Heroes
Yes, heroes - that much devalued concept of antiquity which today is either firemen or supermen, or more generally pop and film and sport stars, but no longer the ordinary men and women who rise above the banality of daily life and provide the rest of us with a valiant role-model.
Yes, heroes - that much devalued concept of antiquity which today is either firemen or supermen, or more generally pop and film and sport stars, but no longer the ordinary men and women who rise above the banality of daily life and provide the rest of us with a valiant role-model.
Among the many themes that have emerged in this blog is that of the men and women upon whom we look back as heroes, the ones who laid the foundations for our history, or our culture, or our values – but who now, in retrospect, may not have merited that status after all; and not because their lives were other than was recorded, but because our own perspective has changed so much that what was once heroic is no longer so, may even be the very opposite of heroic now. The same, of course, is true of those once branded with ignominy, but now recognised as something rather different; they too occupy many an entry in this blog.
Today's date celebrates the birthdays of Robert Clive in 1725, and Horatio Nelson in 1758, the latter thirty-three years after the former, though somehow the atmosphere of their lives makes us feel that Clive belonged to an epoch somewhat later, perhaps as much as a century later – another of the vagaries of time. Clive feels like he belongs with Kipling and Gordon in the Victorian age, with Gunga Din in the Raj, or with Livingston and Stanley at Lake Tanganyika, where Nelson clearly inhabits an aristocratic world before the revolutions of the Enlightenment, in France first, then in America.
Clive and Nelson, if you are English, occupy primary positions in the national hall of fame, though the reality is that one was a colonialist and imperialist adventurer, whose main objective was the establishment of both the military and the political supremacy of the East India Company in Bengal; while the other bought every post he ever held, all the way to Vice-Admiral, and perpetrated atrocities (in Naples especially, but there were many others), for which he would find himself on trial in Den Haag today, and not the man voted "the 9th greatest Briton of all time" in a BBC television poll in 2002.
Clive died in 1774, while the young Nelson was making an early voyage to the East Indies, from which he returned so invalided that it might have ended his career before it had begun. That it did not is something for which history may be grateful - a cliché offered only as a segue to the other notorious mariner of his day.
Four years and twenty days older than Nelson was one Captain William Bligh, of the HMS Bounty. The cruelty that inspired the mutiny against him, on April 28th 1789, is well-known, but not the circumstances. In 1774, the year of Clive's death, Bligh accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage around the world; in 1787 Cook sent him to Tahiti to collect bread-fruit and prepare a base for further scientific research. His men were demoralised and mutinous even before they boarded ship.
Also little known is Bligh's survival. While the mutineers settled on Pitcairn Island, he beached his twenty-three foot open boat at Timor on June 14th 1789, 3618 miles beyond its despatch on April 28th of the previous year - a truly heroic achievement, however ignominious the reason for it. Cook then sent him off in search of still more bread-fruit, and in 1805 he was appointed Governor of New South Wales, where his harshness was no less than on Tahiti. Nelson died that year, but Bligh outlasted him. Arrested for cruelty in 1808, he was released, and the arresting officer cashiered (it's not what you know, it's who you know!). In 1811 he acquired the Nelsonian rank of Admiral, but seems to have played no active part in the conflict with Napoleon. He died in his bed, in London, on December 7th 1817, and no, there is nothing on this date to place him on this page, except for the connections with both Clive and Nelson.
Amber pages
Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Roman statesman and military commander, born today in 106 - and known as Pompey the Great, for reasons that I will challenge when I return to this. What "greatnesses" did Pompey achieve, beyond brutal war in Spain, the ending of the Spartacan slave rebellion against Roman tyranny, and then still more brutal occupation? It was Pompey, to open a circle that will close at the foot of this page, who completed the conquest of Judea, including the "cleansing" of the Temple in Jerusalem, in 63 BCE, a full hundred years of occupation before General Titus' soldiers concluded the destruction of the Jewish homeland?
Elizabeth Gaskell, writer, born today in 1810
Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Roman statesman and military commander, born today in 106 - and known as Pompey the Great, for reasons that I will challenge when I return to this. What "greatnesses" did Pompey achieve, beyond brutal war in Spain, the ending of the Spartacan slave rebellion against Roman tyranny, and then still more brutal occupation? It was Pompey, to open a circle that will close at the foot of this page, who completed the conquest of Judea, including the "cleansing" of the Temple in Jerusalem, in 63 BCE, a full hundred years of occupation before General Titus' soldiers concluded the destruction of the Jewish homeland?
Elizabeth Gaskell, writer, born today in 1810
Miguel de Unamuno, writer, born today in 1864
Enrico Fermi, nuclear physicist, born today in 1901
And today in 1923, Britain took up its self-granted mandate from the League of Nations, to govern Palestine - and virtually their first act was to hand over the entire Trans-Jordanian territory to an exiled Saudi prince. Palestinian land, and they should be given it back.
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