Match-fixing as rite of passage in sumo

From Sumo: A Thinking Fan's Guide to Japan's National Sport, by David Benjamin (Tuttle, 2010), pp. 208-210:

As I've pondered yaocho [match-fixing]... I've developed a grudging admiration for the Sumo Association's almost mystical power to oversee it without seeing it. Sumo's elders keep their little cheating problem in check first by the skillful use of the schedule, giving rikishi every chance to avoid the last-day crisis [finding themselves at 7-7, with the final match deciding whether they will rise in rank with a winning record or fall with a losing one]. Extending this sense of control beyond one basho, I've notice that yaochozumo follows a kind of ebb and flow, proliferating for a while, until some silent signal from the Sumo Association curtails it abruptly.

It appears — Kitao/Futahaguro's disavowal supports the supposition — that many young rikishi are weaned gradually (perhaps reluctantly) into the ways of yaocho. The secret is kept away from those (like, perhaps, Futahaguro) who don't need help, from those who wouldn't benefit enough from it, and especially from those who might be indiscreet. By allowing it but holding the secret tightly within a chosen brotherhood, sumo's elders control yaocho more effectively than if they tried to ban it.

Yaocho's profoundest hold on rikishi — and the reason, I think, that the secret is so well guarded — lies in its use as a rite of passage into sumo's inner circle.

As he reflected on his ten years in sumo, one of Kitao/Futahaguro's most heartfelt remarks was this: "The rikishi bow to each other before the match and after. Sumo people say that sumo begins with politeness and ends with politeness. That's a beautiful tradition, one of the things I miss most of all."

In saying this, Kitao/Futahaguro used the word "rei," for "politeness."

Eventually, in that spirit of "beginning with politeness," each rikishi, at some point, is initiated into sumo's secret brotherhood by accepting sport's politest offer. What higher act of rei than to concede the victory to an opponent who needs it? And what better sign of rei in the initiate than the gracious acceptance of the offer? And what better test of a rikishi's commitment to the brotherhood than his willingness to subordinate his competitive passion to the greater good of all, the collective need? Especially when he knows that he won't get in trouble for it! And even better that he knows it will help break down those icy walls that stand between sumobeya, and will make him feel — once and for all — like one of the guys!

Yaocho prevents great upheavals in the ranks, and makes change a gentle process. All the new blood is filtered and diluted by the humbling process of yaocho. One of the sumo nuances that the observant fan eventually perceives is that a young rikishi proves his readiness to compete at the highest level not by showing that he can win in makuuchi, but by developing a talent for judicious defeat.

Conversely, yaocho also identifies dissenters, those whose pride inhibits them from losing even a meaningless match, even to help a colleague. Those rikishi aren't cast out indiscreetly (perhaps for fear that they might speak up), but their path becomes harder, their progress slower, their status always a little shaky. Among the most prominent of these uneasy princes in past years were Onokuni and Asahifuji. If they submitted to yaocho, they didn't do it often enough or with the proper alacrity. Some rikishi, I think — especially former collegiate wrestlers — are never initiated into the yaocho club at all, because they might not be trustworthy. Sumo gets them too late in life, too fully formed, and too ethically fastidious.

And some sumobeya are more inclined to play the game than others. The boys from Sadogatake-beya, for example, are always ready to make a deal. But the Kasugano rikishi, not so much.

As they govern all other aspects of their sport, sumo's elders govern yaocho with a politeness that borders on intimidation. No one, even a yaocho resister, ever steps very far out of line. To betray the group is tantamount to betraying one's family. When a rikishi resorts to yaocho, he's expected to use it sparingly, silently, with dignity (rei), and with a consciousness that yaocho serves not to further his private glory, but to keep the family in balance.

Yaocho is an invisible, but palpable presence in sumo. Look for it, and you'll never spot it. Even resisters — and I'm certain that there are some — will deny its existence. By comparison, the Cheshire cat's smile is a bite on the ass. But yaocho is there, and will stay there because it ameliorates one of sumo's greatest problems, the loneliness and persistent mediocrity of most rikishi. When someone takes a dive on your behalf, it keeps you afloat. When you tank a match for another guy, you feel a little more deeply the sympathy of your group, your sense of belonging. If you're really talented, you can win day in and day out all by your lonesome. But cheating needs company.

The Most Brutal Schedules in Sumo

From Sumo: A Thinking Fan's Guide to Japan's National Sport, by David Benjamin (Tuttle, 2010), pp. 177-179:

THE TIGHTROPE: A sekiwake is neither here nor there. He's better than almost all those maegashira down below. He's one notch above komusubi — otherwise known as the Meatgrinder. His schedule includes everyone in the upper ranks, and he scores the occasional upset among the Elite [ozeki and yokozuna]. But he's generally a kachikoshi [winning record (8-7 or better)] kinda guy, just trying to stay where he is. He's negotiating a crowded tightrope; there are guys approaching from both ends, eager to push him off.

Rikishi reach the Tightrope and stay there for a while, usually because they have a very effective technique, or some physical feature, that makes them tough to beat. Kotogaume, perhaps sumo's all-time most dangerous Butterball, for instance, was built low to the ground and incredibly dense. He lingered at sekiwake for six straight basho in 1989-90. Terao, a fanatic battler who was able to overwhelm almost anyone for a period of five seconds, established himself in 1990 as a Tightrope level rikishi and spent five basho there. In the 2000's Baruto ... depended on his height to frustrate opponents and cling to the Tightrope.

When a sekiwake like Baruto can't expand his repertoire in response to the intense demands of the Tightrope, gravity will get him by and by — with a stop (possibly even a recovery) in the Meatgrinder on the way down. Kirishima was the rare tightroper who was still learning and growing when he reached sekiwake. For him, the Tightrope was a one-basho pause on his way to the Elite.

For most, the Tightrope is more likely a place from which to fall. And to fall means into the next lower designation, komusubi — not a pleasant fate. I refer to this detention cell for rising and falling rikishi instructively as...

THE MEATGRINDER. The Sumo Association uses the Meatgrinder for three distinct and practical purposes:

To punish maegashira wrestlers who have succeeded excessively in matches at the lower levels, perhaps by racking up a 10-5 or 11-4 record from some lowly rung like maegashira No. 8. The average number of wins per basho for komusubi is 6.5. The Meatgrinder is the schedule-master's way of saying, "OK, smartass, you think you're hot stuff? We have a few large gentlemen we'd like you to meet."

As an entrance exam for rising stars, to see if they're ready for prime time....

The Meatgrinder also serves as a safety net for sekiwake on their way down after makekoshi [a losing record (7-8 or worse)]. The schedule is little different, but after losing at sekiwake, komusubi is the falling rikishi's second chance before he gets kicked down among the riffraff.

How tough is the Meatgrinder? It means you have to wrestle every rikishi ranked above you before you get a break and fight a few of the guys underneath. This is the sumo version of Hell Week. By the time you get to the lower-ranked wrestlers, your form and self-esteem are so shattered that beating anyone — including your grandmother — is beyond your wildest dreams. The Meatgrinder is as high as most rikishi ever go. In almost every case, it's a ticket down.

Wordcatcher Tales: Japanese nautical terms

I've always been fascinated by the great variety and complexity of nautical terminology, especially on sailing ships. I've encountered it mostly in my reading. I don't really have much sailing experience, except as a passenger aboard ferries and ocean liners, plus the occasional opportunity to go aboard a museum ship. The four-masted, sail training ship Nippon Maru, which I explored last month in Yokohama, was a special treat because it offered a glimpse of sailing-ship terminology in two languages, Japanese and English.

Here's the text of the English translation on an explanatory sign about the rigging on the Nippon Maru. Though phrased rather awkwardly, it is very clear and instructive.

Running Rigging and Standing Rigging
Ropes which are used for moving yards, raising or lowering sails are called running riggings. The ship carries around 1,100 running riggings and the total length of these riggings accounts for 14,938m. The number of blocks fixed with running riggings accounts for 854 in total. Running riggings have different kinds: Halyards, Sheets and Tacks to raise the sails and Downhauls, Clewlines, (Clewgarnet), Buntlines, (Leechlines) and Tripping lines to furl the sails. When spreading, it is necessary to loosen the rigging which is hauled for furling. When moving a yard, Braces will be used and to loosen the starboard side of the yard, the port side will be hauled. Wires to secure the mast and the bowsprit are called standing riggings. The ship carries 168 standing riggings and the total length of these riggings accounts for about 3,678m. These riggings include the pieces of shrouds which are horizontally tied to ratlines to go aloft. Most of the standing riggings are placed at the back of the mast in order to handle loads induced by the wind pressure coming in from the back.

The Japanese terms for 'running rigging' and 'standing rigging' are 動索 dousaku 'moving-rope' and 静索 seisaku 'still-rope', respectively. (The matching Korean terms, dongsaek and jeongsaek, are cognate, and the suo 'cable, rigging' in Chinese shengsuo 'rope-rigging' is also cognate with J. saku and K. saek.) 'Starboard' is 右舷側 u-gen-gawa 'right-gunwale-side' and 'port' is 左舷側 sa-gen-gawa 'left-gunwale-side'. (The kanji 舷 gen 'gunwale' also occurs in 舷灯 gen-tou 'gunwale-lamp = running lights' [on each side of the ship], 舷門 gen-mon 'gunwale-gate = gangway', and 舷窓 gen-sou 'gunwale-window = porthole'.) The bow or fore part of the ship is 船首 sen-shu 'ship-neck' and the stern or aft part of the ship is 船尾 sen-bi 'ship-tail'.

