"I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible – for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man’s creation, of the uneasy doubt arising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death – the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct." The narrator, Marlowe, in Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
On this date in history the Jamestown settlement burned down. As if they didn’t have enough problems already. Mind you it wasn’t much of a settlement back on January 7 of 1608. Basically a fort full of fools who didn’t know where they were, how to grow crops or almost anything else you’d want in the old tool kit if you were, say, moving to a new continent in the age of sail.
Be that as it may, there was a lot more there before the fort burned down than afterward. For instance a fort in which to take refuge if the locals attacked you because of something you had done like steal from them or lie to them or show up looking ominous, or just because they had a habit of attacking anyone handy. (Correct answer: all of the above; despite PC versions the first deadly aboriginal attack occurred within two weeks of their arrival.)
Undaunted, they rebuilt the fort and lounged about in it during the "starving time" in which nearly everybody died after eating boot soup (less from the quality of the boots than the insufficient quantity) and various expeditions from England brought more food and more fools. Indeed, just five days before the fire a ship showed up without enough food and 70 more mouths to feed.
Nevertheless John Smith did pull them through the worst of the crisis including abolishing socialism and discovering that people did more work if the benefits were fairly distributed, of all things. And Jamestown prospered and flourished and so did Virginia and then the United States with all its great virtues and some scary defects.
It remains amazing that such a ludicrous venture could in fact succeed despite everything from bad preparation if any to the hostility of the far more numerous locals to choosing a swamp as your ideal site to the worst drought in 700 years to carelessness with fire in your only building. As with many things in history, we should not take it for granted just because it did happen. Certainly if you’d been standing among the blackened timbers on January 7, 1608 you’d have been likely to say "OK, that’s it, I’ve had it, where’s the ship home?"
Only to be told it was one more thing we didn’t really think of.
"In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly." Anonymous, quoted by The Prairie Centre newsletter Vol. II Issue 3 (1995-96)
In my second video for Canadians for Energy East, a project of the Economic Education Association of Alberta, I explain what opponents should not say about them and what supporters should.
If you’d lived in Spain in 1492 you would have considered January 6 a very big deal indeed. For on this date Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile respectively, who ruled a semi-unified Spain, entered Grenada and completed the “Reconquista” of Spain from Muslim invaders after a mere seven and three quarters centuries.
You would have been much less likely to get excited at the sailing on August 3 of that same year of three modest ships from Palos de la Frontera under the command of a deluded Genoan explorer who thought Eurasia was way bigger, the Earth considerably smaller and Japan a lot further east than any of them actually were. Yet that’s the date we still remember: "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Or maybe they don’t do that bit in schools or homes any more because Yes, it’s Christopher Columbus, once much celebrated, now much reviled, who never even admitted he’d found a new continent but did.
Looking back, which matters more? To be sure, the Reconquista was part of the recovery of European confidence and integrity without which the dynamic outward turn from the late 15th century on might not have been possible. But the Turks had only battered down the walls of Constantinople 39 years earlier and would go on trying to conquer Europe for several centuries before taking a break. And they didn’t prevent Spain, Portugal, France and most happily England from embarking on an age of colonization that transformed the world, not always in happy ways, but ultimately surely in very positive ones.
We are so reluctant to talk that way nowadays that, I am informed, some significant scholars and intellectuals including apparently Ortega y Gasset actually deny the Reconquista happened. And soon no doubt Columbus’s voyages will be so thoroughly deconstructed as not to have happened either. But in fact there is a kind of closing of one era and opening of another when by superficial coincidence the Reconquista is completed in the same year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
He once asked an artist the secret of his brilliant painting. "The reply was as concise as it was comprehensive - 'Know what you have to do, and do it'... in every direction of human effort... I believe that failure is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of a thing actually to be done..." John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
In my latest National Post column I argue that Barack Obama's malevolent parting shot at Israel casts a harsh light on his entire disastrous record in foreign policy.