#days bahamas fishing

[saltlifehippie]

Saltlifehippie

Catch of the day. Tuna.

[diemauergone]

exactly 1 week and 2 days until i'm in key west for a whole week.

[armandology]

if no one else got me i know my djungelskog got me

[cheriladycl01]

Love your Fernando's fic about Finland Freeze. Could you do it but with Toto Wolff. Just them spending time together with their son, Jack with a hint of surprise at the end. Thanks!! :)))

Bahama Breeze - Toto Wolff x Wife Reader + Son

Plot: You go to the Bahamas during the winter break with Toto and your son and truly experience that VIP life.

Credit to onboardcamera for the GIF

"Come on. It's our beach day today. Our munchkin is desperate to make sandcastles for his Queen" your husband Toto laughed from the edge of the bed he was leaning on. It was a nice fancy hotel bed that had those crisp white sheets.

You look up at him with your small sleepy eyes, the morning light coming in through the balcony window that was no longer covered by the large curtains, from up here you had an amazing view of the white sandy beach and the crystal clear waters.

There was multiple sounds coming in through the doors, the waves softly crashing, the birds flying around and the sounds of people darting their day down on the beach.

"Come on, get dressed into something for the beach! We'll meet you downstairs for breakfast." he smiles down at you before climbing off the bed, taking your son who was playing by the door with his bucket and spade. You take a few more seconds before starting to fully wake yourself up and get into a bikini and kaftan so you wouldn't burn when walking along the beach.

You brush you teeth and make sure your all clean before heading down to find your family, Toto said they'd meet you in the restaurant where there was a buffet style breakfast, where you both had gained weight at the promise of it being unlimited, but you were on holidays so you didn't care.

Breakfast was pretty quiet where it was later on in the morning and it wasn't too hard to find Toto and his loud voice.

A dad laugh. It rung through the restaurant like a chorus of bells. Nobody could miss it, it was like a load of plates falling where everyone turns to look at where they'd fallen from, but they were now looking at your husband and son.

You all happily ate breakfast together filling your hearts content before heading out and finding sunbeds down by the pool and beach.

As VIP of the hotel, you had premium beds that were right by the pool.

Eventually it was decided you’d go to the beach to try some of the water sports. You set up camp, laying on a towel on your front tanning the back half of your body. Your son obsessed with the sand and the way it felt so while you napped in the sun, he and Toto made sandcastles, Toto running back and forth with see water to help mould the sand better.

Eventually they both ended up just digging a really big hole. All through it you managed to bask in the rays of light shining down on you.

All of a sudden you heard little screams, in your haze of sleepiness you couldn’t tell if they were off distress.

You got up quickly rubbing the sand away from your hands as you looked around. Only to find Toto and your son, him yelling in delight as he stared to bury Toto in the sand pit they created.

As you neared them, your son opened his arms wide asking for a hug and to be lifted up. You however didn't fully slow to a stop as you were walking, and end up slipping off the edge into the small hole next to Toto who was calmly sat at the bottom, legs covered in sand.

"Offph, I know when i married you I signed up for this. But boy do I hate sand in all my crevices" you joke looking over him before helping him out if the sand and up from the beach hole he was in.

"Your the one who got me to come to the Bahamas with you! I would have happily spent my winter at home or in i don’t know Lapland!" He comments, pulling you into a hug. He loved the warm weather so he actually wouldn’t change this for the world.

The next few hours flew by, you and Toto had got your son onto a Lilo and both took him in the sea, showing him all the fishes that were in the crystal clear waters and explaining what they were to him and he had this look of fascination the whole time.

You watched on as Toto rented one of the JetSkis racing around the safe water sports area trying to look cool in front of you, his wife of course!

Then you guys got lunch on the beach bar having some drinks and making sure the little one stayed hydrated on water and juices, he’d become very fond of Dragon Fruit and Papaya on this holiday.

After a few more hours, your getting too hot, your forehead lined in sweat and not enjoying the rising temperatures and lack of wind to help cool you down. You say that you’ll go back to the hotel lobby to get a cocktail and cool down while Toto stays around the pool in the cool water with your son, who didn’t want to go inside and wasn’t suffering from the heat unlike you.

You get in, walking straight to the sports bar where that are showing some Premiere League Football on the TV, Aston Villa vs Burnley. You order your cocktail and go straight under the fan, your face immediately cooling down.

You watch the match, while playing one of those silly games on your phone that don’t take too much attention but use up time until you start to feel like you can head back out.

You stayed there for at least 45 minutes, where you had finally cooled down and felt like you could join your family back outside. You start to walk through the hotel again, noticing little things you hadn’t from when your first got here, like the fish tank behind the reception desk or the cafe off to the left serving coffees and hot chocolate in heat like this.

Eventually you found your sun beds again, Toto was calmly reading his book that he’d brought with him while your son was laying under the umbrella and under a towel where he slept soundly exhausted from all the morning activities.

Rather than going and laying on your own sun bed, you force Totos legs open and sit in between them grabbing your own book out. You were reading some riveting murder mystery where the main character was about to confront her boyfriend thinking he was the murderer when your child woke up, complaining he was hungry.

Toto places his book down and looks at his watch seeing it was around 3. Which means you guys should start to consider lunch before it’s too late.

You walk to the restaurant. Toto holding your hand in one and your sons in the other.

The waiter direct you to one of the more secluded tables in the VIP sections offering you drinks.

“Juice juice juice” your son changed at the Bahamian waitress who just giggled and nodded knowing exactly what your son wanted as she’d been very helpful to you and your family over the last few days.

“I suspect a Kalik Beer and a Tequila Sunrise?” She asks and you both nod thanking her for being so kind and welcoming.

“Come on baby let’s go grab you some grub” you smile down at the little boy, holding out your hand for him to take.

You grab multiple different food items, on two different plates one for you and one for your son. Toto always hated when he had to wait behind on the tables and watch as you and his son walked around hand in hand picking out which delicacy’s he wanted, which most days turned out to be plain kid like food, unlike you and Toto who were every adventurous on your travels, always trying local cuisine.

You set yourself back down in the gable, Toto helping the young boy into his hair so that he could start to enjoy his food and eat. Toto went up right after quickly finding himself somethings to eat before running back so he didn’t miss anything being said.

You guys talk about the holiday so far and if there was anything you really felt like you had to do before you left. Your son babbled to himself while you and Toto continued.

After lunch ended up spending the rest of the afternoon around the pool before you left at around 7pm, purely because the pool closed. No-one was in a rush to get to dinner.

You all spend your time getting ready, you doing your makeup out on the balcony while Toto and your son showered getting all the sand of their bodies.

You walk into the room, seeing your son pulling his Velcro shoes on by himself and Toto in nice fabriced dinner shorts and bare chest as he looked for a nice polo go wear to dinner.

He spotted your gaze and walked over to you, leaning down kissing your lips making you recoil away knowing that your lip gloss would transfer into his lips and leave yours meaning your makeup left ruined for the night.

"Whyyyyy?" he whined looking at you with a frowny and pouty expression that had you giggling.

"I can’t have you smudging all this work baby" you smirk, knowing he wouldn’t care if you went out with mascara streaming down your face.

"Hmmmm, can you choose me a top! Then I’ll be ready to go?" he exclaims before crossing back over to where the closet was in the fairly spacious hotel room.

“Mmmm i like the green but your a little red today baby, so maybe this Brown one” you say holding up the Brown Lacoste Polo.

“Good choice Liebling” he smiles pulling you in for a quick kiss, your son smiling happily and clapping his hands at the interaction making you do it one last time.

He looks in the mirror, trying to fix his wet hair before grabbing the hairdryer not wanting it to go puffy from the humidity here in the Bahamas, he made that mistake on the first night.

“Im so warm already I feel sticky” you complain as you guys step out of your air conditioned hotel room and into the hallways where the glass windows always remained open letting all the hot air inside.

“Yes I can feel it” he teases as he holds your hips swaying you from side to side as you all wait for the lift to come down from either the 12, 16th or up from the 2nd floor. Your son always loved predicting which one would get there first.

"Mmmmm no please!" you complain hating how his big hands that you usually love on you see just as sweaty as your body.

"I'm hurt Schatz! You won’t accept physical contract from me? Your husband?" he asks looking over you and you want to nod you really do but his expression makes you lean into his hold, and let him drape his arms around you while you both watch your son stand in front of the third lift, that being his prediction.

He was right and you all happily clambered into the lifts, Toto lifting him up as you direct him so you can take a picture of the three of you to put on your Instagram and send to your parents and your mother in law who wanted updates on your guys holiday. You’d begged her to come with you but she was a busy lady, promising she’d come next year.

“This is exactly what I needed” he sighs into your next as the lift continues it’s decent.

“Mmmm me too, it’s been a tough year for both of us”

“We earned this” he smiles kissing your neck just before the doors open exposing you to the lobby where your son runs out straight to the massive fish tank making you and Toto both laugh to one another.

What a way to have a break before the next intense season!

@littlesatanicassholebitch @hockey-racing-fubol @laura-naruto-fan1998 @22yuki @simxican @sinofwriting @lewisroscoelove @cmleitora @stupidandunnecessary @clayra-g @daemyratwst @honey-belden @moonypixel @lauralarsen @vader-is-hot @ironcowboycopnickel @itsjustkhaos @the-untamed-soul @beebo86 @happylittlereader @ziejustme @lou-larcher5 @thewulf @purplephantomwolf @chasing-liberosis @chillyleclerc @chanthereader @annoyingmoonballoon @summissss @evieepepi08 @havaneseoger08 @celesteblack08 @gulphulp @fandom1ruined2me @celebstories @starfusionsworld @jspitwall @sierruhh @georgeparisole @dakotatankbig @youcannotcancelquidditch @zzonsbeek @tallbrownhairsarcastic @mellowarcadefun @ourteenagetragedy @otako5811 @countingstacksandpanicattacks @peachiicherries @formulas-bitch @cherry-piee @hopexcroc @mirrorball-6 @spilled-coffee-cup @mehrmonga @bigsimperika @blueberry64857959 @eiraethh @lilypadlover @curseofhecate @alliwantisadonut @the-fem1n1ne-urge @21stcenturytaegi @dark-night-sky-99 @i-wish-this-was-me @tallrock35 @butterfly-lover @barnestatic @landossainz @darleneslane @barcelonaloverf1life @r0nnsblog @ilove-tswizzle @kapsylia @laneyspaulding19 @lazybot @malynn @cassielikereading @viennakarma @landosgirlxoxo @marie0v @jlb20416 @yourbane @teamnovalak @nikfigueiredo @fionaschicken @0picels0 @seomako @urdad-hot @tinydeskwriter @butterfly-lover @ironmaiden1313 @splaterparty0-0 @formula1mount @styl1shl1v @pear-1206

[madebyrolo]

Island boy ☼

Bahamas with Rafe headcanons

obx masterlist

─────────────────────

✿ spending 24/7 on the beach soaking up the sun and attempting to ride the waves

✿ Rafe taking spontaneous trips to the Bahamas with you just ‘cause he can

✿ Rafe yelling at you for going too deep mainly for the fact he’s scared you’ll drown or get swept into sea

✿ Rafe dragging you out for a fishing day on the boat

✿ Having the whole house to yourself for a week before the rest of the family comes

✿ Rafe inviting both of your families for a vacation and paying for an airbnb for them

✿ going out for dinner dates everywhere on the island trying the cuisine

✿ Rafe being more of a Stake man than fish and complaing how everywhere only serves fish

✿ Rafe buying you every bikini you want except for “non family friendly ones”

✿ Stopping at every small shop you see and not caring if they highball you for being a tourist

✿ fruit being 80% of you diet

✿ Rafe being the riches man alive and still arguing with the owners for scamming you an extra $20 bucks

✿ Rafe buying you a Jeep because even though he’ll never stop driving you around but you enjoy the drives

✿ going site seeing and hikes

✿ be friending other island girls your age and hanging out 24/7

─────────────────────

Something quick for you guys !!

