Two Novels of Venezuela

From Venezuela's Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 46-47:

Two novels describe the crux between the past and the imaginary future proposed by Betancourt: Las Lanzas Coloradas (The Red Spears) by Arturo Uslar Pietri, and Doña Barbara, by Rómulo Gallegos. The novels were published in 1931 and 1929, respectively, and both seek nothing less than to explain the country and its prospects. Naturally, both stage their dramas in the countryside.

Uslar Pietri’s Las Lanzas Coloradas tells the story of a slave plantation owned by the descendants of the original Spanish founders at the time of the Wars of Independence. Doña Barbara takes place at a cattle ranch worked by free peons rather than slaves. Gallegos’ Doña Barbara is the story of a college graduate who returns to modernize his father’s land only to find himself opposed by a vicious, uneducated woman with near-magical powers. Barbara, standing in for the country’s dark past, will stop at nothing to derail the civilizing ideals of the protagonist, whose name is Santo, Spanish for Saint. The widely popular soap opera plot in Gallego’s novel ends, predictably, with the triumph of noble civilization over barbarism.

Uslar Pietri’s novel, on the other hand, ends with the Creole family’s plantation burned and reduced to ashes, the last female descendant of the founder graphically raped and murdered by the Pardo foreman, and the white male heir half-crazed and wandering through the countryside. ...

The young Uslar Pietri was the last writer of a generation obsessed with the country’s ethnic divides, the savagery of the 19th-century wars, and what some have called the pessimistic view of Venezuelan history. Las Lanzas Coloradas is packed with impressionistic descriptions of the brutality of life for enslaved workers at the plantation, the psychological effects of human submission, and the fury mixed-race Pardos felt toward their Creole masters. Uslar Pietri’s novel also offers an alternative and radical view of the independence wars’ early years.

Betancourt's Vision of Venezuela

From Venezuela's Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 43-44:

Rómulo Betancourt was the architect of a Venezuela in which race and ethnicity were eradicated from the public discourse. An early 20th-century pro-democracy leader, he laid down the basis for the country’s race-neutral ideology as Venezuela’s president first in 1945, and then again in 1959. Adecos, as Betancourt’s followers were called, would go on to become the political reference point in the life of the country, until Chávez and the new demographic wave destroyed their social project. Their vision’s successes and failures are virtual keys to understanding contemporary Venezuela.

By 1940 the thirty-three-year-old Betancourt was already a promising political leader, but one in the very middle of a unique moment in history. Behind him lay a poor, provincial country with a vast countryside still recovering from the deep social fractures Laureano Vallenilla had described in 1919. Ahead of him was a nation with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to start over again. He imagined that properly distributed, oil money would create a brand-new country to be filled, like a vast empty canvas, with great ideas and institutions. The young Betancourt knew he could shape an entirely new political imaginary. He was convinced he could solve the underlying issues of the country’s ethnic fracture.

His political program for change was clear: the state would charge a 50% tax on all profits obtained by American and British oil companies to underwrite a welfare state that would wipe out poverty, and level all Venezuelans. An enormous investment in education would transform people into informed citizens, and an influx of migrants would bring their legacies to form a new society made up of equals.

His political party, Acción Democrática, would organize workers, peasants, students, professionals, and industrialists around the unifying idea of a new Venezuela that left behind castes, ethnicities, and places of birth. The party’s manifesto called the organization “multi-class” and was purposely silent on matters of race, ethnicity, castes, or regional origin. Oil would fuel the country’s development and well-being, and act as a social glue linking everything together.

...

Betancourt had to embody that majority to sell this project. He emphasized his mother’s African descent. His hometown was on the western edge of the Afro-Caribbean Barlovento coast. His accent lacked the upper-class singsong of Creoles, and he would occasionally refer to himself as a “mulatto from Guatire.” His Spanish was laced with provincial colloquialisms.

But most importantly, Betancourt’s public persona embraced the mannerisms, language, and humor of ethnic Pardos. Ethnicity is an ambiguous combination of perceptions, far from the clearer lines that can define race. By embracing and claiming to be a Pardo, Betancourt became the perfect spokesperson for a project that someone with a Creole accent, a more formal manner, or wearing starched shirts with cufflinks could never sell.

Venezuela's Civil War of Independence

From Venezuela's Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 21-23:

Venezuelan children of the Concorde generation were taught a particular story of Venezuelan independence. It all started, according to the narrative, in a sleepy colonial outpost known as the Royal Captaincy General of Venezuela that was peacefully plodding along at the end of the 1700s. By 1808 Napoleon had invaded Spain, imprisoned the King, and imposed a puppet government over the empire in the Americas. Venezuelan Creoles, using the Cabildo de Caracas, seized the opportunity in 1810 to break away from a now-illegitimate monarchy, proclaimed sovereignty, wrote brilliant declarations, and led the first independence armies.

Yet, the Creole independent forces were, to their surprise, systematically defeated between 1810 and 1817. They seized Caracas twice, and declared and established independent Republics both times, only to be crushed. Their most famous representative and eventual leader, Simón Bolívar, commanded the country’s most important garrison during the first uprising, only to end up in exile in Cartagena. Years later he led the failed Second Republic before fleeing again.

What the elementary school stories never mention is that with the Spanish King imprisoned, and nearly every Spanish soldier on the planet fighting the French on Iberian soil, the so-called “royal” soldiers defeating the First and the Second Republics were mostly locals. The conflict was never one between newly self-conscious Venezuelans and royal Spaniards, but rather one between castes. The war of the First Republic was one of Pardos against Creole-led armies. Those of mixed-race felt no allegiance to the King, had no interest in the monarchy, and did not feel Spanish in any way. They flew the King’s standards, but they were fighting against Creole rule.

...

Pardos, free Africans, mutinous slaves, and many others of indigenous descent, destroyed Creole-led pro-independence governments twice in four long years. They battled Creole-led armies that sought to preserve the caste system and slavery in a newly independent republic. As the third chapter of this book chronicles in detail, the social and military dynamics had changed by 1816. Still, the first half of the independence wars remains critical to understanding what happened by the 1820s.

Venezuela's Demographic Origins

From Venezuela's Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 16-18:

The War of Spanish Succession that ended in 1714 brought significant changes around the world and Phillip V, a French-born king, to Madrid. A new royal ideology wanted more central control throughout the empire in the Americas, less power for Creoles, and a stricter social order. A French-influenced bureaucracy also responded to their century’s obsession with organizing and classifying every aspect of society. In Spanish America, they would find a unique challenge. Most societies there had been aggressively jumping ethnic and racial lines for two centuries. This was especially evident in the Venezuelan territories. The population of New Spain—current-day Mexico—had always been primarily indigenous, and those of Cuba and Hispaniola were already mainly African. By the early 1700s sparsely populated Venezuela enjoyed more numerical balance between those of Spanish origin or descent, African origin or descent, and Amerindians, than other colonies.

Influenced by the new winds from Madrid, both Spanish-born inhabitants and Creoles in every Spanish colony became obsessed throughout the 1700s by the classification of every person’s ethnic descent. Those of African and Spanish descent had always been called Mulattos. Mestizos were those of Indian and Spanish origin. The classification became more formal, and especially in New Spain, more complex. In a 1763 painting, the offspring of Spanish and Mulatta were called Morisco. Children of Spanish and Morisca descent were called Albinos. The children of Spanish and Albina were labelled Torna atrás, or “go back,” presumably because the physical features of grandparents would visibly return by the third generation.

Fascinated by everyone’s ethnic descent, and charged with imposing greater social control, Spanish colonial administrators tightened the regulations of freedom, rights, and privileges for different groups. There were many caste-based restrictions on who could work where; who was allowed to rise within the army, the church, the world of commerce, colonial government; who could worship in particular churches and not others; who could wear certain clothes; who could travel with what permits and where could they go; who could own what and how much of it; or who could get what kind of education.

While an intricate classification dominated the Spanish Americas’ imagination, the civil administration of the marginal colonies in the Venezuelan territories lacked the resources to replicate much complexity. In practical terms, the Venezuelan caste system concerned seven groups of non-slaved people: 1) the Spanish-born; 2) those born in the Americas of Spanish origin or Creoles; 3) those born in the Canary Islands; 4) indigenous people integrated into colonial society; 5) those indigenous in some form of bondage; 6) those formerly enslaved and now free Africans or their descendants; and finally, 7) those of mixed-race, be they Mestizos, Zambos, or Mulattos and their descendants. The latter were increasingly known as Pardos.

Colloquially, the word “Pardo” designates anyone not of pure Spanish, Indigenous, or African descent, but rather a mixture of them. In a more literal sense, Pardos simply have brown skin.

Often enough, documents from the time group every person of mixed-race as a Pardo. The imaginary castes that divided everyone of mixed-race into dozens of categories became, in practice, mute. The regulations and restrictions regarding those of mixed-race increasingly focused on Pardos. The 1700s were also years of relative plenty in the Venezuelan territories. The prices of cocoa and sugar, indigo, and other plantation-economy products were booming on a global scale. While Venezuela never had the extensive or ideal lands for cultivating sugar that made Haiti, and later Cuba, spectacularly wealthy, the economy grew significantly compared to the hard times of the 1600s. As cities and towns across the country prospered, the population grew, and Pardos specifically grew as a share of the population. Little noticed at the time and barely mentioned by contemporary historians, the increasing percentage of the Pardo population would change everything.