These terms were no doubt in use long before Japanese sailors became familiar with European-style sailing ships (before Date Masamune had his first Spanish galleon built in 1613). The same goes for terms like 帆柱 ho-bashira 'sail-pillar = mast' and 帆桁 ho-geta 'sail-beam = yard(arm)'. Nevertheless, the Japanese text begins with the katakana synonym for 'yard' (yaado) followed by its kanji equivalent (帆桁) in parentheses, and employs exclusively katakana terms (borrowed from English) for 'sail' (seiru), 'rope' (roopu), and 'mast' (masuto). Why? Because the names for all the subcategories of nautical masts, sails, and rigging have been imported wholesale from English. At eye-level on each of the four masts is its name in katakana: foamasuto 'foremast', meinmasuto　'mainmast', mizunmasuto 'mizzenmast', and jigaamasuto 'jiggermast' (and 'bowsprit' is bausupritto). There are ways to write 'front mast' and 'back mast' in kanji, but it is much harder to differentiate four masts using traditional (Sino-Japanese) terminology.

Similarly, the name for every length of rigging on this modern square-rigged four-master is directly imported from English: 'halyard' is hariyaado, 'sheet' is shiito, 'tack' is takku, 'downhaul' is danhooru, 'clewline' is kuryuu rain, 'clewgarnet' is kuryuu gaanetto, 'buntline' is banto rain, 'leechline' is riichi rain, 'tripping line' is torippingu rain, 'brace' is bureesu, 'ratline' is rattorain, and 'shroud' is shuraudo.

The same goes for the names of every spar among the yards, as the following Yards chart shows. 'Lower topsail yard' is rowaa toppuseeru yaado, 'upper (top)gallant yard' is appaa geran yaado, 'royal yard' is roiyaru yaado, 'spanker gaff' is supankaa gafu, 'spanker boom' is supankaa buumu, and so on. The Korean translation (yadeu) of the chart title suggests that Koreans have also directly imported this specialized English terminology. (In the Chinese title, 'yard' is mistranslated as dui-huo-chang 'stack-goods-place = freight yard'.)



The last chart included here only confirms the extent to which English modern square-rigged sailing ship terminology has been imported wholesale into Japanese naval usage. Its title in Japanese is Jigaa masuto mawari bireingu pin haichizu 'jigger mast around belaying pin arrangement-diagram'. The nautical terms of English origin, 'jiggermast' and 'belaying pin', are written in katakana, the native Japanese word for 'around' is written in hiragana, and the Sino-Japanese compound translated 'arrangement-diagram' is written in kanji. Although the Korean title is written entirely in the Korean alphabet, the breakdown of word origins is the same (and so is the word order): jigeo maseuteu 'jiggermast', jubyeon 'around', bireing pin 'belaying pin', baechido 'arrangement diagram'.

In the Chinese translation, 'jiggermast' is rendered as 船尾小桅 chuanwei xiaowei 'ship-tail small-mast' to distinguish it from 后桅 houwei 'rear-mast' (= 'mizzenmast', cf. 前桅 qián wéi 'fore-mast', 主桅 zhuwei 'main-mast'). 'Belaying pin' is translated rather directly as 系索桩 jisuozhuang 'fasten-rope-stake'. These Chinese nautical terms do not render the English sounds, as the Japanese and Korean equivalents do.

By the way, there is a mistake in the English translation of the directions at the top and bottom of the chart. Both directions are labeled 'sternward' in English, but in Japanese only the top arrow points sternward (sen-bi-gawa 'ship-tail-ward'), while the bottom arrow points foreward (船首側 sen-shu-gawa 'ship-neck-ward').

Wordcatcher Tales: kazari moufu, kissuisen

On my most recent trip to Japan, I had the chance to go aboard two museum ships in Yokohama harbor. One was the former Japanese naval sail training ship, the Nippon Maru, a four-masted barque with auxiliary diesel engines. The other was the NYK Hikawa Maru, a former luxury passenger liner built for North Pacific routes between Japan and Seattle/Vancouver. Both ships were built in Kobe and made their maiden voyages in 1930.

飾り毛布 kazari-moufu 'decoration-blanket' — Last year, when we toured the Hakkoda train ferry museum in Aomori, we noticed some ornamentally folded blankets in some of the ship's cabins. According to Japanese Wikipedia, the practice of folding blankets into decorative shapes—like origami in wool—originated in 1908 on the ships ferrying passengers across the Seikan Strait between Aomori on Honshu and Hakodate on Hokkaido. (There is no other Wikipedia article in any language on the decorative folding of blankets.) This year I noticed and photographed the same phenomenon in officers' berths aboard the Nippon Maru and in first-class passengers' berths aboard the Hikawa Maru. The Japanese Wikipedia article also links to the FAQ page of an OSK passenger liner named Nippon Maru, whose last entry addresses the question of kazari-moufu. The English version of an explanatory sign outside a passenger cabin on the Hikawa Maru follows.

Ornamentally folded blankets, called "decorative blankets (Kazari-mofu)", were common during the age of passenger ships. The blankets were folded by stewards and placed with care on passengers' beds. The designs included flowers (Hana-mofu), a sunrise, and even the helmet of a samurai warrior, generating anticipation among many passengers about the day's creation. The designs of flowers were originally called "floral blankets (Hana-mofu)" but as stewards became more creative with their designs, the name changed to "decorative blankets (Kazari-mofu)" to better reflect their creations.

喫水線 kissuisen 'waterline' — On the lowest deck of the engine room, there was a red line just over head-high on the inside of the ship's hull that marked the normal waterline, labeled in katakana uotaarain (< 'waterline') and in kanji as 喫水線 kissuisen, which translates literally as 'eat/drink-water-line'. The first kanji shows up in compounds such as 喫茶店 kissaten 'drink-tea-shop (= teahouse, coffee shop)' and 喫煙室 kitsuenshitsu 'drink-smoke-room (smoking room)'. But 喫水 kissui also means the 'draft (of a ship)', so 'eat/drink-water' is probably better glossed here as 'displace-water'.

Wordcatcher Tales: heeltap, punkah louvre

You never know where you'll learn a new English usage while traveling abroad. I came across a couple usages while on vacation in Japan this month.

Deposit Heeltap & Ice here

An English usage new to me appeared on a trash and recycling receptacle in Cafe Cuore atop Miraishin no Oka, a hill of white Italian marble imported and sculpted by Kazuto Kuetani on the grounds of the Kosanji Temple Museum. The Japanese sign reads nomi-nokoshi 'drink-leftovers' and koori 'ice', so the meaning was clear enough, but I had not encountered that use of heeltap before. The Kenkyusha Reader's Plus dictionary in my little Canon Wordtank, however, listed heeltap with two definitions 'heeled shoes' and 'drink-leftovers'.

Punkah Louvre Instructions

Another phrase new to me appeared in a first-class cabin hallway aboard the NYK Hikawa Maru, a Japanese luxury passenger and cargo ship launched in 1930 to run between Japan and Seattle. It was nicknamed the Queen of the North Pacific, and carried Charlie Chaplin among other famous passengers. It was built to compete with the best at the time, and managed to survive the Pacific War because it was requisitioned to become a hospital ship and because its hull was engineered to withstand heavy northern seas and to stay afloat even after hitting a couple of underwater mines during the war.

From reading about British India, I was familiar with the punkah ceiling fan and the poor punkawallah whose duty was to pull the ropes to keep it in motion while his masters attended to other matters. Wikipedia notes that punkah louvre is used to refer to the air vents in passenger aircraft, but this usage for similar individually controlled air vents in passenger ships looks to be older.

"One thing it ain't, is black and white"

From Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today, by Alan Huffman (Penguin, 2004), pp. 104-106, 278-280:

At first glance, Delores's lineage is difficult to discern. Before now we have spoken only on the phone, after I was given her number by her niece, Laura "Butch" Ross. During my research into the story of Prospect Hill, I have often conducted first interviews on the phone rather than in person, and sometimes have found myself deliberating whether the person I am speaking with is descended from slave or slave owner, because many have similar accents and frames of reference. I wait for their perspective to reveal itself through some telltale sign—a verbal marker such as the use of "aks" in place of "ask" by blacks, or a reference to "faithful slaves" by whites. Sometimes the clue lies in what is left out of their account. The prevailing white version of the story of Prospect Hill always includes the slave uprising, but the prevailing black version never does. In many cases my assumptions have turned out to be entirely wrong, and I might be deep into a conversation before I know for sure.

In Delores's case, neither her speech nor her perspective gave her away on the phone. Finally she said, "I'll just be frank with you, it was kind hard growing up in the South with a black mother and a white father."

After greeting me at the door and inviting me in, Delores launches into one of the more curious genealogies that I have come across.

"I'll tell you, Roots, the best movie ever made, don't have nothin' on the Ross family," she says. "We're all over the place. Go way back, all over the place. Here some of 'em started out in Africa, come to Mississippi, then end up back in Africa. And a whole lot of 'em—black, white, you name it, been right here all along—and I'm talkin' a long, long time.

