The Implausible Admiral

 

A regular theme here at "Just Sayin'" is the rogues gallery:  rascals and larger-than-life characters whose stories are always better than fiction.

Take one Anthony Sherley (1565 - 1635), adventurer, Oxford graduate and son of a wealthy English family.  It seems the Sherleys lost their land and fortune (this was during the Tudor era, when such a rude twist of fate was pretty common) and the sons had to take to foreign lands and the seas between to find their way in the world.  There is, of course, constant danger; after Anthony was awarded a knighthood by French king Henry IV, Queen Elizabeth back home was so irritated she out jailed him so he could rethink that, which he did.

It was time to absent oneself from such vigilance, so Sherley took to privateering on the west coast of Africa and all through the Spanish Main.  And then, oddly enough, he went to Persia and so charmed Shah Abbas the Great that monarch made him a prince and his worldwide ambassador.  Rebuffed by Muscovy, he was warmly welcomed by the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of Spain.   News of his service even led to a mention in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night!

How Sherley fooled the savvy Shah, and next the Spanish king, will never be known.  But why would the latter appoint him admiral of a fleet being assembled to attack the Turks?  After all, there was the memory of the Armada disaster and Sherley's own extensive career raiding his majesty's New World empire.  Not mention just having been an employee of an infidel potentate.

Now our intrepid Prince and Admiral made a misstep: failing to link up with the naval forces headed to war with the Barbary pirates at Tunis as he was commissioned to do, he instead raided merchant ships and, unsuccessfully, the Greek island Mytilene.   Sherley's large expenses were to be covered by new taxes on lawyers in Sicily (then a Spanish possession).  The lawyers, churchmen and the nobility-dominated Parliament were incensed.  The rich revolted at the very idea of being taxed, and proposed arming the poor as a mob to make sure that did not stand.  It worked, then as now (Tea Party...), of course.

The Spanish lost confidence in the High Admiral, and he spent the last 30 years of his life barely tolerated at that Court as a supplicant, in poverty.

Stories, maybe true or maybe not, attach themselves to such outlandish actors over time.  It is said Sherley claimed to the Sicilian Viceroy that he knew a secret alchemical process for making silver and how to seize the fabled gold mines of Timbuctoo!  

   

  

The Real Thing

 

One of the pleasanter tasks of summer is choosing which treats will go in the choose-your-own six-pack at the grocery store to be enjoyed on the deck in the dappled shade later on.  We actually found some Coors Banquet Beer bottles in the cooler last week!  Have not seen that in a while.  If something is well made and has been for a long time, it has an attractive air of authenticity.

Coca-Cola boasts that it's "The Real Thing," but since it went to all HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) as sweetener by 1984, I don't think it's been real since.  Or maybe after 1929, when the last traces of cocaine -- or a very similar substance -- were removed.  It was, after all, sold as a stimulant, and coca leaf with caffeine is inarguably that.  And I remember being very disappointed when real German Lowenbrau was no longer imported, but made by Miller-Coors just using the name under license.  Brands sometimes persist like ghosts, seen as having a built-up value, long after the original is gone.    

 If you have met a cat or baby, you can see that they are drawn to authentic things.  Our one-year-old granddaughter just flies to buttons, zippers, paper, container lids and boxes.  And the bought cat toys pretty much lie ignored by Blackberry the cat (a natural thing like a bug has a lot more appeal).   

 We know places become loved to death by mass tourism, and what was originally the draw gradually, then mostly, disappears.  It seems that the tropical island of Bonaire is still an authentic place on the globe, with only about 140,000 visitors a year (HersheyPark, in contrast, hosts three million).  It is primarily a divers' paradise, not a mega resort spot or a cruise ship destination, without international chain restaurants and the locals operating their own small businesses.  Now forget you ever heard of it.

Growing your food, or buying locally produced, and preserving it at home takes planning and deliberate effort, but the feeling of satisfaction (and the taste) is, well, the real Real Thing.   We don't have access to a big garden anymore, but do make a lot of jam, applesauce and sometimes pickles to keep that tradition going.

   

The Puffin, The Piano and the Pirate

 

When visiting coastal places with palm trees, we enjoy strolling around marinas.  I'd much rather admire estate homes, impressive cars and boats than own one.  Boats, especially, live up to their description as "holes in the water to throw money into."  But our recent visit to Hilton Head Island brought forth a memory of one day and night I enjoyed of that diamond life.

