Black Sails and Treasure Island + Outlander and Voyager

     . . . . Black Sails (2017) Season Four, final season was very good.  At this moment I'm still wondering this may be the most historically accurate action adventure period presentation dramatized on screen (and read in most historical fiction).  Cuba! Views of its bay and fortalezas and habana vieja that I too have seen and been to! Invasion of Nassau to put down the motley pre-era of Revolution crew of pirates, self-emancipated slaves, free blacks, indentures and the lower classes in general – as the greatest threat to civilization.

The Black Sails writers really read Marcus Rediker it looks like.

A deluxe 1886 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island included a treasure map.

 This isn't to say that some liberties with historical facts have not been taken -- for instance the Peruvian shipment on the pirated Spanish vessel, Urca de Lima, was made of valuable commodities such as hides and chocolate,  but not that ever more powerful chimera of gold! gold! gold! which is the ever more enthralling, ever more unattainable source of the stories of  Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Starz's Black Sails.  But, over all, throughout, Black Sails tacks remarkably close to what historical facts of Nassau's early history we know.

Guess who . . .  he didn't begin like this.

So it matters more for Spain and Britain to cooperate in putting them than the current war between their rulers. Their sheer outrage that anyone not of the ruling classes should attempt to change anything is brilliantly emoted.

These outsiders' ideals of anti-slavery, equality and fairness, have been bubbling along for the previous season, though sometimes submerged either by the imperious demands of survival, which means financing survival, and rivalries and conflicts of interests of all sorts.  In the final season both the ideal, inter-personal conflict and greed are at center of every action.  In the last episodes the audience begins to glimpse through the current action, the characters as we first got to know them in Stevenson's Treasure Island.

Professor Marcus Rediker

After watching the end of the series, I re-read Treasure Island, on Gutenberg since Black Sails is the prequel to the stories of all these characters long and long before Jim Hawkins enters the picture at his mother's inn, the Admiral Benbow, the black spot and all the rest.  Needless to say, in Black Sails, everybody was much much younger and very good looking, which they generally are not in Treasure Island, except perhaps that charming, enticing storyteller we meet as one-legged Long John Silver, with a parrot named Flint (Captain Flint is the central protagonist in Black Sails) -- and many of them had ideals of freedom, liberty and equality, escape from the real evils of the poor and powerless  attempting to create an alternative to Europe's ancien régime.

But in the end, as stolen treasure does, the Urca's fictional gold destroyed them all. And now they're old, so old, if not actually you know,  like Captain Flint, dead. Yet they're still chasing after that damned treasure for which  that hundreds if not thousands have already lost their honor,  blood and lives.

It had been a long time since I'd re-read Treasure Island.  What isn't different though -- and this is brilliant of Black Sails, considering its unique social and political concerns (also so much part of the age), which are seldom if ever found in adventure entertainments --  from the first pages already, the evil miasma of the Urca treasure contagion is in play.  Hawkins, the boy, of course, like we kids who are much of Stevenson's targeted audience, can't see it.  But the boy can see danger, far more quickly than the adults do.

This particularly struck me in terms of Starz's Outlander, both because I just finished re-reading Voyager, the third novel in Diana Gabaldon's historical romance series from which this current season is adapted, and the latest episode takes place at sea, sailing to Jamaica. The ships used in this episode are among those that had been constructed for Black Sails. 
Voyager's action is located in the spread of 1745 - 1765, only a few decades after Black Sails in 1715.  The African slave trade, slavery and indenture slavery were reaching their peak during this entire arc. This is something that the pirates of the era understood thoroughly.  The more oppressed the bottom, i.e. slaves, can be, the more oppressed are every class above them.

Voyager was the book in the series after which I quit, because none of it was working any more. The arbitrary artificiality of the obstacles being put int the way of the twenty years older Claire and Jamie, to have a life without running, and lots and lots of their happy, happy sex is preposterously obvious. This is the point where the series goes off the rails in the books, and probably does on television too.  It's all more likely due to the author's embarrassing caricatures of non-white characters and her ignorance of the cultures in the Caribbean in general.

The author's determination to keep this a romance, is, in the end, makes the effort only about the personal, and by extension to family and clan's well-being, which are still personal concerns.  In Black Sails, romance was not the point.  Sex wasn't even the point., though there was a lot of it, some, unwatchably violent and abusive, detailed and prolonged. Though lesbians were not punished for being lesbian,  gay men had to keep their love a terrible secret, which such demand by society and law at large, has effects on the development of character, thinking and action.

