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oddree13 · 7 years

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Entre-nous, between us

Written for Nursey/Dex Week Day 3: Alternate Universe

Nursey/Dex Week: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7

(Read on AO3 - also for historical notes!)

Following the Great War, Derek realized returning to Louisiana wasn’t an option. His mother had passed while he was away at war, and his bastard of a father had already remarried in order to get back into his family’s good graces by marrying a woman of proper lineage.

With no proper family to speak of anymore, and a bit of inheritance in his pocket, Derek spent two years after his discharge wandering around Europe before deciding to settle in Paris. Soon Derek found himself immersed in the city of love, deep in the jazz age, playing bass in a band.

He liked Paris - good food, pretty sights, and no one cared who you loved or slept with. He spent his days in cafes and wandering the streets, his nights in clubs, and his late nights in the beds of his lovers. Most excused themselves in the morning once they saw the state of his chest and back, scared by the chemical warfare of the front. Derek shrugged it off and pretended it didn't bother him. He shrugged it off and performed another gig, at his usual haunt, Le Caveau de la Huchette, eager to see what the 1920s would bring him.

It started off like any other performance. Men and women pairing off to the music, switching between themselves to keep dancing. Most nights everyone who came to the club danced - why come if not for the music after all - so it was rare to see someone just watching from a table. Glancing every so often at the ginger who sat alone drinking, Derek wondered what had brought the stranger to his little slice of freedom. He tried not to dwell on it too long, except the ginger made that difficult due to his repeated glances up at him too.

It wasn’t that Derek wasn’t looked at often, his appearance usually only led to confusion because of the colonies, but it wasn’t as common from the men. But the look was unmistakable - the ginger was taking him in.

At the break, Derek walked off the stage and sent a drink over to the stranger’s table, before heading to the back to stretch and re-apply some ointment to his stiff muscles.

Coming back to the front, Derek was elated to see that the ginger was sipping on his fresh beer and giving Derek a pleased, but surprised look. Well, at least he had a shot then. Usually most men who weren’t into that kind of bedfellow downed the drink,, but wouldn’t look at him, or sent it back and left the club all together.

Leaning against the wall closest to the stage, Derek stared at the man a bit more, admiring the smattering of freckles that played over his skin. Pulling out a small notebook from his pants, he made a few notes about autumn before closing it, ready for the next set.

Derek became more of a showboat on stage, especially when the ginger kept eyeing him, but not taking any offers from the women to dance. Seeing a shot he made himself seem like the most charming man on stage, working up a sweat as he really got into the music and was lucky enough to lock eyes once more with the recipient of his drink. Looking across the room at his hazel eyes, Derek winked at him and licked his lips before focusing on the solo he was coming up to. He was pleased to see the man flush, and not look affronted by his advances.

Once the set ended, Derek went to the bar to get a drink of water before packing up, watching people file out. He was bent over his case when a shadow moved across the floor before him.

“Tu joues bien,” Derek hears in a poor French accent and looks up to see the ginger.

“Merci, je suppose que vous ne parlez pas français?” he asks slowly, and gets a nod from the ginger.

“Je suis Irlandais,” the ginger attempts, shakily, and Derek smirks.

“Well lucky for you, I speak English,” he laughed, clicking his case closed, and standing up. “Do I get a name from you or do I keep calling you Gingembre?”Derek winked, continuing to pack up his instrument.

“Name’s William, but you can call me Will or Liam.” The newly named man said, fidgeting nervously. “I gather from the barman you’re Derek?”

“You’ve gathered right. Passing through town or are you settled here in our fair city?”

“A little bit of both. You say our fair city, but your accent sounds American?” he asked, uncertain.

“You’re right, I’m American, but the French decided to claim me for a bit so I can manage their tongue well enough.” Derek said, closing his case and leaning against the stage next to him. He looked up to better asses the Irishman in front of him, greatly enjoying what he was seeing.

“Interesting,” he hummed, standing a bit stiffly, unsure of what to say next.

“I guess it might be, Liam. But as much as I’d like to stand here all night chatting a fair sight like you, the barkeep it giving me a look at means I need to head home. If you have nothing to do, I have a few bottles of wine and a bed to enjoy,” he spelled out, being forward enough for the man before him to get the hint.

Derek could tell that even the direct approach took him a moment to process. After a pause a blush slowly began to spread over his cheeks, and down his neck.

“D-did I give you that i-impression sitting there?” he asked clearly confused by what signals he had been giving off that told Derek he was looking for company in bed too.

“Most men I send drinks to don’t stay and chat if they don’t want me looking their way,” Derek explained, grabbing his case in one hand and gesturing towards Liam with the other. He began walking towards the doors and out into the emptying streets of the city, guiding his companion along the way with a gentle hand. “I won’t take offense if you just wanted to tell me you liked my music and head home by the way.”

“People like you don't buy people like me drinks...” Will replied, but there was no venom in the statement and he continued to walk alongside the other man.

"What do you mean people like me? Ruffians? Vets? Negroes? Americans? Bass players? Men? You'll need to be a little more specific,” the musician chuckled, ambling down the road.

“All of the above I guess. But I was going to be saying fine, you know good looking people,” he murmured, keeping his hands in his pockets and his head down.

“Well first off, thank you. I’m not a lot of people’s types, but I seem to have gotten your eye,” Derek grinned, nudging the Irishman. “Second, this is Paris, it's not criminal to want who you want here. I go home with men, and women, and sometimes both. Depends on who I find attractive that night, and tonight my eyes landed on you," he grinned, pulling out a cigarette for the walk home. “It ain’t like England here. They don’t send guys like us to the labor camps for doing what we do. Sure some look at you funny, and if you get a policeman with a grudge he holds it against you, but overall, it’s entre-nous, between us.”

