Matthew Macfie (1865):

Vancouver Island and British Columbia: Their History, Resources and Prospects
Charles Edward Barrett-Lennard (1862):

Travels in British Columbia: With a Narrative of a

Yacht Voyage Round Vancouver’s Island
Margaret Horsfield & Ian Kennedy (2014):

Tofino and Clayoquot Sound: A History
The sight of these buildings produced the

same effect of wonder on my mind as did

the first visit to Stonehenge

CHARLES BARRETT-LENNARD


1860

TO


1890
BOYACÁ

IQUIQUE


EASTERN RUMELIA

OBOCK


ORANGE FREE STATE

BHOPAL


ALWAR

KINGDOM OF SEDANG

PERAK



PERIOD:




1862-1894




COUNTRY:




OBOCK




POPULATION:

AREA:

2,000

7,500 km2

RED SEA

ERITREA (IT)

ETHIOPIA

OBOCK


Obock

GULF OF TADJOURA

BRITISH SOMALIA

YEMEN


ADEN (GB)

GULF OF ADEN








Arms Dealing and Goat Soup

When Obock was bought by France in 1862, the area was little more than a desolate fishing village surrounded by an olive-green desert whose sand was somewhat coarser than in other deserts.


The atmosphere feels uninhibited and it is easy for a newly arrived colonial official to get caught up in the social excesses of the place. Partway through the welcome party, he may get lost on the rugged, crooked paths beyond the orderly colonial administration quarter, with its single-storey whitewashed brick buildings. Out here, the local population lives in huts made of twigs, straw and clay. It is a clear, starry night but dark nonetheless, with just the flicker of an occasional oil lamp. He stumbles, his bottle of liquorice liquor smashes and his mouth is filled with sand. Dogs bark. Somebody takes him in their arms. He wakes up early next morning, leaning against a bundle of furs. His head is swimming. In the ceiling, he can see daylight coming through the roofing of woven grass matting. A woman serves him goat soup and bread, but he can’t bring himself to eat it. He feels dreadful. But in the midst of it all, he feels a rush of relief at the thought that the rest of his family stayed behind in France.
Obock was the first French colony in the Red Sea region. Following the murder of the French consul to Aden during a tour of the area a couple of years before, the local sultans of Tadjoura, Gobaad and Rheita accepted all the terms. The price was a modest 10,000 Maria Theresa thalers,54 a coin named after a long-dead Austrian empress that was still in circulation in most of the region.

Work on the Suez Canal had already been under way for some years. Both Italy and England were established in the area, and France wanted to set up its own base to secure coal supplies for its modernized navy and a steady stream of heavily laden merchant ships heading back home from the colonies in Southeast Asia.

But Obock soon proved to be a poor choice. Although it was surrounded by coral reefs, the harbour offered little protection against the heavy swells rolling into the Gulf of Aden from the annual storms out on the Indian Ocean. Nevertheless, they kept it going until 1894, when the whole business was moved across the Gulf of Tadjoura to Djibouti, where harbour conditions were much more favourable.
In its heyday, between 1884 and 1885, the inhabitants of Obock numbered around two thousand. Other than the colonial administration and some semi-official tradesmen, many of them were adventurers and petty criminals, drawn there by the local king, Menilek, who had boasted of his massive stores of ivory and other riches.

One of the fortune hunters is the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. At home, he has become famous for his boundless desire for freedom, as well as his ground-breaking experiments in intoxication and sexuality, but at twenty-one years of age he feels he’s all written out. After wandering the length and breadth of Europe and then getting lost without trace in the jungle on Java, he turns up in Obock.

Disillusioned, full of regrets, exhausted and broke after many years of excess, he is trying to bring more order into his life, and above all to secure himself an income. He can no longer bear to live from hand to mouth. The solution is arms dealing.

He rents a simple brick house a little further west in the Gulf of Tadjoura to avoid attracting the attention of the other colonials.


It is a little Danakil55 village with a few mosques and a few palm trees. There is an old fort the Egyptians built where six French soldiers are now sleeping under the orders of a sergeant who is commander of the post.56
He regards Obock society with barely concealed scorn: ‘The little French Administration is preoccupied with the throwing of banquets and drinking of government money, which won’t end up netting a penny from that horrible colony, colonized by nothing more than a dozen freeloaders.’57

He believes himself to be above it all, and is therefore content to collect substantial sums in return for providing King Menelik with loads of obsolete French flintlocks at forty francs apiece. It proves easier than he had expected, spurring him to megalomania; he enters into a insistent correspondence with the French foreign minister, lobbying for support to establish a local arms industry in the country, although of course it never gets beyond the ideas stage.