Portugal's Means & Ends in 1505

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 137-140:

Dom Francisco de Almeida, was only the king’s second choice. Tristão da Cunha had been his initial nomination, but the experienced seaman had suddenly been struck down by blindness, probably the result of a vitamin deficiency. Though he later recovered, the incident was taken as a sign from God. Almeida was to be the first member of the high nobility to lead an India expedition. He was about fifty-five years old, with wide military, diplomatic, and nautical experience, but he also possessed the personal qualities that Manuel hoped for in a man to whom he might entrust high affairs of state. Almeida was incorruptible, unmoved by the lure of riches, benevolent, a widower without home ties, pious, and mature in his judgments. For many, the attraction of India was the prospect of personal gain; Almeida was untarnished by the appetites of the Sodrés. He valued titles above bales of spices, and he knew how to fight.

Almeida was not just to be the captain-major. He was also granted the elevated title of viceroy, nominally with executive power to act in the king’s place. What this meant in practice was spelled out a week later in the regimento, the instructions given to him by the king. They ran to 101 closely written pages, containing 143 different items divided into chapters and subchapters that revealed both the microscopic level of detail at which the king wished to direct his appointee and the breathtaking scale of his ambition.

After sailing around the Cape, Almeida was ordered to get control of the Swahili coast. His targets were to be the ports of Sofala, key to the gold trade, and Kilwa. The recommended method was to arrive in the guise of friendship, then attack the towns by surprise, imprison all the Muslim merchants, and seize their riches. Forts were to be constructed and control then exercised over the sources of gold, necessary for trading on the Malabar Coast in exchange for spices. It was to be a mission of war, disguised as peace. Then, wasting no time, he was to proceed directly across the Indian Ocean and build four more forts: at the stopover island, Anjediva, as a support and provisioning hub, and in the friendly cities of Cannanore, Quilon, and Cochin.

Moving north, another fort was to be built at or near the mouth of the Red Sea and close to the kingdom of Prester John, to choke off the sultan’s spice trade and ensure that “all India should be stripped of the illusion of being able to trade with anyone but ourselves.” Two ships were to be on permanent patrol along the African coast as far as the Horn of Africa. The regimento then turned its attention to the intractable Calicut problem. One way or another, the new samudri, as hostile as his predecessor, was to be dealt with. Almeida was to establish peace if the samudri agreed to expel all the Muslims; if not, “wage war and total destruction on him, by all the means you best can by land and sea so that everything possible is destroyed.”

No strategic point was to be overlooked. After locking up the Red Sea, a fleet was to be sent to other Islamic city-states and kingdoms: Chaul and Cambay, and Ormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Almeida was to demand annual tribute to the king of Portugal; to order these states to break off all commercial relations with the Arab merchants of Cairo and the Red Sea; to capture all Muslim shipping along the way. To pay for all this, he was to ensure the full loading and prompt sailing of the annual spice fleets.

...

Manuel’s ambition did not end there. After seeing to the spice ships, the viceroy was ordered to open up new frontiers by “discovering” Ceylon, China, Malacca, and “whatever other parts have still not been known.” Pillars were to be planted on this new soil as markers of possession. It was an exhaustive list.

Though the instructions also claimed to allow Almeida a certain freedom of action in the case of unseen eventualities, in practice they imposed a rigid agenda. Manuel never had seen and never would see the world whose conquest he was demanding, but the regimento revealed an astonishing grasp of the choke points of the Indian Ocean and an authoritative geostrategic vision for controlling them and constructing his own empire. This knowledge had been acquired at breathtaking speed. Within seven years of bursting into the new world, the Portuguese understood, with a fair degree of accuracy, how the twenty-eight million square miles of the Indian Ocean worked, its major ports, its winds, the rhythm of its monsoons, its navigational possibilities and communication corridors—and they were already eyeing farther horizons. The methodology of knowledge acquisition had been developed over the years of slogging round the coast of Africa, during which the Portuguese had become expert observers and collectors of geographical and cultural information. They garnered this with great efficiency, scooping up local informants and pilots, employing interpreters, learning languages, observing with dispassionate scientific interest, drawing the best maps they could. Astronomers were sent on voyages; the collection of latitudes became a state enterprise. Men such as Duarte Pacheco Pereira, substituting firsthand observation for the received wisdom of the ancients, operated within the parameters of Renaissance inquiry. Information about the new world was fed back into a central hub, the India House in Lisbon, where everything was stored under the crown’s direct control to inform the next cycle of voyages. This system of feedback and adaptation was rapid and effective.

Manuel had drawn on a small coterie of advisers to construct the regimento for Almeida. Influential among them was Gaspar, the Polish Jew posing as a Venetian whom Vasco da Gama had kidnapped on his first voyage. He is woven into the first decade of Portuguese exploration, invaluable as an expert and an interpreter, an elusive figure, changing his identity and name to suit the patron of the moment and the needs of the situation. First Gaspar da Gama, to Manuel probably Gaspar da India, on the forthcoming voyage he would call himself Gaspar de Almeida “out of love for the viceroy.” He had a propensity to tell his new employers what they wanted to hear, but he was well informed. He seems to have had a good knowledge of the Indian Ocean and to have traveled widely. It was he who suggested the first overture to Cochin, and he had probably made voyages to Ceylon, Malacca, and Sumatra. He also understood the strategic importance of the Red Sea. It was this information that seeped into Manuel’s grand plan of 1505.

Gaspar had advocated that the Portuguese should go straight for the Muslim jugular—attack Aden, close the Red Sea, and suffocate Mamluk trade first; then the samudri would be compelled to become a Portuguese client—rather than laboriously constructing forts on the Malabar Coast that would cost money and lives. The wisdom of the forts strategy would become a hotly debated issue in the years ahead. Manuel had absorbed the plan but not the sequence: he preferred first to establish secure bases on Indian soil as a platform for snuffing out Muslim trade.

First Portuguese Toeholds in India

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 119-120:

GAMA SET SAIL FOR Lisbon in February 1503, leaving behind two fragile toeholds on the Indian coast—the trading posts at Cannanore and Cochin—and a furious and humiliated samudri in Calicut, additionally enraged with the sultan of Cochin for defying his attempts to uproot the Portuguese pirates. It was clear that there could be no peaceful negotiations with these intruders, whose visitations were assuming an ominous regularity. With the dying of each monsoon, their ships returned, sometimes in small squadrons, sometimes in major shows of force. They announced themselves with displays of flags and volleys of cannon fire. They came with intemperate demands for spices and for the expulsion of the deep-rooted Muslim community; they flouted the taboos of Hindu culture and backed up their threats with traumatic acts of violence beyond the acceptable rules of war.

The Portuguese now started trying to introduce a toll system for shipping along the shores of the Malabar Coast; they issued safe-conduct passes, called cartazes, that ensured protection for the vessels of friendly powers. This was effectively a tax on commerce. In time it would require merchant shipping to trade in Portuguese-controlled ports and, additionally, pay substantial import and export duties. The cartazes, stamped with the image of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, marked a radical shift in the Indian Ocean. With the coming of the Europeans, the sea was no longer a free-trade zone. The cartaz system introduced the alien concept of territorial waters, a politicized space controlled by armed force and the Portuguese ambition to dominate the sea.

The full implications of these threats to Indian Ocean trade were now echoing across the wider world. In December 1502, the worried Venetians established a Calicut committee with the express purpose of soliciting action from the sultan in Cairo; this was to be undertaken by their ambassador, Benedetto Sanuto, “to find rapid and secret remedies.” The utmost discretion was essential. The potential scandal of aiding Muslims against their Christian brethren made Venetian overtures extremely delicate, but Sanuto’s mission was clear: to highlight to the sultan the threat posed by a Portuguese blockade of his spice route, to urge him to put pressure on the samudri to expel the intruders, and, to the obvious advantage of the Venetians themselves, to lower tariffs on spices traded through Egypt to compete with the Portuguese.

In Cairo itself, the sultan, Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri, had other things to concern himself with—outbreaks of sedition, threats to the pilgrim routes to Mecca and Medina from Bedouin tribesmen, an empty treasury—but the sudden appearance of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was as disconcerting as it was inexplicable. “The audacity of the Franks knows no limit,” reported the chronicler Ibn Iyas of their growing incursions.

They say that the Franks have succeeded in effecting a breach in the dyke constructed by Alexander [the Great]…this breach has been made in a mountain that separates the China Sea [the Indian Ocean] from the Mediterranean. The Franks have been striving to enlarge this cutting to allow their ships to pass into the Red Sea. Such is the origin of this piracy.

Cabral's Armada to India in 1500

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 85-87:

JUST SIX MONTHS AFTER Gama’s return, a vastly larger fleet was ready to depart from the shores of Belém: thirteen ships, twelve hundred men, and a capital investment by Florentine and Genoese bankers, now eager to participate in the opportunities of the Indies. Manuel could be irresolute, easily swayed, and perverse, but the year 1500 resounded with messianic portents, the eyes of Europe were turning toward Lisbon, and this new armada, led by the fidalgo Pedro Álvares Cabral as captain-major, was a swift follow-up aimed at winning material advantages and the crusading admiration of the Catholic world. Cabral’s expedition marked the shift from reconnaissance to commerce and then conquest. In the first five years of the sixteenth century, Manuel would dispatch a volley of overlapping fleets of increasing size, eighty-one ships in all, to ensure success in a life-and-death struggle for a permanent position in the Indian Ocean. It was a supreme national effort that called on all the available resources of manpower, shipbuilding, material provision, and strategic vision to exploit a window of opportunity before Spain could react. In the process, the Portuguese took both Europe and the peoples of the Indies by complete surprise.