“That’s certainly a change from back home,” he replied, shoulders relaxing and low whistle emanating from his teeth. “I could get used to that,” he added, looking up to smile at Derek.

“Good because you look good when someone flirts with you. Got this gorgeous flush,” Derek winked, brushing his finger against a pale cheek and causing said flush to reappear.

"I don't flush," Will grunted, cheeks tinting pink just as he said it.

“This is me,” Derek stopped walking and pointed to a set of stairs leading up to a second floor apartment. “You can come in for wine. Come in for wine and more. Or head out. I won’t say I wouldn’t be heartbroken if you walked away now, but if you do, I play at Le Caveau de la Huchette every other day.”

“Can I say just wine now, and maybe something more later?” Will asked, shyly.

“We certainly can,” he assured him and began the climb upstairs.

Once inside, Derek put down his case by the door and hung up his hat. The place was a modest studio, with a bed bigger than was typical and a small kitchen. He hadn’t wanted to waste all his money on living expenses if all he would be doing here was eating, sleeping, and occasionally entertaining. Pointing to the small set of table and chairs, Derek told Will to make himself comfortable as he looked at his wine selection, plucking two bottles along with some glasses down from the shelf.

“Had you ever heard jazz before tonight?” he asked curiously, pouring each of them a large glass of red.

“Only once on the radio. Different, but a lot of it looks like the music from back home. Communal in a way,” Will tried to explain, wringing his hands. Derek could tell he wasn’t used to talking so much.

“That it is. Takes at least a few people for a jazz band and what good is playing if you have no one to entertain?” Derek smiled, handing the other man a full glass. “I saw you didn’t dance with anyone, even when that lovely lady asked you.”

“I don’t do much dancing,” Will confessed, running a hand over the back of his neck. “And I’m don’t do much with women,” he added.

“Shame, I bet you’d make a fine dancer with some practice,” Derek grinned, and leaned over the table a bit. “So tell me how did you wind up here? I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.

Over a few glasses of wine Derek found out the following - Liam got mixed up in some business with the Irish Republican Army and had to leave his country. He’s trying to find a place he can stay that he likes enough and lets him send money back home to his family. Derek in turn told him that he fought in the 93rd Infantry Division during the Great War, but instead of returning to the States when it was over, he had settled down in Paris.

“I learned the fiddle growing up and well it wasn’t too much of a leap to bass,” he wrapped up, feeling pleasantly buzzed.

“Me too. It wasn’t mine, but I learned. Never knew when a good party would get going and it wasn’t right for the same fellas to play all night you know?” he laughed, his cheeks ruddy from the wine.

“So you said you don’t do women? Never had a chance or never got the urge.”

“Never got the urge. Tried stealing a few kisses in my younger years, but never made my heart race like some other lads. When I got involved with the IRA I met a few forward thinking sorts and had a few tumbles with them, but nothing more,” he explained, swallowing down the rest of his wine.

“More of a Wilde man. No harm in that,” he winked, but the reference didn’t register with Will.

Draining the wine from his own glass, Derek collected the empty bottles and glasses to clean later. “So, Liam, did you want to stay for more or head on home?” he asked, leaning against his counter to look at the other man.

Standing, Will looked around the room, clearly trying to think, but Derek was pleased that the ginger’s eyes kept coming back to him. Seeing the thought process running through Will’s mind, Nursey stepped forward and placed a hand on his waist. “Stay,” he whispered, moving in closer to kiss his cheek. “I’d hate to let a handsome man like you walk out the door.”

The simple kiss seemed to make Will’s mind up for him and he moved his head to capture Derek’s lips. He’d done this much before, and even if it had been a long time, kissing still came naturally to him from what Derek could tell.

Letting his hand rest upon Will’s waist, Derek deepened the kiss, feeling the hard muscles beneath his fingers. Will was certainly a laboring man, and he wondered just how sculpted he was under his shirt and trousers.

It didn’t take long for Will to let go a bit, his hands roaming over Derek’s chest and back. Moving over a particularly sensitive spot, Derek laughed and pulled back and when he looked up he could see that William was smirking.

“You look good with a smile like that. That sultry act is good and all, but I like a man who has a good smile,” Will offered, and moved back to Derek, grabbing his hand and pulling him close.

“So the position of strong, silent type for the night gets taken by you?”

Will nodded and moved Derek to the bed in the corner of the room, kissing him as he moved. Settling down onto the edge, he pulled Derek down gently so he was straddling his lap, and moved a hand to unbutton his shirt, but Derek stopped him.

“You don’t want to do that. The war did a number on my body, but was nice enough to leave my face alone,” he explained, trying to not let show how affected he was. “I promise whatever we want to do I can do it without making you look at that. It isn’t pretty,” he mumbled. Derek tried to move back in for a kiss, but Will moved out of the way.

“I don’t know what kind of people you’ve been going to bed with, but your face isn't what caught my eye.” The ginger said, deadly serious. He pressed his hand firmly against his lover’s chest. “Your fingers played that instrument like you had a story and I wanted to know more. So while your face is right handsome, and your build is something to admire, I ain’t here just for that,” he promised, and moved against to unbutton his shirt. This time Derek let him.

As his shirt was peeled off, Derek didn’t look at the way Will reacted. He’d seen it before. People would think they could handle what they thought the scars would look like, but then his clothes would come off and they’d see the extent that the mustard gas had molted his skin. The gas mask he wore that day had saved his lungs and face, but did fuck all for the rest of him.

It took him a second to realize that the dulled pressure he felt on his torso were kisses that William was peppering over his skin, his arm resting around his waist as he did so. He was so stunned by the gesture that it took Will kissing his lips again to move, swallowing his feelings down with a shaky breath, and chasing after the red-head’s mouth.