Loyalty and companionship matter of course, but most of all for some, at least, among the Black Sails' crews, there were those who had larger loyalties to ideals of social and political justice, for women and men, for black as well as white. Not only is Black Sails a prequel to Treasure Island, but it's a prequel to revolution, located as it is on the eve of the Era of Revolutions that set the whole world on fire (with help from that anti-revolutionary, Emperor  Napoleon) -- Washington, George Danton, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Símon Bolívar.  But the Outlander books, really about Claire and Jamie's ROMANCE, and  her family and their romance,s as more and younger members of her family arrive in the past from the future, are missing this dimension.

Perhaps that makes the contrast between Starz Outlander and Black Sails all the more stark: Outlander's Voyager turned us cranky and impatient; Black Sails got ever more compelling as the seasons and episodes rolled on.

I Am A Bad Person + Poldark

For reasons unfathomable to mere mortals, the bare ankle has been a thing these last couple of years, summer and winter, for both male and female.

Having spend most of today, like yesterday, at a history conference on various matters of slavery in the Atlantic world I could not help but notice the Fashionable and Trendy hording upon on the streets and sidewalks, on a weekend, that if still quite cold, is at least sunny (or it was -- there are mutterings on AccuWeather of mixed snow and rain fall later). They are wearing, without sox, stiletto heeled boots, dazzling white $500 sneakers, rhinestone flatties, all kinds of very fine footwear. They also are all looking at their devices, talking, texting, whatever. Four times -- 4! -- I watched these fashionistas walk into the water gathered at most corners, filthy water from melted snow and ice and all kinds of stuff in it. The expressions of shock when that water went over their bare ankles was so amusing I laffed (though politely and hopefully inaudibly behind my gloved hand, of course). Splutters and swears, shrieks and screams, all of which I confess here to enjoying, very much.  I am a bad person, totally lacking in sympathy for my fellow women and men.  Nor do I give a gd. >g<

Now -- Poldark!

Tomorrow night begins the first episode on BBC1 of the remake of the 1970's Poldark series, which I had loved when amiga T and I would watch it in PBS re-runs on Wednesday nights. This one looks scrumptious -- see the trailer above.

Aidan Turner, the actor playing Ross Poldark, was the romantic male lead on the Brit Being Human, and he was why I watched the first two seasons.  Aidan Turner's character managed to be brooding in that dark moody romantic troubled soul way, and yet very charming and very funny too.  He might make a terrific Ross Poldark, though surely one very

different from the original BBC Ross, played by Robin Ellis -- who was also a very satisfactory period drama romantic male lead.

Among the elements that made this series, the original and this re-make, and the books on which they're based, so appealing to me, is that they take place during the Era of Revolution. This is the 1970's when neither British nor American movies and television had yet turned their backs from including any content in the scripted drama that commented on class and political - economic inequity.

The series begins with Ross coming back to Cornwall from America, where he fought for the King against the rebelling North American colonists.  He returns with sympathy for the rebels and revolutionary ideas about class and rank himself.  Recall, he's a Cornish man, not necessarily in sympathy with the King and the House of Lords.  The more I read in this era's history the more aware I am too of how tough the rank-and-file and poor had it in these times of war with France and Napoleon.  Everything was taxed, just for starters.

Being on the coast, as they are in Poldark, there has always been smuggling, doubtless even before the Romans invaded and conquered. But during these decades of war and taxes smuggling everywhere became the biggest business of all, other than army and navy matériel business.  As well, there were years of bad weather, in which crops failed, and business for everything dropped way down, as Europe was increasingly in chaos (though Napoleon as First Counsel, did manage to bring France back to order, including eradicating the bandits).  All of this is in Poldark.  Yum.

PBS, please bring this Poldark to the U.S. audience too!

Re-reading C.L.R. James

The lines that impress today come from C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins:Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, second edition, revised, 1963 -- originally published 1938.

p. 78 --

"The rich are only defeated when running for their lives."

Something else I've encountered upon this re-reading of The Black Jacobins: this is the only work of history in which there is not a jot of sympathy for the fate of King Louis XVI.

James also observes, which no else has either, that the organization of the plantation sugar slaves for both field and factory work on San Domingo was closer to that of the Russian proletariat than any other group of laborers at that time.  This made for a mass uprising, as in Russia.  He says on p.85:

"The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors."

Historians don't write sentences like these any more.  But who knows, that they may again someday?

Toussaint L'Ouverture

Even more impressive to me, was how he opens this chapter quoting the war song of the San Domingo slaves throwing off, literally, their chains:

Eh!! Eh ! Bomba! Heu! Heu!

Canga, bafio té!

Canga, mouné de lé!

Canga, do ki la!

Canga, do ki la!