Cabral was able to apply all the knowledge gained from Gama’s voyage. The timing of departure was no longer decided by the auspicious calculations of court astrologers but by the rhythm of the monsoon. The route was to follow the looping westward sweep undertaken by the ships in 1497, and to draw on the experience of pilots and captains such as Pêro Escobar, Nicholas Coelho, who had accompanied Gama, and Bartolomeu Dias himself. Cabral’s fleet carried back Malayalam-speaking Indians who had been taught Portuguese, with the aim of cutting out the Arabic-speaking middlemen. The Jewish convert Gaspar da Gama was aboard, knowledgeable about the intricate politics of the Malabar Coast, and another converted Jew, Master John, Dom Manuel’s physician, sailed as astronomer to the fleet, with the duty of studying the stars of the Southern Hemisphere for the purposes of future navigation. After the hideous embarrassment of the gifts offered at Calicut, Cabral carried choice items to entrance the samudri. It appears that the Portuguese persisted in believing that the samudri was a Christian king, albeit of an unorthodox kind, and in accord with the remit of the pope, a delegation of Franciscan friars accompanied the expedition to correct his errors, so that “the Indians…might more completely have instruction in our faith and might be indoctrinated and taught in matters pertaining to it, as befits the service of God and the salvation of their souls.”

Equally important was the commercial mission. The personnel, secretarial resources, and goods to establish a trading post in Calicut accompanied the expedition. With the cautionary example of the failures of the previous voyage, calculated attempts were made to load wares that might be attractive to the Malabar Indians. These included coral, copper, vermilion pigment, mercury, fine and coarse cloth, velvets, satins, and damasks in a whole range of colors, and gold coins. A highly experienced factor, Ayres Corrêa, who spoke Arabic, headed up this commercial initiative, supported by a team of clerks and secretaries to keep records and accounts. These literate subordinates—such as Pêro Vaz de Caminha, who wrote the first account of Brazil—provided some of the most riveting, and sometimes heartbreaking, narratives of the deeds of the Portuguese in the years ahead.

Cabral himself was no seaman, rather a diplomat with a carefully framed set of instructions, some of which had been drawn up by Gama to smooth the troubled waters in the wake of his expedition to Calicut and to establish peaceful and lucrative relations with the “Christian” samudri. Vastly better informed than his predecessor, Cabral could consult this multi-page document, which contained branching options in the case of a whole range of eventualities. It also directed him to take peremptory and high-handed action against perceived enemies that was likely to lead to trouble.

Indian Ocean Trade Before 1400

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 51-53:

The Indian Ocean, thirty times the size of the Mediterranean, is shaped like an enormous M, with India as its central V. It is flanked on its western edge by the arid shores of the Arabian Peninsula and the long Swahili coast of East Africa; on its east, the barrier islands of Java and Sumatra and the blunt end of Western Australia separate it from the Pacific; to the south run the cold and violent waters of the Antarctic. The timing and trade routes of everything that moved across its surface in the age of sail were dictated by the metronomic rhythm of the monsoon winds, one of the great meteorological dramas of the planet, by whose seasonal fluctuations and reversals, like the operation of a series of intermeshing cogs, goods could be moved across great stretches of the globe. The traditional ship that plied the waters of the western Indian Ocean was the dhow—that is, any of a large family of long, thin vessels with triangular lateen sails of various sizes and regional designs, ranging from coastal craft of between five and fifteen tons up to oceangoing ships of several hundred tons that could overtop Gama’s carracks. Historically, these were sewn vessels, held together by coir ropes, made from coconut fiber without the use of nails.

Unlike Columbus, the Portuguese had not burst into silent seas. For thousands of years, the Indian Ocean had been the crossroads of the world’s trade, shifting goods across a vast space from Canton to Cairo, Burma to Baghdad, through a complex interlocking of trading systems, maritime styles, cultures and religions, and a series of hubs: Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, larger than Venice, for goods from China and the farther spice islands; Calicut, on the west coast of India, for pepper; Ormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf and Baghdad; Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea and the routes to Cairo, the nerve center of the Islamic world. Scores of other small city-states dotted its shores. It dispatched gold, black slaves, and mangrove poles from Africa, incense and dates from Arabia, bullion from Europe, horses from Persia, opium from Egypt, porcelain from China, war elephants from Ceylon, rice from Bengal, sulfur from Sumatra, nutmeg from the Moluccas, diamonds from the Deccan Plateau, cotton cloth from Gujarat. No one had a monopoly in this terrain—it was too extensive and complex, and the great continental powers of Asia left the sea to the merchants. There was small-scale piracy but there were no protectionist war fleets, and little notion of territorial waters prevailed; the star fleets of the Ming dynasty, the one maritime superpower, had advanced and withdrawn. It constituted a vast and comparatively peaceful free-trade zone: over half the world’s wealth passed through its waters in a commercial commonwealth that was fragmented between many players. “God,” it was said, “had given the sea in common.”

This was the world of Sindbad. Its key merchant groups, distributed thinly around its shores, from the palm-fringed beaches of East Africa to the spice islands of the East Indies, were largely Muslims. Islam had been spread, not at the point of a sword, but by missionaries and merchants from the deck of a dhow. This was a polyethnic world, in which trade depended on social and cultural interaction, long-range migration, and a measure of mutual accommodation among Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, local Christians and Jews; it was richer, more deeply layered and complex than the Portuguese could initially grasp. Their mindset was defined by the assumption of monopoly trading rights, as developed on the west coasts of Africa and by holy war in Morocco. The existence of Hinduism appears to have been occluded, and their default position when checked was aggression: hostage taking and the lighted taper ever ready at the touchhole of a bombard. They broke into this sea with their fast-firing, ship-mounted cannons, a player from outside the rules. The vessels they would encounter in the Indian Ocean lacked any comparable defenses.

It became immediately apparent as Gama’s ships approached the town of Mozambique that this was different from the Africa of their previous experience. The houses, thatched with straw, were well built; they could glimpse minarets and wooden mosques. The people, evidently Muslim merchants richly dressed in caftans fringed with silk and embroidered with gold, were urban Arabic speakers with whom their translators could communicate. The welcome was unusually friendly. “They came immediately on board with as much confidence as if they were long acquainted and entered into familiar conversation.” For the first time the Portuguese heard news of the world they had come to find. Through the interpreters they learned of the trade of the “white Muslims”—merchants from the Arabian Peninsula; there were four of their vessels in the harbor, bringing “gold, silver, cloves, pepper, ginger and silver rings…pearls, jewels and rubies.” “Further on, where we were going,” the anonymous writer added with a justifiable note of incredulity, “they abounded, and…precious stones, pearls and spices were so plentiful that there was no need to purchase them as they could be collected in baskets.” This heady vision of wealth was encouraging enough; but they also learned of a large presence of Christians along the coast and that “Prester John resided not far from this place; that he held many cities along the coast, and that the inhabitants of those cities were great merchants and owned big ships.” Whatever might have been lost in translation, “we cried with joy and prayed God to grant us health, so that we might behold what we so much desired.”

First Chinese Voyages to Africa

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. xix-xxi:

ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1414, the first giraffe ever seen in China was approaching the imperial palace in Beijing. A crowd of eager spectators craned their heads to catch a glimpse of this curiosity “with the body of a deer and the tail of an ox, and a fleshy boneless horn, with luminous spots like a red cloud or a purple mist,” according to the enraptured court calligrapher and poet Shen Du. The animal was apparently harmless: “its hoofs do not tread on living creatures…its eyes rove incessantly. All are delighted with it.” The giraffe was being led on a halter by its keeper, a Bengali; it was a present from the faraway sultan of Malindi, on the coast of East Africa.

The dainty animal, captured in a contemporary painting, was the exotic trophy of one of the strangest and most spectacular expeditions in maritime history. For thirty years at the start of the fifteenth century, the emperor of the recently established Ming dynasty, Yongle, dispatched a series of armadas across the western seas as a demonstration of Chinese power.na

The fleets were vast. The first, in 1405, consisted of some 250 ships carrying twenty-eight thousand men. At its center were the treasure ships: multi-decked, nine-masted junks 440 feet long with innovative watertight buoyancy compartments and immense rudders 450 feet square. They were accompanied by a retinue of support vessels—horse transports, supply ships, troop carriers, warships, and water tankers—with which they communicated by a system of flags, lanterns, and drums. As well as navigators, sailors, soldiers, and ancillary workers, they took with them translators, to communicate with the barbarian peoples of the West, and chroniclers, to record the voyages. The fleets carried sufficient food for a year—the Chinese did not wish to be beholden to anyone—and navigated straight across the heart of the Indian Ocean from Malaysia to Sri Lanka, with compasses and calibrated astronomical plates carved in ebony. The treasure ships were known as star rafts, powerful enough to voyage even to the Milky Way. “Our sails,” it was recorded, “loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course, rapid like that of a star, traversing the savage waves.” Their admiral was a Muslim named Zheng He, whose grandfather had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and who gloried in the title of the Three-Jewel Eunuch.