“There you are,” he heard the ginger murmur. Derek grinned, pushing Will down to the bed, stripping away the other man's shirt. He was pleased that the freckles adorning Liam’s face were just as prevalent on his torso, and that a sturdy build was hiding underneath.

“I like how your freckles are everywhere, and I want to see how far down they go,” he hummed, as he kissed down his neck, his confidence bolstered a bit.

It didn’t take much longer for both men to be stripped down bare, laying side by side on the bed.

“We don’t have to do more than kiss if it’s too much for one night,” Derek offered, his eyes closed, focusing on the touch of Will’s fingers caressing his skin, the sensation ceasing every so often as it hit a patch of skin that was too damaged to feel.

“I’ve done more than kiss before, you aren’t the first naked man I’ve seen,” Will hummed, and moved to grip Derek’s shaft, stroking him slowly. The sensation caught Derek off guard who tucked his head into the crook of Will’s neck, gasping a bit at the stimulation.

Moving his hands up, Derek gripped Will’s shoulder with one while the other reached to grab his lover's prick, returning the pleasure.

It was Will’s turn to suck in a breath, not having expected Derek to return the favor. “Hope you didn’t think I would leave you wanting. If flirting makes you flush I want to see you after climax,” the American grunted, picking up the pace.

It didn’t take long for Derek to grip both of them in his hand, stroking them together, their combined friction and slick adding more to the pleasure of it all. Within no time, both men were spilling between each other, neither admitting that it had been a long time since they’d been with another person.

They came down, kissing each other, and touching whatever skin they could find, basking in the afterglow. Eventually Derek got up to get a towel, wiped them both down, and collapsed on the bed.

“If you stay until morning we can heat the water for a shower and fool around some more,” Derek whispered, placing another kiss on Liam’s lips, hoping the hot shower would incentivise the other man a bit more.

“How about I stay until morning, we shower, and we go get a croissant and walk around the city. That is if you don’t have to work,” he countered.

“I’ve got all the time in the world for you.”

#nurseydexweek #nurseydex #alternate universe #omgcheckplease #check please #derek nurse #william poindexter #myfics #myposts

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pcurrytravels · 6 years

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Thoughts: New Orleans (Part I)

New Orleans. A city I’ve been obsessed with ever since I was a child. After six years of trying to go only for one thing or another to get in the way, in May of 2018, it finally happened. As I sat in my window seat, looking down upon the Mississippi River, giving way to the marshy swamps and bayous surrounding Louis Armstrong International Airport, I was beyond ecstatic. I couldn’t believe it. I was really in New Orleans.

The hot, muggy, humid air did nothing to compromise my excitement as I felt, the moment I walked off that plane, I was already being treated to the culture. Between leaving the airport and arriving in the city, I kept my ears wide-open as they were being treated to a number of accents. From the Southern twang of the sweet, concierge lady, to the Caribbean-esque Creole drawl of the man shining shoes next to the restroom, to the Brooklyn-esque ��Yat” accent of the NORTA bus driver, and lastly, the strong Cajun talk of two older men who sat in front of me on the bus. It was so intriguing to hear all of these accents among people who are all natives of the same city; a sign of the cultural gumbo reflected in NOLA.

Even the bus ride itself was interesting, especially as someone who’s never been in the Southern region of the United States before. Even the suburbs of Jefferson Parish play host to a large amount of creole cottages, shotgun houses and large oak trees covered in Spanish moss, things I am not accustomed to in the Southwest. Sadly, I also saw a good amount of buildings and homes that, a whopping thirteen years later, still looked as if Hurricane Katrina had made landfall only yesterday (I actually felt low-key pissed off at the sight of it tbh).

After a 45-minute bus ride, we arrived in the Central Business District and walked five blocks or so to our hotel; the Wyndham Garden Baronne Plaza. On a quiet corner that’s almost literally a hop away from Canal Street, it was a decent hotel in a building that was once a location for Sears. Likely, that explains the weirdness of interior rooms with windows that looked out into the hallway. That aside, the rooms were fairly large and roomy.

The Perks: Large rooms that can be had for a good price. Relatively safe and HIGHLY convenient location. On-site coffee shop. Very comfy beds.

The Drawbacks: Awkward layout with weird, interior rooms (though I’ve been told this is an issue with New Orleans accommodations in general). Slow elevators. Rather sparse use of lighting which caused both the hallways and the rooms to feel a bit dark.

Anyhow, after settling in and relaxing a little bit, we set off to Canal Street.

Canal Street is like NOLA’s version of Broadway Avenue/Michigan Avenue/Rodeo Drive. Historically a major shopping and theater hub (much of that past momentum has shifted to Uptown, the Garden District and Metairie in more recent times), and so-named because there were plans to turn the street into an actual canal at one point, Canal Street tells quite the story all by itself. The original neutral ground, when Louisiana shifted from being a French colony to an American state, this was the main dividing point between the Creoles of the French Quarter and the Americans who had settled down in what was then known as Faubourg Ste. Marie. Over time Ste. Marie came to be known as the “American Quarter”; it’s now referred to as the Central Business District but even today it’s VERY easy to see the distinction between the two just by looking at the two sides of Canal Street.

It was quite the anomaly to behold; I really did feel like I was standing on the edge of two completely different worlds whenever I was on Canal. I’m not even sure if the pictures or my words could properly convey the sight as it truly is something one must see to believe. The palm trees lining the boulevard did little to hide the Caribbean look and feel of the French Quarter side and the American look and feel of the CBD side. You could see it in the architecture, the naming conventions, the color schemes, right on down to even the street signs. You see, at each block on Canal, the street has two names: a French/Creole one for the French Quarter and an English/Anglicized one for the CBD.

