How tarsome is the pursuit of truth! The hounding is forever corrupted by chicanery and deception – indeed seldom more than obfuscation and subterfuge designed to obscure the result for the ultimate benefit of those engaged in the hanky-panky.
By Jennifer Hassan, The Washington Post
July 13, 2021
LONDON — Jamaica is preparing to request compensation from Britain over its role in the transatlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries — when at least 600,000 Africans were shipped to the Caribbean as enslaved people — Jamaican officials told Reuters.
Jamaica long served as a key node in a slave trade network that spanned continents, driven by Spain and then Britain.
The country, a former British colony independent since 1962, is set to seek reparations in a petition submitted to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
What is however frequently overlooked is the depth of the deceit which in the case of the British in the identical era included the incorporation of an equally stylized imperative to enslave its own people on the Leeward Islands. The specious argument was neither race nor entitlement – and certainly not truth – but rather the charade of religion.
“Know, friend, that there is no religion a man can pretend to can give a countenance to lying. Thou hast a precious immortal soul, and there is nothing in the world equal to it in value. Consider that the great God of Heaven and Earth, before Whose tribunal thou and we and all persons are to stand at the last day, will take vengeance on thee for every falsehood, and justly strike thee into eternal flames, make thee drop into the bottomless pit of fire and brimstone, if thou offer to deviate the least from the truth and nothing but the truth. For I tell thee God is not mocked. On that I charge you to answer truthfully. How came you to be taken with these rebels?”
Peter Blood gaped at him a moment in consternation. The man was incredible, unreal, fantastic, a nightmare judge. Then he collected himself to answer. “I was summoned that morning to succour Lord Gildoy, and I conceived it to be the duty imposed upon me by my calling to answer that summons.”
“And yet, being, as you would have us believe, a true and loyal subject of our Lord the King, you went to succour him?”
Peter Blood lost patience for a moment. “My business, my lord, was with his wounds, not with his politics.”
***********
“Sure, now, we’ve never seen his lordship since that day at Oglethorpe’s. And where are the other gentry that were taken?—the real leaders of this plaguey rebellion. Grey’s case explains their absence, I think. They are wealthy men that can ransom themselves. Here awaiting the gallows are none but the unfortunates who followed; those who had the honour to lead them go free. It’s a curious and instructive reversal of the usual way of these things. Faith, it’s an uncertain world entirely!”
Excerpt From
Sabatini, Rafael. “Captain Blood”
There was marshalled with this fantastic corruption and vile distortion the further putative rationality of class. It is an alliance as historically convenient to those from the cloisters of the church to the hallways of government and the offices of commerce. And within those narrow, selective avenues has been the rapacity of them all. Make no mistake – few of them has fettered either their conscience or their wallets to conceive of any dominion other than greed. This is what passes for oratory, debate and sermon! It is instead an exhibition of pusillanimity.
Yeoman /ˈjoʊmən/ was first documented in mid-14th-century England, referring to the middle ranks of servants in an English royal or noble household. Yeomanry was the name applied to groups of freeborn commoners engaged as household guards, or raised as an army during times of war. The 14th century also witnessed the rise of the yeoman longbow archer during the Hundred Years’ War, and the yeoman outlaws celebrated in the Robin Hood ballads. Yeomen also joined the English Navy during the Hundred Years’ War as seamen and archers.
In the early 15th century, yeoman was the rank of chivalry between page and squire. By the late 17th century, yeoman became a rank in the new Royal Navy for the common seamen who were in charge of ship’s stores, such as foodstuffs, gunpowder, and sails.
What is overlooked in this historic definition is the paramountcy of those ranking above the yeoman. The determination of entitlement was ultimately the privilege only of those of so-called superior birth – a huge division of human worth based upon often barbarous beginnings – and surely not by any calculation, mystery or perception those from any beneficent being or what they further sought to disguise as nobility.
I will not even beg your forgiveness for being so blunt when I say I’ve had it to the teeth with the rhetoric of religion. It is if nothing else an affront to the medical profession so aptly represented by Mr. Blood!
