This one is too good to be true. It’s like something out of Tintin. Le Temple de Soleil specifically. Because on February 29 of 1504, on his fourth and final voyage, Christopher Columbus actually used his knowledge of astronomy and in particular of a coming lunar eclipse to trick the inhabitants of Jamaica into giving his starving expedition supplies by convincing them he had supernatural powers.

Wow. Columbus had his failings. But that’s a bold improvisation in a tight spot. In fact it’s been copied repeatedly, from H. Rider Haggard in King Solomon’s Mines to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to Hergé in that Tintin episode.

And why not? It really is a brilliant trick. So brilliant that when you read about it in real life, as with Columbus eating iguana and saying it tasted like chicken (yes, also a true story) you think it’s like something out of fiction.

Life. Stranger than a comic book, and even more exciting. But remember: Do not under any circumstances sail into the unknown with ludicrously inadequate preparations without an almanac.

Because you never do know. The moon might save your bacon.

Today is the anniversary of the Cry of Asencio on Feb. 28, 1811. If you’re wondering why Asencio was weeping, well, it was due to misgovernment in Latin America. And that’s gonna bring out a lot of tears.

The cry wasn’t actually a burst of sobbing, of course. Rather, it was a manifesto against colonial Spanish misrule, in Spanish the “Grita de Asencio”, that triggered the Oriental Revolution centred on the city of Montevideo, the capital of Spanish America after revolt in the older capital of Buenos Aires.

Without getting into all the weed, suffice it to say that the revolution succeeded but the Revolution failed. As the “great liberator” Simon Bolivar would lament on his deathbed, in terms of social change he had spent his life “plowing the sea”.

The Spanish empire was both moribund and seedily repressive and it needed to go. But the newly independent regimes copied its political style and its vices to the point that the improvement was hard to discern. Indeed, given how Spain eventually turned out a case could be made that not establishing independence would have brought better rule to Latin America from Madrid than what they got from where they were.

The contrast between this sad history and that of the Anglosphere is worth dwelling on to understand the importance and durability of political culture. Magna Carta was not a declaration of how men ought to be free but of how they were free and ought to remain so. And fundamentally they did, through the long and exciting history we trace in our documentary.

In Latin America, sadly, the noble proclamations are for the most part just “might have beens” to this day.

On this day in 1812, Feb. 27, Lord Byron opened his big yap in the House of Lords for the first time and said something colorfully irresponsible. As you’d rather expect.

Radicals might be torn between disdain for a hereditary upper house and enthusiasm for his view. And he would certainly have had difficulty getting into politics by any other route given his views and scandalous personal conduct, although some extraordinary people do manage to win elections.

In any case his impact on society, for good or ill, and it was the latter, had virtually nothing to do with his membership in the legislature. It was to do with the vehemence and seductive skill with which he put forward dangerous ideas.

His speech to the Lords was certainly in that category. It was essentially a sarcastic defence of Luddite violence against the new-fangled machinery associated with the First Industrial Revolution, that is, steam powered textile machines.

The thing is, Byron had a point about the impact of automation, both on the immediate prospects of those currently involved in the threatened technology, in this case hand-weaving, and on the long-run prospects for the average person to find meaningful work in a coherent community.

Modernity has many worrisome aspects, including the gaga enthusiasm of a lot of the sort of people who talk loudly for a living about robots, smart cars and appliances and this whole “Internet of things” that is not only deeply vulnerable to hacking but also threatening to the ability of normal people without graduate degrees to get jobs. Byron wasn’t wrong about that.

What he was wrong about, characteristically not just of Regency Romantic poets but of radicals generally, was in endorsing a violent and hopeless solution. The Luddites themselves carried out riotous acts of sabotage against machinery, clearly breaching the rule of law in ways that could not be allowed to stand or society would become a war of all against all. And their program was for state coercion to stop technological progress, an even more futile endeavor than state coercion to accelerate it. They aimed at the skull not the brain.

If there is to be a solution, a way either to hold back repellent and disruptive technology or to channel it into courses that enhance rather than undermine human dignity, it must be through cooperation, and a reordering of our own values away from novelty and ease toward meaningful participation in worthwhile creation.