Beyond that history, it’s actually pretty fun to just take a stroll and look around the wide boulevard. At one point it was a hub of luxury shopping akin to Rodeo Drive, in addition to having a thriving theater district. Currently, the Canal Place shops and the Saenger, Orpheum and Joy theaters are the only remaining vestiges of this glamorous past, but there’s still some great shopping to be had beyond the tacky souvenir shops (and even those are worth browsing; you’d be surprised at what you could find inside some of them).

Another thing of note is the wealth of vintage signage present. Many of the hotels on Canal and throughout the older parts of New Orleans in general make use of several once-separate buildings that have been conjoined; the building which used to house the Kress five-and-dime is now a portion of the Ritz-Carlton. How do I know this, you ask? Because the old Kress signage still remains! Of course that’s to say nothing of the vintage Walgreens marquee or the stylish, mid-century sign on The Sanlin building.

As we neared Tchoupitoulas, we were treated to a reminder of home: Harrah’s casino. They’re a chain, apparently. The two of us decided to step inside just for s***s and giggles, but the experience was much different than we expected. In a lot of ways, it called back to Vegas in an older era. There was actually a bouncer at the door who checked ID’s; something that hasn’t been in wide use since the early 1980s. In a lot of ways, it also felt more like the Vegas of my childhood. In this modern era, all of the casinos feel so bland, ascetic, monotone and pretentious; Harrah’s New Orleans on the other hand felt vibrant, colorful and unique, with a theme that paid homage to numerous elements of New Orleans culture. Interesting how a casino in New Orleans does a better job at feeling like Vegas than casinos in Vegas do these days.

After we left there, we then took a look around the Central Business District. Now, I’m going to be frank with you all; from an aesthetic standpoint, the CBD isn’t that interesting. As I said in the mini-guide, it’s like the downtown of any other American city with skyscrapers and office buildings. However, there is some uniqueness if you look beneath surface level. In front of nearly every bar in the area, you will see people standing outside with plastic cups of beer and/or cocktails in hand; an indicator of very relaxed open-container laws (even more relaxed than Vegas, believe it or not). And even then, some unique architecture can still be found; many of the buildings here have a more Victorian and/or Greek Revival look, thanks to most of it having been built in the early/mid-19th century. Once we crossed Podyras at the intersection of Baronne, we stopped by Rouses Market.

Rouses Market is a lot like Whole Foods…………..aside from the fact that it’s WAY cheaper. I honestly wanted to take the store back home with me. Like an indoor market, it had a number of high quality items to choose from. Their fried chicken, salad bar and bakery items in particular were all fantastic. That goes to say nothing of the wide ranging selection of spices, hot sauce and craft beer that was available. And to think this is one of the main grocery stores in the New Orleans metropolitan area? Yeah, I’m very jealous of you guys.

Here’s where things get boring. After we did our little bit of grocery shopping, we went back to the hotel, ate our food, and went to sleep. And yes, I’m still kicking myself for effectively wasting one of my days in New Orleans.

The next day is when the trip really began. Stay tuned.

#new orleans #thoughts and experiences #canal st #central business district #rouses market #wyndham garden baronne plaza #harrahs new orleans #louisiana #Southern U.S.#U.S. Gulf Coast

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drjacquescoulardeau · 7 years

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CHARLES RIVER EDITORS – THE EAST AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE: THE HISTORY AND LEGACY OF THE ARAB SLAVE TRADE AND THE INDIAN OCEAN SLAVE TRADE – 2017

The title bothered me from the very start. But I wanted to see what was inside. If we speak of old slave trade bringing Black African slaves into the vast area covering the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East, or even the Indian Ocean and the Indian subcontinent, and eventually the rest of Asia, we do have a problem. At the level of the world per se we also have the same problem. Slavery developed with the emergence of agriculture and herd husbandry after the Ice Age, between 12,000 and 5,000 BCE. These new economic and productive activities required a new division of labor that made people available when necessary for the crops – cultivation, harvesting and storing. This new division of labor was harsh and the initiative of individuals was no longer necessary. What used to be more or less collective work became slave work when the property of the land and the organization of work was in the hands of a very narrow minority of “free” people. Slavery as such had nothing to do with Islam. In fact, it is clearly present in the Bible (Abraham is given his wife’s slave by his own wife Sara for him to get a son since she, Sara, cannot perform the service. That’s Ishmael. But God being what he is, he grants a son to Sara afterwards. That’s Isaac. Then Sara, the wife, asks Abraham to throw the slave maid of hers and her son Ishmael out into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. But God being what he is, he saves both the slave mother and the slave son Ishmael. We know what will happen later. Isaac is the founding figure of the Jewish and later Christian religions and Ishmael is the founding figure of Islam. Abraham being common to the three religions.

Plato, Socrates and Aristotle all defended a slave society in which the slaves were the majority of the population. In Sparta, one day a year, the free citizens had the right – and duty – to go hunting the slaves normally working the fields of the city. The free citizens could kill these slaves the way they wanted and as many as they could. The big empires in the Middle East, Sumerian, Akkadian, Persian and all other Hittite or Anatolian empires, had a vast number of slaves. One dynasty of Pharaohs in Egypt is known as the Black Pharaohs and are the black slaves used as soldiers in Egypt who managed to seize power for a century or so. The Roman Empire was basically a slave empire. And the arrival of Christianity with Constantine did not change that. In fact, it was changed only when the Germanic tribes arrived because they did not practice that kind of slavery (and the gates of Rome were opened by slaves for the Germanic invaders to come in during the night) and it is Charlemagne who introduced the religious reform of the 9th century that will bring feudalism that rejected slavery by principle, replacing it with serfdom. Black slaves in all these empires were common and the practice of eunuchs was also common. Eunuchs were generally abducted at an early age, before puberty most of the time. They were castrated level to the abdomen and the survivors were entrusted with the numerous harems of these empires. Roman Emperors, like Julius Caesar and all the others had private counselors who were slaves most of the time.