These expeditions—six during the life of Yongle, and a seventh in 1431–33—were epics of navigation. Each lasted between two and three years, and they ranged far and wide across the Indian Ocean from Borneo to Zanzibar. Although they had ample capacity to quell pirates and depose monarchs and also carried goods to trade, they were primarily neither military nor economic ventures but carefully choreographed displays of soft power. The voyages of the star rafts were nonviolent techniques for projecting the magnificence of China to the coastal states of India and East Africa. There was no attempt at military occupation, nor any hindrance to the area’s free-trade system. By a kind of reverse logic, they had come to demonstrate that China wanted nothing, by giving rather than taking: “to go to the [barbarians’] countries,” in the words of a contemporary inscription, “and confer presents on them so as to transform them by displaying our power.” Overawed ambassadors from the peripheral peoples of the Indian Ocean returned with the fleet to pay tribute to Yongle—to acknowledge and admire China as the center of the world. The jewels, pearls, gold, ivory, and exotic animals they laid before the emperor were little more than a symbolic recognition of Chinese superiority. “The countries beyond the horizon and at the end of the earth have all become subjects,” it was recorded. The Chinese were referring to the world of the Indian Ocean, though they had a good idea what lay farther off. While Europe was pondering horizons beyond the Mediterranean, how the oceans were connected, and the possible shape of Africa, the Chinese seemed to know already. In the fourteenth century they had created a map showing the African continent as a sharp triangle, with a great lake at its heart and rivers flowing north.

Preparing Vasco da Gama's Voyage

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 34-40:

What Münzer witnessed [in 1497] was not just a glimpse of an exotic world beyond the earth’s curve but the industrial infrastructure of shipbuilding, seafaring provision, and arsenal facilities that gave Portugal its maritime punch. He saw

an enormous workshop with many furnaces where they make anchors, colubrinas [cannons] and so on, and everything necessary for the sea. There were so many blackened workers around the furnaces that we thought ourselves to be among the Cyclops in the cave of Vulcan. Afterward we saw in four other buildings innumerable very large and superb colubrinas, and also throwing weapons, javelins, shields, breastplates, mortars, hand guns, bows, lances—all very well made and in great abundance…and what enormous quantities of lead, copper, saltpetre and sulfur!

The ability to produce high-quality bronze cannons and techniques for deploying them effectively at sea had probably been developed by the energetic King João, whose inquisitive mind and wide-ranging interests included practical experiments in shipborne artillery. He had developed the use of large bombards on caravels and carried out test firings to determine their most effective use on the decks of pitching ships. The solution was to fire the guns horizontally at water level; any higher and the likelihood was that the shots would whistle overhead. In some cases, if the guns were positioned sufficiently low down in the bows, the cannonballs could be made to ricochet off the surface of the water, thus increasing their range. The Portuguese also developed berços, lightweight breech-loaded bronze swivel guns, which could be carried by ship’s boats and had the advantage over the conventional muzzle-loaders in their rate of fire—up to twenty shots an hour. The superiority of their artillery, which was augmented by recruitment of German and Flemish cannon founders and gunners, was to prove a telling advantage in the events about to unfold.

The expedition in prospect was modest in scale but carefully prepared. It was based on decades of incremental learning. All the skill and knowledge acquired over many years in ship design, navigation, and provision for Atlantic voyages went into building two stout ships, and [King] Manuel drew on a talented generation of practical experience in their construction. The caravel had been the agent and instrument of all this exploration, ideal for nosing up tropical rivers and battling back up the African coast against the wind, but horribly uncomfortable on long voyages across huge seas. Dias’s rounding of the Cape had exposed their operational limits: the crews would go no farther.

...

It was Dias who was charged with designing and overseeing the construction of two stout carracks, the sailing ships the Portuguese called naus, to lead the voyage. The brief was clear: they had to be durable enough to withstand the pounding seas of the southern Atlantic; roomy enough to accommodate and provision the crews better than the rolling decks of a caravel; small enough to maneuver in shallows and harbors. The ships under construction on the banks, their frameworks chocked up by wooden scaffolding, had tubby rounded hulls, high sides, a tall aftercastle, and three masts; they were nevertheless of shallow draft, and not outsized. They were about eighty feet long, and each probably weighed about 100 to 120 tons. Their square sails made them less maneuverable in a contrary wind; the compensation was their sturdiness against the unpredictable battering of unknown seas. A supply ship, intended to be broken up near the Cape, was also constructed.

It seems that no expense was spared in the construction or provisioning of these ships, or the recruitment and payment of the crews. “They were built by excellent masters and workmen, with strong nails and wood,” remembered the mariner Duarte Pacheco Pereira.

Each ship had three sets of sails and anchors and three or four times as much other tackle and rigging as was usual. The cooperage of the casks, pipes and barrels for wine, water, vinegar and oil was strengthened with many hoops of iron. The provisions of bread, wine, flour, meat, vegetables, medicines, and likewise of arms and ammunition, were also in excess of what was needed for such a voyage. The best and most skillful pilots and mariners in Portugal were sent on this voyage, and they received, besides other favors, salaries higher than those of any seamen of other countries. The money spent on the few ships of this expedition was so great that I will not go into detail for fear of not being believed.

The barrels rolled up the gangplanks on the shores of the dockyard contained sufficient food for three years. Gama received two thousand gold cruzados for the venture, a huge sum; his brother Paulo, the same. The seamen’s wages were raised, and some of the money paid in advance to support their families. It was perhaps a recognition that many of them would not be coming back. No detail was omitted. The ships carried the best navigational aids available: as well as sounding leads and hourglasses, astrolabes and the most up-to-date maps—and possibly copies of Abraham Zacuto’s recently printed tables for determining latitudes from the height of the sun. Twenty cannons were hoisted aboard, both large bombards and the smaller breech-loaded berços, along with plentiful supplies of gunpowder tightly sealed against the sea air and quantities of cannonballs. The skilled craftsmen—carpenters, caulkers, forgers of iron, and barrelmakers—who would ensure the security of the ships were recruited in pairs, in case death thinned out their ranks. There were interpreters to speak Bantu and Arabic; musicians to lead sea chanteys and blow ceremonial fanfares; gunners and men-at-arms and skilled seamen, supported by an underclass of “deck fodder.” These comprised African slaves, orphans, converted Jews, and convicted men, enrolled for the menial heavy work: hauling on ropes, raising anchors and sails, pumping out the bilges. The convicts were particularly expendable; they had been released from prison specifically to be put ashore to make first inquiries on uncharted and potentially hostile coasts; priests also went, to lead the prayers and consign the souls of the dead to the sea with a Christian burial.

There were four ships in all: the two carracks, christened São Gabriel and São Rafael after the archangels, according to a vow made by King João before his death; with them went a caravel, the Bérrio, and the two-hundred-ton supply ship. Gama called on seamen he knew and relatives he could trust, to lessen the possibility of dissent in a tightly knit expedition. These included his brother Paulo, commander of the Rafael, and two Gama cousins. His pilots and leading seamen were the most experienced of the age. They included Pêro de Alenquer and Nicholas Coelho, who had rounded the cape with Bartolomeu Dias, and Dias’s own brother Diogo. Another pilot, Pêro Escobar, whose name was carved at the Yellala Falls, had been a navigator with Diogo Cão. Bartolomeu Dias was also scheduled to accompany the expedition on the first leg of the voyage in a ship bound for the Guinea coast.

Emigrating from Liverpool by Sea

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 229-232:

The modern Catholic cathedral in Liverpool is known irreverently but affectionately as Paddy’s Wigwam, in deference to its shape and to the antecedents of the masses who worship within the diocese today. The six years of the Famine sailings saw a million Irish emigrants arrive in Liverpool’s port. The majority had just completed the short trip across the usually turbulent Irish Sea – the first stage of their journey to America or Canada. Nearly a quarter of them would have nothing more to do with that cruel sea and those inhuman ships. Some travelled to England and Scotland but many an Irishman and his family remained in Liverpool. For some the city symbolised the end of all their travels and a section of the city came to be known as Little Ireland.

For nearly two centuries, from c. 1700–1900, Liverpool’s port enabled Britain to dominate rival maritime nations. Liverpool sent out ships to explore the world but also ships full of human cargo, first slaves, and then emigrants. Known as the slavers’ port in the 18th century, Liverpool rapidly became an emigrants’ port in the 19th century, though Liverpool’s ship owners continued to trade in slaves until slavery was abolished by Britain in 1807. During that final year, 185 ships transported as many as 50,000 slaves. Soon the commercial rule of ‘slaves-out and sugar-back’ gave way to ‘emigrants-out and timber-back’. On ships bound for New York or Boston during the Famine, it cost 6 cs to insure US $4 worth of baggage but only 4 cs to insure your life. But the Irish were only part of the emigration story. During the 19th century, a total of nine million emigrants spilled out of Europe, sailing from Liverpool to America. Liverpool enjoyed unique commercial and geographical assets. Sited strategically close to the Irish Sea, the city lay only 3 miles up the River Mersey. Liverpool was also one of the first posts to forge a rail-link with Hull, 100 miles away. Hull, in turn, enjoyed busy trade with the ports of Hamburg and Bremen, Gothenburg and Danzig, from where a remarkable ethnic mix of people journeyed, sometimes fleeing their homelands for various reasons. The crossing from Europe to Hull over the North Sea, was as short as that over the Irish Sea, and the rail fare was only a few shillings. Of course, at this particular time the mainland Europeans formed only a minor part of the emigrant population in Britain.