In that quest, we will find Lord Byron to be what Lady Caroline Lamb (who he seduced into adultery then dumped) called him: mad, bad and dangerous to know. Even in the House of Lords.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPcHJA2ESAM Oh look. Colour movies. How cool is that? It sure makes February 26 a red, blue and green letter day.

Oddly enough, I’m thinking of February 26 1909, when 21 short films using the process were shown to the public at the Palace Theatre in London. Fully 30 years before the famous breakthrough of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind.

It’s easy to laugh at these early efforts, which are not realistic by our standards or, indeed, interesting. Inventor Albert Smith of Brighton, England, had earlier exhibited his riveting 8-minute A Visit to the Seaside (shown above) at a trade show. And the process itself, shooting alternatively through red and green gelatine filters and plain ones, is obviously a million miles away from Technicolour let alone today’s digital techniques for producing banal epics.

Likewise, it’s easy to laugh at films like Nosferatu, struggling to make the transition from stage to screen, or indeed King Kong, not just for the guy in the gorilla suit and the iguanas with toothpicks on their heads (or was that Flash Gordon)? But wipe your eyes and show some respect. Because at the time it was an amazing accomplishment and, indeed, a triumph of technique.

I mean that literally. I personally benefit today from Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and think the world of it. It allows you to do virtually anything you can think of on a laptop (or in my case, a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, a laptop in the body of a tablet). I still have to think of things, and master the controls. But behind the scenes, amazingly complicated miracles make transitions, colour correction and even animation super-user-friendly.

How did they do it back then? I mean gelatine can melt. Old-style celluloid film was highly flammable, which has cost us more than a few old-tyme. And how would you even do a simple dissolve without a computer?

The more I do my own video editing the more I ask that question with genuine awe. I know people in the industry who remember splicing sound literally, by using a razor blade on a strip of magnetic tape. No Ctrl-Z there, lads. But I watch old black and white films and try to figure out how they did simple transitions without having to continually expose new negatives, a process we would today term highly “lossy”.

It's humbling to think what the giants of yesteryear could have done with our technology, and how little we could have done with theirs. Even 1902’s A Trip to the Moon commands our respect in that regard, especially the hand-coloured version. Hey, you use what you have, right? And if we can put aside our jaded pseudosophistication and learn to see these with the eyes of an audience that does not regard Luke Skywalker’s light sabre as clumsy and outmoded, we will realize what we are seeing.

Magic.

On February 25 of 493 A.D. Odoacer, first king of Italy, surrenders Ravenna to Theodoric the Great and makes peace with him. At a subsequent reconciliation banquet in March, Theoderic kills Odoacer and has him sliced neatly in two. Man, if that’s how you make peace, I don’t want to be there when you make war. Or alliances.

Odoacer’s fate is a curious commentary on the nature of worldly ambition. He himself was a soldier who seized power in Italy, posing as representative of the Emperor Zeno in Constantinople but really running it himself at sword-point. He ousted the last emperor in the West, the hapless Romulus Augustulus, himself the product of a coup, (ironically it was by successfully besieging Augustulus in Ravenna, the capital of the Western “Roman” Empire between 402 and that siege in 476, that Odoacer prevailed) and for some reason called himself “Rex” as well as the title “patrician” received from Zeno against whom Odoacer was at war.

His biography makes for unattractive reading, slaying this guy, conquering that territory, lying, cheating, overreaching and being cleaved in twain at a peace banquet following which many of his followers were slaughtered for having backed the wrong thug. I think it’s fair to say it didn’t work.

Emperor Zeno himself had asked Theoderic to become king of Italy and do something about the no-good Odoacer. And he did. With his own hands. And to be fair ruled more or less happily ever after, promoting racial harmony between the Ostrogoths he settled in Italy and the Romans with whom he, um, forbade intermarriage (harmony is apparently an elastic term), slaying this guy, conquering that territory and yet contriving to die peacefully in bed in 526 in, of all places, Ravenna. I think I’d avoid it if I lived back then.

Or if I died. He was buried there, but another conqueror Belisarius scattered his bones in 540 A.D. and turned his mausoleum into a church that still stands. Unlike his kingdom.

