Modern History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Modern History’
William Dampier describes the hand-to-mouth existence of the aborigines of northwest Australia, and reveals a people far advanced in charity.
From January 5th to March 12th 1688, Englishman William Dampier, on the first of his record-breaking three circumnavigations of the globe, explored the northwest coast of Australia (or as he knew it, New Holland) aboard the ‘Cygnet’. He declared the natives ‘the miserablest people in the world’, but testified to their remarkable unselfishness.
After the East India Company quieted the Maratha Confederacy in 1805, Harsukh Rai looked forward to a new era of good government.
After the Second Maratha War (1803-1805), the East India Company had complete control over the Maratha Confederacy, an alliance of kingdoms in modern-day Maharashtra. Much has since been written in criticism of the English in India, but little of it cuts to the heart, or (as he might put it) mantles the English cheek with the blush of shame, quite like Harsukh Rai’s guileless optimism.
After its prime minister signed the Maratha Confederacy over to the East India Company, the member states rose up in a body.
In 1796, Baji Rao II became Peshwa (prime Minister) of the Maratha Confederacy. When Holkar, Maharajah of Indore, one of the Confederacy’s four kingdoms, learnt that Baji Rao was behind the murder of a relative, he thrashed him at the Battle of Poona in 1802; but Baji Rao exacted spectacular retribution by signing the whole Maratha territory over to the East India Company. Holkar did not leave it there.
A ‘slight and delicate’ Canadian woman defied twenty miles of rugged terrain in sweltering heat to warn of an impending attack by American invaders.
In 1813, US President James Madison seized the opportunity afforded by Napoleon’s rampage across Europe to order his troops into the British colony of Upper Canada, where they sacked York (Toronto). Monday 21st June found US General Henry Dearborn in Queenston readying a nasty surprise for Lieutenant James Fitzgibbon, garrisoned in a country home at Beaver Dams near Thorold, Ontario.
Man had proved spiritually unprepared for the discovery of coal, said Robert Bruère, and was poised to squander the next energy revolution too.
In 1922, Robert W. Bruère gave thanks for the enormous social and economic benefits brought by the Coal Age. Yet the benefits could have been far greater. Despite so much plenty, mankind went on living as if life were still a desperate scramble for survival in which might is right and the weakest go to the wall. When we finally realise our dream of solar energy, will we be any better prepared?
Only months after kidnapping the Duke of Ormond, Irish radical Thomas Blood was at it again, this time attempting to steal the Crown Jewels.
In December 1670, Thomas Blood, believed on all sides to be a dangerous republican revolutionary, tried to hang the Duke of Ormond like a common criminal on the gallows at Tyburn. His plan went awry, but once again Blood, his son-in-law Thomas Hunt and the rest of the gang eluded the authorities. Five months later, the Irishman was back in the capital, this time with a plan to steal the Crown Jewels.