So I was surprised – at least – when I found out that this book de facto starts slavery in this region of the world as being Arab and clearly Muslim. There is one allusion to a very old system but no precision. In fact it sounds as if slavery was started in this region in the 8th or 9th century in Arab countries to be understood as meaning Muslim countries, forgetting that Iran, most of Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. are not Arab but all of them Turkic or Indo-European or Indo-Aryan, not to speak of Turkey itself and vast areas in the Caucasus, around the Caspian Sea and in Central Asia including vast areas of western China that were of course not Arab or Arabic since they spoke Turkic languages.

Yet the book insisted on an element that is essential and without which the slave trade in the Indian Ocean would never have been what it became after the 15th century. The Portuguese controlled the vast section of central and southern Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean: Congo, central African small areas that have become Rwanda, Uganda, and some others, Angola, Mozambique, and many islands in the Indian Ocean, plus India of course, meaning the Indian subcontinent. One of their main activity was transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, though they were joined there by the Spanish, the English, the Dutch, the French and a few others. But in the Indian Ocean the Portuguese were alone for at least three centuries. They used some kind of agreement with the “Arab” traders, meaning of course the Muslim traders who collected slaves along the eastern coast of Africa and took them to the Middle East, Egypt included, the Indian subcontinent and the whole Muslim world. Though a map shows another slave trade from western Africa to the Maghreb, Libya and Egypt, the book does not say a word about this one. The land routes from western Africa (the Mali empire that became officially Muslim in the 13th century) and from eastern Africa ‘what is today Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia were highly frequented across the desert and they were the normal routes for future eunuchs. The boys were operated upon in special stations: survival rate about 50%. No official figures.

The book hints at the old practice going back to before Christ, even prehistory, of some tribes establishing themselves as dominant (that will be easy when a Middle East empire or the Roman Legion, etc. will support them, later the various Muslim countries and their traders and the Portuguese not to speak of the French in many islands and the English who take over after the Portuguese in the second half of the 18th century. These dominant tribes (the Swahili and the Yao, and quite a few more) managed to convert to Islam, which protected them since a Muslim cannot be enslaved by another Muslim, and then they raided the inner tribes, seen as less powerful, especially since they are not provided with modern military means and they have suffered from this exploitation for millennia (four or five or more), are systematically kept away from Islam and they provide, at times peacefully with some kind of an agreement with the raiders, the quota of slaves demanded by the raiders. It’s only hinted at not explained.

The consequences are that when the English, like Livingstone arrives with Christian missionary objectives, they will convert these animist populations to Christianity in order to bring them together and make them resist the millennia old practice. It is this minority Muslim tribe versus majority Christian or animist tribes that is at the very basis of today’s tribalism in Africa. The French and the English when they arrived just kept the dominant tribe in power, tolerated the slave trade against the majority tribes and little by little, slowly and painfully, managed in two centuries to bring this trade to something like a halt. The details on the subject are only trying to save the face of the English as being the main liberators, forgetting to say that colonialism took over. It was no longer slave work but colonial work. Not much difference indeed. Let say some very brutal serfdom.

The book is short on one more element. It alludes to the Code Noir (there is a Spanish version of it) of Louis XIV. It does not at all take into account the various practices of the various Christian countries in the Americas. The French and before them the Spanish with the Inquisition and Royal justice impose some strict limitations to the practice of slavery in their American colonies that imposed their Christianization, their marrying in the Catholic Church and the vast practice of manumission (a slave could buy his freedom because he or she had some personal income authorized by his or her master, and anyone could buy the freedom of any slave at any time. That produced the three tier society of the ex-Spanish or ex-French colonies and territories (including Louisiana). On the other hand, the Protestants of the Netherlands or Great Britain refused to recognize the human dimension of slaves, refused to Christianize them and they imposed a brutal over exploitation and the famous theory of the one-drop-of-black blood that supposedly makes you Black. Livingstone was in other words an exception and the book makes one allusion to the Hindu caste system but does not go as far as saying that the Dalits are nothing but slaves.

I think this book seems not to have read the following title that they should read urgently to widen their minds on the subject. “The Indian Ocean From Admiral Zheng He To Hub And Spoke Container Maritime Commerce” by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU & Ivan Eve, Kindle Book, ASIN: B01AY2H0JC, January 2016. The first part of the book is on the subject of slavery in the Indian Ocean. Commentary, review and presentation at https://www.academia.edu/29122940/A_LONG_JOURNEY_IN_THE_WORLD_IN_THE_MIND_IN_THE_SOUL_OF_MAN

One shortcoming is of course the position of Muhammad on slavery: he found it when he took over the Arab world at first and he limited it to non-Muslims and edicted many rules to make it acceptable though he did not in any way softened the lot of eunuchs or future eunuchs. The book is totally silent on the point. You find the same limitation in the Mandingo Charta instated by the first Muslim Malian Emperor in the 13th century: “In the early thirteenth century, following a major military victory, the founder of the Mandingo Empire and the assembly of his wise men proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga the new Manden Charter, named after the territory situated above the upper Niger River basin, between present-day Guinea and Mali.” They just forget to say the victor is Muslim and imposes Islam to the ruling class of the empire (https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/manden-charter-proclaimed-in-kurukan-fuga-00290). Have a good trip and remember that Admiral Zheng He was a Muslim and a castrated slave of the Chinese Emperor.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

#slavery #code noir #Indian Ocean #Africa

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gentlemansaurusrex · 7 years

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Dead Men Do Tell Tales, and so does History

While I was growing up, my mom and others in my family would heavily invest time into studying where our ancestors came from. One of my ancestors came to the United States from Wales, mainly because he was escaping the British who had accused him of being a pirate. I do not know if this is true or not, but it has become a family legend of a sort. Pirates, in general, are surrounded by myths and legends. With the popular film franchise of Pirates of the Caribbean, you have notable pirate legends such as Davie Jones (not the lead singer of The Monkees), Blackbeard, The Kraken, The Flying Dutchman, and honestly so many other cool legends of pirate lore. I will also be debunking some myths and explaining why it is either true or false, which is what I will start off with.

