The Gooey Duck

I’ve been in the Pacific Northwest for about a week, and am spending one day in Vancouver, prior to heading east tomorrow on the long trek back to Europe. Of course it doesn’t compare, but like the Portuguese sailors, I’m looking forward to home.

And yes, I know Vancouver is beautiful, and that one day is nowhere near long enough. But life is the art of the possible.

I’ve been looking at shellfish farms in the Willapa Bay and Puget Sound area, and keeping an eye out for other interesting things. The Portuguese explorer Cabrillo never made it to Puget Sound, and in fact the explorers sailing up the Californian coast under the Spanish flag found the upper section of the coast rather barren, and took a fair old beating, with nowhere inshore to shelter. Cabrillo and others completely missed the entrance to S. Francisco Bay. Incidentally, there is plenty of debate about Cabrillo’s nationality, and you’ll have to make up your own mind. I’m not sure it’s that important, particularly when his achievements are compared with those of the mariners in The India Road, but I did mention in an earlier post that the Spanish Archivo General de las Indias in Seville refers Cabrillo as being from Portugal – and the Spanish are pretty parsimonious about giving away their explorers.

Logging has been a major industry in the northwest, and in certain areas, the pulp mills had a devastating impact on water quality, for instance by discharging chlorine used for bleaching. One small bay I visited yesterday was practically dead for decades because of this. The mill was closed in 1957, and the bay took years to recover. In the long social process, the oystermen and timber people were often at odds, with their disagreements spilling onto the schoolyard where their kids would get into fights due to the reigning animosity.

Nowadays, three million pounds of clams are produced in one section of the bay alone, and the water filtration provided by the animals is an invaluable service in cleaning the bay. A clam will filter about half a liter of water every hour, and at a weight of ten grams or less each, those 1300 tons of clams will get through a million cubic meters of water every day. In US units, that’s over 250 million gallons!

This area of the Pacific is home to a rather impressive bivalve, who goes by the name of geoduck (gooey duck). It is scarcely known in Europe, and I first saw it (and ate it) in China.

Due to its phallic nature, interesting colour scheme, and large proportions, the Chinese unsurprisingly rate it as an aphrodisiac, and consume it with much enthusiasm. The export market over there is huge, and the animals are about five or six years old when they’re harvested and sold. But they can live for over a hundred years, so they can be bequeathed over several generations, and you may find that you’ve inherited grandpa’s favourite gooeyduck. The Chinese are not able to grow them locally yet, so I guess it’s currently a case of ecological penis-envy.

Speaking of competition, a book was published (in Portuguese) in mid-October romancing the life of the spy, Pero da Covilha, and I am due to attend the launch of another book in Lisbon next week, called “A Spy in the Discoveries”. Once again, this is in Portuguese, whereas my objective was to tell my story to an American audience. But the Portuguese translation of my book is going very well, and I am hopeful there will be a version published in time for Christmas.

I suppose I need to finish on-topic, or I’ll be accused of misrepresentation. Life has its wonderful little ways, and as luck would have it, there is a state college at Olympia which has the gooeyduck as a mascot for their athletics department. What could be more appropriate, particularly when confronted with the stirring lyrics of the Geoduck Fight Song ?

The older we are, the better we were…

The quote appears in a book by Victor Niederhoffer, interestingly titled “the education of a speculator”. I spent ten minutes on Amazon doing a cross-search to remember the author’s name – I used to have a copy of the book, but it seems to have vanished. Perhaps the recession destroyed it, who knows? As soon as I found a finance book by an author called Victor, loud bells rang, and it took me a few seconds to get the rest. I’m amazed at the power of the brain to dredge up information from years ago with only a little help, and I’m amazed at the brain itself. One of these days I’ll write about that.

At a table behind me at lunch were two men in their seventies, one of whom had lived a part of his life in Africa, I would guess Angola or Mozambique. In Portugal, it’s relatively easy to find people of that generation who had a similar experience.

They were discussing with some gusto the failings of the young generation, ranging from the inability to read (said one), and count (added the other), to the lack of knowledge about geography and politics. Among the foremost causes was the usual suspect, the computer.

