It’s been 42 years since the Watergate break-in that eventually forced US President Richard Nixon from office, after an investigation that has been described as one of the greatest achievements of modern journalism.
That “third-rate burglary” in June 1972 made few waves at first. In fact, Nixon was re-elected by a landslide a few months later, and it was entirely feasible that government obstruction would have succeeded in putting a lid on the whole story forever.
But that didn’t happen - thanks to the secret help of an official nicknamed Deep Throat (after an infamous 1970s porn film). This anonymous source encouraged Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to pursue the story, which led to Senate hearings, and finally to the resignation of the president.
We now know that the source was Mark Felt, former deputy director of the FBI. Until he revealed himself in 2005, Felt was the most famous anonymous person in America. But his reliability was also legendary. Former Post editor Ben Bradlee told the Public Broadcasting Corporation recently that of the 400 Watergate stories he published, only one panned out badly.
In the early 1970s Tough Call was studying journalism at the University of Miami, enjoying the tail end of the counterculture revolution. Despite all the hoo-ha about Watergate, it was the Vietnam War that occupied the minds of most American college students at the time. They faced the draft after graduation – a fate considered the same as death.
But Watergate was nevertheless a watershed in American history: “1972 was a time when no one could imagine a president of the United States breaking the law,” as one forty-ish commentator put it. “We were trusting and believed what we read and heard back then.”
One hundred years ago (on June 28 1914 to be exact), the heir to the throne of the long-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist struggling for independence.
Germany, then the new rising power of Europe, supported its neighbour Austria-Hungary against Serbia and its patron, Russia; with war declared at the end of July 1914. The British, French and Turks joined in the following month, and by Christmas the various armies had suffered more than three million casualties.
By the time the war ended in November 1918, over 16 million had died and 20 million had been wounded, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history. It was known thereafter as the Great War - replacing the Napoleonic Wars for pride of place in European memory.
A hundred years ago, the British Empire encompassed nine million square miles and 348 million people. And about a third of the troops that Britain raised during the war came from the colonies— a million Indians, half a million Canadians, half a million Australians and New Zealanders, 250,000 Africans, and 16,000 West Indians.
The British government has committed over £50 million to this year's centenary commemoration of the First World War. The money is paying for a major refurbishment of London's Imperial War Museum, as well as a national series of commemorative events and lectures which launches in August.
The wind of reparations has been blowing throughout the Caribbean for several years and will soon begin to flutter feathers here in The Bahamas.
On March 24, Minister of Foreign Affairs Fred Mitchell announced Cabinet appointment of our own National Committee on Reparations, headed by senior attorney Alfred Sears with no less than 22 members—pastors, historians, educators, lawyers, journalists, even a poet/film-maker and a businessman. Mr. Sears proclaimed that an action plan and public-awareness program would be forthcoming.
The background and the objectives of reparations make a fascinating story—reparations for slavery of African blacks and, a related issue, the genocide of Caribbean indigenous peoples.
The issue took tangible form in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 at the UN-sponsored World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. Eleven Caribbean nations, not including The Bahamas, sent delegations (with the vigorous leadership of Cuba’s Fidel Castro himself), as well as African, European and Asian governments; the United States boycotted the Conference.
Reparations were a major controversial issue and according to one participant “bred enough vexation and anger to fill the city beyond the plenary walls. There was palpable rage in some places,” directed at European nations who stonewalled against admitting slavery as a crime against humanity. The Caribbean delegations left the Conference feeling they had been betrayed by African states like Nigeria and Senegal who gave only luke-warm support to reparations .
The hard-line position taken at Durban by the British Government, as directed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, continued until 2007, with the celebration of 200th Anniversary of abolition of slavery within Great Britain.
In the course of many windy speeches in Parliament, Blair was expected to issue a formal “apology” for the black slavery that had been openly approved for centuries. But he refused to use this word, apparently on the advice of lawyers who feared that it would open a flood-gate of legal claims. Instead, he merely issued “statements of regret” and “great sorrow” over the history of slavery; clearly, reparations were out of the question.
NORMANDY, France - As we eased along the peaceful wooded lanes in Alan Wilson’s powerful green Bentley, it was hard to believe that one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War lay just around the corner.
