The crew was calm and sedate as the Princessa approached Nunez Gaona. Fortunately no British ships had come into sight on the journey and the captain, Fidalgo was able to anchor and put boats ashore. The Princessa had arrived to build a fort at Nunez Gaona for the purpose of limiting British expansion on the Northwest coast. For although the Spanish had claim to all territory in the western hemisphere due to the Papal bull of 1493 the British fleet had become increasingly present in the northern waters and a source of nervous tension to the Spanish colonies in the south. With the British laying claim to all territory north of the Strait of Juan de Fuca it was necessary to establish a fort to retain Spanish possession of territory in the Northwest. Russian explorers also began making large claims of territory northwest of Nunez Gaona, an act which also made the Spanish nervous.
A new contact I made at PLU wrote this--he and I have been working on the Spanish fort in Neah Bay, and he has written a very well done paper on it! Isn't this piece really good!!!!!! I am so excited and inspired that I'm going to jump back in and start touching up my own paper. I should probably touch up my paper before I read his so I don't copy his. I've only read the first section and the last, which covers Ed, a tribal elder, still living. Yup, I'm stoked! I wish I could meet this guy and work with him on this project. But I suppose he's doing jolly fine without me anyway, so more kudos to him.
4 Comments:
It all belongs to the Motherland! Long live the Tsar!!! That is really neat that you are into researching WA state history. Not many people focus much on the Northwest, but it really does have some neat, obscure history, such as the Pig War. Keep studying, and make your humble university proud! :)
There are rumors that the pig was a champion breeder and that the pig was worth $100 dollars, or that's what the British wanted to believe, while the American farmer claimed its value less than $10 dollars. The truth of the matter is unsubstantiated by any kind of unbiased public documents. The only historical foot to stand on comes by throwing our hands in the air and admitting that we can say nothing at all about the pig, except that it was a pig, and it that it was shot dead.
Sure, in the future, we may discover the truth behind the rumors, or maybe we'll find there are no truths at all. Worse yet, these rumors may be cunning lies set before us by those deviants who would rewrite history in their favor, for their own subversive humanist agendas! Beware. The reality is that we know very little about this particular pig.
Small details of the pig matter not. What is important is the unwitting role the pig played in the course of human events, events which admittedly have only the most remote historical relevance, but events which have no less have bestowed the pig a kind of immortality. "The Pig War!" it roles off the tongue with the flavor of Ambrosia! What war has been better named? None!
What we do know of the pig? We know the pig through history, human history, from what events the pig's death set into motion. The pig was the proverbial last straw on the historical back of the geographically nebulous San Juan Island. The pig was a bone of contention, a potato-rooting catalyst, whose particular circumstances of death attracted the attentions of two mighty nations, two nations which were trying to scribble outside their topographic lines, to exert spheres of influence, yes, to verily "gobble up" lands, any lands, no matter how remote, isolated, or wet and rainy. Here is where the pig is crafted into something of a looking glass, to say a reflection of things human, and this is precisely where the pig hits the fan.
Undoubtedly, these two bloated nations had great hunger for land. For these proud nations, the entire world was, effectively, a big pie eating contest . . . and San Juan Island was the final bit of berry pie at the end of a very long geographical fork.
In the end, "The Pig War," finds itself aptly named not merely for a dead pig, but for those human inclinations, inclinations we'll call slightly "piggish" (William Golding might use a word a little more pointed, along with a malevolent laugh, a laugh that can only rise from turning in the grave like a schoolgirl on recess, but we'll leave that talk for later).
After all, the pig only intended to eat some potatoes, granted those potatoes did not belong to that pig. Nobody bothered explaining the situation to the pig. Instead it was shot dead for its unwitting trespasses. No doubt the pig would have settled for a nice berry pie . . . as long as it was the whole pie.
http://www.pigwar.com/pigwar_pig.html
Dude! That Pig War website is amazing, and humorous too. Did you read about the pig incident at the reinactment? Really ironic, and at the end very funny.
http://www.pigwar.com/festival_saga.html
I feel like an uneducated heathen for not being aware of the Pig War. :(
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