It was logical for the Irish to aim for Liverpool as their launching pad into the New World, not merely because it was the nearest port of convenience, but also because it was a familiar site and source of summer work. Thousands of Irish farmhands regularly crossed to Liverpool, seeking work at the back end of summer on England’s farms. Too few opportunities existed at home at harvest time and the wages in England were better. Additionally, many more ships were available in Liverpool, with its big, fast vessels and speedy American packet ships. The fast packets grabbed a good half of the emigrant trade towards the end of the Famine years, averaging 40 days westward and 23 days eastward. Liverpool was also one of the world’s busiest shipping ports, with over 36 miles of quays and a massive ship tonnage registered as three times the overall tonnage owned in America at that period. Into this teeming city sailed the Irish families from their rural communities. Already overawed by the Irish cities of Dublin, Belfast or Cork, the rural emigrants had to survive the streetwise con-men and racketeers of Liverpool, and later of New York or Boston. At various levels the Liverpool fraternity was engaged in the business of exporting people and, as human cargo was regarded as a commodity, every trader sought to extract his ounce of flesh from that commodity. Yet help was at hand, if only the emigrants knew where to look and who to ask. Various publications offered guidance, and government circulars advised on how to find lodgings, how to seek a passage and buy a ticket, where to exchange money, what to avoid at the docks, on the ships and on arrival.

The priority for the emigrant in Liverpool was to obtain a ticket for a ship sailing within a few days. Space on most of the Atlantic ships was often sold in one block by the owners to the passenger brokers and competition was so intense that fares varied from day to day, sometimes changing by the hour. A berth in steerage ranged between £3 10s to £5 (US $17.50 to $25). The port authority licensed 21 brokers who each provided a bond plus two sureties totalling £200 (US $1,000). The brokers paid a small commission to dock-runners for each emigrant delivered to their office. Given half a chance, a runner would lead his unsuspecting victims from the brokers to a lodging house, and then on to a chandler for provisions and suitable clothing, earning further commission, if he could persuade his prey to part with his last few pennies. Before the day of departure, each emigrant had to appear before a medical officer who was paid by the ship owner or charterer £1 (US $5) for every hundred passengers he inspected. After a very rudimentary examination, he would stamp each ticket as proof of inspection. Passengers were entitled to board the ship 24 hours before departure. Once settled, if lucky to have among them a fiddler or a piper and while spirits were high, the passengers might enjoy a song and dance. Once out on the ocean, the sloping decks and strong south-westerly winds would soon restrict their activities. Occasionally, there were scenes at the quayside if passengers arrived late, after the gangway had been raised, the mooring lines cast off and the ship had sailed away. The late arrivals would be rushed to the dock-gate and as their ship passed close by, their luggage and boxes would be flung aboard, followed by the passengers themselves, hopefully landing on the deck. If they or their luggage missed the ship and splashed into the water, there was usually a man in a rowing boat positioned for a rescue, and a reward.

Steam tugs usually towed a sailing ship into position down-river. As tugs were not always available during these early days of steam, outgoing ships were sometimes steered by a practised pilot with a single-sail cutter in attendance. The pilot’s local knowledge of navigational hazards, tides, currents and winds and his regular practice in handling a ship were invaluable. During the short voyage down-river, the ship’s crew searched for stowaways. All legitimate passengers were mustered on deck during the search, while dubious bundles were poked with long, sharp sticks and suspect barrels were turned upside-down. Many a barrel or trunk concealed a body or two. Once discovered, the guilty stowaways were transferred to the tug and returned to shore where they would be tried before a magistrate. A lucky few survived the search and made their appearance two or three days later when the crew would be grateful as the successful stowaways worked their passage by doing the most unpleasant jobs on board.

Ireland's Oldest Lighthouse

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 151-152:

In 1849, shortly before Patrick Kennedy left for America, the first three ships to sail directly from his home port of New Ross to America, cast off with their quotas of Famine emigrants. The Lady Constable, the Boreas and the Dunbrody were all bound for New York, and crossed the Atlantic at the same time as the Washington Irving, carrying Patrick Kennedy to his new life in America.

The Dunbrody was named after Dunbrody Abbey standing high on the east bank of the River Barrow, just beyond the point where the Barrow joins the Suir flowing down from Waterford. Further down the river where the calmer waters emerge into the swell of the Atlantic, stands another Catholic landmark, St Dubhan’s Monastery close to Hook Point. For centuries the monks took a vow to warn mariners of the dangers of the rocks below and maintained a lighthouse near the monastery. Caligula, the Roman Emperor who ruled at the beginning of the first century AD, built the world’s first lighthouses as his legions spread across Europe. Some 400 years later, St Dubhan established the oldest lighthouse in Ireland on Hook Point. The monks kept the beacon alight in those early days by burning coal, pitch, charcoal and tar each night. Later, the Canons of St Augustine took over and built an 80-foot-high tower for the light with a small fortress below. The monks continued to preserve the light until 1657 when the lighthouse passed into public ownership. The original tower, coated in white lime to stand out by day, is now 700 years old, and ‘in such good repair it will probably last another millennium’, comments the Irish coastguard service. The tower performed an essential service for all ships entering the delta on their way to Waterford, Wexford, New Ross, or any other harbour en route. For the emigrants on a ship sailing from Ireland on a southerly course, the ancient lighthouse served as the last memorable monument to their homeland. The kindlier captains allowed emigrants up on deck, to catch a last glimpse of their beloved homeland before she disappeared beyond the horizon. With dry mouths, damp eyes and hands clasping the rail, the tearful emigrants gazed in silence at the disappearing coastline. Eventually the silence would give way to the exciting hiss of the bow wave and the roaring seas and the sad men and women would be shepherded down below.

Packet Ships with Livestock

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 146-147:

The scene aboard the Washington Irving is dramatically brought to life in Some Famous Sailing Ships, written in 1928 by Richard C McKay, grandson of the boat-builder:

One cannot help admiring the daring that impelled Enoch Train to start his celebrated line of sailing packets and to commission Donald McKay to build them expressly for the trans-Atlantic passenger, freight and mail service. He had to contend not only with the keen rivalry of the New York packet lines, but the Lords of the Admiralty (in London) had charge of the Royal mails and sometime previously had contracted for the conveyance of these with Mr Samuel Cunard.

He then brought into existence buildings required to house the live-stock for supplying the cabin table, the most important being the cow house where, after a short run ashore on the marshes at the end of each voyage, a well-seasoned animal of the snug-made Alderney breed, chewed the cud in sweet content.

An animal farm might be a practical option aboard one of Cunard’s early steamships, which could proceed with reasonably level decks, but keeping livestock aboard a sailing ship was a tricky business.
However, as Enoch Train was forced to compete with Cunard’s steamships, live animals were kept aboard his packet ships to supplement supplies. As McKay points out:

Preserved milk was unknown in those times; and the officers of a passenger ship would rather have gone to sea without a doctor, to say nothing of a parson, than without a cow and some nanny-goats. The ship’s cow and her health was always a most important matter and it is related that on one occasion, after a long spell of very bad weather, one of these creatures fell off in her supply of milk and was brought around again by a liberal supply of nourishing stout, wisely prescribed for her by the ship’s doctor.

Pigs always proved a thriving stock on a ship farm. Next to the pig, goats were the most useful stock. These animals soon made themselves at home on shipboard; they had good sea legs and were blessed with an appetite that nothing in the way of tough fibre was too much for, from an armful of shavings to an old newspaper or logbook. It was not, however, always practical to turn in sheep to feed with pigs at sea, for the last-named animals were apt to develop a taste for a good live leg of mutton after a few weeks afloat.

Truly in those days a ship was more like a small bit of the world afloat than it is now. One can imagine the noisy confusion that must have reigned aboard one of these packets on sailing day. Ducks, geese and poultry in general always sympathised with excitement near them while pigs and even sheep, thrown together for the first time, had a noisy way of their own. At intervals, even the old cow bemoaned her lot in life.

Poland-Romania Cultural Season, 2025

Culture.pl has been celebrating a Poland-Romania Cultural Season 2024-2025 with many postings on diverse topics.

The Poland-Romania Cultural Season 2024-2025 is being announced in Warsaw and Bucharest on March 3rd for a reason. In a joint decision by both countries last year, the date now marks the celebration of Polish-Romanian Solidarity Day, commemorating the signing of their first defensive alliance in 1921. That document sealed the bonds of friendship that long connected both countries and its leaders – Józef Piłsudski and the Romanian royal family of King Ferdinand and his wife Maria. Tangible later evidence of these relations was the Romanian reception in September 1939 of tens of thousands of Polish refugees, as well as the assistance given in hiding Poland’s gold reserves and the Jagiellonian tapestries, which found safe refuge in Romania.

Here's a snippet from one contribution by Mikołaj Gliński, who writes on language-related topics. He titles it Shared Roads.

Often called a 'Romanic island in a Slavic sea', Romania and the Romanian language have been under a variety of cultural influences since their inception. Romanian, a Romance language, has absorbed a considerable number of Slavic elements – according to some estimates, as much as 20% of the Romanian vocabulary has Slavic roots.

To Polish or Slavic eyes, certain words in Romanian may look familiar:

• drag (dear) and dragoste (love) both remind us of ‘drogi’ (dear)
• glas (voice) looks similar to ‘głos’, its Polish equivalent
• a iubi (to love) has hints of the Polish word ‘lubić’, meaning ‘to like’
• rai (paradise) sounds just like the Polish word ‘raj’
• prieten (friend) has echoes of ‘przyjaciel’
• pivniță [corrected] (cellar) is very similar to ‘piwnica’
• coasă (scythe) is like an accented ‘kosa’
• plug (plow) is one letter off ‘pług’

Many were adopted early in the language’s development, likely from Old Church Slavonic and its local adaptations.