There are memorials and museums all over the rolling Norman countryside, but driving up to Mont Ormel we passed a sign identifying "Le Couloir de la Mort” - the corridor of death. This was where the Allied forces that had landed on D-Day, 77 days before, decisively ended the Normandy campaign in August 1944.
“The German army was hemmed in all along this road and suffered terrible casualties trying to escape the Allied pincer movement,” Wilson told me in his best schoolmaster voice. “Artillery and air strikes caused tremendous damage during the retreat and some 40,000 Germans were captured. The stink of death hung over the valley for months."
Since he began coming to Normandy several years ago, following open heart surgery in Nassau by Dr Duane Sands, Wilson has had a lot of time on his hands to bone up on war history and explore the countryside. He now spends several months of the year here, returning to Nassau for the winter.
“I'm fascinated by the history and I love the people,” he said. “The life is so relaxing I can get a lot of reading in, and you don’t even have to lock your door in our village. There’s fresh vegetables, fruit, meat and beautiful bread - not to mention the wine.”
Originally from Yorkshire, Wilson met and married Bahamian Sharon Cadman (former headmistress at St Andrew’s School) in the early 1970s while at Westminster College, a Methodist teacher training institute in Oxford. He taught at Queen’s College in Nassau for a few years before leaving to work in the automotive trade.
TREASURE CAY, Abaco — During a visit to the site of Abaco’s first loyalist settlement last week, Antiquities Corporation chief Dr Keith Tinker and senior archaeologist Dr Michael Pateman retrieved cultural remains for analysis and talked about organising an archaeological survey this summer.
I wrote a column on Carleton following a personal visit earlier this year, and was able to accompany Antiquities, Monuments & Museums Corporation representatives to the site last week for a brief walkabout. Also present were Tim Blakely of the Treasure Sands Club, which now owns the property; and Matt Claridge of the Abaco Defenders, a public interest group.
Remains of a loyalist-era settlement lie scattered over the landscape just off Treasure Cay Drive, the road that connects to the Abaco highway between the public beach and the adjacent creek. Last week, we collected brick and pottery fragments, bottle glass, and a heavily corroded iron object that looked like a ship's cleat.
And this week, Tinker confirmed that "there is sufficient evidence for the area to be considered a significant heritage site," and called for construction to cease pending further investigation.
"I will be writing a report for the Office of the Prime Minister stating this," he told me. "We also want signage to be installed identifying the area as a heritage site. The evidence is there and the site needs to be researched.”
In the 1980s, Florida archaeologist Robert Carr, historians Steve Dodge and Sandra Riley, civic leader Alton Lowe and others explored the area after researching land grants. They turned up loyalist-era artefacts, including pottery, bottle glass, oven bricks, military tunic buttons, musket balls, sewing implements, shells and animal bone remains. Most of these items are housed at the Albert Lowe museum on Green Turtle Cay.
A bronze plaque on the point just beyond the beach commemorates the 1983 bicentennial of the original loyalist landing on Abaco, but disturbance of this historic area by development has been ongoing for years, with little thought for either the environment or the original settlement.
The Treasure Sands property on which part of Carleton once stood was acquired by an English entrepreneur named Sir Alford Houstoun-Boswall some 30 years ago. In 2010 Sir Alford and his on-site partner Tim Blakely, who is an ex-Royal Navy bodybuilder and celebrity personal trainer, opened a high-end restaurant and clubhouse next to the public beach.
Last year they began clearing the scrub on the creek side of the road to prepare for a small cottage colony and spa that Blakely wants to name Carleton Village. But dredging was halted amid rising public concern over the environmental impact and the permitting process. Critics say the developers had planned to dredge a channel along the entire three-mile creek out to Treasure Cay Marina - a charge that Blakely brands as “scaremongering”.
The project was approved by the government last May, subject only to an environmental management plan vetted by the BEST Commission. There was no requirement for an environmental impact assessment, or for an archaeological survey.
This work contravenes the Planning & Subdivisions Act, which requires an EIA for any development on “sensitive lands”, like wetlands. The purpose is to "promote sustainable development in a healthy natural environment”, to "protect and conserve the natural and cultural heritage” of the Bahamas, and to provide for greater transparency in planning and permitting.
These objectives appear to have been ignored. But the proposed development is now going through a local town planning process. And the AMMC has confirmed it as a heritage site.