Delores's hair is long, wavy, and black, carefully molded with pomade, her skin midway between black and white. Her house is a catchall sort of place, with furniture from the 1960s and 1970s, potted plants and vases of plastic flowers, and every available surface crowded with memorabilia and framed photos of people, both black and white. Many area residents have a tendency to reduce key figures in local history to archetypes and stereotypes—good guys and bad guys, everything black and white, but not Delores. She listens patiently to a summary of the history of Prospect Hill, then leans back on her sofa and takes a long drag off her cigarette. She is unpretentious and self-possessed, and has no qualms about entertaining my questions about her family history—in fact, she relishes the opportunity.

"One thing it ain't, is black and white," she says, and blows cigarette smoke toward the ceiling....

"Here, pass me that picture there, Butch," Delores says, and Butch hands her a framed photograph from among the group clustered on the coffee table. "That's Thad Ross, my daddy," Delores says, and passes the photo to me. "He was a descendant of Isaac Ross." The photo looks to have been taken in the 1930s. A white man is seated on a sofa beside a dark-skinned girl with a black woman seated in a chair nearby. There is no mistaking they are a family. "It was taken down in Jefferson County," she says. "That's my father there. The girl is Jimmie, my sister, Butch's mother. The lady's Queen Esther Polk, Jimmie's mother."

The photo would be right at home in many family albums across the South but for the mix of skin colors. There are many people of mixed race in this part of the country, but they are usually the result of clandestine encounters. Racial mixing is rarely documented for posterity, particularly by members of prominent white families like the Rosses....

Delores points to a group of framed photos on the mantel, and adds, "That's all my family up there." She goes down the line, naming names. Most of the faces are black, but some are white, and others are in between. She pulls out her albums and shows me snapshots of blacks and whites intermingling unself-consciously—fishing on a lake, visiting in someone's living room, gathering for a graduation...."

...

"Isaac Ross was a unique fella during that time," James [Belton] says, in typical understatement. "He went along with slavery but his slaves were not slaves in the traditional sense. I doubt seriously if you would find anything written about the slaves before 1870, when blacks were first included in the census. But from word-of-mouth, folklore, what was passed down from generation to generation, it is apparent they were not like other slaves. I was told, you know, that some of those Beltons actually attended Oakland College. They were not free, per se, but they were educated."

Before the Civil War, Oakland College was a private school for planters' sons, and Isaac Ross sat on its board. Today it is Alcorn State University, which was founded in 1871 as the first land-grant college for blacks in the United States.

Most historical accounts note that many Prospect Hill slaves were taught to read and write, and that they all enjoyed relative freedom within the confines of the plantation. Ross never sold any slaves, and it appears he kept them sequestered from the slaves on neighboring plantations. When Isaac Ross Wade took over as master of the plantation, however, they were treated like any other group of slaves, James says. "By the time of the burning of the house, from what I gather, all of the slaves but a few were extremely bitter. Isaac Ross had treated them like relatives, and the truth is, a lot of them were relatives. The Belton ladies who worked around Prospect Hill were very light—you couldn't hardly tell 'em from white ladies, my father said. But after Isaac Wade contested the will [that freed the slaves and offered them emigration to Liberia], they weren't getting the treatment they had gotten during Ross's lifetime, and resentment just built up. That was how they came to set fire to the house."

Why did any of the slaves choose to remain behind when the majority emigrated to Liberia? James has a ready answer. A few were not given the option of being repatriated, he says, "most likely because they were just bad apples, like you have in any community."

The others, he says, may have been wary of traveling to a distant, unknown land. But Mariah was different. Belton believes she chose to remain behind because her two sons, Wade and Edmond, had fled Prospect Hill to escape being lynched in the aftermath of the uprising, and perhaps she knew their whereabouts.

It may have been the grief she was keeping within over what had happened," he says. "She knew her sons did not go to Liberia, and perhaps she thought, 'For me to ever see my sons again, I have to stay in the area.' So she was sold to Walter Wade and transferred to Rosswood with her son, William. He was my great-grandfather." He digs through the stack of papers on his kitchen table and pulls out a photo of the young man, which looks to have been taken around the 1850s, with an inscription that identifies him as a carriage driver....

James still has a lot of questions, but most of them concern the genealogical riddle. He has organized the documents pertaining to his family and Prospect Hill on a CD-ROM, complete with images of the portraits of Isaac Ross and his wife, and of tombstones in the graveyard, and he plans to give a presentation on the subject at the next Belton family reunion. Since 1984 the Beltons have held reunions, often several times a year, at various locations. Last year the event drew more than 4,000 people, he says. "I had to get my facts in order," he says of his Prospect Hill presentation. "I don't like to lose history, and the first time I mentioned all this at the Belton reunion, the whole place went quiet. People's mouths dropped. They said, 'A white man did that before the Civil War—in Mississippi?' They didn't believe me. One fella who did believe the story said, 'Man, you need to get in touch with Spike Lee. It's make a great movie.'

"There's a lot about our history people don't realize," he says, "Like that a lot of blacks in the South owned slaves." In his view, the story is complicated, and it is shared. "Some of the white Rosses have helped me put a lot of information together, and the white Beltons, too," he adds.

When I mention what so many have said about the story not being simply black and white, he smiles. He says there are a lot of gradations between any two extremes, and cites as an example the quasi-ward system that he remembers as a child, which was similar to that which exists in Liberia today.

"It was basically the same way here," he says. "It wasn't like slavery, but I grew up with a stepbrother and -sister, who Dad took in and raised 'em, and they worked for the family. They were like family, and they were less fortunate, and they worked for us. I see a lot of that—people who are less fortunate, maybe because they're darker-skinned, and they weren't given the same opportunity."

Early Liberian Colonists vs. Indigenous Peoples

From Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today, by Alan Huffman (Penguin, 2004), pp. 45-48:

In creating its Liberian colony in 1820, the American Colonization Society used as a template the colony of Sierra Leone, immediately to the west on the coast of West Africa. Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, had been founded thirty years earlier by English philanthropists as a home for freed British slaves, many of whom had originated in America but had won their freedom by fighting for the crown during the American Revolution. West Africa was chosen for the colonies for several reasons, but primarily because it was known as the "slave coast" and was the general area of origin of large numbers of slaves, including the majority of those who ended up in the Americas. Historians estimate that approximately sixty million Africans were captured as slaves in West Africa from the first recorded slave sale in 1503 to the end of the trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Of those, an estimated forty million died before arriving at their destination.

Until the establishment of the two colonies, the territory that would become Liberia had been held by indigenous tribes, many of which were (and in some cases continued to be) active in the slave trade. In hindsight, it was a recipe for disaster....

In January 1820 the society's first chartered ship, the Elizabeth, set sail from New York for West Africa with three society agents and eighty-eight emigrants aboard. The ship first landed in Freetown, then made its way along the coast to the future Liberia, where the colonization effort got off to an inauspicious start. Within three weeks all of the society's agents and twenty-two of the immigrants had died of fever. The survivors were evacuated to Freetown. Undeterred, the society organized two more voyages and began buying additional land, sometimes under threat of force, from tribal chiefs along the coast. According to historian [Mary Louise] Clifford, U.S. officials struck a deal with indigenous tribes that allowed the tribes' active slave trade, which would have meant that as freed slaves were arriving to settle in Liberia, new slaves would have been setting sail. The colonization society board rejected the deal, however. A compromise that gave the coastal region only to the immigrants, and apparently made no mention of the slave trade, was accepted, but when the immigrants actually landed they met armed resistance and so moved farther down the coast, where they were again attacked. Some escaped to Freetown while others remained trapped within crude, hastily built fortifications. Only a small group persevered....

By the end of 1822 a tenuous peace was negotiated between the settlers and the tribes. Soon after, colonization society officials rebuked the immigrants for what they considered to be a poor effort at self-sufficiency. Clifford wrote that the settlers considered farming too closely akin to the slavery they had known in the United States, yet they had few other economic options aside from trade, which was dominated by the tribes.

To engender a sense of purpose, and because the colonization society was having difficulty finding leaders who would remain in place, the group named the colony Liberia and sought to regiment its government on the local level. The colonists began bartering for more coastal land and eventually took control of most of the valuable slave trading ports. By 1830 more than 2,500 immigrants had arrived in Liberia from the United States, and the next year the state of Maryland incorporated its colonization society, distinct from the American Colonization Society, and appropriated money for its own colony.

Even as the colonization effort was getting on its feet, opposition in the United States grew. The concept of colonization was challenged by both white abolitionists and free blacks who argued that African-Americans had earned a stake in the United States, and that repatriation was tantamount to deportation. Those concerns would still be echoed in 1851, when Frederick Douglass, in a speech to the Convention of Colored Citizens, attacked colonization, saying, "But we claim no affinity with Africa. This is our home ... The land of our forefathers." African-Americans, he said, "do not trace our ancestry to Africa alone. We trace it to Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen, to Frenchmen, to the German, to the Asiatic as well as to Africa. The best blood of Virginia courses through our veins."

