Patti and David Peach report Little History has made the long portage to Anchorage, Alaska, where it was spotted in Barnes & Noble. David was one of my three companions making the trek down the Moisie River in 1972 (see The Complete Wilderness Paddler) and has been practicing medicine there for many years.

One of the themes in A Little History of the United States is how much the American story has been shaped by a succession of economic booms, sparked by the first sustained contact after 1492 between the Americas and Eurasia/Africa. As I note in Little History:

    One boom after another would transform the Americas as Europeans looked to control new resources: furs trapped in North America; tobacco grown in Virginia and Maryland; sugar plantations in Central and South America and later Louisiana. The biggest commodity was of course cotton, the principal driver of economic expansion in both the South and North during the first half of the nineteenth century. The South grew the cotton but northern factories (as well as those in Europe) spun it into ready-made clothing bought by millions.

    Few people today are aware of one of the earliest of booms in post-Contact America, that of pearls. On his third voyage of 1498, Columbus traded beads, hawks’ bells and sugar for pearls collected by natives along the coast of Venezuela. Soon Spain built a fort on the “Coast of the Pearls” to harvest the commodity more systematically, principally from the island of Cubagua. Relations between the Guayaquer Indians and the newcomers were amicable at first, for the Spanish didn’t want to repeat their disastrous experience on Hispaniola, where the native Indian work force was virtually exterminated through enslavement, war, maltreatment and disease. The Spanish protected the Guayaquerí from their hostile Carib neighbors; in return, Guayaquerí divers brought up oysters from the ocean floor and the pearls within, “some as large as hazelnuts, very clear and beautiful.”

    But within a few years, the desire to make a fortune led the Spanish to enslave their Indian laborers, import more from the Bahamas and other islands and push laborers beyond their limits. Slaves were branded on the face and arms with the letter C and sent to work, six divers to a canoe. They worked in pairs, one man weighed down with stones to dive to a depth of up to 8 fathoms (43 feet) or even more to gather oysters; the other man to pull his partner back to the surface. Divers had little time to rest between plunges. If they dawdled, an overseer threw them into the water and whipped them until they agreed to continue. Many died after attacks by sharks or internal bleeding from such deep dives. At night the divers slept in chains.

    Each boat could net around 35,000 oysters in the space of a few weeks. Profits were high; and the usual boom country atmosphere prevailed, with drinking, gambling, quarreling and killing. The Spanish governor was ruthless, at one point subduing a native revolt by capturing and executing two chieftains, one by hanging and the other, a younger boy, by strapping him “to the muzzle of a cannon, [blowing] his head off, [and] throwing his body to the dogs.”

    Eventually excess harvesting and the new practice of dredging the sea bottom took its toll. One modern estimate suggests that as many as 100 billion oysters were collected over a thirty-year period. By the 1530s the pearl boom was finished. Details of this early example of environmental degradation can be found in an excellent article by Aldemaro Romero, Susanna Chilbert and M. G. Eisenhart, “Cubagua’s Pearl-Oyster Beds: The First Depletion of a Natural Resource Caused by Europeans in the American Continent,” Journal of Political Ecology (6:1999) found on the web at http://bit.ly/1LSyyce.

By my friend, playwright Ken Ludwig, who stopped in at Labyrinth Bookstore...

Writing about rough drafts in the previous post brought to mind a similar phrase, rough music. It is fortunately now archaic, but found quite common use in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world. It did not refer to an orchestra out of tune.

Rough music was the fate meted out by a mob to someone it disdained, despised, or feared. Robert Shoemaker describes the custom in The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (2007):

Rough music, Shoemaker notes, became “part of the vocabulary of urban protest” in America as well as in England. Two hundred-fifty years ago, in 1765, Parliament’s Stamp Act met with widespread protests in the American colonies, during which ‘rough music’ was administered either to the administrators of the stamp tax or, if they had fled, to effigies representing them. In November 1765, a mob in New York City coursed through its narrow streets with torches protesting the “death of Liberty.” Prominent among them was a seaman who bore on his shoulders a chair with a large paper effigy of the royal governor, Cadwallader Colden. Onlookers took potshots at the figure with pistols and shouted insults.

And then the mob decided it wanted more. Rowdies peeled off to the governor’s stable and fetched his fancy carriage to use in the parade as a representation of a papal throne. For in those days Protestants regarded the Roman Catholic pope as a symbol of tyranny. Indeed, for years in Boston an anti-Catholic celebration known as Pope’s Day was held annually, with rival mobs from the North and South Ends vying for the honor of getting up the more lively procession. Lanterns and torches surrounded carts bearing competing effigies of the Pope and Satan, as young boys with blackened faces paraded as devil’s imps.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the music will be sweeter, one can only hope, when Pope Francis makes his arrival in New York.

Journalists are fond of saying that news is the rough draft of history. And historians, looking down their noses from a perceived superior perch, are inclined to agree. For that reason alone, I should probably make this the first and last post of my blog. Rough drafts are notoriously short-sighted, present-minded, and liable to large dollops of misguided folly.

With enough sandpaper, though, the rough may be smoothed. I’ve long adopted the maxim that ‘writing is thinking and thinking is hard.’ Any piece worth its salt, be it history or journalism, begins with a rough draft, and the sandpapering commences from there. The act of writing forces thought. Rethinking and rewriting make the analysis better. That will be the goal of these entries: to provide a series of rough-draft reflections that, with any luck, will lead—weeks, months or years later—to something resembling rough wisdom.

Sandpaper requested. Any thinking benefits from multiple points of view. I welcome comments though I will moderate them. Too many sites on the Web mistake bear-baiting for dialogue, invective for reflection. Thanks in advance for your charity and contributions.