I suppose it is that capacity of successive generations to forget the evils of their time which allows people to pass this kind of judgement. It explains why folks always seem to think the weather was better in their youth, or how schooldays can ever be classified as “the best days of your life”. It is that dilution of collective memory that starts new wars and wins elections for the incumbent.

Portugal, and the world as whole, is a far better place now than it was fifty years ago. Much of Eastern Europe was then under oppressive regimes, with no freedom of speech or thought. Portugal was about to embark on a fifteen year colonial war, which would ultimately topple the regime. The illiteracy rate in 1900 was 79%, and in 1980 it was still 18%. In 2003 it had fallen to 7%. Most of the kids who were contemporaries of those restaurant pundits could neither read nor write, let alone count.

Yes, it’s true that kids could know more, and that videobite news leaves little room for thought, leading to an immediacy which is often unsuited to the real world. Reflection is a good thing, but lots of activities favoured by youngsters promote that. Any child who likes games needs to think of a winning strategy, whether it’s soccer, chess or the latest esoteric offering on Wii. Surely Guitar Hero is better than air guitar…

And as for chess, don’t ever elect a president who can’t play it! Sometime last year, it struck me as a cool idea that a chess game might be played by three people against each other. Like most of my “good” ideas, this was not new, but I read a comment on it stating “normal chess isn’t difficult enough for ya?” which sums it up.

The other thing older people don’t get is the value of experience which is factored in the comparisons. Donald Knuth is quoted as saying that he believes it is important to teach a range of materials, including the things that don’t work. I subscribe. Kids only find out what works after getting hit on the head with what doesn’t. That’s reflection.

Barriers to entry

Today is the best day of my life. For all of us, this is an undeniable fact, since other, potentially (I don’t know yet) better days, have gone, and the rest are not yet here. Anyhow, it could be the last. I often wonder when I see all these young men and women getting killed, about how they felt that morning, which turned out to be their last.

Whenever I see people who are a good deal older than me it’s very simple to see myself at that stage, looking back at how I am now with a measure of longing, if not envy. For that reason alone, today always has to be the best day in my life. One of the golden rules is to not spend your time worrying about what tomorrow might bring.

The India Road is now well into its translation into Portuguese, so I have been revisting various parts of the book, checking meanings and interpretations, suggesting words, and in some cases finding mistakes. The translation is like another copy edit, and the guy who is doing the job is first-class.

Latin languages are more convoluted than English, and texts tend to become longer and more intricate. The India Road is based on an amazing story, fraught with difficulty and complexity, jumping across astronomy, oceanography, navigation, politics, and commerce. The aim of the book is to tell it in as simple a way as possible, adding plenty of human emotion, to break down barriers to entry – we have our work cut out trying to keep the translation simple.

Apparently it’s not so easy to find people who will translate a text into the author’s native language – the writer often succumbs to the temptation of micromanagement, and the translator can’t do his or her job. I hate micromanagement, it completely stifles initiative. In an academic context it suffocates faster than cyanide.

The problem is that it’s much easier to browbeat youngsters into that mindset than empower them to think, dream and soar. In Portugal, and many other countries, their educators often prefer it, particularly if they are not confident in their own knowledge; a thinking student will quickly expose a gap a mile wide. But in the end, these are severe barriers to entry for many young people, robbing them of the right balance of knowledge, imagination, self-confidence, and humility that can lead them up the yellow brick road.

Into Africa

For various reasons, this week has turned somewhat African for me. Portugal’s love affair with Africa has been going on for almost 600 years, which by the standards of modern relationships is certainly enduring. In the US, the average first marriage lasts eight years. And a marriage is pretty different from a love affair. In looking for those numbers, I discovered there’s even a divorce magazine. But I digress.

Somewhere along this interracial relationship, the couple went through a serious spate of domestic violence: fifteen years of colonial war. The Portuguese revolution in 1974 put an end to the strife by giving power to the left-wing independence movements in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique. These became political parties, and with the help of Russia, Cuba and others proceeded to do far worse in three decades than the Portuguese had done in three centuries.