[brewed-pangolin]

Fine I'll send another. Captain MacTavish ON THE BEACH. 🥵

I love the beach. I live on it during the summer. It's my second home, I swear. And the way the sea salt air and warm waters can cure the soul is something I just can't ignore with this man. I love this ask so much!!!

18+ MDNI Sexual Themes

You sat alone, comfortably in your beach chair with a cold beer in hand under a magenta colored sky as the sun set beyond the horizon of a turquoise painted surf.

The rhythmic sound of the waves synchronizing with the beat of your heart as the scent of sea salt and sunscreen etched itself into your skin.

The air was still warm, yet it carried a cool breeze off the waters edge as the slow curtain of dusk crept over the white sanded landscape.

It was perfect. A picturesque conclusion to a hot summer's day.

And off in the distance, with a Yeti tumblr of whisky in one hand and a cigar permanently clutched in his mouth, Captain MacTavish cast out his last line into the crashing surf and placed the warn grip seamlessly into its plastic holder dug into the sand.

The beach had done wonders for him since his retirement only a few years ago.

Soothed his war torn psyche with the constant ebb and flow of the tide. Molded his scars beneath a layer of sun kissed skin that further accentuated the seascape blue of his eyes and made every woman swoon with just a mere glance and a smile.

Yet it was here, under the blanket of encroaching night that you saw the man he had truly become.

A man at peace with himself. Letting the setting sun and roll of the tide absolve him of his past and breathe fresh life into his lungs at dawn's first light.

You couldn't pull your eyes off him anymore, and you were no longer ashamed about how your stare lingered on him.

The loss of sunlight elongating the shadows within the curves of his musculature. Accented by the seafoam swim trunks that hung perfectly on his hips. Creating a more defined sculpture of his frame as he effortlessly strutted along the sand to take his place beside you.

"How long you gonna fish for tonight, John?" You asked quietly, rim of the beer can caressing your bottom lip.

"As long as you'll let me, m'lass."

You smiled, watching him raise his tumbler in cheers to take a healthy swig while gently tapping the ash of his cigar into an empty can.

"Guess we'll be here all night, then."

"Aye. Looks that way."

As he relaxed back in his Tommy Bahama chair, your hand reached out to instinctually cusp the back of his head. Thumb and index finger pressing into the back off his skull, pulling a slight groan from his chest as your touch soothed his sun drenched soul.

"Careful, lass. Y'know what that skillful touch a'yers does to me."

"Mhmm. It's a good thing we brought the boat."

Soap rolled his eyes, glancing between your smirking expression and the vessel anchored just beyond the last sandbar.

"Which one ya love more, hm? The boat, or me?"

You raised a brow at his testing inquiry, firmly pressing into the back curve of his jaw with your fingertips as a hushed murmur fell from your lips.

"Don't ask questions you know the answer to, John. Won't get you anywhere."

Soap growled in response. Placing his hand on your thigh and giving your flesh a firm yet playful grip.

"May have ta shorten th'fishing trip then. Looks like I gotta assert my claim over you again."

"Claim over me, John?"

"Aye. Ain't no way I'm losing you to a gas guzzling bàta."

-

You both lasted no more than another twenty minutes before loading everything into the skiff and jetting back to his prized vessel. Where Soap MacTavish made good to his word and staked his claim over you once again.

Spreading you over every flat surface beneath the bow and docking his thickened cock repeatedly into the deep cove of your cunt.

Master of the Swell Masterlist

This is but a taste of the new WIP I have in store for you, Soap Squad. Johnny's got the 4Runner, the Captain's got a yacht. And goddman, do I have plans to rock that boat.

Tagging those who showed interest. Let me know if you liked to be tagged for further posts. Much love 💛

@deadbranch @ohgeesoap @astraluminaaa @a-small-writer-in-a-big-world @d3athtr4psworld @ghosts-goldendoodle @homicidal-slvt @shotmrmiller @glitterypirateduck @macravishedbymactavish @sofasoap @tacticalanxiety @random-thot-generator @writeforfandoms

[alienpossession]

Body Bodies a Day 4: Beach

Usually, algae or some other fishes appeared in huge numbers around the beach due to climate change or things that happened in the depth of the ocean. People then can analyze the phenomenon and come up with the conclusion on the cause. But it's not so simple when no one even aware that something is happening. For example, not a single person in one of the crystal clear Bahamas shore aware that a spaceship crash landed in the middle of the night several hundred miles from the coast. It led to the obliviosuness of everyone that a handful elusive and translucent being already preyed on human bodies that just wanted to enioy themselves under the Caribbean sun.

Matteo and Rowan are two separate individuals that don't even know each other. Matteo is an Italian-American newly-wed having his honeymoon with his wife while Rowan visited the Bahamas with his friends to have some fun time after a grueling bodybuilding year where he competed across the globe. The two strangers fate intertwined as the they became the first two that fell victim to the elusive ETs. As master camouflage, they blended very well with the water and when these men didn't realize, the aliens slithered through the shorts and slid through any available orifices to gain control over the bodies.

As the initial aliens charged to Matteo and Rowan, the rest of the aliens followed suit because they need to stay in pack, so they surrounded the private beach that is managed by a luxurious seaside resort where Matteo and Rowan stayed. From the observation of both controlled men, the amount of available target is quite limited, so some of them have to share bodies until further command. As Matteo and Rowan walked to the shore, their friends followed right behind in disguise either as water or sand. They then dispersed themselves upon reaching the shore and quickly lock their respective target

One by one, men in Speedos quickly fall victim to the invisible threat. The tight Speedo some of the men put on didn't hinder the infiltration process as the cold and slimy being utilized any possible entrance available for them, including the exposed navel that become the aliens favorite access to slither into since nothing hindered the process to get inside the human's body to gain the control of it

Chaos quickly engulfed the beach as more men fell victim in quick succession. One of the used tactics is when a body is being stuffed with 4 or 5 aliens, that body will transfer the excess through kisses or spits, any kind of liquid where the aliens can merge themselves in.

Steve is one of the perfect example when he ran to people in lounger and started to just force people to open their mouth and drool the alien out from his body to the people in the lounger, like Joseph here that simply enjoyed his cigar before Steve grabbed his bald head and spat on his face.

Shocked, Joseph tried to yell but that led to the spit to swiftly move through Joseph's nose and opened mouth and choked him to submission as the aliens gain control of the body very quickly, getting the massive tank of a body as further spreader as he kissed Steve and let some more excess aliens transferred into him and continue the spread while the sole alien left within Steve tried to perfectly integrate itself to Steve's brain.

Around 3 PM, the whole resort already turned into a rehabilitation and also breeding ground for the alien as they prepared themselves to expand beyond the resort as they have an entire island to take control.

[rae-writes]

@[...] has posted a photo

hq boys x reader

wc : 0.5k

warnings : lil suggestive for the last two

synopsis : how they show your relationship to the public

Always posts candid shots. He has collections on instagram of just your pictures and his snapchat followers are graced with at least one a day. There’s you splashing around in the water on your anniversary trip to the Bahamas, you making faces at the fish in the aquarium, you swatting at his best friend with a duster in hand and piece of toast in your mouth…he just thinks you’re beautiful all the time, and he loves the memories, so he shares them with the world to show you’re his. (his fans absolutely adore you and the pay-back candid shots you post of him every now and then). 

Hinata, Osamu, Noya, Aone, Goshiki, Makki, Yaku, Akaashi, Asahi, Kindaichi, Suna

Posts pictures of you two together. Even if he doesn’t necessarily like taking pictures, much less of himself, he adores being in them with you. He loves being able to go through his camera roll and just see the memories he’s made with you; he can see how you’re smiling at him instead of the camera, smile at how your hand is intertwined with his, laugh when he comes across the one where you looked offended at the amount of icing he’d wiped on your face. If he’s gonna post anything, it’ll be with you. He has no hesitations about letting the fans know he loves you- he’d scream it at the world if you wanted him to. Plus, the comments you leave on his posts make him giddy (and his friends putting on a broadway performance of the ‘jealous fans’ is always a sight. The fans eat it all up.)

Tsukishima, Yamaguchi, Ushijima, Tendou, Oikawa, Bokuto, Sakusa, Akaashi

Posts a singular picture of himself (he’s gotta let them know he’s yours). His eyes will be half-lidded in the photo, pupils practically heart shaped. There’s either the faintest trace of a blush or a full bridge of red across his nose but there will be a smirk on his face. The laid-back lazy kind that shows he’d be fine with not moving for the rest of his life. Your hand is wrapped snugly around his throat, pretty sparkly nails glinting in the light. His own hand and matching nails are loosely gripping your wrist, keeping your hand where he wants it to be. You can see a couple strands of your hair in the side of the frame and the half shadow of your head, showing you were clearly on top of him. He’s taken— surely they’ll know now. (They do. And the fans fucking love you two for this.)

Goshiki, Kageyama, Iwaizumi, Kenma, Tendou, Suna, Lev, Kuroo, Osamu, Makki, Oikawa

Posts a singular picture of you (he’s gotta let them know you’re his). Your lips are glossy with spit- yours or his no one knows - and they’re pulled into a wild grin. There’s a flush accentuating your blown out eyes, trailing all the way down to where his hand is curled around your neck. The shirt on your body is obviously his with the way it falls off your shoulder, doing anything but hiding the dark marks littering the exposed flesh. Your own hand is lifted, fingers wrapped around his golden chain, bringing attention to the letter charm on the end— it’s your first initial. The sex-like state your hair is in makes the picture even hotter and fans are screaming in the comments, not knowing who’s position they’d rather be in. (There’s even more of an uproar when it becomes your profile picture). 