Canga, li!

What I did not know the last time I read The Black Jacobins is the legacy of this war song of the San Domingo slave revolution remains embedded in the culture of many places in the Caribbean to where a variety of San Domingueans and later, Haitian, immigrated.  We began to learn of this and understand it via our Puerto Rican amigo, Alex LaSalle (note, name is "french"), whose family's oral culture always said his ancestors were brought to Puerto Rico by a mulatto master fleeing the wars, who brought a female slave concubine and their children with him.  His grandmother was still singing this song to him and other children when they were babies.

From a demonstration / workshop / performance gig of Alma deMoyo in Connecticut.

As well, one of the national dances of Puerto Rico is the Bomba, along with the Plena, both of them contra danses, but at least one of them done to this war song, as the drums thunder out its rhythms.  There are traditional costumes that go with these dances at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, for Baryshnikov and an audience filled with African American and Caribbean heads, of all skin tones and diversity.  

El V and Alex have taught classes around this war song, bringing in the drums and dancers, including a performance plus presentation in New Orleans Congo Square.

These are the sorts of communications out of the past that make my breath come fast and my heartbeat speed up, because they are -- well so wonderful. The Black Jacobins is from the past before I was born.  It is also part of my own reading - research past, going back to the first time before I knew enough to get the benefit from it, to another time when I got a great deal, to now, when I am receiving even more.  The times are so different now from when I first read the book, it's as if that first reading may as well have taken place in another world.

These little bits that are transmitted still via family and culture, and which are personal to people I know, about something I'd seen myself, but upon first encountering, knew nothing.  And this way, I too, in a minute manner, am a part of the transmittal of historical memory.

A Napoleonic Triumverate

That all three of the books with which I'm engaged this week feature Napoleón is accidental, not intentional, but I do enjoy such serendipitous occurrance.

The "recreational" book I'm reading is In These Times: Living In Britain Through Napoleon's Wars 1793 - 1815 (2014) by Jenny Uglow. This book is rather disappointing. I was expecting more content rather than unattached, unconnected extended anecdote (this criticism is also leveled by British history reviewers too, I see). Extended as these anecdotes are though, they frequently leave out what

British view of the XYZ Affair, notorious in the U.S., which here is portrayed as female. The line below reads: "Property Protected a la Francoise."

the reader needs to know. I expected learn specifics about the banking and financing of this era, which includes a British banker pulling the financing together for the U.S., for the Louisiana Purchase. But this momentous event gets a couple of words at most -- and those words are unattached to anything -- in fact one would have to use cogitation to understand the man she mentions is a banker -- and I never learn the name of his bank. I also hoped to learn much more about what it cost Britain to blockade the U.S. shipping not only to their own markets but everyone else's.

The audio book I'm working out with is Napoleon's Wars: An International History (2007) by Charles J. Esdaile. The focus isn't so much on the man and certainly not on his love affairs (yay), but on the why of the many wars he fought, and how they were won or lost and the consequences of the occurrence, the winning and / or losing, on the larger stage of Europe. Among the useful elements the author stresses is that it wasn't until the second coming of Napoleón during the Congress of Vienna in 1814 that all of Europe and Britain and were united against France. This was the only time during this entire era of warfare that happened. I hadn't quite realized that before.

The first edition (1938), from Secker & Warburg

The current research book is a re-read, for the third time: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), by Trinidadian scholar, C.L.R. James (1901 - 1989) which is about the French Revolution, Napoleon, England and the Haitian Revolution. The Black Jacobins is the seminal book on Haiti and the Haitian Revolution. Before this book, Haiti and its Revolution had fairly been written out of the history of the French Revolution and Napoleón's Empire. After this book it was no longer possible to discuss either of them without including Haiti and its Revolution. Or, to quote James from his own book, regarding the Haitian slave owners' claim to representational seats in the 1788 Estates-General:

. . . . Full of confidence these slave owners claimed 18 seats, but Mirabeau turned fiercely on them:  "You claim representation preportionate to the enumber of the inhabitants.  The free blacks are proprietors and tax-payers, and yet they have not been allowed to vote.  And as for the slaves, either they are men or they are not; if the colonists consider them to be men, let them free them and make them electors and eligible for seats; if the contrary is the case, have we, in apportioning deputies according to the population of France, taken into consideration the number of our horses and mules?"

In other words the Big Whites, the white slave owning class of San Domingo (as James refers to it, writer in English as he is), claimed population proportional representation for themselves in the Estates-General based on the number of slaves they owned (just as in the U.S. Constitution for the antebellum southern slave owning elite)  -- while denying other property owners seats in the Estates-General because they were "small whites," i.e. didn't own land and slaves, the rapidly growing class of mulattoes, whose wealth in cash, land and slaves was rapidly increasing, and the "black" free people, who were not wealthy and owned no land or slaves.