Japanese Buddhism Fading in Hawai‘i

Just in time for the onset of the Obon season, the July issue of Honolulu Magazine publishes an article by Tiffany Hill (pp. 38-42) on the "Fading Tradition" of Japanese Buddhism in Hawai‘i. Here are a few excerpts:

It's strange to hear a Christian hymn in a Japanese Buddhist temple, being led by the minister, no less. But [Rev. Earl] Ikeda [of Mō‘ili‘ili Hongwanji Mission temple near the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa] had a reason. "I was invited to do a funeral service recently," he explains. "I talked with the family and mentioned that it didn't have to be a strict service done in the Buddhist tradition." He explained to the family that they could choose a gatha, or song they felt would best honor their loved one. They chose "Amazing Grace." In fact, adds Ikeda, when it came time to sing, the Buddhist minister himself led the mourners in the Christian hymn.

Speaking to us earlier in his modest office upstairs, Ikeda, sporting his usual attire of T-shirts and shorts, says, "I like that song, and the meaning really fits what Buddhism is about. In Buddhism, the idea is to live the moment. We can't be attached to certain ways of thinking, that's exactly what Buddhism isn't." It was a story he wanted to share with his membership....

The person most credited with establishing Buddhism in the Islands is Bishop Emyō Imamura. He came from Japan in 1899 to examine life at the plantations, and he was instrumental in building temples in plantation towns. Plantation workers converted plantation homes to create the first temples. By the mid-1920s, there were more than 170 temples in Hawai‘i. They were the lifeblood of the plantation towns, where they served not only as the place of worship, but as a commmunity center and as the nucleus for political and labor discussions as the Japanese fought for a place in the Islands.

There are 33 temples still open on O‘ahu. Visit one of them today and you'll find a small number of devoted members, all of whom pay annual dues to keep the temples open. It is not uncommon for ministers to speak in front of memberships compromising a dozen members, sometimes fewer. It's also likely that a temple's most active members are in their 70s, 80s, sometimes even 90s....

In addition to a shrinking membership, Hawai‘i's Japanese Buddhist temples are also facing a shortage of ministers. Take [Rev. Jay] Okamoto. For the past six years, he's not only been the minister of the Waipahu Hongwanji, but also the temples in ‘Ewa and Wai‘anae, neither of which have had their own resident ministers in 30 years. The ‘Ewa temple has 30 members and the Wai‘anae temple has around 50, he says.

All Japanese Buddhist ministers must be ordained in Japan before they can work in Hawai‘i and on the Mainland. This often makes it difficult to attract local men and women in the first place, because they have to speak Japanese for their studies. Often, Japanese ministers end up serving in Hawai‘i's temples, but, says Okamoto, they, too, face linguistic and cultural challenges. It's a catch-22.

There's also a seasonally related article by David Thompson in the same issue headlined "Bondancersizing the Night Away" (pp. 43-45).

UPDATE: The article is about "Bondancercise" classes, a word formed from the merger of Bon + dancer + exercise, but the spelling "Bondancersizing (the Night Away)" implies right-sizing Bon dancers (weight loss).

Along the Sumatra Railroad, August 1945

From Chapter VI, The golden spike, in The Sumatra Railroad: Final Destination Pakan Baroe, 1943-1945, by Henk Hovinga, trans. by Bernard J. Wolters (KITLV Press, 2010), pp. 276-281:

It was 15 August 1945. The previous night telexes had spread the news across the world: 'Japan surrendered. Armistice on 15 August at 00.00 hrs.' The Japanese officers there in the godforsaken green heart of Sumatra also knew that. They shouted: 'Banzai Nippon' while they knew that they had been defeated. But they kept quiet. They only talked about the railway that was finally completed at the cost of immeasurable human suffering. At the cost of more than eighty thousand dead, the vast majority of which were romushas.

The POWs who were waiting motionlessly between the trees, still had no knowledge of the surrender. With sweat dripping down their chins, they did not dare to move. Ignorant of this historical moment in the world's history, they looked breathlessly at how the bottle on the table was uncorked, how the glasses went around and the biscuits were presented. A short while later the tense ceremony, that had lasted not even half an hour, was abruptly terminated. Tables and chairs were hastily loaded on to the lorries after the emaciated workers had also been offered a biscuit and a swig from a bottle. Then they were ordered back to the trains. One departed to the north, the other to the south, to the camp in the gorge, where fresh rumours had circulated in the meantime....

That evening, shortly before sundown, the POWs were counted and recounted. All men had returned from the railway. The Japanese commander stepped forward in front of the hundreds of almost naked human wrecks. The ribs could be counted on most of them; many were covered in wounds and tropical ulcers. With their hollow eyes they tensely watched the well-fed, arrogant Japanese. Would he announce what they had all for so long desperately wanted to hear? Lieutenant Visser interpreted:

'Now that the railway is finished, thanks to the efforts of all of you, I have been given the authority in the name of His Majesty, the Emperor, to inform you that all of you are permitted to rest from this moment on. In a short while you will all be relocated to more pleasant parts of the country. As of today all rations of rice, vegetables and meat will be increased. You will be provided with these new rations as soon as we receive new stock. At this moment we do not have any meat or vegetables and we have only a supply of rice for a few days. Pending your relocation, you are not permitted to leave the camp.'

That was all.... The choking uncertainty lasted for over a week, while the men were hanging around the camp with nothing to do. It was probably 24 August when the first train with a real steam powered locomotive stopped at Camp 11.... On August 27 a second contingent of POWs was transferred in the same manner.... The last group from the south departed on 30 August, taking with them the entire inventory of the camp that was now completely abandoned....

'We obtained complete certainty a little later during roll call. Lieutenant Visser stepped forward and shouted: "Today is 31 August. It is the birthday of our beloved Queen Wilhelmina. That is why together we are now going to sing our national anthem, the Wilhelmus: one, two, three..." But nobody had the courage. "Then I will do it alone", Visser said as he began to sing. Fearfully, we looked at the Jap, but when he did not move we all joined in one after the other. At first hesitatingly, but then louder, from the heart. It was a very strange moment. I saw the Jap slowly move his legs; he put down his samurai sword and stood up. When the last words of the anthem sounded, he stood directly across from us and saluted. That was when we knew. At last! We hardly dared to believe it, but this time it was true. We were free. We cheered, shouted and cried. We were free. Finally free...'

Without an official Japanese declaration of surrender lieutenant Visser's group was the last to find out that the war was over. Two weeks earlier the wildest rumours of a possible surrender had already been going around the first camps near Pakan Baroe ['New Market']. Mid August hope of an impending liberation was also glimmering in Camp 2 when the usually sadistic Koreans suddenly turned friendly, even inviting a group of prisoners from the camp staff to a meal! That had to occur at midnight and without knowledge of the Japanese. Naturally the place that would be least likely to attract undesired visitors and snoopers was the cemetery on the other side of the stream. There, at the graveyards, the Koreans offered the representatives of their victims a conciliatory meal. They told the captives that the war was almost over and that they, the POWs, should not be too hard on them. After all Korea had also been occupied and suppressed by the Japanese for years, so that the prisoners and the guards were actually partners in adversity....

When a few days later the news of liberation seeped through to everyone, the most heart-warming scenes took place everywhere along the railway. On 25 August at eight o'clock in the morning the POWs in Logas (Camp 9) were informed that the war was over. The Japs disarmed the Koreans, while a Korean non-commissioned officer stood to attention before a Japanese soldier third class. The next day all ducks and chickens of the Japanese camp commander had disappeared. They had been consumed by the prisoners.

Maggot Therapy in Sumatra, 1944

From Chapter IV, Maggots with sambal, in The Sumatra Railroad: Final Destination Pakan Baroe, 1943-1945, by Henk Hovinga, trans. by Bernard J. Wolters (KITLV Press, 2010), pp. 184, 186:

A great problem in many camps was the acquisition of an adequate amount of proteins. Even though in Camp 3 little fish were caught in the river with a klamboe [= Malay kelambu 'mosquito net', also borrowed into Tok Pisin], most other camps were not near a river. Again Indonesians knew that the maggots of fire ants and coconut beetles were edible and also palatable when cooked with sambal. Doctor W.J. van Ramshorst, who was fighting a losing battle against disease, came to similar conclusions:

'The greatest problem was the lack of food. The sick men were totally emaciated and had lost their immunity to all kinds of infectious diseases. I got the idea to use maggots from the chickens that were quickly becoming fat foraging around the latrines, feeding on the fly maggots there. There was always a cloud of flies buzzing over the holes in the ground where people were defaecating. And I thought to myself, what is good for chickens, must also be good for men. It is a filthy story, but we hauled those maggots by the bucketful from the latrines, washed them, cooked them and gave them to the sick men with sambal. On this protein rich diet their condition improved visibly.

I made another discovery in that terrible camp, where those working on the railroad were sent to die. We had no disinfectants to treat the filthy tropical ulcers. But again maggots were the solution. I bound an old rag with larvae around the wound and after a few days it was cleaned beautifully. Many still died from undernourishment, beri-beri, malaria and bacillary dysentery, for which we had no cure. But at least with those maggots we were able to save a good number of our people.'

