Would You Like to Live in a Palace?

     People think that a royal palace is the last word in up-to-date luxury, replete with everything the heart can desire, and that people who live there do so in absolute comfort. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Life in a palace rather resembles camping in a museum. These historic places are so old, so tied up with tradition, that they are dropping to bits, all the equipment there decades behind the times.

    That was the summation made by Marion Crawford ("Crawfie") of her experience of moving into Buckingham Palace when her employer, the Duke of York had unexpectedly and unwillingly become King George VI.

Traitors to the Human Race

     "The love of money", said Phocylides, "is the mother of all evils" - a maxim which was to become proverbial in the ancient world, being changed to the "metropolis of all evils" by Democritus, and the "root of all evils" by St. Paul.
     Greed for money and, as we shall see, for power can be a strong solvent of a person's morality. Thirty pieces of silver was enough to buy Judas Iscariot's treachery, and a long list could be made of those who turned traitor for the sake for pay. Greed can also dissolve the critical faculty. No-one would possibly fall for the Nigerian scam, for instance, if the prospect of enormous riches hadn't blinded him to the extreme improbability of the proposal. However, it takes a massive combination of baseness and stupidity to fall for a project which is both evil and utterly ridiculous, and one can must grant a certain grudging respect to a con artist who realised it would actually work.

The Riddle of the Amazonian Amazons

      Imagine, if you will, that beyond your towns and farms - the only world you know - dwell large settlements of aliens from outer space, of which you know very little, except that they are completely different, and incomprehensible. You see their flying saucers passing overhead, and more and more frequently they themselves are intruding into your domain. But you keep your distance, because oral tradition tells how they once committed terrible atrocities against your kind, or that once there were friendly relations, but then they brought the plague upon you.
     This, essentially, is the experience of thousands of Indians who are literally hiding from the outside world in the fastness of the Amazon jungle. Every time it is announced that the last uncontacted tribe has been discovered, another turns up. But once there were millions of them - only to be wiped out by massacre and enslavement, but mostly, as in North America, by infectious diseases which could devastate whole communities before any white man arrived. And somewhere in this maelstrom of destruction there was lost a community which most people now relegate to mythology: the women warriors after which the Amazon River was named.

The Tale of a Silly Shakedown

     1995. It's said that bad luck comes in threes. I had just injured my leg in a skiing accident, my tenants had done a flit and let the house filthy and unrentable, and now my car had been stolen. I got off the train and limped down to the station car park, but where was the car? I looked back and forth, but it wasn't there: just a pile of broken glass to suggest that entry had been made through a rear window. What the ...? Didn't this sort of thing only happen to other people? All right, I will admit that repairing it was still cheaper than its purchase price, but the paint was fainted from 17 years in the sun, and unkind people were known to use the term, "rust bucket" when talking about it. Who'd want to steal something like that? At the Sandgate Police Station an officer entered the details into a computer and told me that, if it had been taken for a joy ride rather than parts, they would likely find it in a few days, for they usually cruised around car parks at night looking for stolen cars.
     That was late on Thursday. None of us could have predicted the sort of craziness which the weekend would bring.

Weird Happenings at the Battle of Acoma

     God, gold, and glory should have been the motto of the Spanish conquistadors. Possessed of an inordinate greed for wealth and power, combined with a hypocritical, but nevertheless sincere, religious zeal, they cut a swathe of cruelty and plunder through Central and South America. In the pursuit of these goals they were prepared to endure any hardship, and face any odds. Though their crimes were execrable, their deeds were nevertheless some of the most heroic ever recorded. This story is about the Massacre at Acoma in January 1599, but more particularly some very strange incidents at its climax.

Quick Thinking in Time of Danger

     Picture the scene: South Africa, 1877. The Zulu War is raging. Meanwhile, Britain has officially annexed the Transvaal, and the locals are getting restless. 4,000 armed Boers had camped at Kleinfontein. A detachment of six or eight Britons were sent to keep a watch on the camp, under the command of the young man who had recently raised the Union Flag at Pretoria, H. Rider Haggard, soon to become the leading adventure writer of his time. Haggard and his men were billeted in a nearby inn, under strict orders not to fight unless first attacked, when a commando of fifty or so Boers took positions around the inn, and a number entered.

"We Could Have Been British Saboteurs"

     One moonless night in May 1942, six British Commandos drove into Italian occupied Benghazi in a "battle waggon" painted  to resemble a German staff car with a broad white stripe across the bonnet, the German air-recognition mark. But appearances were deceptive; it was filled with high explosives, along with two inflatable rafts, and mountings for two machine guns, which could be removed and hidden out of sight on the floor. Benghazi was in for some serious business. One of the commandos, in fact, was the son of the British Prime Minister, but it was under the command of Fitzroy Maclean, who soon faced his first crisis: a military check point.

An Island Without Wheels

     For twenty years before I was married I travelled the world - from Greenland to Madagascar to Easter Island. Even so, I had the constant feeling that I had come in too late. Everywhere was starting to look like Everywhere Else. For example, I shall probably never get a chance to visit Madeira, but I see from Google Earth that its capital, Funchal now has normal roads, with normal cars to run on them. Now, if I had arrived 110 years ago, I wouldn't even have found a horse and buggy.

African Stupidity

     Even first aid has changed since I was a boy. I can remember when mouth-to-mouth resuscitation came in. Before that, artificial respiration involving folding and pumping of the arms was all in vogue. As for snake bite, the practice was to bind a tourniquet really tightly around the upper part of the limb, make an X-shaped incision a quarter of an inch deep over the bite itself, then suck out the venom. Snake venom can easily be swallowed without harm, but it could still enter through a cut or sore in the mouth. Also, if you were alone, it helped if you were a contortionist. Just the same, you must remember that antivenene was not readily available at the time, so the method probably did save a lot of lives. You can read about my uncle's adventure with this sort of procedure here. But what has this got to do with Africa and stupidity?

Elephant Antics

     When the platypus was first discovered by Europeans, many people refused to believe it was a real animal. But what about elephants? If elephants had not been known for thousands of years, but had just been recently discovered in some small, remote part of Africa or Asia, who would believe in them? Think about it: as big as a house, legs like pillars, ears like great leather fans, two white horns sticking out the mouth and - wondrous to relate! - a nose like a snake! Come off it! A unicorn is much more plausible.