From the 15th to the early 18th centuries, Romanian (especially in so-called Moldavian-Slavonic documents) borrowed eagerly and directly from Polish. Words like pan (a noble title), zlot (gold coin), basta (tower), and a rocosi (to rebel) entered the language. However, most did not survive due to the 19th-century re-Romanisation reforms, which aimed to purge Romanian of foreign elements, replacing them with Romance neologisms.

But a handful of Polonisms from that era did survive and still remain today. According to Henryk Misterski, a professor specialising in Romania, they are komornik (bailiff), pan, stolnik (carpentry), sołtys (village mayor), szafran (saffron), and złoty (golden). Other terms, like sanie (sled) and lopată (shovel), also persist.

Meanwhile Romanians can easily recognise many Carpathian pastoral terms in Polish, such as watra (hearth) and bryndza (a type of mountain cheese). These entered Polish via the language used by Wallachian shepherds grazing their animals in the Carpathians.

1848 in Ireland

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 85-86:

The government in London still declined to recognise the state of Ireland’s rapidly diminishing population. There was little fight left in the people, little strength to fight the hunger and none at all to fight the British who mistook the mood of the people and remained insensitive to the reality of their situation: even peasant armies cannot fight on empty bellies. Tenants on some of the larger estates banded together to avoid paying rents, current or arrears, and formed combinations while in the towns and cities Confederate Clubs were set up; but that was as far as they went – there is no evidence of well-organised conspiracies to murder landlords or agents, however much they were hated. But the apprehension of an Irish uprising had been growing steadily for more than two years among Britain’s leaders. Elsewhere in Europe, uprisings were rife: in January 1848 the people in Sicily forced concessions from their King; in February a bloodless revolution overthrew the French Parliament; in early March the army in Vienna was routed by the city’s people; then the Austrian rulers were driven out of Milan by the Italians. These winter insurrections encouraged radical leaders of the Young Ireland Party to rebel. As a result, in March three men, William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Meagher and John Mitchel, were arrested and charged with sedition. After the first two were acquitted, the third, Mitchel, a journalist, was tried in May under another act and convicted. The Attorney General in London had just drafted a new Treason Felony Act, decreeing, ‘… any person who, by open and advised speaking, compassed the intimidation of the Crown or of Parliament,’ was made guilty of felony. And in the current climate any person found guilty under this Act would be sure to face a heavy sentence – transportation to an overseas colony possibly for life. Within an hour of the jury returning their verdict, and sentencing Mitchel to 14 years’ transportation, he was on his way out of the country, not on an emigrant ship but aboard a British warship, bound for Tasmania on the other side of the world.

Fear is often fuelled by rumour, which was rife at the time. Misleading stories spread of great protest gatherings, 10,000-strong, and marches of 20,000 militants were reported to London. It was rumoured than an Irish Brigade was being raised in America, and that the Confederate Clubs were arming their members. As a result, the British Government determined to quash the threat of a peasant uprising. More English troops and weapons poured into Dublin and spread around the country. Additional English warships were despatched to strengthen the fleet at Cove, near Cork.

The British decided that further examples should be made among the would-be leaders and early in July, Thomas Meagher, son of the Mayor of Waterford, was re-arrested. His speeches in previous years, urging armed rebellion, had earned him the title Meagher of the Sword. He was detained by the police right outside the offices of the Waterford Chronicle whose editorial that day, on July 12th, cautioned against immediate rebellion, urging instead, ‘Wait until England is engaged in a major European war. The Chronicle will equip 200,000 men to fight against England.’

U.S. Aid for Ireland, 1847

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 54-56:

No fewer than 5,000 crossings are estimated to have carried the million Irish Famine emigrants westwards over the Atlantic. Yet a single passage in the opposite direction has achieved great significance historically. This was the voyage of the Jamestown, a well-armed man-of-war and one of only six sloops in the American navy, transformed overnight into a merchant vessel on a mission of mercy.

The winter months of 1846 right through to the following spring were bitterly cold, with unusually heavy snowfalls, and the full extent of the suffering in Ireland, especially during the early months of 1847, was never fully or widely appreciated around the world, especially in England where the plight of the Irish achieved neither recognition nor sympathy. The greatest help came from the United States: the recent emigrant arrivals carried the news with them and each one had a personal story which bore testimony to the hopeless situation in every corner of their homeland. Months before the first of the coffin ships sailed, a wave of relief organizations and meetings broke across America. Ships from Newark, Philadelphia and New York sailed before the spring arrived for Cork, Londonderry and Limerick, carrying some clothing but mostly food.

The Quakers Society of Friends were the first large-scale organizers of relief for Ireland, and when the American Vice-President chaired a huge public meeting in Washington on February 9th, they urged that every city, town and village should hold a meeting so that a large national contribution might be raised and forwarded with all practicable dispatch to the scenes of the suffering. Just before that meeting, the government in London announced they would pay the freight charges on all donations of foodstuffs to Ireland.

Washington matched this by stating that no tolls would be charged on roads or canals for goods on their way to Ireland, and several independent railway companies promised to carry suitably labelled packages for free. Cash came in from all sides, including a noteworthy contribution of US $170 dollars from the Choctaw Indian Tribe. Suddenly, available shipping for the eastern crossing of the Atlantic became scarce, and another crowded February meeting, this time in Boston, heard that Congress had been petitioned that one of the ships of war now lying in Boston Harbour, be released to sail for Ireland freighted with provisions.

Reaction in the capital was swift. We need to remember that at this time America was heavily engaged in war against Mexico. Congress voted on March 8th that the USS Jamestown in Boston and the USS Macedonian in New York be released from service, their armaments removed and assigned to the Irish Relief Committee in each city who would arrange for a civilian captain and crew to sail these ships to Ireland with relief supplies.

Three weeks later, the Jamestown set sail. The sloop, which was 157 feet long, 1,000 tons and normally carried 22 guns, was now commanded by Captain Robert Bennet Forbes, a well-known Bostonian. By May 16th he was back home, fully a month before the Macedonian, a frigate of 1,700 tons with 44 guns and buffeted by all sorts of political problems, could leave New York.

Loading had begun in Boston on St Patrick’s Day; the Labourers’ Aid Society composed almost entirely of native Irishmen, stowed all the cargo without drawing pay. If the departure of the Jamestown was seen as such a triumph in America, imagine how she was greeted as she dropped anchor after a voyage of only 15 days in the harbour of Cove, close to Cork City.

Coffin Ships of 1847

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 41-44:

The potato crop had failed again, so it was not surprising that the direct shipping trade picked up dramatically, and 1847 lives in the memory as the worst year of the Famine, the year of the coffin ships. Thousands of passengers who suffered in these few months were not willing emigrants, they had not voluntarily given up their homes to seek a better life. They were the evicted tenants of wealthy landlords, sent out of Ireland aboard ageing ships on cheaper fares, the victims of landlord clearance.

This was really a phenomenon particular to the Canadian sailings and various estimates of the number of deaths have been voiced over the years. They can only be estimates, as so many died unreported on board ship and by no means all the burials on land could be recorded. In 1847 the emigration to Canada swelled enormously for several reasons. Considerably more than 100,000 set out for the Canadian ports, as compared with 43,000 in 1846, and began arriving as early in the spring as the melting ice would allow. The death toll was similarly out of all proportion: the most conservative estimates show that around 30,000 were struck down with typhus. One third of passengers managed to survive but there were at least 20,000 deaths, over 5,000 at sea, and 8,000 in Quebec and 7,000 in Montreal.

...

Typhus is a fever, one of the most contagious diseases in existence, and the conditions endured in almost every facet of the emigrants’ lives, in the weeks and days leading up to departure, on the ocean, detained on board awaiting inspection and then in the quarantine centres, were ideal for its survival and propagation. Workhouses, lodging houses, ship’s holds without any form of sanitation, hospital wards and tents were perfect, and the typhus spread like wildfire. In 1847 it was called ship fever but before then it was known as hospital fever, gaol fever or camp fever. The microorganism is carried in the faeces of body lice and fleas which dries into a fine dust. The dust can be absorbed through the eyes or by being inhaled, and even people who were fit, healthy and clean, and not living in overcrowded conditions, went down with typhus.

Avoiding typhus was difficult indeed, and some emigrants contracted the disease at home before they travelled. In the first half of the year 300,000 Irish were crammed on to tiny vessels to reach Liverpool, where they slept as many as 20 to a room in boarding houses while awaiting passage, and there is no doubt that the fever started to spread in that environment. Residents of Liverpool suffered too, and in May alone, 1,500 cases were reported; the local landlords were as much to blame as the recently arrived Irish who then had to spend weeks at sea, jammed together in a ship’s hold, on their way to Canada.

The body lice which spread the fever are easily dealt with today by fumigation but the disease was a killer 150 years ago, with the surrounding problems. Doctors, nurses and priests in Canada, working in the quarantine hospitals and immigration sheds, died trying to save the lives of their new patients.