Theoderic briefly united Ostrogoths and Visigoths through a complex system of alliances and marriages whose lowlights included his son-in-law Sigismund, king of Burgundy, killing his own son Sergeric, Theoderic’s grandson, leading to renewed war during which Sisigmund was beaten, disguised himself as a monk, and was beheaded and flung down a well.

Would it be naïve to ask, in light of such results, what’s with all the hacking, slaying and treachery?

I’m not saying I’d have had terribly useful advice if I’d lived there at the time, except the bit about not going to Ravenna without first prearranging. I’m not even having much luck giving advice in Canada where they never invite you to a peace banquet before smiting you on the collarbone with the sharp edge of a sword. But I am struck by the dangerously fatuous way people keep thinking this time killing, plotting and lying will build something lasting and worthy because this time it’s me.

Retreating into a monastery somewhere remote might not be a better answer, especially as the guys with swords will find you sooner or later no matter where you hide. Trying to straighten out the mess in public affairs is a duty of engaged citizens. I just wonder if being a bit more honest and less self-seeking might not be an improvement. Well, that and trying not to murder people at banquets.

Is it so much to ask?

Well, this sounds dull. On February 24 back in 1803 William Marbury’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus to force the Secretary of State to deliver his Justice of the Peace commission was rejected on the grounds that the Judiciary Act of 1789 was contrary to the original jurisdiction provisions of Article III of the Constitution.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Actually that paragraph was really exciting and important. No, really. Because the case, Marbury v. Madison, established that the United States Supreme Court could strike down laws that were contrary to the Constitution.

Well duh, you might say. But it’s neither dull nor duh. Because the operation of the United States Constitution we now take for granted, with three separate and equal branches, was by no means a certainty before this case or, indeed, in the immediate aftermath.

There were those, most prominently and even hysterically Thomas Jefferson, who denied that judges should be able to strike down laws. They would, he feared, make what James I had earlier called “shipman’s hose” of the laws if given this power. And certainly in our day judges have gone from striking down unconstitutional laws to inventing laws and constitutional provisions in a way that threatens the separation of powers, the rule of law, liberty and self-government. But none of that should be laid at the feet of Chief Justice John Marshall and his colleagues who made the pivotal ruling in Marbury.

Indeed, logically speaking I can see no alternative to their view that the entire constitution becomes shipman’s hose if laws that contradict it can nevertheless stand. But such an absurd result has indeed arisen among people who floated off into abstractions instead of grasping the necessary link between principles and practice. Indeed, the French Constitution of 1791 rigorously separated judicial, executive and legislative functions, to the point that neither legislators nor the King (still hanging in there) could exercise judicial functions and judges could neither strike down laws nor hear cases against executive branch officials related to their duties.

The result, of course, was that there was no rule of law. Whereas in the United States there is. There have been lapses, including Andrew Jackson’s infamous defiance of the Marshall court over Indian removal. And the Court has sometimes engaged in ludicrous as well as pernicious overreach, including in Dredd Scott in 1857 and Roe v. Wade in 1973. But I say again, John Marshall is not to blame.

His vision was of three equal branches, all doing their job and all checking each other. If courts in the U.S. and especially Canada are not checked, they should be, as Marshall envisioned. It’s very odd that we, in a singularly anti-American period, should have brought into our constitutional order an American element we understood so poorly that instead of making the courts too weak we made them far too strong. One more reason to regard the 1982 Constitution as a preposterous botch job.

As for John Marshall, major American historian Clinton Rossiter wrote toward the end of his book 1787 The Grand Convention that “by asserting the power of the court to ignore and thus invalidate laws judged to be unconstitutional, he put the last stone in place in the foundation of 1787. When Marshall had finished reading his opinion in Marbury v Madison on February 24, 1803, the grand convention stood at last adjourned.”

It was a monumental achievement, and an act of statesmanship which Americans and especially Canadians ought to be seeking to emulate in restoring constitutional balance.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (of all people) wrote “The pen is mightier than the sword.” You ain’t foolin’, buddy.

Consider that on this date, Feb. 23, as far as scholars can tell, the first Gutenberg Bible was printed back in 1455. At the time it seemed rather nebulously cool, and copies sold as far away as England and possibly Sweden for sums that would have hired a clerk for three years, but hardly revolutionary. After all, the Bible was already rather widely known and taken extremely seriously. And while Gutenberg’s Bibles were big and heavy, you’d still have come off badly wielding one against a man with a sword.