The relationship with Portugal is now platonic, but don’t get me wrong. All over Africa, many of these countries are getting seriously screwed, there’s just been a change of partners. One of the reasons that the Portuguese are seen in a better light is because of the capacity to integrate. I was shown some slides yesterday of Malacca, Malasia, with a host of Portuguese landmarks, family names and culture.

In Mozambique, I have witnessed how the local people look down on the “cooperantes” from eastern Europe with revulsion, but are truly fond of the Portuguese. I’ve heard identical stories from Angola and every other country which was an ex-colony of Portugal. Aside from Macau. The best example of all is Brazil. Unlike the U.S., the Brazilians didn’t have to fight a war of independence.

The India Road deals with many technical aspects of ocean currents and winds, and I was told this week that those sections are accurate, in the judgement of someone who is perhaps the greatest living expert on the voyage of Vasco da Gama. My hope is that when you read the book, that part of the story will help you understand the true scope of the Portuguese discoveries in the fifteenth century and beyond, but told in a way that you won’t find boring.

Your reading life will be more enriched by reading good books twice than by reading twice the books. I don’t lay claim to a good book, but I can assure you there’s plenty in a second read that you won’t get from the first.

I’ll be returning to Africa next year, probably first to South Africa. Some friends from the Cape I saw earlier in the week told me that the universities there presently have a quota system, 2/3 of places for non-whites. Given that the white population of South Africa is at most about 10%, that’s food for thought.

Gold coins from the Bom Jesus - Courtesy J.M. Malhão Pereira

I was also privileged to see some pictures yesterday of the wreck of the Bom Jesus, which occurred in Namibia in 1533, in what is now “De Beers” country. The story has been written up in the October issue of National Geographic, and it’s worth a read. I was sitting in a house high up on the hills, overlooking the mouth of the Tagus, staring at a photo of a marine archeologist. holding a hatful of Portuguese and Spanish gold coins. You become a small child again when you see that shine of gold, and your mind fires up for the treasure hunt.

The Portuguese coins had the shield and escutcheons, the Spanish bore the profiles of the Catholic Kings, looking at each other. Isabella still looks as if she wears the pants.

Berlin Bolas

Airports and blogs seem to converge for me. I’m sitting in Frankfurt, waiting to connect to Lisbon, after a couple of days in Berlin, which by the way is a great city. I still haven’t managed to find the answer to one of my curiosities: the exact meaning of “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

There is an apocryphal tale that JFK’s famous words really mean “I am a donut”, and the expression should have been “Ich bin Berliner.” On beaches in Portugal, people make money in summer by walking back and forward shouting “bolas de Berlim”, and selling these donuts to hungry sunbathers. Kids love to imitate the shouting, introducing an extra measure of entropy into the mix.

I was in Berlin for a meeting and it reminded me of my very early days in Lisbon, starting out as a young graduate. It included, in unusually large proportions, people who insisted on talking loudly, repeatedly, and often saying not very much. When I first started out, that was the standard Portuguese technique: shout your opinions, interrupt proceedings, and generally impose your views through mayhem. In my mind, I christened this new group TLC: not for Tender Loving Care, but as the Talk Loudly Club.

On the outbound leg, I stopped by the airport bookstore to find out how to place The India Road there for sale. I had already done the same at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. Until the 11th October, it has an exhibition called “Encompassing the Globe” on the Portuguese Discoveries, which was originally produced by the Smithsonian Institution. Holland Cotter wrote an interesting article on it for the NY Times. If you’re in Lisbon, don’t miss it. The museum is in a pretty cool area of Lisbon anyway, and if after your visit you walk east towards Cais do Sodré, you go by the Ribeira, where the ships were built for India. The whole of that downtown area was levelled by the earthquake of 1755 and the following fire and tsunami. Many crucial records of the Portuguese XVth and XVIth century discoveries were lost forever. What I hadn’t realized was that the effects were also strongly felt in Seville, with a tsunami wave surging up the Guadalquivir.

Anyhow, back to selling books. Or rather, selling is not the key driver, I just want people out there to be aware of it, and decide if they want to read it. If as a result you buy a copy, great.