  Way back, growing up in suburbia,  we had a neighbor family unlike any other around there.  Mr. and Mrs. Bill S. and their two daughters had an ordinary home, but on entering you did not see anything like the ordinary:  no furniture in the living room except for a gleaming black Steinway piano and a huge black and white photo of a movie pirate.  The piano represented the girls' exceptional musical talent (the younger played a gold-plated flute), and the picture told you something essential about Mr. S.  

From 1969 to January 1974 he owned a legendary ketch (a two-masted yacht) called the Pious Puffin II, built in 1947 at Amsterdam.  The previous owner, Josephine Forrestal, widow of the Secretary of the Navy, had purchased it to donate to Bob Jones College of Jacksonville, Florida.  It had a short stay there, as two professors tore the 65' masts off under a bridge (here it is languishing, post-accident:)

Mr. S. bought it for $64,000 to restore and then put the Puffin into charter service.  He had operated a marina and could do just about anything (he had a degree in music education, was a jazz drummer, and at this time was a self-employed telephone systems consultant0.  But things went awry, as any foreign-hulled boat could not be used as a charter in the U.S.  He took the matter to Congress, but the bill was nixed in committee, since the law was clear and the sort-of association with James Forrestal was not enough to make an exception.  

Many friends and family enjoyed the magnificent Puffin anyway, with its built-in piano, stained glass, engraved cocktail shakers and room to sleep eleven and three crew.  A couple married on her in 1971.My one day and night on her was devoted to work, sanding, polishing and applying pumice paint to the edges of the deck.  The Puffin went up and down the East Coast, to Chesapeake Bay and the Caribbean, and I didn't, but it was the coolest anyway.

 A couple from Iowa bought the boat to complete the restoration, but there were not sufficient funds left to make their planned around the world sail.  It ended its 33-year career as the official Pirate Week vessel at Grand Cayman; it was scrapped in Miami by 1980.

Looking like Errol Flynn, Mr. S.  lived, in a way, the life of the pirate on the living room wall.  And I will probably never meet anyone like him again.

"The Greatest Liar on Earth"

 

(No, not the Mean Tangerine and his gang of mendacious morons.  They should remember what Dean Wormer said: "Loud and stupid is no way to go through life, son.")

John Hance was born into a family of fifteen in Tennessee in 1838.   Things did not go really well for him earlier in life.  After joining the Confederate army, he was captured, imprisoned in the awful Alton, Illinois camp but was fortunately exchanged.  He headed West with Wild Bill Hickok's brother as a teamster and scout and escaped death again after being wounded three times in brush-ups with native Americans.  

John then went prospecting, but like most, found pretty much nothing.   Did he finally give up?  Not at all -- he headed to the Grand Canyon and built a legend for himself as he became a guide and host for visitors.  Theodore Roosevelt was so amused by Hance's tall tales while exploring the trails in 1903 he bestowed that "Greatest Liar" title.   Well deserved:  two that are remembered was that he claimed to have dug the Canyon by himself, and that his horse could fly over it on top of the fog.   If he was not used by Mark Twin as a model for a character, he should have been.

John's last home was a cabin at the beginning of the Bright Angel Trail.  He was the first person interred, in 1919, in the Grand Canyon Pioneer Cemetery.  Would that we had someone like him in the news today.

  Reclusive artist Arthur Harold Beal, another endearing eccentric, left behind a more tangible legend in the form of gigantic folk art.  In 1928 he purchased a steep tract in Cambria, California, and spent the next fifty years building Nitt Witt Ridge, a sprawling "castle on the hill" using only manual tools.  It was made of wood, concrete, car parts, appliance parts, stone, cans, shells and beach debris, and supposedly parts of the nearby Hearst Castle where he is said to have worked for a time.

Neglected and vandalized for seven years after his death in the early 1990s, it was bought and opened for tours.  Today Nitt Witt Ridge is a California Historical Landmark.  So Beal finally attained some respectability and stature, things he probably could have cared less about!

   

For Twenty Four Centuries

 

"My intellectual desire is to escape life as I know it and dream myself into that old world..."

George Gissing, successful 19th Century British novelist (23 books in 23 years), had reasons for finding comfort in nostalgia for the ancient world.  Two miserable marriages and expulsion from the college he had worked so hard to attend, as well as ill health, made a trip to the lands of Magna Grecia in far southern Italy a tempting diversion.  