The upshot was that the San Domingo Big White slave owners were allowed only 6 deputies, while:

" . . . the great Liberal orator [Mirabeau] had places the case of the Friends other Negro squarely before the whole of France in unforgettable words.  The San Domingo representatives realized at last what they had done; They had tied the fortunes of San Domingo to the assembly of a people in revolution and thenceforth the history of liberty in France and of slave emancipation in San Domingo is one and indivisible."

Alas, such attitude lasted for a very short time, as emancipation was not to the taste of those who initially played such a role in France in making the Revolution, the great property owner class, referred to as the Great Bourgeoisie  and particularly the Maritime Bourgeoisie, whose entire fortunes were tied to every aspect of slavery in San Domingue.

This time around understand more clearly I had previously James's assertions that PM Pitt's demand to abolish the European African slave trade was high hypocrisy. By the time of the French Revolution, San Domingue was the most wealth-producing territory on the globe, financing almost all of France with its production of sugar, coffee, cotton and indigo, and the related industries including the slave trade. However, at this time as well, England's India colonies were beginning to be successful producing sugar and cotton, and the workers needed to be paid only a penny a day. San Domingue demanded more African slaves every year to put more of the island into cultivation -- devouring the captives' lives in less than ten years, from overwork, disease, starvation and abuse. By 1789 San Domingue was importing at least 40,000 Africans annually. Pitt's desire to abolish the European African trade was straight up protectionism for English products -- his definition of Adam Smith's "free market" meant eliminating the competition. Previously this had sailed right past me.

This latter, btw, is the book anyone must read before even thinking s/he's going to write anything about San Domingue, Haiti (especially if s/he's never been to Haiti, the Caribbean and doesn't know anyone from these parts of the world) or the French Revolution, whether journalism, history, literary fiction, genre fiction -- anything. For if s/he hasn't read this book s/he is going to make a huge fool of her/himself. This time around I'm reading the second edition (1963), to which James appended his seminal essay, "From Toussaint L'Overture to Fidel Castro."

Is it necessary to add that James was a Marxist in his politics and in his historical perspective? This is why U.S. history departments in the 50's and 60's didn't want him on the syllabus.

Would that all of our books would remain so foundational, so seminal, so necessary, 80 + years after initial publication as The Black Jacobins has.

Hmmm. The library says that Ancillary Sword is ready for pick-up. Will the pages of this novel contain as much excitement as the matters of these books, even though the events -- though not their consequences and effects -- took place so very long ago?. .

NBC's Revolution

The 2012 television series has begun streaming on Netflix.

Initial thoughts:

Sets, fight scenes, etc. are generally cheesy, indicating this has a small production budget.

This is Illinois?  It sure looks like the South to me, judging by the vegetation and trees.

Swords: is it a good idea, really, to make the hilt of your blade be a brass knuckles, meaning your fingers are imprisoned in those holes, so you can't drop the blade or whatever if your enemy is turning the blade against your body?

Judging by what supposedly is going on when the lights go out, should there be powerful ministers and other religious figures everywhere?

Fifteen years since the world's power supply died, and everything is so very well organized already, particularly for agriculture, which is mostly mono-culture and doubtless infected with the one growing season only Big Agribiz genetically modified grains and cereals?  Where are the wild dog packs and feral hogs attacking your domestic animals and tearing up your fields (as wild hogs are doing even now)?  That everyone remains so well dressed is potentially plausible because there should be so much stock around, while the population must have precipitously dropped -- at least it is implied the population has dropped so much. (But really?  That AC / DC t-shirt has survived 15 years of hard wearing and washing?  Did men who never have dealt with laundry and buying clothes dress these characters?)  Same with hair products, and surely hair stylists survived so they can do hair cuttery in their spare time from growing food.  But dental and optical corrections don't seem as likely since these are so dependent on very high tech all run by electricity.

While we learn enormous amounts about weaponry, warlords, militias and division of territories, what is the economy?  What is passing for money?  With whom and where do we trade?  Why are we told that Europe doesn't exist .... surely if we can get the technology together to successfully raise, train and equip horses for soldiers, we can build ocean going ships?  Or -- is it we've destroyed the forests long ago that provide the sort of lumber that you need for ocean going ships? Yet they've got the big boats necessary for Great Lakes fishing.

OK, this is Illinois.  How come there are only white people and black people?  No Native Americans, no Asians of any background? Where the gay members of the community?