The reflection here is that the new business model for music, video, and now becoming more relevant for books is still only a partial empowerment. As many would-be artists have found on YouTube, the problem is not publishing your work, it’s the rest of it.

The simple equation is:

Exposure = Creation + Publication + Visibility

and:

Success = Exposure + Acceptance

Materially, revenue is a (rather variable) function of success. As is happiness.

The net has done a great job of empowering the creation and publication (along with the duplication), and so far, the revenue dilution caused by illegal downloads has not obviously affected creativity. But since artists need to eat, it will tend to, unless the artist community is prepared to return to the system of patronage which fed the great painters of the renaissance, or starved the ones who were not so fortunate or competent. Or maybe artists will be supported through an internet tax.

So interestingly I’ve been getting mail shots about book fairs, my publisher in Portugal has asked for the go-ahead to begin publicizing the launch of “A Estrada da India” which is due out sometime in the fall… in other words, the classic marketing mechanisms which promote sales. This area is one where search engines, blogs, and the Long Tail (which I previously discussed) are not very useful.

The Long Tail, or Pareto distribution, came back to me as I discovered how to use the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon. I am driven by what Eddie Izzard calls technojoy (please don’t click the link yet, I’ll explain in a moment). “Look Inside” is great, but there is still the problem of finding the book in the first place. It’s like the book somewhere at the back of the store, which is really hard to find, before you can look inside – and it’s a gigantic store! So only sales, or cash (curiously called “bar” in German), bring it out of the back shelves and to the front. Physical bookstores, CD and DVD stores, get paid by publishers to promote books on the front racks. Just like supermarkets. I wonder if Amazon does it too? hmm…

I think yes. Thanks for holding on. Go look at that link now. If you’d clicked before you’d never have come back here, because Eddie Izzard was just brilliant back then!

Requiem

Last week was the 40th anniversary of a music festival held on a farm in upstate New York. It was later described as three days of Love, Peace and Music, which arguably could also be called LSD, Promiscuity and Marijuana. Whatever you might think about it, the generation that attended was born in the post-war baby boom (there were 500,000 of them there), and is now about to verify whether Paul McCartney’s predictions in “When I’m 64″ are true or not.

Country Joe McDonald, who for present generations would have to be considered obscure, sang a song about the Vietnam war at the festival which could well apply to Afghanistan today (“don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop Afghanistan”). He is perhaps even better remembered for the “Gimme an F… What’s that spell?” rag.

Of course there is no longer a compulsory draft in the US, the UK and many other countries, but the worldwide recession has drawn many young people to the military as an alternative to unemployment. Lack of choice can become an obligation. The common ground is that young people are dying for reasons neither they nor their parents comprehend. The Karzai government recently approved a law authorising husbands who were denied sex to starve their wives. I would imagine this and many other violations of human rights are commonplace in that country as in so many others, but I don’t see the need to enshrine them in legislation. I can’t imagine it helps western troops to identify with the cause.

In the end, democracy will both win and lose. It will win in the occupying troops because public pressure will call them home, and lose on the ground of the occupied land, where the mindset of the country is not tuned to the right station. In medieval Europe, feudal life did not respect borders, power structures served individuals.

The Our Father and Hail Mary - a medieval cartoon

There is an excellent exhibition right now in Seville, in the Archivo General de las Indias, on the role of Spain in the Americas (the “Indias” misnomer is part of the whole Columbian misconception) which illustrates this very well. That same feudal structure is what we are trying to change, by applying a western mindset to societies which are 300 years or more away from the values we cherish. We have no chance. We can’t do it, they don’t want it.

Incidentally, the exhibition, which is extremely parsimonious in praising the role of Portugal in the whole process of XVth century discoveries, does concede that Juan Cabrillo, who discovered San Diego and made his way up the Californian coast all the way to Point Reyes (latitude 38 degrees, about the same as Lisbon) was actually Portuguese. Various websites state that he was in the service of Spain, but that is a modern mindset. Like Fernão de Magalhães, another Portuguese who is known in English as Magellan, Cabrilho served the King of Spain. Not Spain, which in any case only existed as a kind of conglomerate at the time, held together by fragile links of bloodlines and bloodshed.

