The only real thing that I can note relative to buccaneers is that no matter who renders the account of them, the governments of the world since the times of the buccaneers have only chosen the monstrous portrayals of these extremely free and political gentlemen. Even when their personal performances exceded that of a King or a President they were immediately denigrated by lesser men.
Take the best example of Jean Lafitte the French pirate out of Louisiana who actually single handedly warned the Americans of the British invasion when even the President himself {President James Madison} had no idea of the extent of it and the top general in the region {the general and future President Andrew Jackson} had to madly scramble to prepare defenses for Louisiana and New Orleans.
"On November 23, 1813, the governor of Louisiana posted a $500 reward for the capture of Jean Lafitte, who countered with a $5,000 reward for the delivery of the governor to Barataria.
Meanwhile the War of 1812 approached a climax as Britain prepared invasions of northern New York state, the Chesapeake, and the Gulf Coast. On September 3, 1814, emissaries of the British force preparing to attack New Orleans offered Lafitte $30,000, a commission in the British military, and immunity from punishment for past transgressions if he and his men would assist them against the Americans. When Lafitte passed information about British plans to U.S. officials, most thought it a ruse aimed at getting them to cancel an expedition being formed to attack the outlaw's settlement. In September a joint navy-army force of two schooners and six gunboats with seventy soldiers burned Lafitte's headquarters at Barataria, imprisoning eighty men, and captured sixteen of their vessels. Lafitte was away at the time so he escaped, but the prisoners were taken to New Orleans and charged with piracy."
"Shortly, intelligence confirming Lafitte's information arrived in New Orleans. In a mad scramble to prepare defenses, Louisiana governor William Clairborne accepted Lafitte's offer to help, though Major General Jackson, the U.S. commander, had earlier denounced the Baratarians as "hellish banditti." Some of Lafitte's men fought with the army on the river below New Orleans, but most served on the outskirts of the city in three companies of artillery that on December 28 turned back a British reconnaissance force. Lafitte and the Baratarians supplied maps and expert knowledge of the area; cannons and cannonballs; and flints, powder, and musketballs, all of which Jackson needed because he had seriously depleted his own supplies during the campaign against the Creek Indians. The assistance of the Baratarians in defeating the British on January 8, 1815, earned them a presidential pardon for their illegal activities prior to that time."{p. 181-182, Pirates: Terror on the High Seas-from the Caribbean to the South China Sea, Consulting Editor-David Cordingly, Turner Publishing, Inc.} I believe it is quite possible that Jean Lafitte actually told General Jackson, "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!"
But then Ted Turner's sponsored book goes on to run Lafitte down. Ted Turner owns our top cable news service and doesn't admire the courage, dignity, vitality, and sense, over and above the President, of Jean Lafitte and chooses instead to run him down as a 'pirate.' What a scoundrel, Ted Turner. Did he marry Jane Fonda, 'Barbarella?' The former anti-U.S.-government activist. Did they drain her brains out?? How about doing a waltz with Billy-balls our present President??
First they portray Captain Morgan as a ruthless and clever Welshman. If you read my King Arthur paper, you will find how ruthless people other than the Welsh can be. Particularly the utterly ruthless Catholic Church and their volumes of secrets and dainty lies. Dainty lies are all right to release in volume. If you release dainty lies in volume you cannot be accused of being a liar and the public and the world soon believes them, particularly if you leave the only written Latin History of King Arthur, which the church did. But if you carefully observe the textual abnormalities of the Church's English History, you will find what I did. That it is a dirty little piece of Christian Propaganda. The Catholic Church even has a Propaganda Ministry of sorts!!?! Don't we like King Arthur, Ted???
Turner's sponsored version says that Morgan consistently used torture on 'citizens' to extract their wealth. The first thing I would like to say about Captain Morgan who was later Knighted by the King of Great Britain, King Charles II., is...
Imagine yourself a dispossessed Welshman in the Virgin Islands. The British Crown has just been threatened by the Spanish Armada. The Spanish are gaining extensive ground in South America and around the world with the immense quanities of gold they are stealing from the native peoples. You are British. What would you do??? You. Same thing?? Become a buccaneer. Raid the gold-laden Spanish galleons. Keep the gold in the Americas and for Great Britain. Right? Then why are our American publishers, like Ted Turner the owner of CNN Headline News, etc., trying to run Captain Morgan and other exceptional individuals down. I would really like to ruin your reputation Ted Turner, but, of course, the American public would by that time believe everything you say because you're their trusted news source. Right Ted?? Dainty lies. Are you Catholic?
The writers Ted Turner has hired also use words like butchery, perpetual state of drunkeness, orgy of torture, rape, and murder to describe Captain Morgan's military defeat of a Spanish town in the Americas. These are the words the denigrators use. What was the Spanish Armada Ted?? Did the Spanish have slaves? Women slaves? How did they set up their gold mining operations?? Ethically?? Are you Spanish?? Are you Catholic?? Do you defend the Spanish Armada against Queen Elizabeth?? Were the Spanish totally clean?? Were slaveowners in the United States South?? CNN is out of Atlanta. Are you suggesting a police state utilizing the American news media?? All of Great Britain were shivering in their boots after the Spanish Armada.
The denigration of Captain Morgan goes on. Is he related to J.P. Morgan??? At all??? Why was he Knighted by the crown of Britain??? Ted Turner doesn't Knight him. Instead in a Chapter entitled, Officially Disowned, Teddie's girl, Jenifer Marx, states that: "Morgan, however, with a talent for turning a disaster into a triumph, not only avoided a trial and prison but was lionized by the English public and knighted by the king. Setting a thief to catch a thief, King Charles sent Sir Henry back to Jamaica, where he sat as judge of Jamaica's Vice-Admiralty Court, which tried pirates.