POW Ben Wolters discovered another remedy for tropical ulcers, when two large ones developed on his left foot instep. One afternoon he was sleeping on his left side on the balé-balé [bamboo stretcher on wooden posts] with his left foot instep toward the boards. He woke up due to an itch in the ulcers, which had turned dark red. When he took a closer look and inspected them he saw tiny ants. They had removed all deleterious material. After [he removed] the tiny ants, he covered the wounds with a cloth patch and glued it with fresh liquid latex from a rubber tree. Soon the wounds were healed. And so ants and maggots made a positive contribution to the POWs' lives.

Venice's Imperial Stato da Mar

From: City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2012), Kindle Loc. 1815-1866:

By the treaty of October 1204, the Partition of the Lands of the Roman (Byzantine) Empire, Venice became overnight the inheritor of a maritime empire. At a stroke, the city was changed from a merchant state into a colonial power, whose writ would run from the top of the Adriatic to the Black Sea, across the Aegean and the seas of Crete. In the process its self-descriptions would ascend from the Commune, the shared creation of its domestic lagoon, to the Signoria, the Serenissima, the Dominante—“the Dominant One”—a sovereign state whose power would be felt, in its own proud formulation, “wherever water runs.”

On paper, the Venetians were granted all of western Greece, Corfu, and the Ionian islands, a scattering of bases and islands in the Aegean Sea, critical control of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, and, most precious of all, three-eighths of Constantinople, including its docks and arsenal, the cornerstone of their mercantile wealth. The Venetians had come to the negotiating table with an unrivaled knowledge of the eastern Mediterranean. They had been trading in the Byzantine Empire for hundreds of years, and they knew exactly what they wanted. While the feudal lords of France and Italy went to construct petty fiefdoms on the poor soil of continental Greece, the Venetians demanded ports, trading stations, and naval bases with strategic control of seaways. None of these were more than a few miles from the sea. Wealth lay not in exploiting an impoverished Greek peasantry, but in the control of sea-lanes along which the merchandise of the East could be channeled into the warehouses of the Grand Canal. Venice came in time to call its overseas empire the Stato da Mar, the “Territory of the Sea.” With two exceptions, it never comprised the occupation of substantial blocks of land—the population of Venice was far too small for that—rather it was a loose network of ports and bases, similar in structure to the way stations of the British Empire. Venice created its own Gibraltars, Maltas, and Adens, and like the British Empire it depended on sea power to hold these possessions together.

This empire was almost an accidental construct. It contained no program for exporting the values of the Republic to benighted peoples; it had little interest in the lives of these unwilling subjects; it certainly did not want them to have the rights of citizens. It was the creation of a city of merchants and its rationale was exclusively commercial. The other beneficiaries of the partition of 1204 concocted scattered kingdoms with outlandish feudal titles—the Latin Empire of Constantinople, the Kingdom of Salonika, the Despotate of Epirus, the Megaskyrate of Athens and Thebes, the Triarchy of Euboea, the Principality of Achaea, the Marquisates of Boudonitza and Salonae—the list was endless. The Venetians styled themselves quite differently. They were proud lords of a Quarter and Half a Quarter of the Empire of Romania. It was a merchant’s precise formulation, coming in total to three-eighths, like a quantity of merchandise weighed in a balance. The Venetians, shrewdly practical and unromantic, thought in fractions: They divided their city into sixths, the capital costs of their ships into twenty-fourths, and their trading ventures into thirds. The places where the flag of Saint Mark was raised and his lion carved on harbor walls and castle gates existed, in the repeated phrase, “for the honor and profit of Venice.” The emphasis was always on the profit.

The Stato da Mar allowed the Venetians to ensure the security of their merchant convoys, and it protected them from the whims of foreign potentates and the jealousy of maritime rivals. Crucially, the treaty afforded full control of trade within the center of the eastern Mediterranean. At a stroke it locked their competitors, the Genoese and the Pisans, out of a whole commercial zone.

Theoretically Byzantium had now been neatly divided into discrete blocks of ownership, but much of this existed only on paper, like the crude maps of Africa carved up by medieval popes. In practice the divisions were far messier. The implosion of the Greek empire shattered the world of the eastern Mediterranean into glittering fragments. It left a power vacuum, the consequences of which no one could foresee—the irony of the Fourth Crusade was that it would advance the spread of Islam, which it had set out to repel. The immediate aftermath was less an orderly distribution than a land grab.

The eastern Mediterranean became a magnet for adventurers and mercenaries, pirates and soldiers of fortune from Burgundy, Lombardy, and the Catalan ports. It was a last Christian frontier for the young and the bold. Tiny principalities sprang up on the islands and plains of Greece, each one guarded by its desolate castle, engaging in miniature wars with its neighbors, feuding and killing. The history of the Latin kingdoms of Greece is a tale of confused bloodshed and medieval war. Few of them lasted long. Dynasties conquered, ruled, and vanished again within a couple of generations, like light rain into the dry Greek earth. They were dogged by continuous, if uncoordinated, Byzantine resistance.

Venice knew better than most that Greece was no El Dorado. True gold was coined in the spice markets of Alexandria, Beirut, Acre, and Constantinople. They impassively watched the feudal knights and mercenary bands hack and hatchet each other and pursued a careful policy of consolidation. They hardly bothered with many of their terrestrial acquisitions. They never claimed western Greece, with the exception of its ports, and unaccountably failed to garrison Gallipoli, the key to the Dardanelles, at all. Adrianople was assigned elsewhere for lack of Venetian interest.

The Venetians’ eyes remained fixed on the sea but they had to fight for their inheritance, continuously dogged by Genoese adventurers and feudal lordlings. This would involve them in half a century of colonial war. Venice was granted the strategic island of Corfu, a crucial link in the chain of islands at the mouth of the Adriatic, but they had to oust a Genoese pirate to secure it and then lost it again five years later. In 1205, they bought Crete from the Crusader lord Boniface of Montferrat for five thousand gold ducats, then spent four years expelling another Genoese privateer, Henry the Fisherman, from the island. They took two strategic ports on the southwest tip of the Peloponnese, Modon and Coron, from pirates, and established a foothold on the long barrier island of Euboea, which the Venetians called Negroponte (the Black Bridge), on the east coast of Greece. And in between they occupied or sublet a string of islands around the south coast of the Peloponnese and across the wide Aegean. It was out of this scattering of ports, forts, and islands that they created their colonial system. Venice, following the Byzantines, referred to this whole geographic area as Romania—the “Kingdom of the Romans,” the word the Byzantines used for it—and divided it up into zones: Lower Romania, which constituted the Peloponnese, Crete, the Aegean islands, and Negroponte; and Upper Romania, the lands and seas beyond, up the Dardanelles to Constantinople itself. Farther still lay the Black Sea, a new zone of potential exploitation.

Crusaders vs. Constantinople, 1204

From: City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2012), Kindle Loc. 1547-1597:

The Crusaders repaired and re-armed the ships and prepared to launch a new assault the following day: Monday, April 12.

They adjusted their equipment for this second attempt. It was clear that a single ship throwing its flying bridge forward to attack a tower had not worked: The defenders could bring all the weight of numbers to bear on the one spot. It was now decided to link the high-sided sailing ships, the only vessels with the height to reach the towers, in pairs, so that the flying bridges could grapple with a tower from both sides like twin claws. Accordingly they were chained together. Again, the armada sailed out across the Horn to the din of battle. Murtzuphlus was plainly visible in front of his tent directing operations. Trumpets and drums sounded; men shouted; catapults were cranked up—the waterfront was quickly engulfed in a storm of noise, “so loud,” according to Villehardouin, “that the earth seemed to shake.” Arrows thocked across the water; gouts of Greek fire spurted up from the siphons on the Venetian ships; enormous boulders, “so enormous that one man couldn’t lift them,” were hurled through the air from the sixty catapults ranged on the walls; from the hill above, Murtzuphlus shouted directions to the men, “Go here! Go there!” as the angle of attack altered. The defensive arrangements of both sides worked well. The Greek fire fizzled out against the timber superstructures on the ramparts, which were protected by leather casings soaked in vinegar; the vine nets absorbed the force of the boulders which struck the ships. The contest was as inconclusive as the day before. And then, at some point, the wind shifted to the north, propelling the giant sailing ships closer to the shore. Two of these vessels which had been chained together, the Paradise and the Pilgrim, surged forward, their flying bridges converging on a tower from both sides. The Pilgrim struck first. A Venetian soldier clattered up the walkway, sixty feet above the ground, and leaped onto the tower. It was a gesture of doomed bravery; the Varangian Guard advanced and cut him to pieces.

The Pilgrim’s flying bridge, responding to the surge of the sea, disengaged and closed in on the tower for a second time. This time a French soldier, Andrew of Durboise, took his life in his hands and leaped the gap; scarcely grabbing the battlements, he managed to haul himself inside on his knees. While he was still on all fours, a group of men rushed forward with swords and axes and struck him. They thought that they had dealt him a deathblow. Durboise, however, had better armor than the Venetians. Somehow he survived. To the astonishment of his assailants, he climbed to his feet and drew his sword. Appalled and terrified by this supernatural resurrection, they turned and fled to the story below. When those on that level saw the flight, they in turn became infected with panic. The tower was evacuated. Durboise was followed onto the ramparts by others. They now had secure control of a tower and tied the flying bridge to it. The bridge however continued to dip and rear with the movement of the ship against the sea. It threatened to pull down the whole wooden superstructure. The bridge was untied, cutting off the small band of soldiers on their hard-won foothold. Farther down the line, another ship struck a tower and managed to take it, but the Crusaders on the two towers were effectively isolated, surrounded by a swarm of men on the towers on either side. The contest had reached a critical point.