The thing is, of course, that printing with moveable type let people produce books far faster and, a subtly vital point, in identical editions. No matter how careful hand-copyists are, they do make mistakes, and most hand-copyists were reasonably prone to fatigue, distraction, discomfort and sheer carelessness.

With printed books, people can compare notes precisely at a distance. Which isn’t just good news for pedants. It allows for more detailed and precise scholarly conversation over time and space. And the profusion of books gave them more to argue over.

Plus you can print more than just books. The rise of Lutheranism and Protestantism generally owed more than a little to the proliferation of Bibles in the hands of lay people, in vernacular languages rather than priestly and largely inaccessible Latin. But it was also driven by the ease of printing polemical pamphlets.

Now I don’t know what you think of the Catholic Church. And I grant that especially after the Middle Ages but before the Reformation it had its flaws. But Lutheran pamphlets were frequently themselves disgraceful: inflammatory and scatological, not least those Lucas Cranach did for the bodily-function-obsessed Luther himself, showing peasants farting at the Pope and other subtle hilarity. And they worked.

The printing press blew Europe apart, shattering the admittedly already highly fractious “unity” of Christendom, reinforcing the rise of the nation-state by facilitating bureaucracy (no printing press, no forms, you see), helping commerce, prompting free thinking, encouraging intellectual experimentation, helping increase literacy and generally turning everything on its head.

The results have not been quite as uniformly wonderful as progressive enthusiasts would have you believe. But they have certainly been as revolutionary. And they have been so despite vigorous efforts to stop them by the application of military force itself made far more effective by the technological and intellectual dynamism fostered by the spread of printing.

Admittedly in hand-to-hand combat a half-way-decent sword still beats even a first-rate tactical pen. But when a printing press falls on a knight in armor, the Middle Ages is definitely done.

On this date in history, February 22, France invaded Britain. The expedition lasted two days, culminating in the ignominiously named, and ignominious, Battle of Fishguard. The “last invasion of Britain” it was. The Norman conquest it wasn’t.

The whole thing had a profound air of unreality about it. Including the force that actually landed, at Carregwastad Head in Pembrokeshire, Wales, being under the command of an Irish-American Col. William Tate, who had fought against the British in the American Revolutionary War but fled to France after a failed coup d’etat in New Orleans. It is a not a resume I’d suggest putting in the “hire” pile.

There were meant to be two other invasion forces, striking in Ireland and Newcastle, and marching in triumph on Bristol, Chester, Liverpool and London. Bad weather and mutiny stymied the other two and general futility the one that actually got ashore.

Also, it grew out of the French revolution, which is almost never a good thing. But there’s a more fundamental reason it failed. It was aimed at an Anglosphere country. So it annoyed the locals and they struck back.

Indeed, the whole thing has the usual comic-opera feel of failed plots. But a crucial element is that when some 1,400 troops from the melodramatically named La Legion Noire landed, most of the 800 irregulars took off to loot and pillage while the rest ran into about 500 armed citizens and sailors who walloped them.

Yes, armed citizens. Reservists and militia. Among the key characteristics of the Anglosphere until recently was that the people went armed, and the government was neither able to disarm them nor arm itself disproportionately. There is a Royal Navy and a Royal Air Force in Britain but no Royal Army, for the same reason that the British did not arm their police until the 20^th century. The people distrusted the government and kept it under control, not the reverse.

That is not to say that the people were ungovernable. Quite the reverse. They governed themselves, in both senses.

While given to all the failings humans are prone to, they were loyal to the political as well as social community and resolute in its defence. But they also were the political community and they knew it and never let their “betters” supplant or marginalize them, as so disastrously even in France, let alone outside western Europe.

It was a great source of strength, not just of cultural vitality and economic dynamism but of military strength if it came to it. A nation whose inhabitants assemble and crush an invading force in ways that make the expedition seem laughable is a mighty nation.

OK, Fishguard remains a wretched name for a battle. But you’d still far rather win it with armed citizens than lose it with professionals and a rabble.