One of the best examples of a pirate and treasure is a big ol’ red X that marks the spot for buried treasure. The myth of buried treasure is essentially the goal of almost every single pirate related movie. The big red X on a map is the designated spot for the buried treasure of gold, silver, stolen goods, or whatever the heck else could be valuable. This was not the case. Usually, the treasure, “booty”, swag, or goods was a mixture of items stolen off of trade ships like lumber, cloth, spices, honestly anything that could fetch a good amount of coin. Pirates, however, did not bury their treasure because it would ruin the lumber, spices, and cloth. The only notable pirate who really did this was Captain William Kidd, but the act of burying treasure to get it later was very rare and honestly strange.

The next myth is walking the plank. This was a method of execution during the golden age of pirates, but it is not very effective. Why make a person walk the plank when throwing them overboard, marooning them, shooting them, or my personal favorite, keel-hauling is easier. Keel-hauling is where a sailor is tied to a looped line that goes through the ship, thrown overboard, then dragged through the keel of the ship. The area of the ship where a sailor was usually keel-hauled was covered with barnacles which would result in the person being seriously cut or decapitated. If the ship was going slowly, the weight would eventually crush the person. This was not a fun way to go, but with the brutality of being keel-hauled, it created the myths for Bootstrap Bill in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

Before I move onto legends of pirates and lore, I would like to talk about two last myths that were true. Pirates did have peg legs and eye patches, as well as a code which was followed. Peg legs and eye patches were typical when trying to hide an injury, except a peg leg would make it obvious that you had lost your leg. Let’s be honest, when you have a peg leg you can’t really hide the fact that you lost your leg because it looks nothing like a leg. Naval battles were costly. Cannons would blow a gaping hole into the ship sending pieces of wood, metal, anything sharp really into the air. People would lose eyes and body parts. I honestly wonder what went through pirate and naval doctors’ minds when they saw injuries like this. It probably went like “Hey Doc Hook, a cannon crushed this dude’s leg. Think you can shove a piece of wood in his hip and make it look like a leg?” or “He lost his eye, let’s get a piece of cloth to cover his injury to hide the fact that he’s half blind.”. There are many myths and truths about pirates, but that could be a whole post on its own.

For legends, I am going to start off with the spooky stuff first. Two monsters in pirate or sailing lore is that of the Kraken and the Luska. Everyone knows the Kraken because it was under control of Davie Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise or from Greek mythology, being the pet creature of Poseidon, the God of the Sea. To those who do not know, the Kraken is usually depicted as a monstrous squid or octopus. It was rumored by sailors or pirates to live in the deep waters of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean terrorizing ships that crossed its path. The Kraken myth was most likely the results of pirates and sailors trying to find a scapegoat for the unexplained phenomena. The Luska was a different monster myth and was more believable than the Kraken. People sailing the Caribbean believed it more than the Kraken. The Luska was believed to be a beast that was half giant shark and half giant squid/octopus. It lived in dark blue circles that were rumored to have a tunnel system where the Luska would hide. There has been no definitive proof of whether this is true or not, but a half squid/octopus and half shark hybrid sounds like something from a cheesy sci-fi movie. Legendary pirates, on the other hand, were not as ridiculous sounding.

For this section, I am going to be breaking down the stories of legendary pirates or mythical figures. The figure of Davie Jones is a lot darker than what most people think. Davie Jones was in fact, not a real person. The name was sailor slang for the devil. The term Davie Jones’ Locker referred to the bottom of the ocean. This gives me a new perspective on some Spongebob episodes now.

The first pirate I would like to discuss is Jean Lafitte. Laffite was born either in the Basque region of France or the French colony of Saint-Dominique. He and his brother Pierre both became pirates and smugglers in the Caribbean but eventually bought warehouses in New Orleans, Louisiana. When tensions became high towards the up and coming Napoleonic France, the United States, and England resulting in the Embargo of 1807, they moved to another part of Louisiana. In 1815, Lafitte was recruited to help the United States fight off the British during the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. After getting a taste of the privateer life through that, he was then a spy for the Spanish during the Mexican War of Independence. The rest of Lafitte’s life is mainly running from the law and shrouded in mystery. Historians are not sure of how or where he died, and there are rumors that he was Napoleon Bonaparte’s main man for getting him out of exile then, but this is just a rumor that has no substantial proof.

The next pirate that is speculative and has more legend than fact is Henry Avery. Avery was well respected among sailors and other pirates giving him nicknames such as The Arch Pirate or The King of Pirates. Avery was a big deal. He inspired many to take up a life of being a sailor or a pirate. He is one of the most successful pirates in history mainly because he could retire with his vast fortunes. Avery had no specific target for plunder, he targeted the British, French, Spanish, and even sailed to India attacking Mughal ships (not to be confused with the Harry Potter term, they were a Muslim Empire in India). When Avery retired, many who took up his legacy in piracy claimed to have parts of his treasure. This caused his old fleet and crew to go all over the world. Many people believe, due to the amount of treasure Avery had, that his treasure is still hidden around the world. This has inspired many legends and is also the premise of one of my favorite video games called Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Finding Avery’s lost treasure was the main premise of the game taking the story from Panama, Scotland, Madagascar, and eventually a pirate haven where Avery’s treasure was hidden.