This August has been a particularly sad period, brightened only by the appearance in print of The India Road. If you want a copy, you can get it from Amazon US or Amazon UK. I found two typos in short order which everyone missed. Nothing like the cold hand of the printed page, exposing the weakness of digital camouflage. Life is in many ways a series of small deaths followed by one big one, and as I said in an earlier post, you need to enjoy the process, not the end-point. As the great ecologist Howard T. Odum wrote, you need a macroscope so you can look at yourself and others around you from a sensible distance; only then can you understand your “ecosystem”. That perspective will cure all your little deaths. All kids should have things around them ending in “scope”. If you were lucky enough to have a telescope to play with when you were little, you were fascinated to see things close up, as if you were spying on the world.

When I was small, my mother explained that if I examined the stars, I would be looking at light from millions of years ago, and the object I saw might no longer be there. I used to love the idea that someone on the other side, with a really good telescope (with a TV screen, night vision and little green antennae) would be looking down and seeing dinosaurs wandering around 200 million years ago. The second thing you did with your telescope (apart from hit your kid brother or sister over the head) was to flip it around. And when you looked at life from that far away you had yourself a macroscope.

Chicago blues

Chicago is a wonderful town. I just drove in from the suburbs, where the Historical Novel Society conference was held, and am looking down on Lakeshore Drive from a height of about 300 ft, watching the sun set over Lake Michigan.

The conference itself was interesting, it was surprising for me that the vast majority of writers (and readers) are women, and I learned a lot. Sex was a prominent feature of the discussions, which was to say the least a curiosity. I couldn’t help smiling to myself as I sat in a room full of highly respectable ladies hell-bent on discussing the finer points of writing about orgasm. How different from the discussions at the science conferences I attend. Although a story told by a Dutch colleague did come to mind, of a diagram shown in a slide during a talk on plant physiology. By all accounts, the gigantically projected image bore a striking resemblance to a vagina, complete with labia and clitoris, much to the satisfaction of the audience and the puzzlement of the oblivious male presenter.

The conference was a new experience for me, as you know, and I felt a great empathy with the many people who have become unemployed, and search for or secure jobs in a totally new field. I was in the unusual situation of not knowing anyone, and had to tread water vigorously to avoid sinking out of my depth. The respect I already had for those who are rebuilding their lives in these hard times increased tenfold. And it reminded me of what young scientists go through when they start up the ladder. It’s been almost 30 years, and I’d lost perspective. Good to have it back. Humility applied with proportionate force is always a strength rather than a weakness.

I’m driving a Prius, which is a curious machine, I keep thinking I’m driving one of the old UK electric milk floats, silent but deadly. And it keeps speaking to me about kilowatts, so I don’t know if I’m driving a car or boiling the kettle. But true to America’s wonders, the hybrid only pays half-price for valet parking in the hotel.

Since I am more caught up with marine activities, it would be unlikely to find myself in Chicago on business, which makes me wonder how many great inland cities I don’t know. Although Lake Michigan looks like an ocean from here. Then of course there’s the music, which for me is a godsend. The guy who helped me with my bags plays trombone, and I popped into Buddy Guy’s and found a blues band rocking the place. On a Sunday. At 4pm. Siesta time the world over!

Buddy’s is at Wabash and 8th, and as you walk south from the Chicago River, past Macy’s and the like, the landscape changes from ritzy white to something altogether different in about a block. I was expecting the club to be more swanky, but it’s just what a blues bar should be. No reservations, music good and loud, no one cares if you go in and just listen, they know that in a while the thirst will come. And lots of minor chords.

John Lee Hooker - Guitar

… Somehow I knew this story couldn’t end here. I found myself walking south on Wabash around 10 O’Clock last night, heading for the blues. Subconsciously, I knew it might well happen so I had taken cash only, no passport, no cards. That whole area seemed run down but safe. Still, things can change in the small hours. No crowd at the door, fifteen bucks to get in.

