Evanston: the world’s greatest land grab
Evanston: the world’s greatest land grab
I have resumed reading RIVERS OF GOLD. In fact I have nearly finished it.
Columbus was to have a tenth of everything--from gold to pearls to spices--in any lands he discovered. Not bad.
But even that pales besides Balboa, who upon sighting the Pacific Ocean “took possession of all that sea and the countries bordering on it” in the name of the Spanish King and Queen. Hugh Thomas says that one’s first reaction on hearing this is to laugh; and second to be amazed at the audacity.
Certainly those men had nerve, and they believed in their own myth, but I think the better word is effrontery.
The Pope had already divided the world between the Portuguese and the Spanish. When one of the leaders of an indigenous tribe was told this, he said, “Oh, the Pope must have been drunk to give away lands already in someone else’s possession.”
For the five hundred years after Columbus and da Gama, the history of the world has been the history of Europe, counting Russia as part of Europe and the U.S. as an off-shoot. That seems to have come to an end.
I was impressed by a letter from Isabel de Bobadilla to her husband, who was being sent to govern what is now Panama and Columbia and intended to leave her behind.
“My dear husband,” she wrote. “We have been united from our youth, as I think, for the purpose of living together and never being separated. Wherever destiny may lead you, be it on the tempestuous sea or be it among the hardships that await you on land, I should be your companion. There is nothing that I should more fear, nor any kind of death that might threaten me, which would not be more supportable for me than to live without you and be separated by a great distance. I would rather die or be eaten by fish in the sea or devoured on land by cannibals than to consume myself in perpetual mourning and unceasing sorrow awaiting not my husband but his letters.”
She went.
As I have mentioned before, Chicago is not the windiest city in the United States, Boston is, and was first called windy by New York journalists because of long-winded Chicago boosters when both cities were vying for the 1892 World’s Fair.
However what wind there is often whistles around the south side of our building and makes it sound windier than it is. It is doing so now, but the trees outside the windows to the west are barely moving. Still I think it’s time to start a fire.
Friday, February 16, 2007