Christmas Every Day

1836

The battle of the Alamo begins

For years American migrants had been arriving in the north of the new Mexican Republic, in the  province of Texas. These colonists remained a largely foreign element, making little effort to adapt to the local culture and resentful of Mexican decrees that outlawed slavery. In 1835 war broke out between the Texians (English-speaking immigrants) and Mexican troops. At first the Texians were successful in driving out the Mexican army but it returned in strength under President Santa Ana.

Santa Ana had declared that the rebels would be treated as pirates and subject to immediate execution — there would be no prisoners of war. On February 23, 1836 2,000 Mexican troops surrounded a makeshift fort that had been constructed around an old Spanish mission near San Antonio, called the Alamo. It was garrisoned by around 200 Texians who had unwisely decided to stay and fight. Their ranks include newly arrived volunteers from the United States, among them famed Indian-fighter and Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett.

The Mexicans began the siege by raising a blood-red flag indicating that no quarter would be given in battle. The Texans tried to negotiate an honourable surrender but were told that only an unconditional surrender and no promise of safety was on the table. The fighting lasted for ten days during which time the defenders appealed urgently for help. The commander William Travis sent out a letter, addressed “to the people of Texas and all Americans in the world”:

To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World:

Fellow citizens & compatriots—I am besieged, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna—I have sustained a continual Bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken—I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch—The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country—Victory or Death.

William Barret Travis

On March 6 a Mexican assault overwhelmed the defenders and all of them, except black slaves, women and children, were killed.

The defeat at the Alamo turned into a propaganda victory and in less than two months Santa Ana’s army had been defeated and an independent Texas Republic had been secured.

Despite Travis’s talk of Liberty, the new republic decreed:

• Persons of colour who had been servants for life under Mexican law would become property.
• Congress should pass no law restricting emigrants from bring their slaves into Texas.
• Congress shall not have the power to emancipate slaves.
• Slaveowners may not free their slaves without Congressional approval unless the freed slaves leave Texas.
• Free persons of African descent were required to petition the Texas Congress for permission to continue living in the country.
• Africans and the descendants of Africans and Indians were excluded from the class of ‘persons’ having rights.

1848

The publication of The Communist Manifesto

1848 was the Year of Revolutions. All across Europe rebellions of national and liberal varieties broke out against the monarchies and multinational empires of the Continent. All of these flared up and failed, but one little revolutionary publication, scarcely noticed at the time, survived to become one of the most influential political tracts ever written.

The Communist League (born a decade earlier as the League of the Just) was a little-regarded, loosely-connected potpourri of socialist malcontents, one of a myriad of left-wing collectives, much better at philosophizing and arguing with each other than they were at bringing down the established powers. Among its members were two German exiles, the journalist Karl Marx and the rich man’s son Friedrich Engels, who had pledged to draw up a statement of the League’s beliefs. After many false starts and much procrastination, The Communist Manifesto arrived just in time to have no influence whatsoever on the revolutions of that year.

The little book’s great impact was to occur in the decades to come as it inspired revolutionaries with its claims of a truly scientific analysis of human history. The present economic state of a mass of underpaid labourers oppressed by the great industrialists was soon to be over. The dialectic of history had been decoded by Marx and Engels who predicted that the proletariat would soon overcome the bourgeoisie and usher in a classless state of equality and freedom from want or alienation. Despite numerous  attempts at producing such a heaven on earth on the national level, Marxism has been successful only in winning over academics in the social sciences and Grievance Studies.

1959 

Cancellation of the Avro Arrow

Want to get a Canadian historian all teary-eyed and remorseful? Want to see him clench his fists and trouble deaf heaven with his bootless cries? If so, just sidle up to him and whisper “Diefenbaker canceled the Arrow”, but step back quickly lest you be caught in the sudden outburst of mingled lachrymosity and rage.

The CF-105, Avro Arrow, was surely the most beautiful fighter aircraft ever built. It was also the most advanced interceptor of its era, designed to counter the threat of Soviet bomber attacks on North America. Capable of Mach 2 performance and armed with nuclear missiles that could destroy whole waves of attackers, the Arrow was far superior to its predecessor, the CF-100 Canuck, and other fighters of the time such as the Delta Dart, the Voodoo, and the Mig-21.

In February 1959 the Diefenbaker government abruptly cancelled the Arrow program and ordered all prototypes, plans, and parts destroyed. This decision crippled the Canadian aerospace industry, and resulted in tens of thousands of lost jobs and a brain drain of engineers and scientists to the USA and Britain. One of the big winners was NASA which scooped up dozens of Arrow technicians for its missile and moon mission projects.