I could do another post about famous pirates and their deeds, but before I conclude, I just want to briefly mention a few more pirates. One of my favorite pirates from history is a guy named Stede Bonnet. Bonnet was a wealthy landowner before he decided to trade everything in to become one of the most famous pirates. Like most pirates, he had a cool nickname which was The Gentleman Pirate, mainly because he was not cruel like most of his counterparts. He terrorized the American colonies, specifically North and South Carolina. Near the end of the Bonnet’s life, he failed several times to acquire more ships for his fleet and ended up becoming a part of Blackbeard’s crew temporarily. Eventually, Bonnet was hung for piracy in South Carolina.

Earlier, I mentioned the Uncharted video game series. The main character is a descendant of Sir Frances Drake. Drake was an explorer as well as a pirate. His nickname was personally given to him by Queen Elizabeth the First, which was simply “my pirate”. Back in the 17th and 18th century, the world powers would heavily rely on pirates under the military’s payroll. These pirates were given the name of privateers. Privateers were paid to undermine the enemy of the country who hired them. Drake was often hired to do damage again the Spanish and is rumored to be a key player in the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Most famous pirates came from England but, like Lafitte, some came from France. Jean-David Nau or more commonly known as Francois L’Olonnais was one of the cruelest pirates to sail the seas. L’Olonnais would cut men to pieces or hang them until their eyes would pop out. There were stories about his brutality which caused him to be one of the most feared pirates. One story was that he had heard about being betrayed, went to the leader of the men who was plotting against him and publicly executed him. This execution consisted of cutting out the man’s heart and taking a bite in front of his crew. Ironically, L’Olonnais was killed and eaten alive by a group of cannibals.

The last pirate I would like to talk about before conclusion is Blackbeard. You cannot simply talk about pirates without mentioning, probably the most famous pirate in history. Blackbeard’s real name was Edward Teach who came from England. Blackbeard was often referred to as a demon of the high seas and practiced in magic. This magic and so-called demon nicknames were just Blackbeard using different dramatic techniques to frighten his crew and those who hated him. One famous technique was inserting gunpowder and fuses into his beard, lighting them on fire. The flames and smoke in his beard would create this effect that made him seem more menacing. His ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge was custom built from a slave ship and contained roughly 40 guns which was essentially a floating fortress. He would also carry multiple pistols and daggers on his chest, giving the impression that he was not one to mess with. At the end of Blackbeard’s life, he was living in North Carolina. While in North Carolina, he got into a fight with the British where he received 20 stab wounds and was shot 5 times before killed. Lieutenant Robert Maynard took Blackbeard’s body, decapitated it, and mounted Blackbeard’s severed head onto the mast of his ship as a warning to all pirates. With the death of Blackbeard, the golden age of piracy had ended. Eventually, pirates would die out and there was nothing left but romanticizing the idea of pirates.

The life of a pirate and a sailor was harsh, but people still romanticize that life. I do it on occasion, seeing boats and the ocean as an adventure. Video games and movies do a great job expressing this romanticism. The stories that come from this are interesting, showing how people during this time had made their lives. I highlighted some of my favorites, but they were either British or French. Not all pirates came from England or Europe. Several came from the Barbary Coast (Northern Africa, I have a blog post about that too), the Caribbean, other African ports, and Asia. No matter where they came from, they all had swashbuckling stories, and remember, dead men do tell tales!

P.S.: I highly encourage you all to find out about your ancestors!

Next Week: I will be at a conference from Monday to Thursday. I will do a short post, but hopefully, I can get it done and post it!

#pirates #pirates of the caribbean #history

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newstfionline · 7 years

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The Founding Fathers Encrypted Secret Messages, Too

By Rachel B. Doyle, The Atlantic, March 30, 2017

Thomas Jefferson is known for a lot of things--writing the Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia, owning hundreds of slaves despite believing in the equality of men--but his place as the “Father of American Cryptography” is not one of them.

As a youth in the Virginia colony, Jefferson encrypted letters to a confidante about the woman he loved. While serving as the third president of the newly formed United States, he tried to institute an impossibly difficult cipher for communications about the Louisiana Purchase. He even designed an intricate mechanical system for coding text that was more than a century ahead of its time.

Cryptography was no parlor game for the idle classes, but a serious business for revolutionary-era statesmen who, like today’s politicians and spies, needed to conduct their business using secure messaging. Codes and ciphers involving rearranged letters, number substitutions, and other now-quaint methods were the WhatsApp, Signal, and PGP keys of the era.

Going into the Revolution, Americans were at a huge disadvantage to the European powers when it came to cryptography, many of which had been using “black chambers”--secret offices where sensitive letters were opened and deciphered by public officials--for centuries. It was not uncommon for the messages of Revolutionary leaders and, later, American diplomats in Europe, to be intercepted and read by their enemies, both at home and abroad.

As a result, early Americans “operated in multiple secret languages during the Revolution,” says Sara Georgini, the series editor of The Papers of John Adams, at the Massachusetts Historical Society. “They didn’t throw away those habits once the new nation got formed.” The Founding Fathers continued to rely on encryption throughout their careers: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, and James Madison all made ample use of codes and ciphers to keep their communiqués from falling into the wrong hands.