Irish Famine Destinations

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 30-36:

The Irish arriving on America’s eastern seaboard usually settled in lodgings close to the port, especially in New York where a staggering average of 300 were disembarking daily, every day for six years: on some days more than 1,000 would arrive on a single tide. As we know, this was the favoured destination of the Irish exodus, which immediately raised its status to that of the busiest port in the world. Whether their original intention had been to move on to other cities or out on to the plains and lush farmlands, to head for the frontier or to join the Gold Rush, the majority of the Irish emigrants stayed right there, in New York.

...

The exodus to Canada was different: the vast majority moved on. Though many thousands sailed to the colony known as British North America, their true destination was the United States. Canada was cold, sparsely inhabited, and many of its people spoke only French. Job prospects were poor, and worse still, to remain there meant a continued existence under the hated British flag. Boston had only a tenth of New York’s direct traffic but its Irish population was swollen by the masses coming from Canada.

Many had sworn an oath to settle north of the border, in return for a cheaper Atlantic passage to Halifax or Saint John, and, if they were sailing into Quebec, a free place on a barge to carry them up the St Lawrence River to Montreal. English politicians and civil servants were anxious to populate the country and subsidized fares as low as £2 (US $11), were made available. Many thousands of families were not given a say in the matter. Canada was the destination for destitute tenants on the huge estates in Ireland, cleared by their landlords, who paid the fares and chartered the ships, and the passage to Canada was far more economical than to the United States.

Once they landed, however, a great many emigrants went south. If they had a little money they took the lake steamers, small coasters and schooners, or whatever means of transport was available. If not, they walked across the border. For six months of the year the larger Canadian ports and the St Lawrence seaway were ice-bound and closed but even in the warmer half of the year, the great majority of Ireland’s Famine emigrants an – estimated 200,000 – merely used those ports as staging posts.

Voyage of the Perseverance, 1846

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 17-18, 34-35:

As Ireland’s capital city, Dublin was by far the biggest and busiest of all the ports around the Irish coast, and the passengers for one of the first voyages of the Famine period, directly to New York, boarded here on St Patrick’s Day in 1846. The sweet smell from the hatches of the Perseverance still hung in the air, for Demerara, the old Dutch colony in the West Indies, was her last port of call and sugar, rum and molasses had recently been unloaded.

...

The abundant Canadian forests had more than enough wood to equip the expanding fleets on either side of the ocean and timber was only a fraction of the price compared with Europe. So Martin and Sons despatched their senior captain, William Scott, to Saint John in New Brunswick, to build, buy and commission new ships to sail under their flag, to be registered in the port of Dublin.

A native of the Shetland Isles in the north of Scotland, Captain William Scott was a veteran of the Atlantic crossing. At around the time when most men would be thinking of retiring, he gave up his desk job and his home in Saint John and returned to his adopted city. When he took the Perseverance out of Dublin that day, he was an astonishing 74 years old.

For the first time Captain Scott’s barque of 597 tons was carrying passengers, the vanguard of a million Famine emigrants. He would cut short the farewells, scorning the quayside tears, anxious to get this strange cargo down below while he prepared his ship to catch the late afternoon tide the following day, on Wednesday, March 18th. The crew had cleared the holds, and ship’s carpenter James Gray had fitted out bunks four tiers high and 6 feet square. The fare in steerage was £3 (around US $15). In the cramped conditions for 210 passengers, pots and pans to cook their meagre rations were a priority, as were a tradesman’s tools to earn a living in America. The mate Shadrack Stone checked the passengers and their belongings as they stepped on board. Perhaps there was also room for a couple of fiddles, maybe a squeezebox or a set of Irish pipes.

...

In reasonable weather groups of 20 or 30 passengers at a time would be allowed on deck to breathe fresh air for a change, wash their clothing and clean themselves, and to cook whatever rations were still intact and fit to eat. In bad weather they would be forced to remain below, in complete darkness if the seas were really rough, the heaving waves bringing all kinds of discomfort as well as the inevitable seasickness for poor travellers. Most of the time they stayed on their bunks: despite the lack of space, it was usually more comfortable there than on deck.

...

The hearths were nothing more than rudimentary boxes lined with bricks, a crude form of barbecue. When the weather was rough, no fires would be allowed, but there would often be a period of calm at the end of the day, as dusk was settling on the ocean, when a few passengers would be allowed on deck to cook for their families and friends below. Then it would be the turn of the youngest apprentice seaman on board, Jack in the Shrouds as he was known, to clamber up the rigging carrying a jug of water to douse the flames. Many a protest was raised, but no argument was heeded.

The water ration was supposed to be 6 pints per person per day, to drink, wash and cook. If the journey lasted beyond the estimated period, passengers and crew alike went thirsty and dirty, and those on board could soon gauge if they were going to be on the sea for longer than expected when the daily water allocation was reduced. Head money covered the dues which might be payable by the captain at the port before any passengers were allowed to disembark.

During the six years of the Famine Emigration the Passengers’ Acts, which covered the provision of food, were changed, and different versions of these Acts were imposed by American and British governments. A glaring example of the contrast between the legislation of the two countries was in the number of passengers allowed on board. America decreed only two people be allowed for every 5 tons of the vessel’s registered tonnage, while in Britain, the allowance was three for every 5 tons. Thus, British ships could carry half as many passengers, again 300 instead of 200, as American ships of similar size. Not surprisingly, American ships were considered to be faster, safer, more comfortable, more modern, and sailed by more competent crews.

Rigid enforcement of the Acts was impossible. There were regularly too many passengers aboard too many ships and too few Customs and Immigration officers. These were hard times, desperate times: with so many ships carrying emigrants for only one voyage, the politicians in Washington and London could easily be ignored, and many a captain was guilty of failing to care properly for the people in his ship. Changes in the Passengers’ Acts were aimed at making ocean travel safer, for the protection of the passengers, but their effect was to drive up the fares, bringing despair to the impoverished people in Ireland.

In the first year of the Famine sailings the ships were supposed to provide each passenger, each week, with a total of 7lbs of bread, biscuit, flour, rice, oatmeal or potatoes. One pound of food a day was nothing more than an insurance against starvation: the passengers themselves were supposed to be responsible for anything else they required. Three years later, in 1849, the Acts were amended, decreeing that twice a week tea, sugar and molasses were to be given out. Ship owners were also directed to provide more space on board for each passenger. The new Act laid down a minimum of 12 square feet, so now the bunks were 6 feet long and 2 feet wide where previously they had been only 20 inches wide.

Irish Famine Ships Introduction

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 13-14:

Five thousand ships sailed across the Atlantic with Irish emigrants in the six years of the Famine Emigration. They were diverse in size, safety and comfort, or the lack of it, and they varied in many other respects – in age and in the experience and quality of their crews, their speed on the voyage, provisions on board, and the fares they charged.

American packet ships of more than 1,000 tons, with triple-decks were built in the late 1840s specifically for the emigrant trade. They would carry more than 400 passengers, some in private cabins. But by no means all the ships were custom-built. When the British Queen first put to sea in 1785 she needed several major repairs before she could carry passengers on regular voyages from Liverpool to New York. And when the Elizabeth and Sarah achieved infamy in the fever year of 1847, she had been at sea for 83 years.

Undoubtedly, many of the Famine ships would have carried African slaves in the early years of the 19th century. The European slave traders finally ended their activities barely a dozen years before the onset of the Famine and the Arab slavers continued to ply well into the 1860s.

There were tiny vessels like The Hannah with a crew of six and measuring only 59 feet – about the same length as four family cars parked bumper-to-bumper. She was converted from a coaster by the addition of a third mast to enable her to go into deeper waters, and sailed to New York five times, from Dublin, Cork and Limerick, with a complement of only 50 or 60 passengers crammed below in a single hold.

These Irish men and women were not always welcome on arrival in their new homeland, for this desperate migration represented cheap labour, a threat to the established American workforce. But they dug canals, built roads and laid railways, they became seamstresses and servants.

The alternative was to stay at home and starve. A meal, a job, a place to rest, a chance to survive was all the Famine emigrants asked. They left Ireland by sailing ship every day, summer and winter, for six years while the Famine lasted, to make the 3,000 mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean. This is their story.

Polish Acronyms ZSRR, ZOMO

I came across two striking Polish acronyms in the last chapter of the history book I just finished reading: Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014).

ZSRR = Związek Socjalistycznych Republik Radzieckich, lit. Union of Socialist Republics Soviet (abbr. Związek Radziecki, Union Soviet),
also ZSRS = Związek Socjalistycznych Republik Sowieckich (abbr. Związek Sowiecki, Union Soviet)

ZOMO = Zmotoryzowane Odwody Milicji Obywatelskiej, lit. Motorized Reserves of the Militia of Citizens. These were the troops who broke up large public demonstrations against the regime from the 1950s through the 1980s. They were disbanded in September 1989, after the election of June 4, 1989, a day of glory in Poland (and of infamy in China).

Another linguistic tidbit from the last chapter (p. 630) is Nie ma wolności bez Solidarności! lit. Not have freedom without Solidarity!

The Far Outliers will be heading for Poland next month.

Piecing Poland Back Together, 1920s

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 553-555:

The first task facing the new state was to recover from the devastation of the war, which had been enormous. Much of the infrastructure of the country had to be rebuilt from scratch. Industry needed to be developed, as there was huge unemployment. And agriculture, which had been disrupted and ravaged by the war, needed to be put back on its feet. The country was impoverished; it was also experiencing a food crisis. To boot, some four hundred thousand Poles had died fighting in the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian armies during World War I, which meant a depletion of the best patriotic forces.