Morgan publically espoused the official anti-buccaneering line, boasting "I have put to death, imprisoned and transported to the Spaniard for execution all English and Spanish pirates I could get." However, his many detractors complained that at the same time he was secretly operating a private employment agency for former Port Royal buccaneers, collecting 10 percent of the prizes taken under clandestine commissions issued by his old ally Governor d'Ogeron in French Hispaniola. So many English buccaneers carried commissions from the French that King Charles II angrily declared that he was determined Jamaica be a plantation and not "a Christian Algiers."
I truly believe that these two quoted phrases denouncing buccaneering were only press releases for the Spanish. King Charles had begun a British Secret Service and was constantly worried about Spanish Holy Roman Empire plots on his affairs of state and possibly his life. He had to stay on the good side of the Spanish. He did not want war. Remember the Spanish Armada? I am certain that he knighted Morgan and briefed him about the problems of fueling the Spanish desire for war with buccaneering conquests in the Americas. Morgan was sent to monitor, not to stop.
They finalize their burial of Captain Morgan in a Chapter titled, Morgan: the End by saying before he died he was a 'debauched' alcoholic bearing little resemblance to the dashing buccaneer leader he had been. They gorily describe all of his aging symptoms and how he refused medicine from an English physician.
A contemporary verse mourned the passing of the man and the era:
This verse is not contemporary with Morgan's death mind you. It was recited to the author, Jenifer Marx, in 1966. Another dainty lie??
It is all written about in the book Roxanna by Joan Hunter and briefly without mentioning Roxanna or Dirk in Turner's Pirate book: "Dampier has some claim to being the most remarkable of all the seamen of the seventeenth century." {p. 59, Pirates, Chapter entitled Buccaneer Explorers} And he was a buccaneer.
Dampier circled the globe three times. "He took part in numerous pirate attacks {like Dirk and Roxanna's}, but he also led an official voyage of exploration to the South Seas in a naval warship. He traveled with the expedition that marooned the Scottish seaman Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. He was also present when Captain Woodes Rogers rescued Selkirk from four years as a castaway. He wrote a discourse on the tides, winds, and weather systems of the world that was admired by generations of sailors, while his reports on the hitherto unexplored lands that he visited were a revelation to people back in Europe." {p. 59}
Then Jenifer goes on: "Dampier was a complex and not altogether likeable character." Not as personable as you, huh, Jenifer and Ted?? I am absolutely certain that Dampier wrote volumes back to Dirk and Roxanna explaining his voyages and probably Dirk had a signed copy of at least one of Dampier's books: A New Voyage Round the World, Voyages and Descriptions, A Supplement of the Voyage Round the World, Campeachy Voyages, A Discourse of Winds, A Voyage to New Holland. "...Dampier's books are remarkable for their immensely detailed descriptions of trees and plants, birds, animals and fish. Unlike Gilbert White, who confined his meticulous observations to a few square miles of English countryside, Dampier crossed three oceans and visited four continents." {p. 60}
I have seen William Dampier on a record album cover. He is a rock and roll star here in the nineties. Same pose as Dampier. I can't remember his name or what band.
I have seen a man recently in Madison who looks exactly like Captain Morgan. His name is Jimmy Tribble. He has the same British buccaneer manner, long hair, and that ever so distinctive nose. I have for 99.999% of my life been living almost exactly on the 90 degree longitude west. King Arthur was on 0 degrees longitude. Krsna was 90 degrees longitude east. I have another theory.
I have a 'know' that most of the incarnations of past figures in our world are located around me at 90 degrees west longitude. I have seen a gentleman, Dan Felbab. It suddenly came to me very forcefully that he was Louis XVI. of France. 6 years later, I looked up portraits of Louis XVI. at the art library here on campus. Dan Felbab is 6' 3" tall, barrel chested, has a broad pointed nose and absolutely looked just like the portraits of Louis XVI. I was looking at. I have seen Bach. I have seen Beethoven. I have seen Krsna, as I mentioned in my opera. It has come to me strongly that I have seen Makumba. I have seen Apollo. I saw Cleopatra on my trip to the Virgin Islands. She had just gotten a job life-guarding there from Los Angeles. I was going to tell her she was Cleopatra and I was Mark Anthony as Richard Burton was. She told me her father was Egyptian. I told her she was Adam & Eve's grandaughter and was the reincarnation of the singer Bobbie Gentry, "Up on Choctaw ridge..." She said she was part Choctaw. There was a long-haired-black-haired-bearded man she sat with one night. I believe he was her first legitimate companion as Adam's grandson...Son of Cain. He was also one of Blackbeard the Pirate's {or buccaneer's?} buccaneers. Where is the harvest of the earth the bible describes. Sun rises in the east, sets in the west. Why am I in the middle and think I am who I am?? Striking question!.
"Jeanine Is Still A Walloon Just Like Captain Morgan, If My Calculations Are Accurate..."
"And Maybe...Just Maybe...A Bourbon As I AM."
"Heeeerrrrreeeee Coooommmmeeeeesss The Suuuuunnnnnn Kinnnnnnnggggg..."
"SuperAbundance Of Courtship For A Lost Cause..."
"And I AM Not A MegaloManiac While Some Still Are..."
"My Directory List Comes Up Very Quickly On A Sunday Evening, Watson..."
"If They Believe In Your Web Page, Then They Are Thinking About Becoming True Christians Once Again, Holmes."