Predictably, he also becomes embroiled in a complicated romance, probably with a French woman. This goes awry too. We can picture it for ourselves: an unkempt, stoop-shouldered man of indeterminate age drifting constantly back and forth along the desolate shore, steeped in self-pity and despondency. He is impervious to impressions from the outside world, be it the sour stench of a beached school of sardines or the shimmer of sunlight on the bright blue water outside: ‘I have seen too much of this masquerade…I must therefore spend my remaining days wandering, in exhaustion and hardship, with nothing to look forward to but death and suffering.’58

In the end, he manages to pull himself together enough to flee over to the British territory of Aden, on the other side of the mouth of the Red Sea. Shortly afterwards, when he falls gravely ill, he is quickly bundled on a steamer called l’Amazone and dispatched to France, where he dies.


Menilek II is the one who does best out of the whole business. He wins himself the throne to the Ethiopian empire and goes on to father the even more legendary Haile Salassie.

The motif on my stamp shows a group of native warriors with standard-issue shields and spears. This more than underscores the significance of the decrepit weapons Rimbaud had procured.

The stamp is postmarked 9 March 1894, in other words just before the colony is dissolved, and perhaps it was used to send news of an imminent reunion to those back home. Note the fake perforation teeth. The point of perforations was to make it easier to tear the stamps off by hand, and they had already been in use in most countries for a long time. Not in Obock, though. Here, they settled for indicating the intention.
[1894: Native warriors gathered for a council of war]
France retained its position around the Gulf of Tadjoura, which was first renamed French Somaliland and later the Territory of the Afars and the Issas, after the two dominant tribes living there.

Only after a referendum and massive pressure from the neighbouring countries was the Free Republic of Djibouti declared in 1977. Today, it is the smallest country on the Horn of Africa, although it still suffers severe internal conflict, which has repeatedly led to bloody clashes. The city of Obock – which lies in the area traditionally belonging to the Afar tribe – has so far been spared.


Fah-Fah Soup (five portions)

500g goat meat

250g potato

1/4 kale or cabbage

1 leek

1 tomato


1 clove of garlic

1/2 green chilli

1 onion

Salt, pepper and coriander


Preparation: Chop up the vegetables and meat and put them in a saucepan of water. Simmer on a low heat for 20 minutes. Add the coriander and crushed garlic. Add more water and simmer for another hour. Season with salt and pepper.
Wyatt Mason (2003):

I Promise to Be Good:

The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
Richard Alan Caulk (2002):

Between the Jaws of Hyenas:

A Diplomatic History of Ethiopia
The little French Administration is

preoccupied with the throwing of banquets

and drinking of government money, which won’t end

up netting a penny from that horrible colony,

colonized by nothing more than a dozen freeloaders.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD




PERIOD:




1863-1903




COUNTRY:




BOYACA




POPULATION:

AREA:

498,541

91,647 km2

COLOMBIA

Muzo


Chinquinquirá

Bogotá


LAKE MARACAIBO

Chita


BOYACA

The River Meta (Orinoco)







Decadents at War

Julio Flórez never collected stamps. His interests lay in quite different directions. In photographs taken shortly before the turn of the century, he exudes an almost narcissistic dignity: hair swept back in greasy, oil-black waves, the tips of his moustache like panther tails and eyebrows so arched they would have done Salvador Dali proud. All this arranged carefully around eyes that were slightly protuberant, as if subject to some pressure from within – the way you often see with poets. He has recently published a collection of ground-breaking erotic poems, to widespread moral outrage – which must have elevated him to a state of almost provocative ecstasy: against his father, against his mother, against the rest of his family.


Julio Flórez was born into the liberal aristocracy in the small town of Chiquinquirá in 1867. It was the administrative centre of the Estado Soberano Boyacá (the Sovereign State of Boyacá) in the coffee belt in the far north of the Andes. The town clings to the western face of the steep mountains of the Cordilla Oriental, which tower more than 5,000 m in the east before descending via the tropical high plateau, the Llanos, to the source of the Orinoco water system and the border with Venezuela in the north.

Until 1863, Boyacá was part of Colombia, which became South America’s first constitutional republic in 1819. After a bloody civil war, the republic dissolved into a fairly unstable collection of more or less autonomous states. Bocayá was by far the poorest. This was not primarily because it lacked resources: Boyacá had large salt mines in Chita and emerald deposits near Muzo. There were also fertile agricultural areas, especially in the many long valleys to the west. But the road networks were very poor and all transport of goods had to be suspended during the two rainy seasons – with the exception, at best, of a couple of llama-loads of the locally produced hemp sandals known as alpargatas, which might find their way to the market in Bogotá.

