Couple last Caribbean thoughts

  • Carib tileI almost for­got. This is the ceramic tile I did on the cruise. I’ve taken to try­ing to fig­ure out my own logo for the cruises, and I decided to go with the basics for this one. I fig­ured I was bound to see par­rots and mon­keys and lizards and rum, and bingo! I got that right. So hooray for craftsmanship.

    Other last thoughts before leav­ing the islands:

    Pirates — It didn’t even occur to me that you could look into the pirate his­tory on almost any one of the islands we vis­ited. Some­how I always thought pirate action must’ve hap­pened in a dif­fer­ent hemi­sphere from what­ever one I’m in. Some­where where a unit of exchange might con­ceiv­ably be a dou­bloon. Por­tu­gal, prob­a­bly. But any­way, I’m wrong. A guide told us that the high­est point in San Juan was used to keep an eye on the port in case Cap­tain Mor­gan thought he’d come into town to do some frol­ick­ing. Yes, that Cap­tain Mor­gan. And by the way, there was a Black­beard the Pirate as well, though he sounds like a bit of a thickie. Ate gun­pow­der with his break­fast because he thought it would make him tough — ended up mak­ing him insane. (More read­ing here for those pirate fans.)

    What’s in a name? — It only occurred to me recently that I’d been hear­ing the name West Indies bandied about on the trip. And a quick Wikipedia search reveals that yes, that whole region can be called that. And that name hear­kens back to the whole enor­mous mis­take Colum­bus and oth­ers made, think­ing that in find­ing the New World, they had found a short­cut to the real hot prop­erty of the time — the East Indies. In fact, look­ing at how the East Indies was divvied up by Spain, France, Eng­land and the Nether­lands makes it obvi­ous that the game just moved to a new venue when the Caribbean islands were col­o­nized. Good grief, these guys must’ve thought a lot of their indigo, cot­ten and spices. They dis­cov­ered a whole hemi­sphere they didn’t know about, and all they could fig­ure out to do for the first cen­tury or two was fight over who got to plant paprika first. (Or what­ever. What spices were they on about any­way? There’s some­thing for another Wikipedia search.) By the way, you could also call this area the Antilles, but I’m not likely to do that because it sounds like a silly word.

    Okay, that’s it. I think I can leave off now.


    Related posts:

    1. Caribbean slideshow
    2. Trav­el­ing
    3. Cruis­ing: But then again …
    4. Cou­ple Mon­day observations
    5. Thoughts about the Ortho­dox Church and cap­i­tal punishment

    March 29th, 2006 | Grace | No Comments |

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