Why is this post-apocalypse so danged healthy and homogenous?  Where are the members who have lost their legs or have received or been born with various physical challenges? Where the children born with Downs Syndrome or Aspergers?

Also, revolution, secession and civil wars don't happen by accident.  In the U.S. very powerful, very wealthy people made all three, so surely the same is the case here. (In this way the San Domingue Slave Revolution, and,for another example, the Vietnamese Revolution, were unlike the U.S. revolution.) Who are these people -- or, in other words, what was in it for them?  One must ask these questions because they are thrown in our face, with the terminology of 'rebels' and 'patriots,' with the U.S. flag, rather than the stars and bars as representing the rebels, and the militias' uniforms right out of the U.S. Civil War.  (And who makes these uniforms and out of what?  Military uniforms made by hand, which many were in the Civil War, were hard to do, and also very lucrative contracts -- government contracts.  The competition for them was great, as former slave Elizabeth Keckley

describes in her book, Behind the Scenes, when she and brother achieve one of those contracts.

There are many episodes still ahead  for this watcher in the first season of Revolution. * Though obviously I've got lots of problems with the series, I'm willing to continue. Doubtless there are better informed viewers who know the answers to all these questions too. Still, it seems to this viewer, if somehow some of this could have been overtly included in the limited screen time, even such a low-budget series would overall be a lot more interesting with rather more content.  Instead, they've opted for including at least one prolonged fight-it-out scene in each episode to eat up what time they've got.  Grrr.

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 *  Is this going to be another Lost or X-Files?  If so, then they've lost me for certain.

In the Age of Revolutions

Talleyrand coined the famous, "Women are politics!" and did so long before the Revolution or the Directoire.

We haven't produced a public -- or private -- figure anything like Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, prince, bishop (defrocked), statesman, diplomat, imperial elector and much else besides.

We couldn't, one would consider, for this nation hasn't had the interlocked three ruling class estates to lock down all opportunity for itself: the Roman Church (Talleyrand received Jesuit training, among other training), the aristocracy and the army.  The Church and the aristocracy owned the land, and the the Church and the army was run by their enlisted and appointed aristocrats.

This is a very different world in every way than Atlantic seaboard North American colonial culture and economy, where there was always land to be had, one way and another, and labor = cash.  It is enlightening then,  to contemplate this defrocked French aristo, dislocated to Philadelphia,  fled from the Revolution that he'd done his best to assist into being, walking with the help of his cane and his black mistress, the icy streets of the early Republic's capital.

Talleyrand in 1794 - 1796 Philadelphia personifies culture shock. He was a most unwilling immigrant and refugee. It was leave England where he'd initially escaped from the Terror, or be deported back to France and certain death.  This reminds one of other refugees from yet another revolution: the slaveholding escapees from the San Domingue Revolution, coming to safer haven in Cuba.  Then it was either swear allegience to Spain or leave.  So again they packed up their mistresses and families of color -- whatever the planter's tone of skin -- and flee, this time to New Orleans – *which either is in negotiation for purchase or just recently purchased by – the Americans.

For Citizen-Prince Talleyrand, there was only one place in the world in which any man of value could live, Paris, the City of Light and Salons, salons hosted and dominated by brilliant, witty women, women who ruled both the art of flirtation and the art of politics. He didn't much care for Philadelphia, America or Americans.  The only person he'd encountered that he judged worthy of respect was Alexander Hamilton.  This judgment of Talleyrand's would bode badly, then, for the self-exiled, disgraced Aaron Burr's hopes to have a meeting with Napoleon, during which he hoped to offer his talents in service of the Emperor. Talleyrand ensured that the Emperor never encountered the only American who resembled himself at all, and who resembled him more closely than he liked to admit.

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* el V takes some issue with that statement, observing: "It was 1809 -- Louisiana safely in Claiborne's hands since dec. 20 1803. "

Still, I stand with my statement as I intended it to convey not a specific date, but this: "It didn't happen all at once.  There were greater waves, but the movement was constant for decades. The multiple revolutions in the old world and new – had far more forced refugees and immigrants -- and even deportees --  than many realize. It was a continuing churn in population and individuals that also churned culture and ideas. This took place separately and outside traditional culture churn that comes with armies encountering places, people, languages and culture different from that they were born into. After Napoleon's fall, this movement was felt even more strongly in South America with her revolutions and wars of independence.  One great example are the consquences of Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt, and England’s successful campaign to drive him and his army out. The furnishings of the era are only one areas in which we can see the force of that impact, in Europe, in South America and the young USA Republic.

 I didn't explain what I meant, and what I said, I expressed poorly.