After yet another civil war in 1885, Boyacá’s sovereignty came to an end. The Republic of Colombia was re-established and Boyacá was downgraded to a province, although it continued to have broad authority. In 1899, it saw a chance to issue its own stamps, one of which depicted a bald-headed Andean condor with a white collar and outspread wings reposing on a slightly indistinct coat of arms. The poor-quality paper used was easily torn and the printing quality is nothing to write home about either; a lick of the tongue shows that these are very dry goods indeed.
Julio Flórez’s poetry collection was published in 1899. This was the same year that the future fabulist and surrealist, Jorge Luis Borges, first saw the light of day in Buenos Aires, several thousand kilometres further south on the continent. And in the same year the last stamp from Boyacá was issued, 1904, the painter and poseur Salvador Dali was born in Figueras, Spain. Julio Flórez, who had already been active for some years by then, was, in many ways, the ideological precursor of his better-known successors.

It is at this time that he moves to Bogotá and forms La Gruta Simbólica [‘the Symbolic Grotto’] with a group of like-minded fellow-artists. The idea arose, he said, after they had a narrow escape from a battalion of government soldiers one night after curfew. The conversations and rum drinking that followed resulted, the next morning, in the pamphlet entitled ‘Of Decadence and Symbolism’. It is strongly inspired by the French poets, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.

The end of the 1800s was a period of prosperity, full of belief in the future; but many people, particularly artists and philosophers, did not share this optimism. The term fin de siècle was coined, describing with a certain melancholy a period on the wane. The most tenacious called themselves decadents. The term ‘decadence’ signified a phenomenon in absolute decline, and was part of a conscious strategy of provocation. The decadent artists did not, themselves, wish to appear decadent. Their intention was rather to reveal the decadence they believed they saw in their age. At the same time, they claimed the right to freedom of artistic development, independent of shallow and authoritarian influences. In poetry’s ‘supernatural’ realm of beauty, declared Baudelaire, desire is ‘pure’, melancholy is ‘gracious’ and desperation is ‘noble’.59

The Symbolic Grotto consists of seventy painters, musicians and poets, some of whom are women. They hold secret salons at restaurants near the Cathedral in Bogotá with names like The Greedy Cat and The Cradle of Venus.


On warm evenings, they break into nearby graveyards.

Melancholy music from stringed instruments issues from the crypt. Birds ruffle their wings in the cypresses, fireflies swarm about and the moon lights up the marble gravestones. Confidences are shared with the graves! Serenades are delivered to the dead! Some rest their foreheads on the tree trunks and meditate.60
At that time, Colombia was embroiled in the Thousand Days War, a liberal rebellion against a strict, conservative regime. It erupted after the conservatives were caught out in election fraud in 1899, and was intensified by an economic crisis that followed a fall in coffee prices. More than a hundred thousand were wounded or killed during the conflict, including a large group of child soldiers who were forcibly conscripted on the conservative side.

Little changed after a peace treaty was signed in 1902, under heavy pressure from the USA, which feared that the disturbances might delay the start of construction on the Panama Canal.


And in 1905, Julio Flórez was exiled for blasphemy. For reasons that are unclear, he returned to favour a couple of years later and was appointed secretary to the embassy in Spain, where he died in 1923, probably of cancer. Today he is largely unknown, but in Colombia, his poem ‘Mis flores negras’ [‘My Black Flowers’] still lives on: ‘Listen: beneath the ruins of my passions / in the depths of this soul that you will no longer delight / amid the dust of dreams and illusions / my black flowers bloom benumbed’.61 The poem, whose title is probably a paraphrase of the title of Baudelaire’s poetry collection, Les Fleurs du Mal [‘The Flowers of Evil’], has been set to music and performed by numerous Latin American tango musicians.62
[1903: Coat of arms with an Andean condor and flag.]
The original province of Boyacá is now divided into Boyacá, Arauca and Casanare. The new Boyacá Province mainly covers the mountainous areas to the west. The city of Tunja, 2,800m above sea level with 180,000 inhabitants, is the capital of the province. The road networks are much improved, and the coffee, tobacco, fruit and grain production can now reach the markets.

In the background, the ghost of the political rivalry between liberals and conservatives still lingers, locking Bocayá into a persistent and sometimes extremely violent culture. But if nothing else, at least Julio Flórez has had a park named after him in his birthplace of Chiquinquirá.


Yüklə 463,42 Kb.

Dostları ilə paylaş:
1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   ...   19




Verilənlər bazası müəlliflik hüququ ilə müdafiə olunur ©genderi.org 2024
rəhbərliyinə müraciət

    Ana səhifə