The Treasure Sands development is the latest effort to capitalise on Treasure Cay’s fabulous three-and-a-half-mile beach. The original second home/marina/golf course resort was launched in the 1950s by the late Leonard Thompson, but is now owned by German-Bahamian investor Ludwig Meister.
Local government officials and property owners began asking for information about the project. A spokesman for the Treasure Cay resort perhaps summed up these objections best: "Treasure Cay Ltd and the Treasure Cay homeowners still do not know exactly what Treasure Sands Club plans to build, except what we have read in the newspapers. Since this project is immediately adjacent to our resort, it would be helpful to know what is planned for the area and also get the right information released to the public.”
When loyalist emigres arrived here from New York in 1783 (after the American Revolution), Carleton Creek opened to the sea where the public beach huts stand today. The anchorage proved unsuitable for large vessels. And in any event, within a year of their arrival most of the settlers revolted and moved 20 miles to the south to found a new settlement at what they called Marsh’s Harbour. Within three years of this split, after several hurricanes, Carleton essentially ceased to exist.
However, the site should be as historically significant to Abaco as Jamestown, Virginia is to Americans. Jamestown was the first English settlement in North America. Over 200 colonists arrived there in 1607 but the settlement was abandoned in the 1690s, after which it was largely forgotten. In recent years, it has become a major archaeological and tourist site. Unfortunately, no effort has been made so far to capitalise on the Carleton settlement since the initial explorations back in the 1980s.
Steve Dodge was the first to identify the Carleton site in 1979, while researching records in Nassau for his book Abaco: History of an Out Island. Carr’s excavations a few years later indicated that the site was a loyalist settlement in the area originally known as Carleton. Survey records were provided to the government at the time, but interest waned and memories faded.
Of course, Carleton was not the first human settlement on Abaco. There were Lucayan Indians living here from about 900 years ago. But this area was settled by 250 whites and free blacks who sailed from New York in 1783. They named their settlement after Sir Guy Carleton, the general who supervised the British evacuation from America, and who carried out the Crown's promise of freedom to slaves who had joined the British during the war.
Since the 1980s no further archaeological work has been undertaken here. And the recent clearing of some three acres by Treasure Sands caused extensive damage according to Carr, who re-visited the area last November at the invitation of the Abaco Defenders.
The artefacts recovered from the site recently will be sent to the University of Florida for further expert analysis, and an archeological survey may be planned for later this year. it is not just a matter of looking for more bricks and artefacts but also locating house foundations and other features to reconstruct the settlement pattern. This is done by mapping the artifacts and features in place.
During my visit in January, Blakely said he was thinking of setting up a small museum as part of the Treasure Sands development, and would name a restaurant after the New York tavern where the loyalists signed up for their Abaco journey. "We are very open to cooperation with anyone who wishes to survey the site,” he told me at the time.
Clearly, the historical value of the Carleton site can only enhance the proposed development. However, minor construction work on the site continues.
By royal mandate the House of Assembly was established in the Bahama Islands in 1729 during the governorship of Woodes Rogers.
The institution was intended for white men of means. Slaves, their descendants and women did not legally qualify to sit in the House. White men of lesser means were unable to sit by virtue of their lower economic standing.
The institution evolved over the centuries, becoming the centre-piece of Bahamian democracy representing the relative advancement and equality of various segments of society.
During the second and third decades of the last century, R. M. Bailey and the politicians C. C. Sweeting and S. C. McPherson formed a political group, the Ballot Party. McPherson, like Stephen Dillette, Walton Young and others before him, were among the first blacks elected to the House.
In the 1940s Dr. C. R. Walker, Bert Cambridge and Milo Butler engaged the struggle for racial equality, championing the cause as members of the House.
Still, the largely undemocratic nature of the assembly involved not only those eligible for election. It also concerned those “qualified” to vote. As noted by Governor General Sir Arthur Foulkes in an independence address last year:
“One had to be male to register to vote. One had to own or rent property of a certain value. One male could vote in every constituency in which he owned or rented property. ... A lawyer could cast a vote for each of the companies registered at his office.”
The gross inequality of the system was overwhelmingly directed against blacks and women.
Following in the wake of Disney’s blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean movies, two new American television dramas have been produced based on the period when the Bahamas was a pirate republic.