Iwaizumi, Kenma, Suna, Atsumu, Matsukawa, Tsukishima, Futakuchi, Semi, Akinori, Yaku, Daishou

[katz-chow]

my first time requesting im sorry if it sounds really bad or cringe ehehsbbejrr

how do you think Simon would react to someone who has a seashell collection they are v e r y overprotective of and they give him one of the seashells because they trust him???

selling seashells by the seashore? nope!

synopsis: what the ask said! + a bit more because i started to really get into it

warnings: fluff, sfw, gn! reader, established relationship, marriage, a glimpse into simon's private life, soap being soap

a/n: i’m literally on an island rn and i’m pretty sure this seagull is screaming at me so i thought this would be very fitting 😝

Simon definitely has his pockets filled, only with Moroccan sand and shells and rocks and…possibly a starfish? It’s not much, but truly it’s honest work when it comes to him picking up and inspecting every shell or sea cookie there is out here on this damn beach. Soap hollers at him from a few yards away, hand beckoning for him to come over.

“Ain’t this one a big ol' Lad?” Johnny says with his hand on his hip and the other pointing down at a huge mollusk, it’s opal and rainbowed color shone in the blazing sun.

The taller one smiled behind his mask and grunted as his knees popped, reaching down to pick it up. With a knife, he poked and prodded into whatever was in it, which was now just a dead, sandy mess at his feet. “Pretty, then again, anything prettier than your face, Johnny.”

Soap glared at him, “Yeah, at least I have a face.”

Simon missed you terribly. Miles and miles away, he just thinks about how his lovely spouse is on their daily walk down the beach, trading and finding pretty shells to show him once he gets back. You two do this every time he comes home. After a few days of resting (with mostly Simon either shutting off in his own room or hiding his face in the crook of your neck in your shared room), you sit him down on the kitchen table and pull out your beach bag to debrief about the new shells. Each one with a different story attached to it and each one you wanted to share and love.

“I got this one from a fisherman that caught it in his net when he went fishing in the Bahamas!” You showed him a huge, pink and white conch shell that was larger than both your hands combined.

Simon smiled at you and took your prized possession from your hands and inspected the shiny finishing of it. “You weren’t at the Bahamas, Lovie, what did you do to get it?”

“Oh I traded a hermit crab shell for his nephew’s crab.” You said fondly, petting the shell that looked normal sized in his own hands.

Simon pockets the large nautilus shell into his bag somewhere and feels his breast pocket for the small, spiral shell that you’ve gifted him. It was his birthday, the day you saw his toothy grin for the first time.

You had found a beautiful, black, spiral shell the size of a blade. Taking it home, you filed the tip into it was sharp enough to cut through…something, you thought. You don’t know what he exactly would cut, but it’ll come in handy right?

He cried that day when you sheepishly offered him this small gift box, a silver bow resting on the top of it. After you calmed him down and held onto his arm, he opened it and a goofy smile replaced his tears.

“I sharpened it, it’s like a…like uhm a shank?” You said, rather confused actually.

Your husband snorts at your reasoning and picks up the lustrous black shell into his hands. He examines it closely, spinning and turning it in his fingers to make it shine in different angles. With the hard padding of his index finger he grazed the tip of the shell, and sure enough, it was sharp. Simon huffs a laugh to himself thinking about how he could potentially use this as his next melee weapon.

“Do you…like it?” You ask him hesitantly, sitting across from him on the couch. Your own hand fidgeted with each other as you pull and push on your knuckles, making them pop gently.

The large man in front of you looks up at you, eyes a bit wide in confusion. A small gasp is heard from the parting of his lips and he softens his gaze, looking at you fully. He didn’t laugh at you, he laughed at himself. “It’s silly…to be killed with a seashell, hmm?”

Large hands found yours as he abandoned the shell temporarily on the safe coffee table. He kisses your forehead. “Of course I love it, my sea star…best gift ever.”

Simon knew that it wasn’t just a gift from his spouse that day. No that’d be too simple, and his life is anything but. That was a piece of you, your love for him manifesting in such a small, delicate object. To break it, was to break a piece of you…and you would raise hell if he did.

His face settled on a slightly less disgruntled face under his mask as he looked off into the coast. With a pat on the breast pocket of his vest, he pondered to himself, ‘This time, it’ll be different.’ This time he has his own collection to present to you. This time he knows you’ll be even more excited than that time you found a perfectly round sand dollar when he shows you these little treasures. Maybe this time you’ll even scream when he shows you this dried starfish.

But one thing’s for sure, he’ll come home to you after all this. And one day, there’ll be no more war, no more bloodshed, just two old spouses sitting on the beach, the sun rising steadily, and a wall of shells from coasts all around the world.

[ltwilliammowett]

John Rackham - Calico Jack

Measured by his hauls and compared to many other pirates of his time, John Rackham also known as Calico Jack (his nickname was derived from the calico clothing that he wore, while Jack is a nickname for John) was not a prominent figure - rather a "small fish" with a spatially limited sphere of activity, his female companions were much better known.

Anne Bonny and Calico Jack, portrayed by Clara Paget and Toby Schmitz (x)

Therefore, not much is known about his earlier life, except that he was probably born in England in 1682 and then moved to the Caribbean. Until the end of November 1718, he sailed as quartermaster on the brigantine of the pirate Charles Vane. When Vane refused to attack a French warship with superior armament, Rackham stood up to him and demanded that he board the enemy. Vane initially prevailed and the pirates escaped the warship, but the next day a majority of the crew declared Vane a coward, deposed him and elected Rackham captain. Vane and his few followers were left with a small captured sloop, complete with provisions and ammunition.

John Rackham in "A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates", published 1725 (x)

Rackham subsequently plundered a number of ships; he initially turned down the royal amnesty that Woodes Rogers had brought with him to New Providence in July 1718. In the spring of 1719, after a few more captures, he overhauled his brigantine in the Bahamas. There Rackham met a married woman named Anne Bonny, who became his mistress and was soon pregnant. Rackham is said to have bought her off her husband James Bonny for a considerable sum.

After a sloop sent out by Rogers drove him off and took two pinches back from him, Rackham settled in Cuba for a time. He lived there with "a sort of little family" until he ran out of money and food; this apparently refers to Anne Bonny and their child together. In between, he now also submitted to the royal amnesty and sailed as a privateer for Woodes Rogers. Part of this crew was Mary Read, who was later arrested with him.  According to legend, Anne and Mary Read fell in love with each other after they had to show up on board disguised as men. In drawings, the two women are often depicted as a couple, though neither Anne nor Mary seemed to live monogamously. "They don't need each other. They want each other," says Amanda Cotton, a British artist, about her sculpture of Bonny and Read, which the British government, however, refused to install.  Historian Susan Baker also suggested that there was a lesbian relationship between the two, expressed in love and concern for each other. Whether they were purely lesbian is quite speculative, but more likely they were bisexual, considering that Anne and Mary had sexual relationships to men as well. 

Anne Bonny and Mary Read in "A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates", published 1725 (x)

Rackham and his crew quickly relapsed as pirates, however, and eventually the Bahamas dispatched a heavily armed sloop under Jonathan Barnet, a privateer, to seize them. Barnet surprised the pirates off Cape Negril in western Jamaica during a drinking bout and overpowered them with little resistance. Only the two female pirates are said to have put up a determined fight.

Proclamation from Woodes Rogers naming Jack Rackham and crew as pirates, 1720 (x) 

Rackham and his men were tried in Santiago de la Vega in Jamaica on 16 November 1720, found guilty and hanged the following day. The two women escaped the gallows by claiming to be pregnant. Read is said to have died in prison. There is only speculation about Bonny's further fate. She is said to have been freed through the influence of her father and returned to Charles Town, where she is said to have spent the rest of her life married and with children. Others say she simply disappeared, but it is known that she was not hanged.

[scrollsfromarebornrealm]

moonfire mayham: crab

"Is this good enough?" Estinien hammered one final nail into place. The first supply run had wood--planks and lattice panels--listed as a priority. Sebastian needed a crab pen built from scratch.

"Good enough, my thanks." Sebastian handed the dragoon a glass of fruit juice. Estinien downed it, watching as the hyur started to cover the pen's interior with leaves.

"Why are we keeping crabs?"

"So I can cook them later on in the week." Wisely Sebastian added an anti-climb charm to the pen's walls.

"Something I learned from one of the local fishermen. Crabs will eat anything, and I mean anything. And that'll show up when you cook them. Told me that it's best to clean out the crabs--feed them bread, bits of fresh fish, meat. Rinse out the pen every day, and in a week you don't have to worry about your crab tasting like quite literal shite." He explained.

"Huh." Estinien said. "Does that go for all of their fellows?"

"Not lobsters. Crayfish, I heard you flush out the tail and it's all good. Shrimp, yes." Satisfied with the pen's floor, Sebastian placed in several bowls of water.

"So now we just need--" Estinien trailed off as a spear thrust itself in front of him from the side. A particularly large example of crabkind was clinging for dear life by a claw where spear head met shaft.

"This fucker is mine when you cook him." Reinhardt growled. He shook the spear, but the crab hung on. "He actually attacked me!"

"I admit I'm impressed with the grip." Estinien remarked.

"I'm impressed with the size!" Sebastian bent to examine the maliciously glowering crab. "You ser, are going to be lunch and dinner!"

"Get him off my spear." Reinhardt growled.

"Where's his friends?" Estinien asked, watching as the other dragoon angled the spear over the pen and started to gently shake it.

"How the hells am I supposed to know? I was putting the beach stuff on the porch and motherfucker decided to come for me with murder in its beady-ass eyes! He'll have friends soon, don't worry."

-----

Note: Cleaning crab is a reference to an actual practice done in my birth country, the Bahamas. On many islands crab can be caught in the wild--and then like the old folks used to advise, 'clean your crab!'