The band started at half past. Lil’Ed and the Blues Imperials. I’d never heard of them, have you? Two white guys and two black guys, the white guy kicked it off and played a couple of amazing songs, clearly the man in charge. Of course I’d forgotten the old blues move of warming up the main act. Lil’Ed plays slide, and I never heard anything that made me want to give up guitar so fast. Best gig I ever saw in my life. Period.

This man is straight out of another generation of blues, which makes it even stranger that I’d never heard of him – he was born in 1955. Plenty to see on YouTube, but watching the band live in a small club is breathtaking. Funny too, good music should always bring a smile to your face, but watching Ed sing “Check my my baby’s oil” (someone bin stickin’ their dipstick in her oilpan) is downright hilarious.

I only made it back to the tony side of town around 2.30am. Walking up Wabash at that time is fairly lonely, but aside from discouraging a few anatomical propositions from lurking night people of both sexes, it was calm itself. Reminded me of my dad, who was in Tenessee in 1971, and told me that only him and black people walked. Everyone else drove. Anyhow, even if I’d been interested, I only had three bucks in my pocket. Today is starting off slow, but I doubt very much anything I do could beat what I did last night. By the way, I’m not sure I’d eat at Buddy’s, although the food might well be good. I can vouch for the whisky, though.

The flip side

I was in Italy last week, up in the northern area of the lakes. It’s a great place, with true quality of life, and some of the best wines in the world. Italy functions, although you need to hunt for internal consistency, not logic, when you try to understand the country. But that is a universal truth.

The italians have fielded dozens of governments since World War II, and thrive despite government, not because of it, humming along on a mixture of soccer, great food, and presumably some Roman organizational genes left over from the times of Caesar.

Also, the country was rife with the new retro baby Fiats. I started off driving one in the late 1970’s, which was christened “the egg”, and cost 43 Portuguese “contos”. The “conto” was short for “conto de reis”, literally a tale of kings. The equivalent in escudos, the old pre-euro currency of Portugal, was one thousand – a huge fairy tale sum. Works out to 5 euros. So that brand new egg cost around 220 euros. The Italians now make them in a host of different colours, from red, green and blue painted Easter eggs to black Chinese preserved eggs.

The old eggs were a huge success in Europe, ported to Tito’s former Yugoslavia as the Yugo, to Franco’s Spain as the Seat, and seen everywhere. The poor family’s car, but with a cross-purse appeal. Like any universal classic, families were started in them (I personally tried to start a couple), transported in them, taught to drive in them, made nicknames for them. And now small is beautiful again, and the Italians have come full circle. Well, almost… If we get any greener, we’ll all be driving Vespas again, and our urban landscape will be a cross between Fellini and Manhattan.

Still in the car world, I’ve been struck by the paradox that China, a communist state, is fomenting the capitalist business model at all levels, while the US, the world bastion of liberalism, is in the business of government-owned manufacturing and banking. As Stephen Stills might say, “there’s something happening here”…

History teaches us about the future, and the present teaches us to appreciate history. As I write, the world is puzzled by the Air France plane which went missing in the intertropical convergence. Our world is now so different from a couple of hundred years ago, where ships went missing without a heartbeat. In the days of the Portuguese caravels, which navigated the route down the Brazil coast where the airliner disappeared, perhaps half the ships vanished. That was one of the reasons for the “Padrão”, or pillar, that was set on newly-discovered lands – in some cases it was the “black box”.

Let me update you on The India Road, which is now contracted for publication by Fronteira do Caos in Portugal, after translation. That is ongoing, so the book launch is planned for this fall. I think a publisher called “Chaos Frontier” is highly appropriate in the context of my life, I just haven’t figured out which side of the border I’m on.

The original (US) version will come out in IUniverse this year, and we’ll see what happens after that. The key thing, as I wrote in a previous post, is to understand that this is a process, like life, and to enjoy every minute. There are no end-points, only milestones. End-points are only good if you’re a strong believer in the afterlife. Next week I’ll be at the Historical Novel Society Conference in Chicago, where I hope to understand better other parts of the process. And to listen to some Chicago blues. Portugal has a version too, it’s called Fado.

