Hitting the road and Jack

Published: Tuesday | May 18, 2010

By the side of a road that leads from Kingston to St Thomas there's a monument dedicated to Jack Mansong, also known as Three Finger Jack. If you don't know who that is, don't feel too bad, you're not alone. On a recent stop at the monument and surrounding areas, I came across lots of people, but little information.

It's hard to miss the monument dedicated to Three Finger Jack as you zip along the somewhat lonely stretch of road near enough to Bull Bay, St Thomas. There would be, however, little reason to stop, as other than the sign, there's nothing much around, save for bush and the occasional fast-moving mongoose. I, however, gave in to curiosity and pulled over at the spot last week to get a closer look.

In short, according to the inscription, Jack Mansong made the hills behind the marker his home as he waged a mostly single-handed war on English colonisers between 1780-1781. Nobody knows if he was brought to Jamaica from Africa or if he was born here, but he's believed to have been skilled with a machete and musket and gave the English soldiers hell during altercations. He was eventually ambushed and killed near the spot the monument now occupies.

The stranger

It was while standing at the side of the road reading the information that I heard a sneeze behind me. I turned to see an older fellow wearing a hat, sitting on a bicycle. He said hello as soon as I spotted him.

"Ah see yuh reading about old Jack, man!" he said, seeming quite happy about it. "Many people pass here, but nobody much really stop to find out what is what," he said. I asked him his name. "I am Smith, Everton Smith. I live down the road out there," he said, pointing in the direction of Kingston. I asked him what he knew about Three Finger Jack. He smiled broadly.

"I don't grow around here, yuh know. I am from Manchester and I know about Jack from I was a young bwoy inna short pants," said Everton. He adjusted his hat and continued.

"Three Finger Jack was a slave weh never tek nuh chat from no planter. Him decide seh him is a man and him not into dis slavery business, so him start fight like Chuck Norris and run weh inna di hills fi live. Any bwoy test, Jack just deal wid dem case, crucial. Dem eventually set trap fi him and kill him, but mi hear seh Jack tek out bout five ah dem same time." Everton smiled broadly as he related the story. I asked him if he knew how the name Three Finger Jack came about.

"Well, to be honest, mi not sure. My grandparents dem tell mi dat is while fighting one day him lose two of him finger dem and so him get him name, but I don't see nothing on di sign about it, so mi nuh know how true it is," he said.

Younger idiot dem

I mentioned to Everton how happy he seemed to be to recall the legend of Three Finger Jack and he nodded. "Yes, man. These are di stories people must know. Di younger idiot dem nuh know noting bout Jack. Di only Jack dem know ah cyar jack," he said, frowning. ...

Plus ça change, plus ça même chose, mes chers.


Ta much, dear BrightKnight

I have long held that being right ain't always cool.

Ta much, dear Glenn321

Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Compiled by scientists, science communicators and historians – and co-ordinated by Professor Michael Thompson FRS – it celebrates three and a half centuries of scientific endeavour and has been launched to commemorate the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary in 2010. ...

... A testy Duke of Bedford asked him why he insisted on making his wife look like a lesbian, but Vidal didn’t think that his clients looked like lesbians. He thought they looked modern, liberated — which they were: liberated from the rollers, the perming, the setting, the back-combing, the huge dryers and the humungous output of aerosol particles that constituted a trip to the salon throughout the Fifties. Vidal, despite having trained with “Mr Teasy Weasy” himself, the great Raymond of Mayfair, had sensed, as a new decade dawned, that the days of teasing and weasing were numbered. The signs could be divined everywhere, even in architecture: “You had only to look at Mies’s [van der Rohe] Seagram [a 1957 New York skyscraper] or Breuer’s Whitney [the 1966 art museum, also in New York] to know.” Or, indeed, at those geometric Sixties clothes. He clipped 4ft from Nancy Kwan’s hair....



Free your head, free your mind, take half the time you once did getting ready, buy shampoo only once a year: cut off your hair.

Yes, I am disgusted that this page also features a link to a "Six steps to the beehive: this season's must-have hair" article. Fuck that teasy-weasy shit. Why be a slave, or look like one?

... So you have to hand it to the maharajas. We’ve underestimated them. Their talent for exploiting their populace and growing rich, disgracefully, was close to super­human. That admitted, I see the V&A has set out to understand them in deeper and different ways.

Every now and then in this display, you encounter a map of India placing a particular nawab, nizam, rana, raja or sultan — the maharajas were a federation of royals, rather than a single species — in his shifting geographic kingdom. There are newsreels, too, and documentary-style black-and-white photographs of jewel-encrusted maharaos with curly moustaches meeting stiff British dignitaries with brooms up their jackets. On one of its strata, the show harbours an ambition to locate the maharajas in the full history of their times. But trying to hear this documentary message above the roar of the surrounding diamonds is like listening to a chirping robin while standing next to Niagara Falls. Yes, the maharajas may have played an interesting role in the jittery relationship between India and Britain. But what really matters here is the size of their rocks.

I have seen goose eggs smaller than the yellow diamond at the centre of the great necklace commissioned from Cartier in the 1920s by Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala. It was the largest single commission ever received by the finest French jeweller. And what of the string of huge emeralds worn by Ranjit Singh’s horse in the 1830s? Wouldn’t the weight of all that priceless stonewear around its neck have slowed the nag to a hobble? At one point in the glitterfest, I found myself staring at a slab of blue glass, roughly the size of a pear, set into the centre of a turban monument from Murshidabad. It turned out to be several hundred carats of uncut sapphire. ...