[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 7.10

Holidays

Armed Forces Day (Mauritania)

Army Day (Albania)

Battle of Britain Anniversary Day

Battle of Poltava Day (Russia)

Beatles Day (Liverpool, Hamburg)

Capybara Appreciation Day

Chronic Disease Awareness Day

Clerihew Day

Cumin Day (French Republic)

Don't Step On A Bee Day (UK)

Flag Day (Mongolia)

Global Energy Independence Day

Gospel Day (Kiribati)

His Masters Voice Day

International Glut1 Awareness Day

International Safewords Day

Lá Cuimhneacháin Náisiúnta (National Day of Commemoration; Ireland)

Lady Godiva Day

London Bridge Falling Down Day

Merchant’s Festival (Elder Scrolls)

Minion Day

Naadam Day (Mongolia)

National All American Pet Photo Day

National Caleb Day

National Contour Day

National Fish Farmers Day (India)

National Kitten Day

National Lineworker Appreciation Day (Canada)

National Stella Day

National Transplant Financial Coordinator Day

Natto Day (Japan)

Nikola Tesla Day

Oils and Concentrates Day

Police Radio Day

Protogeneia Asteroid Day

Rhodes Day (Rhodesia)

710 Day

Silence Day (Meher Baba)

Srebrenica Memorial Day

Stay Away From Bees Day

Teddy Bear's Picnic Day

Telstar Day

Uniwaine (Senior Citizens’ Day; Kiribati)

U.S. Energy Independence Day

World Airway Disorders Day

World Miniature Golf Day

World Shuvit Cancer Day

Food & Drink Celebrations

Beer Distributors Day

National Piña Colada Day

National Pizza Day (Brazil)

Pick Blueberries Day

Independence & Related Days

Bahamas (from UK, 1973)

Federal Republic of New Potato Land (Declared; 2017) [unrecognized]

Wyoming Statehood Day (#44; 1890)

2nd Wednesday in July

National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving (Montserrat) [2nd Wednesday]

Weekly Holidays beginning July 10 (2nd Week of July)

Sweetheart Days Festival (Minnesota) [2nd Wednesday; thru Friday]

Festivals Beginning July 10, 2024

American Cheese Society Annual Conference (Buffalo, New York) [thru 7.13]

European Balloon Festival (Igualada, Spain) [thru 7.14]

EXIT (Novi Sad, Serbia) [thru 7.14]

Love International Festival (Tins, Croatia) [thru 7.16]

Mad Cool Festival (Madrid, Spain) [thru 7.13]

Ossipee Valley Fair (South Hiram, Maine) [thru 7.14]

Riddu Riđđu (Manndalen, Norway) [thru 7.13]

Sandcastle Contest (Belmar, New Jersey)

Tangomarkkinat (Seinäjoki, Finland) [thru 7.14]

Vegan Summerfest (Johnstown, Pennsylvania) [thru 7.14]

Winona County Fair (St. Charles, Minnesota) [thru 7.14]

Woody Guthrie Folk Festival (Okemah, Oklahoma) [thru 7.14]

Feast Days

Alice Munro (Writerism)

Amalberga of Maubeuge (Christian; Saint & Widow)

Amalburga (Christian; Saint & Virgin)

Antony and Theodosius Pechersky (Christian; Saints)

St. Bathilda (Positivist; Saint)

Camille Pissarro (Artology)

Canute IV of Denmark (Christian; Saint)

David Teniers III (Artology)

Day of Holda (Goddess of the Underworld; Anglo-Saxon, Norse)

Feast Day of Knut the Reaper, Hela, Holda and Skadi (Norse)

Feast of Translation of Saint Maclovius, Bishop of Saint-Malo (Christian; Confessor)

Feast of The Seven Brothers (Januarius, Felix, Philip, Silvanus, Alexander, Vitalis, and Martialis; Christian; Martyrs)

Felicitas of Rome (Christian; Martyr)

The First Sermon of Lord Buddha (Buddhism; Bhutan)

Giorgio de Chirico (Artology)

Hela’s Day (Pagan)

Joe Shuster (Artology)

Kanute IV, King of Denmark (Christian; Martyr)

Knut the Reaper's Day (Norse; Scotland)

Marcel Proust (Writerism)

Mel Blanc Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Millennial Fairy Olympics, Day 5 (Shamanism)

New Robe for Athena Day (Ancient Greece)

Otto Freundlich (Artology)

Pina Colada Day (Pastafarian)

Reach Out and Touch a Green Leaf Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

Reg Smythe (Artology)

Ronnie Cutrone (Artology)

Rufina and Secunda (Christian; Martyrs & Virgins)

Rusty (Muppetism)

Septic Bralu Diena (Ancient Latvia)

Seth Godin (Writerism)

Seven Brothers (Christian; Martyrs)

Sixto Rodriguez (Humanism,)

Tita or Tatata Ita (Muppetism)

U Festinu (a.k.a. Feast of St. Rosalia; Palermo, Italy) [thru 7.15]

Viaticum of Llefoed Wynebglawr (Celtic Book of Days)

Victoria, Anatolia, and Audax (Christian; Saints)

Wickerwork Giants Parade & Festival (Douai, France)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Butsumetsu (仏滅 Japan) [Unlucky all day.]

Fatal Day (Pagan) [13 of 24]

Prime Number Day: 191 [43 of 72]

Unfortunate Day (Pagan) [39 of 57]

Premieres

Ball Four, by Jim Bouton (Sports Memoir; 1970)

The Brave Little Toaster (Animated Film; 1987)

Cocky Cock Roach (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1932)

Cool World (Animated Film; 1992)

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham (Novel; 1951)

Do Way Diddy Diddy, by Manfred Mann (Song; 1964)

Escape from New York (Film; 1981)

The Fox and the Hound (Animated Disney Film; 1981)

Greyhound (Film; 2020)

A Hard Day’s Night, by The Beatles (Album; 1964)

Heat Wave, by Martha and the Vandellas (Song; 1963)

Homesteader Droopy (Tex Avery MGM Cartoon; 1954)

The Hot Spell, featuring Farmer Al Falfa (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1936)

Lethal Weapon 4 (Film; 1998)

I Got You Babe, by Sonny and Cher (Song; 1965)

I Love You Beth Cooper (Film; 2009)

In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust (Novel; 1927)

In the Midnight Hour, by Wilson Pickett (Song; 1965)

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Film; 1985)

Minions (Animated Film; 2015)

Moon (Film; 2009)

Mother Necessity (America Rock Cartoon; Schoolhouse Rock; 1976)

New Maps of Hell, by Bad Religion (Album; 2007)

Ode to Billie Joe, by Bobbie Gentry (Song; 1967)

The Oily American (WB MM Cartoon; 1954)

The Old Guard (Film; 2020)

Once Upon a Mouse (Disney Cartoon Documentary; 1981)

The Outpost (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1942)

Palm Springs (Film; 2020)

Parachutes, by Coldplay (Album; 2000)

Pi (Film; 1998)

Pink Valiant (Pink Panther Cartoon; 1968)

She Wolf, by Shakira (Album; 2009)

Small Soldiers (Animated Film; 1998)

Smoke Signal (Animated Film; 2018)

Son of Schmilsson, by Harry Nilsson (Album; 1972)

Summertime, recorded by Ella Fitzgerald (Song; 1936)

Tempted, by Squeeze (Song; 1981)

Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham (Novel; 1960)

Unnatural Death, by Dorothy L. Sayers (Novel; 1927) [Peter Wimsey #3]

Up N’ Atom (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1947)

The Wayward Pups (Happy Harmonies Cartoon; 1937)

We Are the Champions/We Will Rock You, by Queen (UK Song; 1977)

Your Hit Parade (TV Series; 1950)

Today’s Name Days

Engelbert, Knud, Raphael (Austria)

Feliks, Srećko, Viktorija (Croatia)

Amálie, Libuše (Czech Republic)

Knud (Denmark)

Saima, Saime, Saimi (Estonia)

Saima, Saimi (Finland)

Ulrich (France)

Knud, Engelbert, Raphael, Sascha (Germany)

Amália (Greece)

Amália (Hungary)

Armando, Marziale, Pietro, Rufina (Italy)

Lielvardis, Lija, Olīvija, Uve (Latvia)

Amalija, Eirimė, Gilvainas (Lithuania)

Anita, Anja (Norway)

Aleksander, Amelia, Aniela, Filip, January, Radziwoj, Rufina, Samson, Sylwan, Sylwana, Witalis (Poland)

Amália (Slovakia)

Cristóbal (Spain)

André, Andrea, Anund (Sweden)

Anthony (Ukraine)

Emanuel, Emmanuel, Gage, Immanuel, Manuel, Manuela (USA)

Emanuel, Immanuel, Maos, Manuela, Ulla, Ulrich, Ulrika, Ulrike (Universal)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 192 of 2024; 174 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 3 of week 28 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Tinne (Holly) [Day 4 of 28]

Chinese: Month 6 (Xin-Wei), Day 5 (Yi-Hai)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 4 Tammuz 5784

Islamic: 3 Muharram 1446

J Cal: 12 Red; Foursday [12 of 30]

Julian: 27 June 2024

Moon: 21%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 23 Charlemagne (7th Month) [St. Bathilda]

Runic Half Month: Ur (Primal Strength) [Day 2 of 15]

Season: Summer (Day 21 of 94)

Week: 2nd Week of July

Zodiac: Cancer (Day 20 of 31)

[xtruss]

The Notorious Pirate King Who Vanished With the Riches of a Mughal Treasure Ship

In the late 17th century, Henry Avery—the subject of the first global manhunt—bribed his way into the Bahamas

— Sean Kingsley and Rex Cowan | April 2, 2024

Some said the pirate king went to ground in London or Scotland, others that he died penniless and was buried in an unmarked grave in Devon. Or was he sipping fine French wine in the hills above Marseille? Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Henry Avery stealthily steered past Hog Island. In the English-controlled waters of the Bahamas, his crew was under strict orders to call him Captain Henry Bridgeman. The Fancy’s gold, silver and diamonds, plundered off the coast of India from a Mughal emperor’s treasure ship, the Gunsway (or Ganj-i Sawa’i), were tucked away under false floorboards in Avery’s cabin.

Palm trees bowed toward the battered ship and the newly nicknamed pirate king. Sea oats shimmered in the early morning breeze. With blue skies and light winds, it was going to be a beautiful day. The final leg into Nassau’s calm harbor was tricky. It took a skillful old hand to squeeze through the narrow channel. On either side, shifting sandbars waited to chew up and spit out wayward traders, nationality be damned. One false move, and all the months of jeopardy would be for nothing.

It was April 1, 1696—a day to make fools of the smartest of men. Luckily, Avery knew all about the island of New Providence. He understood what made the darkest of souls tick and was skilled at turning any man to his way of thinking.

New Providence was the perfect place to make landfall. It straddled the ancient sea lanes between the Province of Carolina and Jamaica (both British colonies) and the Caribbean Sea to the south. Havana was just a three days’ hop away. From Nassau, would-be pirates could watch the panorama of New World trade gliding by.

At 28 miles long and 11 miles wide, New Providence, the heart of the islands of the Bahamas, was big enough to lay low. Best of all, it had a reputation for aiding and abetting villains. The pirate mantra “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies” could have been invented for this dodgy outback.

Avery knew the bad folk of New Providence were as rotten as a shipwrecked barrel of apples. In fact, he was banking on it. The Bahamas’ motley mob included experts in fishing wrecks sunk along the Florida coast, locals who rushed to salvage Spanish, British, Dutch and French valuables lost to hurricanes and storms. It was easy and generous work that beat breaking one’s back tilling the hateful earth.