E-Piracy

This morning, in Lisbon airport, one of the stores sold a bunch of plastic kiddies figures, in menacing stances, featuring the well-known pirates of the Spanish Main; Blackbeard, Morgan and the like. No Somalis, which I think misses a market opportunity. Somali piracy is fascinating, a true product of the information age. The Somali pirates, mainly destitute teens armed with RPGs, a pretty explosive mix, are not really pirates. The classic pirate which I grew up reading about had a very predictable M.O.: board the vessel, after making it heave to, secure the cargo, and dispose of it for a profit. Or in extreme cases raid targets on land.

These new guys have disproportionate firepower, and in the age of the videobite, or the twittertime, tap into the fact that the shipowners must safeguard cargo and crew. The Somalis don’t want the cargo, only the ransom payment. In the golden age of piracy, it would have taken six months for the shipowner to hear of the seizure, and (maybe) pay the ransom, so it would never have succeeded as a business model. The other aspect of the current spate of pseudo-piracy is that the use of proportional force aboard the merchant vessels is not an option – only non-lethal weapons are aboard; is that pepper spray and tasers against RPGs?

So the navies of the world powers are spending millions (of public money) in defending a shipping route in the Horn of Africa. And no one knows what to do with the pseudo-pirates (Rowdy Pubescent Gunners?) when they’re captured – and if they get sniped, as recently happened, two dozen more come out of the woodwork. Because when you’re hungry, destitute, and see no future, even with the naval might patrolling the Arabian Sea, you are dangerous. And it’s all the modern communications facilities that ensure the pirate success: E-Pirates, cashing in on a totally unexpected use of new technology.

But piracy comes in many forms. Woody Guthrie sang: “I been robbed for cash and I been robbed on credit.” It’s 9pm, I’m sitting on a Air France jet, flying from Paris to Lisbon, in a business class seat which cost me a packet – one way. After an unbelievably poor level of service, being “automatically” bumped off a connecting flight, and refused any form of compensation for damages, including missing a key meeting.

The area around Somalia was well known both to Pero da Covilha, the Spy in The India Road, and to the Portuguese XVth and XVIth century sailors. On January 2nd 1499, Vasco da Gama bombed Mogadouxo (Mogadishu) on his way back from Calicut, not due to any particular piracy, just for good measure. Proportionate force. The North Arabian Sea has been the monsoon route of the spice trade for over 2000 years, so it isn’t surprising that it is legendary for piracy and greed. And now it’s home to a new play, E-Piracy.

Springboard to the East

For Europeans, to travel anywhere in Europe outside their own country is a chance to see different scenery, new nations, and experience local customs, food and drink. But Europe is well-mixed, both in culture and blood; A+ is by far the most common blood group in Europe, with exceptions such as the Basques, where Rh negative is dominant.

When I go to different European countries, I feel completely at home. I prefer some to others, but there is a commonality which gives Europe its own identity in the world. Of course they drink beer in the north, wine in the south, but Visa will get you by anywhere, and so will English.

But take a step into Africa, across the straits at Algeciras, and land in Ceuta, 40m later, and you are in a new world. The escutcheons of the Portuguese crown still visible on the flag, a memory of the conquest from the Moors in 1415 by the greatgrandfather of King John II, John I of Portugal.

Or take off from the cosmopolitan vibe of Lisbon and land in Mozambique, where you feel the warmth of the land and the people, and the soft kiss of the Indian Ocean, in a crazy mix of Portuguese colonial architecture and avenues named after Marxist-Leninists of total irrelevance to the locals.

That is when travel becomes disruptive, and fascinating. Everything is different, incomprehensible and fun. After you’ve done it, you can never see it on TV. Because there is no smell. No heat. That notion that things might suddenly become dangerous, or that you swam out too far, and what’s that dark shape anyway? And a trip in Europe is like popping to the grocery store.

The Spy is about to arrive in Alexandria. Everything will be different from now on.

http://www.theindiaroad.com/blog/1487 – The Knights of the Hospital.pdf

This is the last public post for The India Road, now all chapters are redone. Everything will be different from now on.