His final goal was to visit the sole remaining fragment of the largest temple built in the old Greek colonies, that of Hera Lacinia, at Capo Colonna, the easternmost point of the Calabrian peninsula.  The temple had endured from the 5th Century B.C. until the 17th Century, before it was ignominiously dismantled for use in building projects in nearby Cortone.  But disappointment dogged Gissing, who had become too ill with malarial fever  to go beyond a sight of the lone Doric column in the distance.  He did, however, leave a fine account of his travels, By The Ionian Sea, published just two years before his death in 1903.  It is still currently available, fortunately, in several reprints. 

An excavation in 1910 revealed a good many objects from the vanished temple of surprising artistic quality; above is a gold diadem that crowned the statue of Hera.  While it seems impossible that it was not looted long ago, ancient coins showing it in place on the statue seem to prove its authenticity.  Votive offerings also found, now in the local archaeological museum,  were far above the level of the usual terracotta or minor jewelry items:

 

   A 1095 review in The Nation stated "The book is worth reading from beginning to end."  Rather faint praise.  But like the stalwart temple column, Gissing's work will stand the test of time.

I Want To Believe

 

People want to be fooled.  The fun ways include April Fool's jokes,  magic acts, haunted house attractions, and movie magic (heroes, fantastical superheroes and action-adventures).  Other situations are dangerous, morally ambiguous or just a waste of money:  carnival sideshows,  patent quack medicines, mass scams and speculative bubbles like the South Seas and tulip hysterias, and more recently the 1920's stock market and the 2008 real estate blowup.  And many do fall for telephone and e-mail frauds because it just may be that this time you win and get something for little or nothing.  

Shamans and priests throughout history have leveraged knowledge of mysteries, herbs and hallucinogens to gull generations.  People really want to believe that sort of thing.  Psychopaths are highly skilled in fooling and manipulating others; even the educated and savvy can fail to detect one in time, or at all.  They can take a lot more than your money, as any viewer of Dateline is aware.

Psychopathic dictators and strongmen can fool masses of people to reach for their guns and act completely against their own interests.  Such people want a strong leader in total control who will defend them from imagined enemies and allow them to escape mundane reality by roiling in emotion.  Easy to fool people consumed by fear and absolute conviction. 

  They hate educators and "experts" (after they're told to) because they do not want their dreams, hopes and beliefs to be discredited by the facts.   They badly want to be fooled.

As another blogger advised so well:  Act rationally in an irrational world.

 

Fools' Gambit

 

Today is the 50th anniversary of President Nixon's visit to open up China and welcome it into the world community.  Unlike other grim anniversaries such as 12/7/41 and 9/11/01, it was not a call for unity but just an unnecessary surrender in advance.  "The U.S.president put himself in the position of supplicant to Beijing.  Chinese state media said a prosperous China would be a peaceful China, and it would be a huge market for American exports." (June Dreyer of the U. of Miami)

But the exact reverse happened.  

Domestic big business saw a large untapped market in China as well as a source of very cheap outsourced labor.  Nixon thought he could pry China away from the Soviet Union (they had a little tiff going) and possibly get some cooperation in ending the Vietnam War, in addition to advancing those big business dreams.  

What we got instead was a disastrous trade imbalance in China's favor, closed manufacturing plants, loss of jobs and hope in cities and rural areas, and a tsunami of inexpensive low-quality goods that do not  last.  My grandparents had several Vornado floor fans, built like tanks, for the summer.  They worked for decades.  Now all you can find is Chinese-made ones that are wobbly plastic contraptions whose switches will fail in a few months, and are of course unrepairable.  

  And there seems to be no way out now.  In answer to Trump's retaliatory tariffs, China put the brakes on American grain imports, devastating the Midwest.  I saw this myself on the Mississippi River, where loading stations were deserted and barges, normally following each other closely, were nowhere to be seen.  

In 1972, China was divided by its Cultural Revolution and despite saber-rattling was not a credible regional threat.  Now they have a large, very modern Navy and Air Force -- and guess who paid for it.  Masters of the long game, after 72 years Taiwan and the South China Sea are easily within their grasp.

Like hornet nests and sleeping junkyard dogs, some things are best left alone.