A view of New Providence today. Sean Kingsley

The New Providence of 1696 was a long way from becoming the world’s wickedest Republic of Pirates, its chaotic lanes home to such notorious figures as Benjamin Hornigold, Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackham, Charles Vane, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. By the fall of 1717, as many as 800 pirates would rendezvous in New Providence to divide spoils, fence looted cargo and party away their ill-gotten gains. At times, the lair swelled to a thousand cutthroats, commanded by a changing “who’s who” of crazed leaders. Brawn and brains were respected, but strength always won control. All pirate captains understood that on these shores, the “strongest man carries the day.”

Avery had a knack for reading places and people like others read books. As an ex-Royal Navy sailor who became the skipper of the meanest pirate ship on the high seas, he needed to decide in a blink of an eye who he could trust and what gossip peddled in some mosquito-infested East African tavern was hogwash. His gut rarely let him down.

Peering through his eyepiece, Long Ben—as Avery’s crew called him on deck—made out a few dozen makeshift huts inland of the trees screening the coast. He spied what was little more than a shantytown on the make. Locals were gathering salt to hawk to passing cod-fishing traders from Newfoundland and New England, who used it to stop shipboard meat from rotting too quickly. The New Providence of 1700, with 160 houses and a church, was still a few years away. Up the slope, piles of masonry were being cut and plastered into foundation trenches to build the town’s desperately needed Fort Nassau, paid for by port customs’ profits. Equipped with 28 cannons, its gates would only open in February 1697.

Aurangzeb sits on a golden throne while holding a hawk. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Avery, the man who put the world’s economy on a knife-edge by plundering the flagship of Aurangzeb of India, possibly the richest person in the world, drew deeply on a pipe filled with Virginia’s finest tobacco. The gray smoke billowed into the charred rafters of the Wheel of Fortune inn and out the chimney stack to freedom. Avery was thinking about liberty, too. The hard knocks of family life as a child, and betrayal by the Royal Navy, had shattered any dreams Avery once cherished. These days, he was a cold-blooded hyper-realist.

Avery had just become the first pirate commander to chase down a Mughal emperor’s treasure ship. Overnight, he and his crew were millionaires, celebrities, notorious. The pirate would enjoy the moment before deciding his fate. There was much to be said for staying in the Americas—the laid-back lifestyle, the tropical mood, the sun on your back standing next to the tiller.

But he viewed the people as vermin. And the culture. What culture? Avery had rolled out his deadly plans with all the guile and strategic know-how that his navy training had taught him. His scheming wasn’t over yet. Ever since he’d stripped the stricken Gunsway off the coast of Surat, Avery had been thinking about payback: to the family of his old governor who cheated him out of his fortune, to his country for betraying his men in A Coruña, Spain, and pushing him to mutiny.

An 18th-century illustration of Henry Avery. Public domain via the Internet Archive

Avery wondered how much power a man with a fortune like his could buy. To him, power meant returning home to England, the land of his fathers, and Bideford in Devon, a town thick with bittersweet memories. Yet again, he would prove the world wrong.

The nectar of the pirate’s sweet tobacco was a welcome respite from the anarchy of New Providence. The town had no proper governing body and little order. Human waste and garbage choked the alleys. Outside the tavern window, Avery saw the bones of repairs, abandoned hulls and burned-out prizes littering the shores. The island’s wide, open beaches were perfect for careening hulls, beaching ships and listing them to one side to scrape off the foul barnacles and shipworms that infest the tropical Caribbean.

Avery sipped his glass of wine. His plan had gone just how he’d hoped. On paper, Nicholas Trott, governor of New Providence, was an upstanding pillar of the community. Avery knew better. He had gained intelligence about the top dog’s true nature.

Trott liked to frog-march around the harbor with his crisp leather ledger tucked under his arm, all-important. But make no bones about it: Avery knew that the governor was a snake in the grass without a shred of experience serving king and country. As Richard Coote, the powerful First Earl of Bellomont and the governor of Massachusetts Bay, warned London in 1699, Trott was “the greatest pirate-broker that ever was in America.”

An 18th-century depiction of Avery, with the Fancy shown in the background. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The king of the pirates would play nice, try diplomacy. If that failed, he would have no qualms strangling Trott’s neck until his eyes popped out.

To Avery, dropping into Nassau and dealing with Trott held no big risk of being slung into a dungeon for piracy. Trott was no gamble. Here was a man who could be bought, greedy to top up his demeaning £30 annual salary. Money meant power. Power meant status. The question was: What was Trott’s price?

To be sure his reckoning was sound, that morning Avery had moored the Fancy off the island’s coast and sent three of his men to New Providence with a personal note for the governor. Avery, in the guise of Bridgeman, pretended his ship was a slaver bending the rules as so many did, trafficking enslaved Africans and elephant tusks without the seal of approval from the Royal African Company, which owned the British crown’s monopoly over the trade.

The Fancy’s tall tale claimed the crew needed permission to take on provisions before going straight. Avery sent a purse stuffed with pieces of eight to make sure the governor got the point. In return for the courtesy of letting him land, Trott could expect a tip of 20 silver pieces of eight and 2 pieces of gold from each crew member. Avery would pay double as captain.

Trott’s fawning reply played the innocent to perfection. With a nudge and a wink, he embraced Avery’s crew as “soldiers of fortune” who “had done no Christian nation any damage and were the king’s subjects.” Trott sent the trio back to the Fancy, weighed down with a cask of wine, a hogshead of beer and a cask of sugar, as well as permission for Avery to land at his leisure.

A proclamation for Avery's apprehension. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Avery knew full well that the clincher for Trott would be the offer of the added tip of the Fancy, with its 46 guns and 100 barrels of gunpowder. French forces had recently seized the island of Exuma, 140 miles away. Rumor had it they were heading for Nassau with three warships and 320 men. Fear filled the air. Nassau had no men-of-war ships, and Trott’s stone fort was still a building site. But with dozens of guns lining the shore, the French would think twice about raping and pillaging.

By the time Trott grounded the Fancy on Hog Island and started stripping its bones bare, he had raked in a small fortune. The strong man was rich and had hardly needed to lift a finger.

As the weeks unfolded, however, only one winner emerged. Avery’s crew scattered. The pirates were spotted openly walking the streets of Philadelphia, thick as thieves with judges and sheriffs, the Gunsway’s riches buying influence and power. Others preferred spending their loot in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. A few of the crew stayed local. Two men settled in Bermuda. Some seven of Avery’s crew married in New Providence and bribed Trott to sign royal pardons. Most of the pirates went straight.

All the while, the rumor mill churned alarmingly. The wrecking ball of Avery’s recent past was catching up with him. East India Company agents were seeking the pirate king in Bombay and Calcutta. The Royal Navy was thinking about dispatching battleships to hunt for the Fancy in the waters between West Africa, Madagascar and Arabia. Bounty hunters crisscrossed the world from the Indian Ocean to the English Channel. Avery was the most wanted man in the world. The world’s first global manhunt was underway.

As the number of guns for hire searching for the pirate grew, proclamations for his apprehension flew from port to port. The legend of Avery the pirate king echoed through the world’s taverns, smoky coffee shops and fashionable ladies’ salons. Avery had shown the world how to unpick the richest treasure box on earth and revealed the wealth waiting to be stolen from heathens’ pockets.

A 19th-century illustration of Captain William Kidd. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Every pirate wanted to match Avery’s strike. The golden age of piracy had begun. Men of fortune flooded the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Captain William Kidd, the Scottish privateer sent on a mission in September 1696 to hunt down and destroy pirates, instead joined the free-for-all by seizing the Quedagh Merchant. Four years later, Kidd ended up dangling from the end of a rope at London’s Execution Dock.

Avery, for his part, wanted to keep his precious head on his neck. So far, his plan had worked like a dream. Trott was eating out of the palm of his hand. Avery was now the strongest man in Nassau.

The burning question in need of an urgent resolution was how to slip through the closing net. Should the pirate king hide out in the Caribbean or head to England for payback? Should he live a life of luxury in the West Indies or risk it all and be damned for retribution on far more dangerous British soil?

Within a few months of his arrival in the Bahamas, Avery was back on the waves. He was seen landing in Ireland in June 1696. That November, five of his crew members were hanged in England. But Avery himself escaped punishment. Some said the pirate king went to ground in London or Scotland, others that he died penniless and was buried in an unmarked grave in Devon. Or was he sipping fine French wine in the hills above Marseille?

Most ballads and books were convinced that Avery vanished in Madagascar, home to a supposed utopian pirate colony called Libertatia. But one fact was certain: When the Lords Justices of England offered the “assurance of our most gracious pardon” to all pirates in December 1698, only Kidd and Avery were excluded by name. The pirate king was still wanted, dead or alive.

[kirythestitchwitch]

Unnamed 'No Roses On Your Bones' Sequel - opening pitch

Caroline’s phone pinged loudly as she was leaving work around 1 AM, tired and sore from ensuring the reception dinner for a local politician’s son’s wedding went smoothly. It could have been more of a nightmare than it had been–the parents of the groom were, true to type, a giant disaster waiting for a place to happen–but the actual couple had been lovely and clearly smiling for pictures while waiting for it to be time to bolt for the Bahamas for two weeks. At least Caroline could help the pair out by finding social situations for the parents to solve periodically, thereby pulling them away for a few minutes. It was a juggling act, but Caroline was very good at her job.

Sticky and hot in the muggy July air, the air was practically dead in the underground employee parking lot of The Drake Hotel. Fishing her phone out of her purse, she waved a hand at the security guard in her booth when she passed by. As she walked to her car parked not that far away, she thumbed through her notifications, keeping an eye out around her just in case. Kol had put out a new video, better save that for tomorrow morning. Bekah’s Story said she was at a party at Tao Chicago nightclub, which might be true, but when Caroline had asked her if she wanted to stop by for dinner on her break, she’d said she had to work tonight.

The newest notification was a text from Klaus. Before she could read it, she stuffed her phone into her bra as she unlocked her car and opened the door, tossed her purse in on the passenger seat, and got in. Palming the door locks as she started the car, she sat for a second while the Bluetooth linked up and her music playlist started up over the speakers. Then she pulled out her phone and opened his message. When she read it, she immediately huffed, typing out her own message.

Caroline paused a moment before pointing out that you basically have to commit murder or sign over your firstborn for those tickets this late into the season. Right, she was talking to Klaus. 

Squinting at the screen, Caroline tapped her finger against the side of her phone, thinking. This man held too many cards. Dropping her phone in her cupholder, Caroline tapped the car's touch screen of her contacts until Klaus' name came up. When the sound system started ringing, she pulled out of the parking spot.

"Hello, love," As was often the case when Klaus picked up, his voice sounded like this was the best part of his day.