However, the sight of flags flying from these towers put new courage into the attackers now landing on the foreshore in front of the seawalls. Another French knight, Peter of Amiens, decided to tackle the wall itself. Spotting a small bricked-up doorway, he led a charge of men to try to batter it open. The posse included Robert of Clari and his brother, Aleaumes, a warrior monk. They crouched at the foot of the wall with their shields over their heads. A storm of missiles pelted down on them from above; crossbow bolts, pots of pitch, stones, and Greek fire battered on the upturned shields while the men beneath desperately hacked away at the gate “with axes and good swords, pieces of wood, iron bars and pickaxes, until they made a sizable hole.” Through the aperture they could glimpse a swarm of people waiting on the other side. There was a moment of pause. To crawl through the gap was to risk certain death. None of the Crusaders dared advance.

Seeing this hesitation, Aleaumes the monk thrust his way forward and volunteered himself. Robert barred the way, certain his brother was offering to die. Aleaumes struggled past him, got down on his hands and knees and started to crawl through with Robert trying to grab his foot and haul him back. Somehow Aleaumes wriggled and kicked his way free to emerge on the far side—to a barrage of stones. He staggered to his feet, drew his sword—and advanced. And for a second time the sheer bravery of a single man, fueled by religious zeal, turned the tide. The defenders turned and ran. Aleaumes called back to those outside, “My lords, enter boldly! I can see them withdrawing in dismay. They’re starting to run away!” Seventy men scrambled inside. Panic rippled through the defense. The defenders started to retreat, vacating a large part of the wall and the ground behind. From above, Murtzuphlus saw this collapse with growing concern and tried to muster his troops with trumpets and drums.

Whatever the new emperor may have been, he was no coward. He spurred his horse and started down the slope, probably virtually unaccompanied. Peter of Amiens ordered his men to stand their ground: “Now, lords, here is the moment to prove yourselves. Here comes the emperor. See to it that no one dares to give way.” Murtzuphlus’s advance slowed to a halt. Unsupported, he drew back and returned to the tent to rally his forces farther back. The intruders demolished the next gate; men started to flood inside; horses were unloaded; mounted knights galloped through the gaping holes. The seawall was lost.

Meanwhile Peter of Amiens advanced up the hill. Murtzuphlus abandoned his command post and rode off through the city streets to the Bucoleon Palace, two miles away. Choniates bewailed the behavior of his fellow countrymen: “The cowardly thousands, who had the advantage of a high hill, were chased by one man from the fortifications they were meant to defend.” “And so it was,” wrote Robert of Clari from the other side, “that my lord Peter had Murtzuphlus’s tents, chests, and the treasures which he left there.” And the slaughter began: “There were so many wounded and dead that there seemed no end to them—the number was beyond computation.” All afternoon the Crusaders plundered the surrounding area; farther north, refugees started to stream out of the land gates.

Venice and Constantinople, 1082

From: City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2012), Kindle Loc. 335-379:

For four hundred years the Adriatic itself had been ruled from Rome; for another six hundred the sea, and Venice itself, had been subject to Rome’s Greek-speaking successor, the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople. By the year 1000, this power was starting to wane, and the Venetians were engaged in a stealthy act of substitution. In the small stone cathedrals of Zara, Spalato, Istria, and Traù, the Venetian doge was remembered in prayers only after the name of the emperor in Constantinople, but this practice was, simply, a ritual. The emperor was far away; his power no longer stretched much north of Corfu, at the gates of the Adriatic, and along the Italian shore. The lords of Dalmatia were in all fact the Venetians. The power vacuum created by weakening Byzantine control would allow Venice to move up the scale progressively from subjects to equal partners and finally, in tragic circumstances, to usurpers of the Byzantine sea. The lords of the Dalmatian coast were embarked on the ascent.

The relationship between Byzantium and Venice was one of intense complexity and longevity, chafed by mutually contradictory views of the world and subject to wild mood swings, yet Venice always looked to Constantinople. This was the great city of the world, the gateway to the East. Through its warehouses on the Golden Horn flowed the wealth of the wider world: Russian furs, wax, slaves, and caviar; spices from India and China; ivory, silk, precious stones, and gold. Out of these materials, Byzantine craftsmen fashioned extraordinary objects, both sacred and profane—reliquaries, mosaics, chalices chased with emeralds, costumes of shot silk—that formed the taste of Venice. The astonishing Basilica of Saint Mark, reconsecrated in 1094, was designed by Greek architects on the pattern of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople; its artisans recounted the story of Saint Mark, stone by stone, in imitation of the mosaic styles of Saint Sophia (Hagia Sophia); its goldsmiths and enamelers created the Pala d’Oro, the golden altarpiece, a miraculous expression of Byzantine devotion and art. The whiff of spices on the quays of Venice had been carried a thousand miles from the godowns of the Golden Horn. Constantinople was Venice’s souk, where its merchants gathered to make (and lose) fortunes. As loyal subjects of the emperor, the right to trade in his lands was always their most precious possession. He, in turn, used this privilege as the bargaining chip to rein in his uppity vassals. In 991 Orseolo gained valuable trading rights for Venetian support in the Adriatic; twenty-five years later they were tetchily withdrawn again in a spat.

Differing attitudes to commerce marked a sharp dividing line. From early on, the amoral trading mentality of the Venetians—the assumed right to buy and sell anything to anyone—shocked the pious Byzantines. Around 820 the emperor complained bitterly about Venetian cargoes of war materials—timber, metal, and slaves—to his enemy, the sultan in Cairo. But in the last quarter of the eleventh century the Byzantine Empire, such a durable presence in the Mediterranean basin, started to decline, and the balance of power began tilting in Venice’s favor. In the 1080s the Venetians defended the empire in the Adriatic against powerful Norman war bands, intent on taking Constantinople itself. Their reward was sumptuous. With all the imperial pomp of Byzantine ritual, the emperor affixed his golden seal (the bulla aurea) to a document that would change the sea forever. He granted the city’s merchants the rights to trade freely, exempt from tax, throughout his realms. A large number of cities and ports were specified by name: Athens and Salonika, Thebes and Antioch and Ephesus, the islands of Chios and Euboea, key harbors along the coasts of southern Greece such as Modon and Coron—invaluable staging posts for Venetian galleys—but above all, Constantinople itself.

Here, Venice was given a prize site down by the Golden Horn. It included three quays, a church and bakery, shops and warehouses for storing goods. Though nominal subjects of the emperor, the Venetians had effectively acquired their own colony, with all the necessary infrastructure, in the heart of the richest city on earth, under extremely favorable conditions. Only the Black Sea, Constantinople’s grain basket, was barred to the avid traders. Quietly echoing among the solemn, convoluted lines of the Byzantine decree was the sweetest Greek word a Venetian might ever want to hear: monopoly. Venice’s jostling rivals in maritime trade—Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi—were now put at such disadvantage that their presence in Constantinople was almost futile.

The Golden Bull of 1082 was the golden key that opened up the treasure-house of eastern trade for Venice. Its merchants flocked to Constantinople. Others started to permeate the small ports and harbors of the eastern seaboard. By the second half of the twelfth century, Venetian merchants were visible everywhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Their colony in Constantinople grew to around twelve thousand and, decade by decade, the trade of Byzantium imperceptibly passed into their hands. They not only funneled goods back to an avid market in continental Europe, they acted as intermediaries, restlessly shuttling back and forth across the ports of the Levant, buying and selling. Their ships triangulated the eastern seas, shipping olive oil from Greece to Constantinople, buying linen in Alexandria and selling it to the Crusader states via Acre; touching Crete and Cyprus, Smyrna and Salonika. At the mouth of the Nile, in the ancient city of Alexandria, they bought spices in exchange for slaves, endeavoring at the same time to perform a nimble balancing act between the Byzantines and the Crusaders on one hand and their enemy, the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt, on the other. With each passing decade, Venice was sinking its tentacles deeper into the trading posts of the East; its wealth saw the rise of a new class of rich merchants. Many of the great families of Venetian history began their ascent to prominence during the boom years of the twelfth century. The period heralded the start of commercial dominance.

With this wealth came arrogance—and resentment.

Wordcatcher Tales: minarai, shashou, tetsuya, akuma no daibensha

I learned a few more interesting Japanese etymologies from reading Delayed Departures, Overdue Arrivals: Industrial Familialism and the Japanese National Railways, by Paul H. Noguchi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1990).

見習い minarai (lit. 'see-learn') 'apprentice' – The components of this native Japanese term for 'apprentice' are not only much easier to recall, but also far more positive than the standard Sino-Japanese term that renders 'apprentice' in many compounds, 徒弟 totei lit. 'useless-younger.brother'. The kanji 徒 appears in such words as 徒心 adagokoro 'fickle heart', 徒物 adamono 'useless thing', 徒桜 adazakura 'ephemeral cherry blossom', 徒者 tadamono 'ordinary person', 徒労 torou 'wasted effort', 徒食 toshoku 'life of idleness', and 徒論 toron 'worthless argument'.