Black Sails launched on Starz earlier this year. It is written as a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel,Treasure Island, and features both fictional and real-life pirates. The series is filmed in South Africa and includes some nudity as well as cheesy computer-generated pirate ships.
Filmed in Puerto Rico, Crossbones is described as "a fact-based drama that focuses on one of the world’s most notorious real-life pirates”. This is none other than Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, who is played by John Malkovich.
This series airs on NBC next month and was inspired by the 2007 book, Republic of Pirates, by American journalist Colin Woodard. According to the producers, "This is a story about a man who wants to create a new world, which required us as filmmakers to at least approximate the new world. We basically built a town in Puerto Rico.”
Both Crossbones and Black Sails are set in and around the island of New Providence - which was pirate HQ in the early 1700s. So it is disappointing that neither were filmed in the Bahamas.
Dr Harold Munnings is about to publish a book on the history of healthcare in the Bahamas. While the introduction describes what little is known of the medical traditions of the earliest Bahamians - the Lucayans - most of the book deals with healthcare developments since the Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1718. One of the most interesting sections focuses on the social conditions of New Providence in the early 20th century - which fostered illnesses like typhoid, worms, dysentry and gasrtroenteritis - and the effort by healthcare professionals and others to improve these conditions. The following is an edited and abridged version of this part of the book.
In the early years of the 20th century public health held a position of low priority on the government agenda, and swathes of the most populous areas of New Providence were like a giant cesspit. The poor sanitation of these communities meant that typhoid fever and similar illnesses were endemic.
The social conditions that led to the prevalence of these diseases existed throughout the British Empire at the time. It was not until 1936 that the imperial government began to accept responsibility for the state of health in the Caribbean. That was when W.M. MacMillan shamed the Colonial Office with the publication of his Warning from the West Indies.
MacMillan was a Rhodes scholar and a respected historian who could not be ignored when he wrote that most of the Caribbean’s so-called ‘tropical diseases’ were actually diseases of poverty and poor living conditions. He urged the British government to acknowledge that it had a duty to improve these conditions. But colonial governments remained largely disengaged from the health needs of their people.
Typhoid is an infection caused by bacteria, which serves up a four-week programme of misery that begins with a headache and weakness. This progresses to a continuous high fever, bellyache and delirium. Death often comes cruelly at the end the illness, just when the sufferer seems to be improving. Before antibiotics, about 10 per cent of those who contracted the disease would die.
GILPIN POINT, Abaco -- On a beautiful ocean beach just south of the Crossing Rocks settlement lies a complex prehistoric site unlike anything else discovered in the Bahamas.
Following a presentation at the recent science conference in Marsh Harbour organised by Abaco's Friends of the Environment, Dr David Steadman of the University of Florida led a field trip to the site - which is known as Gilpin Point.
Steadman, along with landowner Perry Maillis, Nancy Albury of the Antiquties Corporation, and others recently published a paper on this special site in the scientific journal Holocene. It is titled Faunal and Landscape Change in the Bahamas.
The paper describes a bone-rich peat deposit radiocarbon-dated to about 900 years ago that is exposed today only for brief periods at very low tide. The deposits and the bones they contain represent a vertebrate community at the time of first human presence in the Bahamas, and only 10 of the 17 identified species of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals still live on Abaco.
“We think the peat was laid in a freshwater estuarine system when the coast was further out,” Steadman said. “There are buttonwood stumps, which are freshwater mangroves, in upright growth position, so the sea level had to be lower and rising sea levels killed off the buttonwood.
“We also found extinct tortoise shells with crocodile bite marks like those found in the Sawmill Sink blue hole, as well as lots of sea turtle bones with bite marks. Some shells are burned on the outside with teeth marks on the inside, indicating that humans butchered and feasted on the turtles and then crocodiles scavenged the remains."
Lucayan Indians arrived on Abaco about 900 years ago, which is the estimated age of the peat deposits. Although there have been written references to ‘serpents' and crocodiles in the Bahamas since Columbus, Gilpin Point provides the first physical evidence that crocodiles and humans co-existed on the islands. Among the finds in the peat was a polished Lucayan shell bead.