"I have some conditions," Caroline said as she weaved through the underground parking lot.

She could hear him grinning. "Of course you do." There was a pause. "You're not driving, are you?"

Huffing, she pulled up to the exit and waited while the security bar lifted to let her car out to the street. "Excuse you, glass houses? Those who text and drive do not get to throw stones."

His voice filled with disgruntled pique. "If my insurance agent can't prove I did it, I don't think you should be able to hold it against me."

"Harassment-free technicalities don't include insurance fraud, Klaus." Her way was clear and she pulled out into the street. At this time of night, the streets were free of anything resembling traffic, and it wouldn’t take too long to get back to her apartment. Normally she took the L during the day since there was a stop near her apartment, but the last two times she’d taken the elevated train that ran through most of Chicago at night, she’d been not-so-discretely followed by one of the guys she had one-hundred-percent seen playing bouncer at one of the doors of a Mikaelson underground casino. Which sibling was being an over-protective weirdo might have been a guessing game, if she wasn’t fully aware that exactly one of them had a mysteriously accurate bead on her schedule. 

“Perhaps they should? If you’d only spoken to my secretary after your last accident–”

“Zzzt!” Caroline shushed him with one hand, despite him being unable to see it. “That was a tiny little fender bender, hardly worth Dana’s time. I’m saving my descent into villainy for something really worth it.”

“Like baseball tickets.” The smug tone was back in his voice again.

Caroline tapped her fingers against the steering wheel at a red light. “I am not descending, I’m merely… slouching.” When his soft laugh rumbled across the line, she may have preened slightly. Whatever, he'd never know. "Anyways. My conditions."

[reasoningdaily]

Neo-Griot

Kalamu ya Salaam's information blog

HISTORY: Indians, Slaves, and Mass Murder: The Hidden History

Indians, Slaves, and

Mass Murder:

The Hidden History

by Peter Nabokov

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 431 pp., $30.00

 

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 by Benjamin Madley Yale University Press, 692 pp., $38.00

Carl Lumholtz: Tarahumara Woman Being Weighed, Barranca de San Carlos (Sinforosa), Chihuahua, 1892; from Among Unknown Tribes: Rediscovering the Photographs of Explorer Carl Lumholtz. The book includes essays by Bill Broyles, Ann Christine Eek, and others, and is published by the University of Texas Press.

1.

The European market in African slaves, which opened with a cargo of Mauritian blacks unloaded in Portugal in 1441, and the explorer Christopher Columbus, born in Genoa ten years later, were closely linked. The ensuing Age of Discovery, with its expansions of empires and exploitations of New World natural resources, was accompanied by the seizure and forced labor of human beings, starting with Native Americans.

Appraising that commercial opportunity came naturally to an entrepreneur like Columbus, as did his sponsors’ pressure on him to find precious metals and his religion’s contradictory concerns both to protect and convert heathens. On the day after Columbus landed in 1492 on an island in the present-day Bahamas and saw its Taíno islanders, he wrote that “with fifty men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.” Soon the African trade was changing life in Spain; within another hundred years most urban families owned one or more black servants, over 7 percent of Seville was black, and a new social grouping of mixed-race mulattos joined the lower rungs of a color-coded social ladder.

Columbus liked the “affectionate and without malice” Arawakan-speaking Taíno natives. He found the men tall, handsome, and good farmers, the women comely, near naked, and apparently available. In exchange for glass beads, brass hawk bells, and silly red caps, the seamen received cotton thread, parrots, and food from native gardens. Fresh fish and fruits were abundant. Glints in the ornaments worn by natives promised gold, and they presumably knew where to find more. Aside from one flare-up, there were no serious hostilities. Columbus returned to Barcelona with six Taíno natives who were paraded as curiosities, not chattel, before King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.

The following year, Columbus led seventeen ships that dropped 1,500 prospective settlers on Caribbean beaches. As they stayed on, relations with local Indians degenerated. What was soon imposed was “the other slavery” that the University of California, Davis, historian Andrés Reséndez discusses in his synthesis of the last half-century of scholarship on American Indian enslavement. First came the demand for miners to dig for gold. The easy-going Taínos were transformed into gold-panners working under Spanish overseers.

The Spaniards also exploited the forms of human bondage that already existed on the islands. The Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, a more aggressive tribe, regularly raided the Taínos, allegedly eating the men but keeping the women and children as retainers. A similar discrimination based on age and gender would prevail throughout the next four centuries of Indian-on-Indian servitude. As Bonnie Martin and James Brooks put it in their anthology, Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands:

North America was a vast, pulsing map of trading, raiding, and resettling. Whether the systems were pre- or postcontact indigenous, European colonial, or US national, they grew into complex cultural matrices in which the economic wealth and social power created using slavery proved indivisible. Indigenous and Euro-American slave systems evolved and innovated in response to each other.*

Taínos who resisted the Spanish were set upon by dogs, disemboweled by swords, burned at stakes, trampled by horses—atrocities “to which no chronicle could ever do justice,” wrote Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, a crusader for Indian rights, in 1542. Against the Caribs the Spaniards had a tougher time, fighting pitched battles but capturing hundreds of slaves as well. Columbus sailed home from his second voyage with over a thousand captives bound for slave auctions in Cádiz (many died en route, their bodies tossed overboard). He envisioned a future market for New World gold, spices, cotton, and “as many slaves as Their Majesties order to make, from among those who are idolators,” whose sales might underwrite subsequent expeditions.

Thus did the discoverer of the New World become its first transatlantic human trafficker—a sideline pursued by most New World conquistadors until, in the mid-seventeenth century, Spain officially opposed slavery. And Columbus’s vision of a “reverse middle passage” crumbled when Spanish customers preferred African domestics. Indians were more expensive to acquire, insufficiently docile, harder to train, unreliable over the years, and susceptible to homesickness, seasickness, and European diseases. Other obstacles included misgivings by the church and royal authorities, which may explain Columbus’s emphasis on “idolators” like the Caribs, whose status as “enemies” and cannibals made them more legally eligible for enslavement.

Indians suffered from overwork in the gold beds, as well as foreign pathogens against which they had no antibodies, and from famine as a result of overhunting and underfarming. Within two generations the native Caribbean population faced a “cataclysmic decline.” On the island of Hispaniola alone, of its estimated 300,000 indigenous population, only 11,000 Taínos remained alive by 1517. Within ten more years, six hundred or so villages were empty.

But even as the Caribbean was ethnically cleansed of its original inhabitants, a case of bad conscience struck Iberia. It had its origins in the ambivalence of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella over how to treat Indians. In the spring of 1495, only four days after the royals advised their bishop in charge of foreign affairs that slaves “would be more easily sold in Andalusia than in other parts,” they ordered a halt to all human enslavement until the church informed them “whether we can sell them or not.” Outrage was more overt in the polemics of Las Casas, who had emigrated to the islands in 1502. He had owned slaves and then renounced the practice in 1515. After taking his vows as a Dominican priest, he helped to push the antislavery New Laws of the Indies through the Spanish legal system in 1542.

Slaving interests used a succession of verbal strategies for justifying and retaining unfree Indian labor. As early as 1503 tribes designated as “cannibals” became fair game, as were Indian prisoners seized in “just wars.” Hereafter labeled esclavos de guerra (war slaves), their cheeks bore a branded “G.” Automatic servitude also awaited any hapless Indians, known as esclavos de rescate (ransomed slaves), whom Spanish slavers had freed from other Indians who had already enslaved them; the letter “R” was seared into their faces.

In 1502 Hispanola’s new governor, Nicolás de Ovando, made use of an old feudal practice for ensuring control over workers’ bodies. To retain native miners but check rampant cruelty, Ovando bestowed on prominent colonizers land grants (encomiendas) that included rights to tribute and labor from Indians already residing there. Although still vassals, they remained nominally free from “ownership.” They could reside in their own villages, were theoretically protected from sexual predation and secondary selling, and were supposed to receive religious instruction and token compensation of a gold peso a year—benefits that were often ignored. Over the next two centuries the encomienda system and other local forms of unfree labor were used to create a virtually enslaved Indian workforce throughout Mexico, Florida, the American Southwest, down the South American coast, and over to the Philippines.

The story of Native American enslavement told by Reséndez becomes confused by the convoluted interplay of indigenous and imported systems of human servitude. Despite his claim of uncovering “the other slavery,” when speaking of the forms of bondage imposed on Indians he fails to acknowledge that there was no monolithic institution akin to the “peculiar” transatlantic one that would become identified with the American South, which imported Africans auctioned as commodities. Even the distinction some scholars draw between such “slave societies” and “societies with slaves” (depending on whether slave labor was essential or not to the general economy) only partially applies to the highly complex, deeply local situations of enslaved American Indians. For these blended a dizzying variety of customary practices with colonial systems for maintaining a compulsory native workforce. If Reséndez is claiming to encompass the full tragedy of Indian slavery “across North America,” he does not distinguish among the different colonial systems of Indian servitude—enabled by Indian allies of the colonizers—that existed under English, French, and Dutch regimes.

During the seventeenth century, as some Spaniards continued to raise the question of the morality of slavery, silver mines opened in northern Mexico, and the demand for Indian manpower increased. This boom would require more workers than the Caribbean gold fields and last far longer. Now the physical effort turned from surface panning or shallow trenching to sinking shafts hundreds of feet into the ground. More profitable than gold, silver was also more grueling to extract. Miners dug, loaded, and hauled rocks in near darkness for days at a time. Around present-day Zacatecas, entire mountains were made of the gray-black ore.

To meet the growing labor demand, Spanish and Indian slaving expanded out of the American Southwest, sending Pueblo and Comanche slaves to the mines, and seizing slaves from the defiant Chichimec of northern Mexico during particularly violent campaigns between the 1540s and the 1580s. From the beginning of the sixteenth century to the first decade of the nineteenth, twelve times as much silver was extracted from over four hundred mines scattered throughout Mexico as was gold during the entire California Gold Rush.

At Parral, a silver-mining center in southern Chihuahua and in 1640 the largest town north of the Tropic of Cancer, over seven thousand workers descended into the shafts every day—most of them enslaved natives from as far off as New Mexico, which soon became “little more than a supply center for Parral.” After the state-directed system for forcibly drafting Indian labor for the Latin American silver mines, known as the mita, was instituted in 1573, it remained in operation for 250 years and drew an average of ten thousand Indians a year from over two hundred indigenous communities.

As Reséndez shifts his narrative to the Mexican mainland, however, one is prompted to ask another question of an author who claims to have “uncovered” the panoramic range of Indian slavery. Shouldn’t we know more of the history of those Indian-on-Indian slavery systems that Columbus witnessed and that became essential for delivering workers to Mexican mines, New Mexican households, or their own native villages? Throughout the pre-Columbian Americas, underage and female captives from intertribal warfare were routinely turned into domestic workers who performed menial tasks. Through recapture or ransom payment some were repatriated, while many remained indentured their entire lives. But a number were absorbed into their host settlement through forms of fictive kinship, such as ceremonial adoption or most commonly through intermarriage.