Another enormous challenge concerned the knitting together of disparate pieces of territory and peoples who had experience of very different imperial regimes—different legal systems, educational systems, forms of national and local governance, and the like. The enormity of the physical task of bringing together the previously partitioned lands, after 123 years of belonging to states other than Poland, was reflected in the network of railways. The railways all led to the imperial hubs, thus being a centrifugal not a unifying force. New railway branches had to be added to facilitate travel to the capital of Warsaw as well as to cross the breadth and length of the state. Even today one still notes a particular denseness of railway lines in the west (the former Germany), light coverage in the east, and the south best served by the Galician west–east line connecting Kraków with Lviv and beyond.

Those businesses that were able to resume operation relatively quickly now faced a different domestic market. No longer were they able to export to Berlin, Vienna, or Saint Petersburg. And if they had relied in part on inputs available elsewhere in those empires, they would need to find new suppliers within the borders of the new state. The country experienced a painful bout of hyperinflation in 1923: at one point, one U.S. dollar was worth 20 million Polish marks. The replacement of the mark by the zloty in the spring of 1924 and the concomitant currency correction essentially wiped out the savings of the country’s middle class. This did not augur well for the economic well-being of the citizens of the young Polish state.

As the history of partition suggests, not all Polish citizens were equally prepared for national independence. Regionalism became pronounced, as inhabitants felt they had more in common with those who came from their partitioned zone than with those from other partitioned zones. Few had any real experience of self-rule, making Galicians the most likely candidates to move to the new capital, Warsaw, to help run the new government. This in turn rendered Lviv, the former capital of Galicia, a remote provincial backwater. At the same time, there must have been a clash of cultures in the new Polish capital. The earlier inhabitants of Warsaw (as we have seen) had a very unpleasant experience in the elections to the Russian State Duma. Would these experiences carry over to Polish politics in an ostensibly Polish state?

Indeed, few Poles knew what to expect from the new Poland. In a novel by Stefan Żeromski, The Spring to Come, the reality of life in a state experiencing growing pains is brought to life. A Polish industrialist in what was then the Russian imperial port of Baku tries to interest his son (the main protagonist of the novel), who had lived his entire life outside of the homeland, in moving to Poland. The father weaves a beautiful story of Poland as a land of glass houses and does convince his son to try his luck in the new Poland. However, this useful fiction of glass houses—a place of perfection, a promised land—proved but a bubble that soon would burst. There were no glass houses. Rather, the reality of life in the young state proved challenging at best.

Of course, no one in 1924 knew what a normal nation-state was to look like, let alone how to create one in this heterogeneous part of the world. There were various ideas as to Poland’s future shape as well. Various political camps had their own visions and mobilized their constituencies to fight to turn them into reality. The Roman Catholic clergy most decidedly had its own ideas of the role the church was to play in Polish life. Peasants sought improved conditions for farming, as well as greater access to land—something that was more easily accomplished by expropriating non-Poles than by doing the same to Polish nobles.

Poles in Japan vs. Russia, 1904

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 526-528:

In 1904 war broke out between Russia and Japan. As odd as it may seem, the clash with its tiny Asian neighbor proved troublesome for the Russians. The war effort led to problems at home and provided new opportunities, and new challenges, for the Poles of the Russian Empire.

The hostilities provided impetus for the Poles (always on the lookout for opportunity in the international arena) to plot. Both Piłsudski and Dmowski made their way to Tokyo, independently of each other, and each with a different agenda. Piłsudski offered the Japanese Polish military services; his men would fight the Russians on their home front, thus helping Japan win the war. Dmowski came to warn the Japanese against taking up Piłsudski’s offer; he expected that the war might compel the Russians to make concessions to the Poles. While the double visit might have been seen as a comedy of errors (the two men actually met while in Tokyo, discussed their respective views, and respectfully chose to differ), the fact that the bemused Japanese were willing to hear each side suggests the Poles were being treated as if they were genuine players in the international realm, and not subjects of Russia. And, although they declined to use the Poles to fight, the Japanese general staff did provide Piłsudski with some money and war materièl in the hopes he might gather intelligence for them.

The Revolution of 1904–1907

In the meantime the Russo-Japanese War continued, increasingly showing the weakness of the eventual loser, Russia. This weakness had repercussions for the Poles of the empire. The diplomatic efforts of Piłsudski and Dmowski notwithstanding, the events of 1904 and beyond would be more noteworthy for the upheaval and bloodshed they engendered. In the fall of that year, a working-class demonstration broke out in Warsaw’s Grzymułtowski Square in which Piłsudski’s PPS fighters (some sixty strong) defended the crowds against the Russian police and mounted Cossacks. A number of participants were injured, while over four hundred were arrested and six lost their lives—as did one Russian policeman. This was the first armed clash between Poles and Russians since 1863....

Back in the Polish lands, strikes in places such as Warsaw and Łódź raised the specter of revolution; martial law was declared. Poles were becoming radicalized, especially the Polish workers, many of whom lost their jobs as a result of the economic decline brought on by the war.

Rebuilding a Polish Nation in Galicia

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 504-507:

Unlike the Hohenzollerns of Prussia/Germany or the Romanovs of Russia, the Habsburgs were Roman Catholic monarchs—and this is an important distinction. Furthermore, Habsburg piety was proverbial. All this meant that there should have been more common ground between the Poles and Austrians. At the same time, the Habsburgs had historically been the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (defunct as of 1806) and thus had a special relationship to the Germans of the rest of Europe.

As in all the partitions, the treatment of the new subjects was uneven. In the beginning, the Austrian authorities sought to civilize what they considered to be a backward land. Later, under the oppressive influence of Metternich, they sought to constrain what they thought was a revolutionary people—as witnessed in the debacle of the peasant jacquerie of 1846. (The incorporation of the Free City of Kraków into Galicia set the relatively thriving medieval capital of Poland back decades.) Metternich had seen fit to equate Polonism with revolution. Doubtless the new ruler of the Austrian Empire, Franz Joseph, felt similarly.

Only after a period of absolutism and Germanization did the tone change. This was brought about by several Austrian military defeats. The loss to the French in 1859 led to reforms at home that ultimately resulted in constitutional rule in Austria as of the early 1860s. Notably for the Poles, they were allotted their own provincial Seym as early as 1861.

The defeat of Austria by Prussia in 1866 was even more significant. The defeat forced the Habsburgs to reach a new modus vivendi with the Hungarians, who had been chafing under Habsburg rule particularly since the end of their failed revolution of 1848–1849. In 1867, the two parties reached the famous compromise that led to the establishment of the Dual Monarchy. Henceforth, the country would be known as Austria-Hungary.

That the Habsburgs had been compelled to make concessions to one of their subject peoples was a fact not lost on the Poles. Already the failure of the January Insurrection under Russian rule led some important Galicians to reconsider their approach to the Habsburg monarchy. A new and influential group known as the Kraków Conservatives resolved to be loyal to the Habsburgs. Although initially skeptical, after several years the Polish elites of Galicia were won over to this idea. Even the defeat of Austria at the hands of Prussia did not shake their belief in the monarchy.

...

These developments led to a third, and most fruitful, phase for the Galician Poles. Unlike the disgruntled Czechs of Bohemia, Poles decided to participate in the Reichsrat or imperial council, a two-chambered parliament in Vienna. Polish elites sought to recast Galicia as a conciliatory, conservative, loyal province. All this boded well for the position of Poles within the Habsburg Empire. Indeed, during the Dual Monarchy, a number of Poles actually came to hold important posts in the imperial government, including that of prime minister.

Given a degree of autonomy, Galicia became a haven for the Poles—a place where Poles could be Poles while still being loyal to the Habsburg dynasty. This dual identity was facilitated by Article 19 of the Fundamental Laws, which specified that each people within the monarchy had the right to cultivate its own nationality and language. Poles, and especially the democrats who vied with the conservatives for influence within the province, availed themselves of this opportunity in various ways, including the celebrating of a series of national figures and historic anniversaries. Among the most noteworthy were the solemn reburial of the poet Adam Mickiewicz in the Wawel crypts in 1890 and the five-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald in 1910, also celebrated in Kraków. The Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski had commissioned a massive monument commemorating that great medieval battle. These large public celebrations helped to bring Poles from all three partitioned lands closer together.

Thus, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the best place to be a Pole—certainly if one wanted to be politically active—and unlike in the Prussian or German lands, politically active in Polish—was Galicia. One could breathe Polish air there—or, as was also remarked, the very stones spoke Polish. To be sure, in Vienna (in the Reichsrat) Poles used German for their interpellations. However, back in the province, in the Galician Seym, the Polish language ruled (although it should be noted that Ruthenian interpellations during the proceedings were written down, phonetically, in Latin—not Cyrillic—script). Polish nonetheless became the language of government, the language of schooling.

Galician Poles had a high degree of autonomy—all of which allowed them to school themselves in the art of governance, to work in the bureaucracy, to develop scholarly institutes and universities where Polish would be the language of instruction, and the like. They lived in a country in which they had parliamentary representation and the rule of law. This, combined with the rights of nationalities, suggests that, as of the last third of the nineteenth century, one might think of Galicia as the closest thing to a Piedmont that the Poles had (Piedmont, meaning the Italian province that initiated Italian unification in the 1860s). Could these advantages within Galicia, thus, help propel the Poles to their own unification?