But no one went as deep into the encryption game as Jefferson. Born in 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia, Jefferson was learning Latin, Greek, and French by the age of 9. He went to the College of William & Mary at 16, to study physics, math, and philosophy, and by early 1764, Jefferson, then 20 years old, was writing letters in code. At first glance, a cryptic letter he sent that year to John Page, a close college classmate, is difficult to parse: It drops Latin phrases in the middle of what sound like emotional ultimatums about an upcoming contractual agreement with some man, whose name is written in Greek characters.

“My fate depends on ad???eß’s present resolutions: by them I must stand or fall,” Jefferson writes. But the Greek characters are in fact an anagram for Rebecca Burwell, a 17-year-old from Yorktown he wanted to marry. Four days later, Jefferson decided that his earlier code was too obvious. “We must fall on some scheme of communicating our thoughts to each other, which shall be totally unintelligible to every one but to ourselves,” he told Page.

Although most encrypted letters were a mixture of cipher and “plaintext,” deciphering them could be a patience-straining process. It was easy to mess up during the encoding or decoding process. Letters using dictionary and book codes--where the writer provided a set of numbers that indicated the page, column, and position where the word they wanted could be found in an agreed-upon book--could become garbled by line-counting errors.

The alternative was having secrets stolen and--then as now--even leaked in an embarrassing scandal. As some of the colonists grew more radical following the Boston Massacre, a cache of private letters by Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson and his lieutenant were leaked and published in newspapers up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In the letters, Hutchinson said that colonial Americans were owed only a fraction of the rights English citizens could expect. Americans took to the streets to burn effigies of the two men.

On Christmas Day in 1773 none other than Benjamin Franklin copped to being the source of the leak, a sort of colonial Julian Assange. He lost his job as deputy Postmaster General of North America, but things accelerated quickly toward revolution and war, raising the stakes for secret communications even higher. Soon, similarly compromising documents emerged from the offices of colonial governors in New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina--duly stolen and leaked to newspapers.

During the Revolutionary War, American leaders had “an informal and amateur approach to espionage,” says Georgini. Some relied on dictionary codes. George Washington, a code enthusiast himself, used an invisible-ink formula devised by John Jay to communicate with the members of his spy cell, the Culper Ring, in British-controlled New York City. “If deciphered, the British could identify the senders, arrest them, and hang them,” says Alexander Rose, the author of the book Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (now a TV series, Turn: Washington’s Spies).

Even after the war was finished, Washington remained suspicious of sending letters by mail. “By passing through the Post offices [my sentiments] should become known to all the world,” he complained in a 1788 letter to Marquis de Lafayette.

As the newly formed United States entered the world of diplomacy, invisible ink and book codes were no longer going to cut it. Forced to hold its own against sophisticated European players, American cryptography evolved in tandem with U.S. diplomacy, explains Georgini. Its foreign ministers communicated in a riot of different secret methods, and the deluge of codes and ciphers sailing across the Atlantic was a chaotic assemblage of individualized systems. The diplomatic corps in Europe generally relied on variations of the clunky, medieval-era nomenclator system, which saw statesmen lugging around long code lists, where hundreds or thousands of words and syllables--from “a” to “Amsterdam” or “Aaron Burr”--were reassigned as combinations of digits. Still, it is estimated that more than half of all U.S. foreign correspondence ended up in British hands.

Back on U.S. soil, domestic surveillance was still a major concern heading into the 19th century. “The infidelities of the post office and the circumstances of the times are against my writing fully & freely,” Jefferson concluded in 1798, when he was vice president. His concern, says James McClure, the general editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton, “was the opposition getting a hold of something he wrote: They would put it in the newspapers and use it against him.” But even writing in code was not a failsafe. Jefferson understood that the popular nomenclator system was vulnerable to security breaches; all it took was a code list falling into the enemy’s possession. So he decided to go a step further. “Jefferson got interested in encipherment systems that didn’t rely on lists,” says McClure.

Sometime in the 1790s, Jefferson designed a “wheel cipher,” which was “so far ahead of its time, and so much in the spirit of the later inventions, that it deserves to be classed with them,” writes David Kahn in his seminal cryptography book, The Codebreakers. Jefferson’s device, which included 36 turning wooden wheels with the letters of the alphabet marked on their edges, was remarkably similar to a device the U.S. Army adopted more than a century later, in 1922.

“Had the President recommended his own system to Secretary of State James Madison, he would have endowed his country with a method of secret communication that would almost certainly have withstood any cryptanalytic attack of those days,” Kahn writes. “Instead he appears to have filed and forgotten it.”

Many of the other methods that Jefferson was most enthusiastic about, such as the “perfect cypher,” designed for him by the mathematician Robert Patterson, just never caught on. As with privacy-minded people trying to get their friends to use PGP keys today, sometimes the newfangled inventions felt like too much trouble. Jefferson’s U.S. minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, simply refused to use Patterson’s complicated transposition cipher--where plaintext is reordered and transformed--while negotiating the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson developed a specialized non-list cipher to be used by Meriwether Lewis for his expedition into the Louisiana territory that hinged on the keywords “antipodes” and “artichoke.” Lewis did not appear to share the president’s enthusiasm, or was just too tired from crossing the continent on boat, foot, and horseback. He never ended up using it.

The best method of keeping encrypted messages completely secure appears to have been losing or destroying the translation key. To this day, scholars are still working to piece together decoded passages in diplomatic letters from the revolutionary generation. “There are at least three codes for which no key has been found,” says McClure.

A couple of years ago, a cryptographer at Princeton finally managed to crack Patterson’s supposedly “indecipherable” code. It turns out, an encoded block of text that Patterson sent to Jefferson in 1801 as an example of an unbreakable code was the Declaration of Independence.

#Thomas Jefferson #founding father and cryptography #cryptography and Jefferson

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