Among the eleventh-century mound-building Indian cultures of the Mississippi Bottoms, such war prisoners made up a serf-like underclass. This civilization collapsed in the thirteenth century and the succeeding tribes we know as Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and others perpetuated the practice of serfdom; Cherokee war parties added to each town’s stock of atsi nahsa’i, or “one who is owned.” The custom continued across indigenous America, with child-bearing women and prepubescent males generally preferred. Their husbands and fathers were more commonly killed. Reséndez hardly mentions the subsequent participation of those same tribes in the white man’s race-based “peculiar institution.” They bought and sold African-American slaves to work their Indian-owned plantations. Once the Civil War broke out there was a painfully divisive splitting of southern Indian nations into Confederate and Union allies.

As with Carib predation upon the Taíno, it was not uncommon for stronger tribes to focus on perennial victims. In the Southeast, the Chickasaw regularly took slaves from the Choctaw; in the Great Basin, the Utes stole women and children from the Paiute (and then traded them to Mormon households that were happy to pay for them); in California, the northeastern Modoc regularly preyed upon nearby Atsugewi, while the Colorado River–dwelling Mojave routinely raided the local Chemehuevi. These relationships between prey and predator might extend over generations. Only among the hierarchical social orders of the northwest coast, apparently, were slaves traditionally treated more like commodities, to be purchased, traded, or given as gifts.

Indirectly, the Spanish helped to instigate the next upsurge in human trafficking across the American West. Their horses—bred in northern New Mexico, then rustled or traded northward after the late seventeenth century—made possible an equestrian revolution across the plains. In short order the relationships between a few dozen Indian tribes shifted dramatically, as the pedestrian hunter-and-gatherer peoples were transformed by horses into fast-moving nomads who became dependent on buffalo and preyed on their neighbors. In white American popular culture the new-born horse cultures would be presented as the war bonnet–wearing, teepee-dwelling, war-whooping stereotypes of Wild West shows and movie screens. Among them were the Comanches of the southern plains and the Utes of the Great Basin borderlands.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Comanche military machine had put a damper on Spanish expansionism. Their cavalry regiments of five hundred or more disciplined horsemen undertook eight-hundred-mile journeys northward as far as the Arkansas River and southward to within a few hundred miles of Mexico City. The slaves they plucked from Apaches, Pueblos, and Navajos became their prime currency in business deals with Mexicans, New Mexicans, and Americans. At impromptu auctions and established crossroads, Native American, Mexican, and Anglo slaves were being sold, some undergoing a succession of new masters. Until the US government conquered them, the Comanches held sway over a quarter-million square miles of the American and Mexican borderlands.

Reséndez argues for continuities in this inhuman traffic right down to the present day. But his abrupt transition to the present after the defeat of the Comanches only reinforces our sense that his effort has been overly ambitious and weakly conceived, as if achieving the promised synthesis for so complex and persistent a topic has simply (and understandably) overwhelmed him. His treatment of the multinational practices of Colonial-period slavery is spotty, and the ubiquitous traditions of native-on-native enslavement seem soft-pedaled.

Reséndez loosely estimates that between some 2.5 to five million Indians were trapped in this “other slavery,” in which overwork and physical abuse doubtlessly contributed to the drop of 90 percent in the North American Indian population between Columbus’s day and 1900. But somehow little of all that torment comes across vividly in The Other Slavery. We are told that Navajos called the 1860s, when their entire tribe was hounded for incarceration in southern New Mexico, “the Fearing Time.” Aside from that hint of the collective emotional impact from the victims’ side, we get few testimonies that reflect the anxiety and terror behind Reséndez’s many summaries of human suffering, tribal dislocations, furtive lives on the run, and birthrights lost forever.

A more convincing sense of the racial discrimination and hatred that bolstered and perpetuated the slavery systems discussed in Reséndez’s book comes from even a melodramatic film like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), while the terrors of surviving in the late-eighteenth-century West amid roving bands of merciless slave raiders are better evoked in Cormac McCarthy’s Grand Guignol masterpiece Blood Meridian(1985). Reading Reséndez’s account one hopes in vain for something similar to Rebecca West’s quiet comment in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), her chronicle of Yugoslavian multiethnic animosities: “It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of a skunk.”

2.

Indian slavery becomes a contributing factor in An American Genocide, the UCLAhistorian Benjamin Madley’s extensive argument that genocide is the only appropriate term for what happened to native peoples in north-central California between 1846 and 1873. For American Indians, slavery in the New World took many forms that persevered over four centuries while changing according to local conditions, global pressures, and maneuvers to evade abolitionist crusades. Genocide—the elimination of entire groups—might seem easier to evaluate. Yet which historical episodes of mass Indian murder qualify as genocide has become a matter of debate.

Madley shies away from the hyperbolic accusations of genocide or holocaust often made in simplistic discussions of American Indian history. The definition that he invokes with prosecutorial ferocity is the one produced by the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, which defines genocide as, first, demonstrating an intent to destroy, “in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,” and, second, committing any of the following acts: killing members of a group; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; inflicting conditions that are intended to cause their destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; and transferring children of the group to another group. Whereas the large unspecified “group” referred to in this post–World War II statement was, of course, defined by the Nazis, Madley’s is smaller and, even then, it is composed of many hundreds of indigenous units, each an autonomous, small-scale cultural world that was decimated or destroyed.

Madley has documented his charge of genocide by years of scrolling through local newspapers, histories, personal diaries, memoirs, and official letters and reports. These revealed what many indigenous groups endured at the hands of US military campaigns, state militia expeditions, impromptu small-town posses, and gold miners, as well as ordinary citizens who hunted natives on weekends. Most western historians and demographers could agree that genocidal behavior toward a North American Indian population occurred during the nineteenth century. But Madley has concentrated on the killing in California during the bloody years between 1846 and 1873.

Edward S. Curtis: Mosa—Mohave, 1903/1907; from Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks. The book is by Christopher Cardozo, with contributions by A. D. Coleman, Louise Erdrich, and others. It is published by Delmonico/Prestel and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography.

The factors that led to this American tragedy are worth recalling. Many Indian communities had already been defeated in their resistance to servitude during the Spanish Mission and Mexican Rancho years. The United States victory over Mexico in early 1848 opened the way to the last great American land rush. Until California became the nation’s thirty-first state in 1850, there were two years of lawlessness. The Anglo-American settlers whose wagons began rolling into the region carried anti-Indian attitudes imported from colonial times. The discovery of gold in early 1848 multiplied that immigration and aggressive settler colonialism. There was pervasive racism toward the state’s diverse and generally peaceful native population. They were denigrated as animal-like “Diggers”—a pejorative term based on their food-gathering customs. Political, military, journalistic, and civic leaders favored creating a de facto open season on its native peoples.

When the state’s first legislature convened, it passed a number of orders that, according to Madley, “largely shut Indians out of participation in and protection by the state legal system” and granted “impunity to those who attacked them.” The legislature funded, with $1.51 million, state vigilantism coupled with exhortations from top officials, including two state governors, to war against Native Americans. Near the beginning of this campaign, California’s first governor, Peter Burnett, pledged that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged…until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

At the time of first contact with whites, the native California population amounted to some 350,000, perhaps the densest concentration of Indians in the country. But they were divided into at least sixty major tribes that, in turn, were made up of scores of small, independent, autonomous villages that spoke upward of a hundred separate languages. After the epidemics, mission programs, land losses, and peonage of the Spanish period, about 150,000 Indians remained on the eve of the US takeover. By 1870 the number of California Indians had been cut to under 30,000, a population loss that would continue until it bottomed out at under 17,000 by the turn of the century.

When gold was struck near present-day Sacramento in January 1848, Indians were occupying some of the most desirable natural environments in North America. The size of these Indian groups ranged widely. The proximity of so many autonomous villages made bi- or even trilingualism not uncommon. But especially in the north-central region—with its abundant acorn groves, salmon-rich rivers, valleys plentiful in fruits, roots, and seeds, foothills teeming with game, plentiful marine life, wildfowl and associated plants along the sea coast and wetlands—their small, self-governing and self-sufficient villagers could thrive in their homelands. However, the combination of Spanish and American invasions would cost the Indians and their fragile ecologies dearly. Meadows bearing life-giving nutritious seeds and roots were put to the torch for conversion into agricultural fields and cattle pastures, streams were poisoned by the sludge from mining, and forests were cut for lumber.

To characterize these fairly self-contained worlds, the dean of California Indian studies, anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, coined the term “tribelet.” But when it came to describing the sufferings of these California tribelets during the Gold Rush, Kroeber wrote dismissively of their “little history of pitiful events,” which, as an ethnographer drawn to “millennial sweeps and grand contours,” he felt unable to comment upon.

That did not stop one of his colleagues, the anthropologist Robert Heizer, from doing so. Heizer’s revelatory They Were Only Diggers (1974), along with his other anthologies, compiled newspaper clippings and reports on the myriad killings and other brutalities experienced by the region’s Indians. Together with a state demographer, Sherburne Cooke, he began documenting the unpublicized story of the California Indian catastrophe. Now Benjamin Madley, building upon the ethnohistorical work of Heizer and Cooke, has delved more systematically into the outrages of the period.

His chronicle opens with accounts by Thomas Martin and Thomas Breckenridge, members of John C. Frémont’s early expedition, which invaded what was still Mexican-held territory. In April 1846, along the Sacramento River near the present-day city of Redding, Frémont’s troops encountered a large group of local Wintu Indians. With the command “to ask no quarter and to give none,” his troops encircled the Indians and began firing at everyone in sight. Breckenridge wrote: “Some escaped but as near as I could learn from those that were engaged in the butchery, I can’t call it anything else, there was from 120 to 150 Indians killed that day.” Martin estimated that “in less than 3 hours we had killed over 175 of them.” A third eyewitness account found by Madley raised that estimate to between six hundred and seven hundred dead on land, not counting those, possibly an additional three hundred, slaughtered in the river. “The Sacramento River Massacre,” he writes, may have been one of the least-reported mass killings in US history, and “was the prelude to hundreds of similar massacres.”

So begins Madley’s calm, somber indictment. One after another he describes the cultures and the histories of tribes that were victimized, and he profiles the victimizers. Many of the atrocities were committed not only by US soldiers and their auxiliaries but also by motley companies of militiamen that murdered young and old, male and female indiscriminately—and often with an undisguised glee that comes through in Madley’s abundant selection of quotes.