From Julius Caesar to Adolf Hitler, the invasion of Britain has been a constant theme in the history of these islands, even if the successful attempts have been heavily outnumbered by the unsuccessful ones.

Until now, however, one plan has remained unknown: an 18th-century plot to invade with an American army during that country’s War of Independence.

Drawn up by a French general, the scheme was to bring over an American force of 10,000 that would find a Britain so distracted by the war on the other side of the Atlantic, that victory would seem certain. Just to make sure, however, the general suggested that the force include a corps of Native Americans, or “sauvages”, as he termed them, who would strike such fear in British troops that any resistance would collapse immediately. ...

The first modern biography of the pirate genius who inspired Darwin, Defoe, and Cook

Charles Darwin called his books 'a mine of information' and took them aboard the Beagle. Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe used his experiences as inspiration in writing Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Captain James Cook depended on his observations while voyaging around the world, and Admiral Nelson urged all his officers to study his books. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him a genius and "a man of exquisite mind." In the history of exploration, few have ventured farther or achieved more than Englishman William Dampier (1651–1715). Yet, whereas the exploits of Magellan, Cook, Shackleton, and a host of legendary explorers have been widely chronicled, those of Dampier have been virtually invisible for more than a century—an omission that Diana and Michael Preston have redressed in this vivid, compelling life story.

At a time when surviving a voyage across the Pacific was cause for celebration, Dampier journeyed three times around the world, sailing more than 200,000 miles in his lifetime and witnessing people, places, and phenomena no European had seen. As a young man he spent several years in the swashbuckling company of buccaneers in the Caribbean and Pacific, learning to survive in their bloodthirsty, uncertain world before setting off on his first journey around the globe—a many-year odyssey, much of it spent in the theretofore mysterious Pacific and Southeast Asia. Later, his bestselling books about his experiences were a sensation; the vividness of his prose and accuracy of his descriptions put armchair readers in the midst of unknown worlds and introduced many words into the English language, including barbecue, chopsticks, and kumquat. Over time, Dampier's observations and insights influenced generations of scientists, explorers, and writers.

Dampier's powers of observation were astonishing. He was the first to deduce that winds cause currents and the first to produce wind maps across the world, surpassing even the work of Edmund Halley. His insights on land were equally astute: for example, he introduced the concept of the "sub-species" that Darwin later built into his theory of evolution, and his description of the breadfruit was the impetus for Captain Bligh's voyage on the Bounty. Dampier reached Australia eighty years before Cook, and he later led the first formal expedition of science and discovery back to Australia. So influential was Dampier that today he has more than one thousand entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. ...

The books and websites which confidently depict a whole range of pirate flags, each associated with a different pirate captain are without number. For so long have the same flags been reproduced by so many sources that there is now no doubt as to their authenticity, they have truly entered Pirate Mythtory to the extent that even a number of well respected pirate scholars have fallen down and printed them. Some of the oft-printed flags have a decent amount of evidence to support them, but a large number come originally from one undated, unsourced manuscript held in the National Maritime Museum. The manuscript shows a number of pirate flags, stating to whom each belonged, but there is no evidence as to how old the manuscript is, where it came from originally, who drew it, what their evidence was and whether or not they knew anything about pirates or whether they were working from their imagination. In short, the authenticity of a number of flags is extremely suspect, and there is a certain amount of evidence (based principally on the interpretation of the manuscript itself) which gives great doubt to its provenance.

I have found around 20 pirate flags in books and on the internet, many of which are, I believe, fictional. From original sources I have managed now to collect over 100 genuine pirate flags, which I will be collating into a separate Pirate Flags website in the near future. On this page you will find those flags which can be found on the net and in books with a description of whether they are fact or fiction, together with pictures of the genuine flags flown by the pirates in question.

I must express my gratitude to Corsair2k3 for his generosity of time and research which has been an enormous help to this page. ...

Abdominable Snowman stuff, dude.

To Detroit: Never, never give up!
BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
April 28, 2009

In all the 307 years since Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac and a convoy of 25 canoes carrying two priests, 50 soldiers, 50 fur-runners and 100 American Indians arrived on the banks of the Detroit River and built a settlement named Fort Ponchartrain du Detroit, this city has survived every kind of crisis and catastrophe.

Detroit has never given up. Sometimes we need a reminder that we shouldn't.

Motown is at the center now of a perfect storm of disasters that threaten to sink us: the banking and insurance mess that is costing the government billions, a growing unemployment rate that is now the nation's highest and the implosion of an auto industry that, like Michigan, waited too long to redefine itself.

But consider this: Nearly 204 years ago, an early-morning fire began in a stable at the west end of Ste. Anne Street and spread. By day's end, Detroit had burned down.

We survived.

And consider this: On Aug. 13, 1812, just weeks after the United States declared war on Britain, Detroit commander William Hull surrendered the city to avoid a possible massacre by Indians the British claimed were on their side. Detroit was occupied for a year before the Brits abandoned it, and Detroit owned itself again. ...



It's been hard for the folks living here even before Detroit was founded:
"The first recorded mention of what became Detroit was in 1670, when the French Sulpician missionaries François Dollier de Casson and René Bréhant de Galinée stopped at the site on their way to the mission at Sault Ste. Marie. Galínee's journal notes that near the site of present-day Detroit, they found a stone idol venerated by the Indians and destroyed the idol with an axe and dropped the pieces into the river." ...
From Wikipedia, History of Detroit article