Sawmill Sink (just up the road from Gilpin Point) has yielded the largest sample of prehistoric crocodiles so far known in the region - more than 50 individuals - including skulls and skeletons that date back thousands of years. These giant toothsome lizards have been identified as Crocodylus rhombifer, which is found alive today only in a small area of southern Cuba and on the Isle of Pines off the southwestern Cuban coast.
Human involvement in deposition of bones at Gilpin Point is supported by the dense, midden-like concentration of large bones (crocodile, green turtle, and tortoise) in the peat, and the fact that some bones of both the green turtle and Abaco tortoise are charred.
"Our failure to find any pottery or rich shell midden at Gilpin Point might be due to inadequate sampling,” the researchers noted in their paper. “If the site extends inland beneath the beach ridge (which seems likely), then the peaty sediment that we have observed would represent less than 1 per cent of the entire site."
The fact that many of the animals whose remains were found in the peat no longer live on Abaco should be cause for concern, according to Steadman. “It shows that even prehistoric people with simple tools and weapons can have a significant effect on the environment. We don’t want to lose more than a third of our fauna over just 900 years. That puts our current environment in better perspective - knowing that we have already lost a lot.”
Sea level when the peat deposits were formed was about eight inches lower globally, Steadman said, but probably lower locally, and the current beach was the landward side of a lagoon.
"At both the local and regional scales, these low islands can be affected dramatically by changes in sea level. Over the last century sea level has risen between 6 and 16 inches, which may not sound like much unless you own a condo on the beach.”
The Gilpin Point site was discovered by Sabrina Bethel and Perry Maillis in 2009, during a very low spring tide. The dark, peaty sediment is inundated today by the ocean under normal circumstances, as well as being covered by sand.
"A challenge now is to search the beaches of Abaco’s windward side to begin to learn whether the Gilpin Point site is truly unique or merely represents a more common situation that heretofore has been overlooked,” the journal paper concluded.
“The Island of Abaco is blessed with a good harbour, and is well secured by nature...(abounding) with timber.” 1783 loyalist advertisement circulated in New York.
TREASURE CAY, Abaco — Remains of Carleton, the first loyalist settlement on this island, lie scattered over the landscape just off Treasure Cay Drive, the road that connects to the highway between the public beach and the adjacent creek.
The head of that creek was dredged last year and surrounding land cleared and filled to prepare for development of an upscale spa and nature resort by the Treasure Sands Club - on nine acres of private land and just over half an acre of Crown land.
The project was approved by the government last May, subject only to an environmental management plan vetted by the BEST Commission. There was no requirement for an environmental impact assessment, or for an archaeological survey.
This contravenes the Planning & Subdivisions Act, which requires an EIA for any development on “sensitive lands”. The purpose is to "promote sustainable development in a healthy natural environment”, to "protect and conserve the natural and cultural heritage” of the Bahamas, and to provide for greater transparency in planning.
In the case of Treasure Sands, all these objectives appear to have been ignored by the government.
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The FNM, the Equality of Women and the Progressive Cause
by Simon
By royal mandate the House of Assembly was established in the Bahama Islands in 1729 during the governorship of Woodes Rogers.
The institution was intended for white men of means. Slaves, their descendants and women did not legally qualify to sit in the House. White men of lesser means were unable to sit by virtue of their lower economic standing.
The institution evolved over the centuries, becoming the centre-piece of Bahamian democracy representing the relative advancement and equality of various segments of society.
During the second and third decades of the last century, R. M. Bailey and the politicians C. C. Sweeting and S. C. McPherson formed a political group, the Ballot Party. McPherson, like Stephen Dillette, Walton Young and others before him, were among the first blacks elected to the House.
In the 1940s Dr. C. R. Walker, Bert Cambridge and Milo Butler engaged the struggle for racial equality, championing the cause as members of the House.
Still, the largely undemocratic nature of the assembly involved not only those eligible for election. It also concerned those “qualified” to vote. As noted by Governor General Sir Arthur Foulkes in an independence address last year:
“One had to be male to register to vote. One had to own or rent property of a certain value. One male could vote in every constituency in which he owned or rented property. ... A lawyer could cast a vote for each of the companies registered at his office.”
The gross inequality of the system was overwhelmingly directed against blacks and women.
Continue reading "The FNM, the Equality of Women and the Progressive Cause" »
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