What follows is a much-too-long comment in response to a throwaway remark on The Moon of Alabama’s comment thread.
The Portuguese in the Asia pacific – they were there quite early.
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Apr 18 2023 8:02 utc | 148
Our histories are all garbled deceptive rubbish. (You would use more salty terms, Peter AU1!) Take the Portuguese for example: I used to have a little 24 foot sloop anchored in Gabarus Bay, Cape Breton. It was named such by Portuguese who were there since the 1300’s. Near La Rochelle France there is a strait called Breton.
It is a portolan* port with the Breton Strait so named because by following its latitude you come to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and that connection was made long before 1492. For example native Mi’kmaq historians in Cape Breton tell of a treaty made with an English king in the 1100s. They sent several hundred of their strongest warriors over to fight in one of the great battles, Crecy or Agincourt. To this day many of the men have huge arms and shoulders and are very intimidating to meet in gas stations where for some reasons many congregate! This is because their ancestors made and used very large bows operated by lying on the ground and arcing them with both legs before release – probably for bringing down mastodons, saber-tooth tigers, maybe even tyrannosaurus rex … who knows!. Their arrows were so much more powerful than anything the English or French had that they were armour-piercing. At that time, the French had the technological edge in the form of excellent armor for their mounted knights who were almost indestructible. They could be hacked away at for hours without anyone being able to bring them down.
[* The portolan wikipedia link doesn’t do a good job describing them, but it’s all I could find on short notice.]
I can just see it: some pimply, poncy Duc de Cologne or Marquis de Brie, rises to partake of camembert, garlic and wine of a morning, along with his petit pain and je ne sais quoi, then dons his outfit and, quaffing the familiar reek of all that national culture swirling around in his helmet, he surveys the enemy laid out in battle formation before him. Through the garlicky haze he spots an unfamiliar, well nigh unbelievable, sight: a couple hundred half naked enormous* savages with feathered headresses lying down suddenly. No doubt they were terrified of our superior French armour, he thinks – or perhaps they were intimidated by the odours of cheese and garlic, of our superior French cuisine? Hard to say, but in any case clearly these godless heathen savages have been awed into instant submission. As all should be in the face of their great King and the Mighty French!!!
But just as they are chuckling in arrogant glee as they keep finding ways to smuggle ever more cheese and wine through their bulky metal visors (whilst their wives wait at home with bulky metal padlocks around different, lower-situated mouths!), a command goes up from the opposing side, all the naked savages start moving mysteriously and then suddenly a dark, bristling hail of arrows comes flying in unison through the air issuing forth from this body of bizarrely prone half-naked savages. The arrows come fast and thick and before they even have time to wipe away their grins, many of France’s bravest knights and wealthiest Comtes and Marquises lie dead from thick wooden arrows that easily pierced their otherwise unpiercable armour leaving only a lingering odour of garlic to remember them by. There are scattered records including drawings in the English history books about the Mi’kmaq Chief and his daughters. He was best friends with the English king, apparently, and they got along famously. This is all back in the 1100’s. The tribe’s history goes back long before the ice age, they say. And some of them became Christian. [See below attached history book: Basket Stories by John Bear MacNeil.]
*[ in those days Europeans were nearly all quite small, around 5′ tall if you go by their armour. The Mi’maqs were around six feet and built like NFL linebackers, almost giants. Those Frenchies never knew what hit ’em; and Shakespeare wasn’t tellin’ when he dramatized the battles centuries later…]
So the whole Columbus discovery story is just another set of lies. He had Piri Reis maps most likely and if so knew the coastline pretty well from them. (Those maps show Antarctica accurate to within 100 meters, something only satellite surveillance can match. We have no idea who made those maps or how.) Admiral He’s greatly reduced fleet of ‘only a few hundred’ at that point was in the Caribbean around 1421-2 and then went up to Cape Breton where they built a structure whose remains are still there to this day. The Chinese left artifacts all over the Gulf area in Texas and elsewhere, carved dragons and such like I believe. And of course the Vikings were coming to the Americas long before Columbus as well.
I spent precious time with a Mi’kmaq chief a few years back who told me that according to their tribal histories, Asian people in China are actually their descendants, not the other way around, but this was a very long time ago. She – for they are a matriarchal tribe – was insistent on this point. Now these are Northern peoples who learned to live in a world of ice and snow. The world at the top is a small circle and it’s only a matter of a week or so’s hiking that determines whether when you go South you end up in China, or America, or Norway, or the vast middle in Russia. So I think she was talking of the northern peoples who lived through the ice age in the ice or thereabouts. She says they originally come from around Manitoba long, long ago. Some call them Eskimos. Some call them People of the Deer and there are entire provinces in Russia with millions of these fully autonomous people to this day – far happier than their decimated, impoverished relatives in Colonial Canada.
But there are no doubt many strains of those who have peopled Asia who came from tropical region oceans, not only those from the ice-bound North. Some of them may have come from great lands existing before the scattering of small islands now left today, perhaps the lost civilization that built those huge men staring into space. Such things are simply not known in these latter days. But as the polygamously constructed Warram catamarans ably demonstrate, you can sail the world very nicely in twin-hulled dugouts lashed together intelligently – no need for floating papyrus reed rafts with sails, though they can do the job as well if far more clumsily. People have been navigating by the stars in the Pacific since time out of mind. We have no way of knowing how far back such things go.
And all along there have been battles between builders and plunderers. This is not really a racial thing as too many attest, including here on MoA. Racism is usually riled up to justify violence the purpose of which is to steal other peoples’ stuff. It’s realy a plunder mentality thing, something karlof has studied extensively. Some peoples build and other peoples raid and take or capture and enslave. Or more simply put: some people give and other people take. A friend of mine was chatting with a Chinese martial arts master decades ago asking him about the origins of the many different fighting forms they have like Tai Chi, kung fu etc. The master told him to check with our Tibetan Buddhist master for, he said, it was Tibetan monks who developed the organized fighting forms later taken up by the Chinese. (I’m not sure if this is correct given some of Hua To’s medical qigong animal forms from the time of Christ but…) There were so many bandits and robbers in organized gangs roaming all around everywhere stealing, raping, pillaging etc. that the monks developed ways of defending themselves using their advanced yogic skills to craft fighting methods involving the harnessing of prana-chi which they were already doing for other purposes. The story is more than plausible, but the point is: there was plenty of plundering going on in Asia just as everywhere else in the world. And of course Africa was rife with it, not to mention the world’s greatest supplier of slaves.
Russia-China is proposing a new civilization for builders and peacemakers. All decent people should wish them well. But whatever they build will become a target for plunderers. Such mentalities will never go away even if there is not a single white person living anywhere. For plundering has nothing to do with race. It’s a Cain and Abel thing, yin and yang, moon and sun, night and day. Some things never change.
(Also posted at https://ashleyschowes.substack.com/p/a-moon-of-alabama-comment-that-wasnt )
An unconventional history of Cape Breton Island:
baronbrasdor.art 