車掌 shashou 'conductor' (lit. 'car-handler') – The native Japanese readings for the kanji 掌 include tsukasado(ru) 'rule, administer, conduct' and tanagokoro 'palm, hollow of the hand' (< 'hand-heart'). It also occurs in such learned Sino-Japanese compounds as 掌中本 shouchuubon (lit. 'palm-middle-book') 'pocket edition' and 掌状 shoujou (lit. 'palm-shape') 'palmate'. Train conductors hold our fates in their hands.

徹夜 tetsuya 'all-nighter' (lit. 'pass-night') – The tetsu in this compound has nothing to do with 鉄道 tetsudou (lit. 'iron-road') 'railroad'. Its native Japanese reading as a verb is tooru 'pass (by or through)', always written with a synonymous kanji, 通る. In the JNR, 徹夜 tetsuya meant a 24-hour shift on duty with only 4 hours of sleep.

悪魔の代弁者 akuma no daibensha 'devil's advocate' – When I first encountered just the romanized shape, daibenmono 'mouthpiece', in this book, I really wanted to analyze it as 大便物 (lit. 'large-convenience-stuff'), rendering 'mouthpiece' into '(bull)shitter'. But the actual kanji are 代弁者 daibensha (lit. 'change-speech-person') 'spokesperson, proxy'. The kanji 弁 ben can also mean dialect, as in 広島弁 Hiroshima-ben 'Hiroshima dialect'. The kanji 代 dai has three broad clusters of meanings: (1) 'age, generation, era, reign', as in 六十代 rokujuudai 'in one's sixties' or 六十年代 rokujuunendai 'the 1960s'; (2) 'change, proxy, substitute', as in 代母 daibo 'godmother' or 代名詞 daimeishi 'pronoun' ('proxy noun'); and (3) 'rate, fee, price, charge', as in 代金引き換え daikin hikikae 'C.O.D.' ('charge reversal'). Now, add in one devil and you get 悪魔の代弁者 'devil's advocate'.

Wordcatcher Tales: hagitoriya, ekiben daigaku

I learned two new Japanese idioms related to transport in Delayed Departures, Overdue Arrivals: Industrial Familialism and the Japanese National Railways, by Paul H. Noguchi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1990), on pp. 41 and 46-47, respectively:

Hagitoriya 剝ぎ取り屋 'peeling-taking-doer'
or hagashiya 剥がし屋 'causing.to.peel-doer'

Commuter culture is a common feature among all transportation systems. However, the JNR worker had to contend with the intensity of this culture in Japan more than his Western counterpart. Twice a day the major urban centers in Japan become transportation madhouses which pale the images of New York's Grand Central Station. Commuters have acclimated themselves to a high tolerance for discomfort in an over-crowded mass transportation system and have devised complex strategies for coping with these stressful conditions. They have learned the technique of sleeping while standing as well as the best way to fold and read a newspaper to minimize the use of space....

A direct result of this overcrowding on commuter trains was the creation of a specialized occupation, the oshiya ([推し屋] pusher), whose job it is to make sure the commuter is safely shoved into the railroad car before the doors are closed. The counterpart of the oshiya is the hagitoriya [剝ぎ取り屋 'peeling.off-taking-doer', or hagashiya 剥がし屋 'causing.to.peel-doer'], or the one who pulls out passengers who insist on boarding an already overcrowded train so it can depart. Some of these trains carry more than than 200 percent of their rated capacity.

Ekiben daigaku 駅弁大学 'station-boxlunch-college'

Another part of the culture complex of the railways in Japan is the various box lunches (ekibentō) sold at many stations. For some older Japanese they are symbolic of railroad transportation itself. The box lunch sold at any particular station is distinctive to that station, and some have achieved considerable fame throughout the country.... These box lunches have persisted into modern times; even on the bullet train one can purchase a bentō as the train passes through a geographical region famous for a particular kind of box lunch.... A number of idioms built around ekiben have crept into the Japanese language. For example, in the postwar period after higher education was made more available to the Japanese masses, the nation witnessed a phenomenal growth in the number of colleges and universities under the new educational system. Obviously, these were not of the same calibre as the prestigious national universities and the selective private colleges. As station box lunches could be found almost anywhere, so, too, could these fourth-rate institutions be discovered throughout Japan. Hence they were labeled ekiben daigaku (station box lunch colleges).

Achebe on the Nigerian Pogroms of 1966

From: There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, by Chinua Achebe (Penguin, 2012), Kindle Loc. 1307-1326:

Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions. A Sierra Leonean living in Northern Nigeria at the time wrote home in horror: “The killing of the Igbos has become a state industry in Nigeria.”

What terrified me about the massacres in Nigeria was this: If it was only a question of rioting in the streets and so on, that would be bad enough, but it could be explained. It happens everywhere in the world. But in this particular case a detailed plan for mass killing was implemented by the government—the army, the police—the very people who were there to protect life and property. Not a single person has been punished for these crimes. It was not just human nature, a case of somebody hating his neighbor and chopping off his head. It was something far more devastating, because it was a premeditated plan that involved careful coordination, awaiting only the right spark.

Throughout the country at this time, but particularly in Igbo intellectual circles, there was much discussion of the difficulties of coexisting in a nation with such disparate peoples and religious and cultural backgrounds. As early as October 1966, some were calling for outright war. Most of us, however, were still hoping for a peaceful solution. Many talked of a confederation, though few knew how it would look.

In the meantime, the Eastern Region was tackling the herculean task of resettling the refugees who were pouring into the East in the hundreds of thousands. It was said at the time that the number of displaced Nigerian citizens fleeing from other parts of the nation back to Eastern Nigeria was close to a million.

Achebe on the Cradle of Nigerian Nationalism

From: There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, by Chinua Achebe (Penguin, 2012), Kindle Loc. 727-64:

Here is a piece of heresy: The British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care. There was a very highly competent cadre of government officials imbued with a high level of knowledge of how to run a country. This was not something that the British achieved only in Nigeria; they were able to manage this on a bigger scale in India and Australia. The British had the experience of governing and doing it competently. I am not justifying colonialism. But it is important to face the fact that British colonies, more or less, were expertly run.

There was a distinct order during this time. I recall the day I traveled from Lagos to Ibadan and stayed with Christopher Okigbo that evening. I took off again the next morning, driving alone, going all the way from Lagos to Asaba, crossing the River Niger, to visit my relatives in the east. That was how it was done in those days. One was not consumed by fear of abduction or armed robbery. There was a certain preparation that the British had undertaken in her colonies. So as the handover time came, it was done with great precision.

As we praise the British, let us also remember the Nigerian nationalists—those who had a burning desire for independence and fought for it. There was a body of young and old people that my parents’ generation admired greatly, and that we later learned about and deeply appreciated. Herbert Macauley, for instance, often referred to as “the father of Nigerian nationalism,” was a very distinguished Nigerian born during the nineteenth century and the first president of the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), which was founded in 1922.

The dawn of World War II caused a bit of a lull in the organized independence struggles that had been centered mainly in the Western Region of the country up to that time. Across the River Niger, in Eastern Nigeria, I was entering my teenage years, bright-eyed and beginning to grapple with my colonial environment. At this time most of the world’s attention, including Nigeria’s, was turned to the war. Schools and other institutions were converted into makeshift camps for soldiers from the empire, and there was a great deal of local military recruitment. A number of my relatives quickly volunteered their services to His Majesty’s regiments. The colonies became increasingly important to Great Britain’s war effort by providing a steady stream of revenue from the export of agricultural products—palm oil, groundnuts, cocoa, rubber, etc. I remember hearing stories of valiant fighting by a number of African soldiers in faraway places, such as Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia), North Africa, and Burma (today’s Myanmar).

The postwar era saw an explosion of political organization. Newspapers, newsreels, and radio programs were full of the exploits of Nnamdi Azikiwe and the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC, which later became the National Council of Nigerian Citizens) that was founded in 1944. Azikiwe built upon lessons he had learned from earlier forays in political activism and successfully persuaded several active members of the Nigerian Youth Movement to form an umbrella group of all the major Nigerian organizations.

By the time I became a young adult, Obafemi Awolowo had emerged as one of Nigeria’s dominant political figures. He was an erudite and accomplished lawyer who had been educated at the University of London. When he returned to the Nigerian political scene from England in 1947, Awolowo found the once powerful political establishment of western Nigeria in disarray—sidetracked by partisan and intra-ethnic squabbles. Chief Awolowo and close associates reunited his ancient Yoruba people with powerful glue—resuscitated ethnic pride—and created a political party, the Action Group, in 1951, from an amalgamation of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, the Nigerian Produce Traders’ Association, and a few other factions.

Over the years Awolowo had become increasingly concerned about what he saw as the domination of the NCNC by the Igbo elite, led by Azikiwe. Some cynics believe the formation of the Action Group was not influenced by tribal loyalities but a purely tactical political move to regain regional and southern political power and influence from the dominant NCNC.

Initially Chief Obafemi Awolowo struggled to woo support from the Ibadan-based (and other non-Ijebu) Yoruba leaders who considered him a radical and a bit of an upstart. However, despite some initial difficulty, Awolowo transformed the Action Group into a formidable, highly disciplined political machine that often outperformed the NCNC in regional elections. It did so by meticulously galvanizing political support in Yoruba land and among the riverine and minority groups in the Niger Delta who shared a similar dread of the prospects of Igbo political domination.

When Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, decided to create the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) in the late 1940s, he knew that the educationally disadvantaged North did not have as rich a source of Western-educated politicians to choose from as the South did. He overcame this “shortcoming” by pulling together an assortment of leaders from the Islamic territories under his influence and a few Western-educated intellectuals—the most prominent in my opinion being Aminu Kano and Alhaji Tafewa Balewa, Nigeria’s first prime minister. Frustrated by what he saw as “Ahmadu Bello’s limited political vision,” the incomparable Aminu Kano, under whom I would serve as the deputy national president of the Peoples Redemption Party decades later, would leave the NPC in 1950 to form the left-of-center political party, the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU).

Sir Ahmadu Bello was a schoolteacher by training. He was a contentious and ardently ambitious figure who claimed direct lineage from one of the founders of the Islamic Sokoto Caliphate—Shehu Usman dan Fodio. It was also widely known that he had “aspired to the throne of the Sultan of Sokoto.” By midcentury, through brilliant political maneuvering among the northern ruling classes, Sir Ahmadu Bello emerged as the most powerful politician in the Northern Region, indeed in all of Nigeria.

Sir Ahmadu Bello was able to control northern Nigeria politically by feeding on the fears of the ruling emirs and a small elite group of Western-educated northerners. His ever-effective mantra was that in order to protect the mainly feudal North’s hegemonic interests it was critical to form a political party capable of resisting the growing power of Southern politicians. Ahmadu Bello and his henchmen shared little in terms of ideological or political aspirations with their southern counterparts. With the South split between Azikiwe’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) and Awolowo’s Action Group, his ability to hold the North together meant that the NPC in essence became Nigeria’s ruling party. A testament to its success is the fact that the NPC later would not only hold the majority of seats in the post-independence parliament, but as a consequence would be called upon to name the first prime minister of Nigeria.

The minorities of the Niger Delta, Mid-West, and the Middle Belt regions of Nigeria were always uncomfortable with the notion that they had to fit into the tripod of the largest ethnic groups that was Nigeria—Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo. Many of them—Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Itsekiri, Isang, Urhobo, Anang, and Efik—were from ancient nation-states in their own right. Their leaders, however, often had to subsume their own ethnic ambitions within alliances with one of the big three groups in order to attain greater political results.

Wordcatcher Tales: Chuckatuck, Nottoway

During my recent trip to see relatives in southeastern Virginia, I got curious about some of the Native American placenames and the languages they came from. Eventually I came across a very comprehensive article in Wikipedia on Native American tribes in Virginia (whose main contributors have the usernames Til Eulenspiegel, Parkwells, and—early on—Sarah1607). In it, I found that those tribes include not just descendents of Algonquian speakers (like the Powhatan Confederacy), but also a few far outliers who once spoke Iroquian and Siouan languages. The area I was visiting was where the three language types once met.

The village of Chuckatuck is now a borough of the city of Suffolk (the "World's Largest Peanut Market" and home of WLPM-AM), formed out of what used to be called Nansemond County. As an English colony, Chuckatuck dates back to 1635. Chuckatuck Parish church (now St. John's Episcopal Church) was established in 1642, and George Fox himself established Chuckatuck Friends Meeting in 1672. (Some of my ancestors show up in Chuckatuck Monthly Meeting records, but there is no longer a Friends Meeting there, as I discovered on this visit.) A Chuckatuck grist mill operated continuously from 1676 to 1972.

Despite being a tiny riverport and crossroads town, it has its own Greater Chuckatuck Historical Foundation, and Chuckatuck Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. According to the Foundation's website, the village name comes from Chuckatuck Creek, "or Crooked Creek as the Indians called it" (a tributary of the James River). Those Indians must have been Algonquian-speaking members of the Nansemond tribe. The Virginia Algonquian language is also known as Powhatan, and was the source of such English words as hickory, hominy, opossum, persimmon, and (corn)pone.

Nottoway Parish was the original name of Southampton County, Virginia. It was named after the Nottoway River, which was in turn named for the Nottoway Indians who lived along it. The name Nottoway appears to come from an Algonquian word for peoples who were not Algonquian speakers. The same name shows up elsewhere in two counties named Nottoway in North Carolina and Louisiana, streets named Nodaway in Iowa and Missouri, and Nadoway Point in Michigan, where it faces Iroquois Island in Whitefish Bay, Lake Superior. The wide-ranging Algonguians had many foreigners in their midst.

We know the Nottoway used to speak an Iroquian language because someone collected a wordlist in 1820 from one of the last elderly speakers and sent it to Thomas Jefferson, who shared it with Peter DuPonceau, one of the earliest experts in the indigenous languages of North America. A few more words were added to the list, but they are the only trace we have left of the language. Nevertheless, they suffice to show that Nottoway was closely related to Tuscarora, which is much better documented but now highly endangered.

Two other groups of Northern Iroquian speakers lived in the area. The Meherrin Nation once lived along the Meherrin River in Virginia, but migrated south to North Carolina during the early 1700s. They signed several treaties with the colony and are now one of the eight indigenous nations officially recognized by the state of North Carolina.

The Tuscarora people once lived around the Roanoke, Neuse, and Tar Rivers in North Carolina, but began migrating north after the Tuscarora War of 1711-1713. Those who reached New York became the sixth nation of the Iroquois who are nationally recognized in Canada and the U.S. But other descendants of the Tuscarora have remained in North Carolina, and some have moved to Oklahoma.

Of the eleven tribes recognized by the State of Virginia, only three groups are not of Algonquian heritage. The Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia, Inc. and the Choreonhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe of Southampton County both descend from people who once spoke the same Iroquoian language.

The third group claims descent from speakers of Eastern Siouan languages (also known as Catawban). The Monacan Indian Nation gets its name from one of two historic tribes, the Monacan and Manahoac (or Mahock), who once lived in Piedmont Virginia and spoke languages (now extinct) closely related to Tutelo. The Tutelo fled north in 1740 and were adopted by the Iroquoian Cayuga in 1753. The ethnologist Horatio Hale, working among the Cayuga in Ontario, was the first to discover that the Tutelo language from Virginia belonged to the Siouan family. (He was also the first to identify the Cherokee language as Iroquoian.) So the Siouan language family once extended as far east as Virginia and the Carolinas and as far south as Biloxi, Mississippi.

Four Notable Slaves and Two Generals

While visiting ancestral haunts and a few more famous historic sites in Southampton County, Virginia, in April, we pulled the car over in front of the Rebecca Vaughan house in Courtland and I got out to take a photo of it. Soon I heard a lady's voice behind me asking, "What do you think?"

She turned out to be the head of the Southampton County Historical Society, which runs a museum in another historic site I had photographed near what used to be called Jerusalem Courthouse, when the county seat had been called Jerusalem. Perhaps she had followed us from there, because she followed us into Heritage Lane, where the Vaughan house sits, and back out when we stopped to take a photo.

The house is still being restored and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places because it was the last house in which anyone had been killed during the Southampton Insurrection of 1831, more commonly known as Nat Turner's Rebellion. (I read William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner not long after it first appeared in 1967, the year I moved in with my uncle in Southampton County after finishing high school—in fact most of my childhood—in Japan.)

We two history buffs had a long and enthusiastic conversation that might have gone on even longer if it hadn't been getting close to supper time. She named four famous slaves born in Southampton County.

1. Nat Turner (1800-1831), who led the slave rebellion in 1831.

2. Dred Scott (1795-1858), who left the County not long after his birth and died shortly after the landmark Dred Scott Decision in 1857.

3. Anthony Gardiner (1820-1885), whose family emigrated to Liberia in 1831, and who went on to become Liberia's 1st attorney general (1848-1865), 7th vice president (1872-1876), and 9th president (1878-1883).

4. John Brown (c. 1810-1876), who escaped to England in 1850, where he dictated his life story to the president of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which published it under the title, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (1855). (Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had appeared in 1852.)

I hadn't heard of the last two men, but I had heard of the two Civil War generals she next told me about.

General George H. Thomas (1816-1870) born in Newsom's Depot, Southampton County, acquired several epithets from his leadership during the Civil War: "Rock of Chickamauga," "Sledge of Nashville," and "Slow Trot Thomas." Until very late in the War, the Union troops never crossed the Blackwater River to invade Southampton County, and my interlocutor suggested that Gen. Thomas may have had something to do with that. (I doubt it, for two reasons: he commanded the Army of the Cumberland in the Western Theater; and Gen. Ulysses Grant held him in low esteem.)

General William Mahone (1826-1895) once lived in Mahone's Tavern, just across from Jerusalem Courthouse. Trained as a civil engineer at Virginia Military Institute (class of 1847), he was hired to build the railroad between Norfolk and Petersburg. (His wife, Otelia Butler of Smithfield, is credited with naming several of the stations.) During the War, he distinguished himself at the Battle of the Crater during the Siege of Petersburg. He had worked as a teacher before becoming a railroad executive, and after the War joined the biracial Readjuster Party. He was a strong proponent of education for freedmen and free blacks and helped found Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute in 1882 (now Virginia State University), the first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for black Americans in the United States.