Rape was rampant, and natives were intentionally starved, tortured, and whipped. Under the new California Legislature’s Government and Protection of the Indians Act of 1850, any nonworking, publicly drunk, or orphaned and underage Indians could become commodities in an unfree labor system that was tantamount to slave auctions. The act’s impact on the young meant that ten years after its passage, thousands of California Indian children were serving as unpaid “apprentices” in white households.

For over a quarter-century, Madley shows how the region became a quilt of many killing fields. Of the estimated 80 percent decline in the California Indian population during these years, around 40 percent has been attributed to outright “extermination killings” alone. Yet each of these tribes and tribelets functioned as an independent cultural world. Each was knit together by strands of kinship and deep attachments to place, as well as oral traditions about both that were passed on from generation to generation. Strewn across California were not only human bodies, but entire worldviews.

At the start of the Gold Rush, the Yuki Indians who lived at the heart of the region had well over three thousand members; they were reduced to less than two hundred by its end. The same decline occurred among the Tolowa Indians to the northwest, while the Yahi people were practically wiped out altogether.

In the hateful rhetoric of many nineteenth-century military, religious, and bureaucratic hard-liners quoted by Madley, the word “extermination” was often used. Yet this outcome was considered no great tragedy for an entire people who were uniformly and irredeemably defined as savage and subhuman.

Madley’s nearly two hundred pages of appendices are the most complete incident-by-incident tally ever compiled of Indian lives lost during this terrible period. Asking for names would have been impossible; instead we get numbers of deceased and places where they perished—one or two with brains smashed on rocks on a particular day over here, thirty to a hundred shot to death and left floating in a river over there. This scrupulously detailed epilogue is the equivalent of a memorial wall that we are visiting for the first time.

[voxxgrimly]

The Impression That I Get (Ch. 1)

CHAPTER 1

One Headlight

Monday, November 21st, 2005 (10:30 AM)

“Come up for Christmas, Henry.”

Calloused fingers pinched the bridge of his nose— dislodging his rectangular glasses. Eyes closed, he leaned back; broad shoulders met the backrest of his leather office chair with a dull ‘poff’. “Were wishes fishes, Charles.” The baritone of Henry McCoy, Secretary of Mutant Affairs, rumbled over a shiny cellphone set to speaker. “With the encroachment of Registration perceptually looming in the senate…?” The large, blue mutant huffed a rueful breath and set his lips into a firm line before deigning to speaking again. “I would prefer the Bahamas. Perchance Cuba?”

That was just being cruel.

“I apologize, Charles.” Hank groaned, then leaned forward onto his cherry wood desk elbows first.

His old friend’s voice hummed over the speaker; cultivated and longanimous– patient. Sometimes Hank envied him his wisdom; his telepathic cosmos. And then he reminded himself that his anxiety would never stand for it.

“The students would be elated to see you, Hank. Your colleagues too. I would be.”

Damn the man for knowing every emotional string to towboat straight into his own favour. Hank tossed up a clawed hand. Charles couldn’t see it, he knew, but he assumed that his tone reflected his emotional state adequately regardless. “Fine! As you like it! Officious, antiquated–” Nearly at a loss for words, he audibly snapped his fangs shut. A growl bullied its way up from his barrel chest.

“Now, now. Don’t be like that, Henry.” He could hear the laughter in the professor’s voice; almost see the way his eyes sparkled. “When can we expect your arrival?”

“Don’t assume you’ve won just yet! It won’t be conceivable for me to exonerate myself from my obligations for at least a week. My secretary, Eleanor, would taxidermy me. She’s already threatening to convert my pelt into a rug.” Hank digressed swiftly; “Next Saturday at the earliest. Does this convenience you, Professor Xavier? Oh, dear friend of mine?”

“Very!” Now Charles’s giddiness was just presumptuous and, frankly, a little comical. Hank found the corners of his own mouth turned up with poorly disguised mirth.

------------------

Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 (12:30 PM)

New York was frigid. The streets were slick with snow and while the impending holiday yielded twinkling lights and all manner of decorations, Hank could confidently confirm that the sidewalks were desolate for a city that normally bustled— veritably bursting at the seams with pedestrians. No one wanted to be out in that weather and he couldn’t blame them. He would have been content to count himself among those bundled up inside save for one important and unavoidable fact: He had procrastinated on his Christmas shopping.

The task was nearly completed, and with his stomach ‘singing the song of its people’, Henry pulled his SUV over to the curb the moment his blue eyes alighted upon a whimsical cafe. It was nestled in the middle of a line of quaint shops. They were the kind that had brick facings and bowed display windows with canopy awnings; delicate in details, strong in turn-of-the-century design.

He turned off the vehicle and immediately nudged up the sleeve of his coat. One claw pressed a subtle button on the side of his wristwatch and in the rearview mirror, Hank watched his visage blip, then shimmer.

The image inducer remained a bizarre exercise in nostalgia no matter how many times he engaged it; a reminder of how much he had changed. Despite the lack of boyish charm and the tell-tale signs of crow’s feet and smile lines, the shift from cerulean to brown (these days with a few smattered streaks of grey), never ceased to tug his heart strings.

Hank smoothed a hand over his chin strap beard and resolutely refused to look at himself on any reflective surface. Only rumination and self-depreciation would be his rewards for that. He was used to the blue– he was! While the image inducer was a necessity to not be mobbed in public, a trip down memory lane was decidedly not.

A book and his tablet tucked securely under one brawny arm, Hank nudged open the door to the cafe and was rewarded with warm lighting and a wave of homey aromas that wafted to him from across the room. His lashes danced and a sharp inhale revealed the smooth flavour of coffee and a tantalizing sweetness: Desserts. Cookies, cakes… oh, he had chosen perfection.

‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.’ A helpful literary recollection– Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin could describe the most mundane with a mouthwatering enthusiasm. Particularly apt considering his position.

He needed to pull himself together.

Fishing glasses from the inner pocket of his coat, Henry perched them on his strong nose, stepped into the line for the counter and brought his touchscreen up to review that shopping list.

Ororo was certainly done and Charles too he could cross off. Scott was nearly complete. Then there was Logan; an infuriating man but a friend nonetheless. Something cheap and alcoholic? He seemed like the type.

Hank winced. No, that would not do! Cigars, then. Surely that imbecile could appreciate a Perdomo, and hopefully enough to get them through the encroaching season without trying to gouge out each other’s trachea.

Ruminating the perils of two ferals encroaching on unwillingly shared territory, Hank felt his hackles rise beneath the illusion of his image inducer when a short, soft, nigh fragile form jostled into his back.

He hadn’t heard a thing until the thump of books, a gasp and: “I’m so sorry!”

Whirling in a sharp turn, Hank darted down onto one knee without thought and forgoing so much as a glance; hands offering assistance. “Water under the bridge, my dear.” Then eyes finally canted over his glasses and the mutant-in-disguise was struck by the fact that this woman was stunning.

And so he paused.

Henry was about to add two more hefty textbooks to the load already wrapped in the girl’s arms when he paused– pity making him suck in his lower lip. “Let… me take these to a table for you.”

The girl gathered dark curls behind one ear and her hazel eyes flitted around the cafe. “Oh, no. I couldn’t–!”

“Then it’s fortuitous that I’m insisting!” Both heavy eyebrows ascended. Hank smiled, rising to his feet with a grunt; his chin soon nudged in the direction of an empty table by the window. “Sufficient?” “More than.” The woman’s shoulders dropped in relief. “I can’t thank you enough– and I’m the one that ran into you!”

Waving a hand, the burly man implied that, again, it was hardly a misdemeanor. In fact his eyes seemed far more preoccupied with the subject of the books temporarily in his retinue. “Journalism major?”

Seating herself, the woman indicated the chair across from her. It was out of politeness, he knew, but Hank took it gladly– casting his wool coat over the back while she offered a response. “Trying. Final year.”

A hum of sympathy offered; “Specialization…? If you don’t object to my curiosity.”

“Editorial. I know, I know– I’m a glutton for punishment!” Both of her hands gestured, and she crashed back into her chair– slumped inelegantly.

Hank hid a smile behind fingers that rubbed over the lower half of his face. “I’ve surmised from colleagues in the field that the workflow demand only increases after completion of your B.J.” He was teasing, naturally– eyes crinkled and shoulders in the telltale, silent motion of mirth. “Which makes it obvious why you bowled me over– caffeine necessitated a complete lack of etiquette!.”

“Oh– so you’re a comedian! Right, yeah– funny!” The woman huffed, if not impolitely. She seemed to enjoy the banter. “I thought that was– what did you call it? Water under the bridge?” One finger twisted a curl of her impeccable hair

Hank, despite having just been challenged, found the motion far too distracting. She truly was exquisite. Thankfully his stomach growled– sudden, loud and insistent. It was enough to pop him out of his staring with a few blinks and the sharp rise of his shoulders; back drawn stiff at the reminder that he wasn’t there to flirt with a stranger (he wasn’t). “Perchance, could I interest you in a coffee?”

Her lips twisted into a smile across the table. “Isn’t that a little fast? You don’t even know my name.”

Red flushed his cheeks like a tidalwave. It overtook his ears and right down his neck. Stars and garters–! He hated it when he blushed. “I didn’t mean it like that!”

He did mean it like that.

So much for verbose eloquence.

The beautiful, sophisticated woman who had found herself proficient in rendering Doctor Henry McCoy’s IQ dejectedly close to his shoe size pressed exactly two fingers to her lips– hazel eyes shimmering. Blessings upon blessings; she took pity on his mortal soul. “Charlotte. My name is Charlotte.”

Reaching over, Henry offered her his hand and an audible breath of relief. “Hank.Terrific to make your acquaintance, Charlotte.”

“Call me Lola, Hank.”

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Read More: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48750490/chapters/122975914

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

This story is an AU of The Last Stand combined with SOME comic elements and a LITTLE bit of Alternate Movie Timeline shenanigans. I pull stuff as I see fit and have fun! Enjoy!

I'll be posting a chapter per day / every other day until I catch up with my AO3! I'll also be posting my other Hank McCoy story titled Coffee, Tea or Me.

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STORY SUMMARY

Secretary Hank McCoy has traditionally spent the holidays alone. This year he’d been invited by Charles to the mansion for a celebration he wasn’t morally able to turn down.

During a trip to New York for presents, Hank stumbles across a human woman he just can’t seem to walk away from. It’s serendipity at its finest during a time of year when romance seems magical.

Lola, a Journalism major with innocent dreams of making the world a better place, finds herself attracted to a muscular, charismatic middle-aged man she runs into (quite literally) in her favourite cafe. He likes wearing fine suits. She's just trying to make it to the end of her final year.

There’s more than meets the eye, however, to the gentleman that’s caught HER eye. He isn’t what he seems and he’s hiding a very BLUE secret from her.