A cold calculus might back the government’s decision. The Arrow was an enormously expensive programme and the development of Russian ICBMs meant that a bomber threat was less likely. Canadian counter-intelligence suspected a Soviet mole at work in the project and it was they who demanded the destruction of the aircraft. (Parts of the plane and its plans were, nonetheless, smuggled out by workers for preservation.) The money that was to be saved by cancelling the Arrow was spent on the ultimately useless Bomarc anti-aircraft missile, dubbed “the world’s most expensive lawn dart”.

The Arrow lives in in Canadian mythology as a lost moment, a bit of greatness that might have been but never was.

1594 Birth of Henry Prince of Wales

Henry Frederick Stuart was the oldest son of King James VI of Scotland who in 1603 became James I of England. His death in 1612 left second son Charles as the heir. It was the fate of Charles to prompt the English Civil War and be executed for  treason in 1649, prompting the founding of an English republic. Chambers in his Book of Days laments the death by typhoid of Henry and the course that English history might have taken:

It is blessed to die in promise, rather than after all the blots and mischances of performance. We naturally credit the young dead with much which might never have been realized. Nevertheless, in the early death of Henry Prince of Wales there is no room to doubt that the national bewailment was just. All accounts concur in representing him as a youth of bright talents, most generous dispositions, and the noblest aspirations. At sixteen, he had the figure, the proportions, and the sentiments of a full-grown man. With the love of study which belonged to his father, he possessed what his father entirely lacked, a love of manly military exercises. In riding, in archery, in the use of arms, he was without a superior. He studied shipbuilding and the whole art of war with as much zeal as if he had had no taste for elegant learning. When, at Christmas 1609, the romantic spectacle called his Barriers was presented in the Banqueting House at Whitehall,—when he and six other youths met each in succession eight others, at pike and sword play,—all clad in the beautiful armour of the period,—Henry was remarked, to the surprise of all, to have given and received thirty-two pushes of pike and about three hundred and sixty strokes of sword, in one evening.

It was in the midst of active study and exercise, and while the nation was becoming fully aware of the promise he gave as their future ruler, that this accomplished prince was seized with a fever, the consequence, apparently, of the too violent fatigues to which he occasionally subjected himself. What immediately affected him to a fatal illness, seems to have been his playing at tennis one evening without his coat. In the simple act of stripping off and laying aside that coat, was involved an incalculable change of the current of English history; for, had Henry survived and reigned, the country would probably have escaped a civil war—and who can say, in that event, how much our national destinies might have been changed, for good or evil? During the twelve days of the prince’s illness, the public mind was wrought up to a pitch of intense anxiety regarding him: and when, on one occasion, he was thought to have yielded up the ghost, the cry of grief went out from St. James’s Palace into the street, and was there repeated and spread by the sympathising multitude. All that the medical skill of that age could do was done to save so valuable a life, including some applications that sound strangely in our ears: for example, pigeons applied to the head, and a split cock to the feet. Sir Walter Raleigh sent from his prison in the Tower a ‘quinteseence’ which he believed to be of wonderful power: and it did give the prince the only approach to a restoring perspiration which he had had. But all was in vain. Henry died on the 6^th of November 1612, when three months less than nineteen years of age. As a historical event, his death ranks with a very small class in which deceased royalty has been mourned by the nation’s heart.

The national admiration of this young prince is shown in some quaint lines, hitherto inedited, in the Burleigh MSS.:

Loa where he shineth yonder, 
A fixed star in heaven:
Whose motion heere came under 
None of your planets heaven.
if that the moone should tender 
The sunne her love, and marry, 
They both would not engender
Soe great a star as Harry.

1478 The death of the Duke of Clarence

Second murderer: Take him [the Duke of Clarence] on the costard with the hilts of thy sword, and then throw him into the malmsey-butt in the next room.

First Murderer [to the Duke of Clarence, stabbing him]: Take that, and that. If all this will not do, I’ll drown you in the malmsey-butt within.

This is how Shakespeare treats the death of George, Duke of Clarence, brother to King Edward IV and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III. Before and after the Bard’s version, historians have debated how Clarence died and who was responsible for his death. In the sixteenth century it was widely believed that Gloucester had ordered the execution while more recent historians have expressed the possibility that Gloucester opposed his brother’s death.

By the standards of the time, Clarence certainly deserved to get the chop. He had betrayed his brothers and allied himself with this family’s dynastic rivals, Henry VI and the Lancastrian faction, but eventually deserted them to rejoin his Yorkist siblings. Never quite stable, mentally, he then seems to have again aroused suspicions of disloyalty in Edward’s mind and he was convicted of treason and sentenced to death.

His two surviving children who lived into the 16th century were both murdered on the orders of Henry VIII, whose Tudor father Henry VII had usurped the throne from Richard III.

1804 Americans burn the USS Philadelphia

The civilized world was plagued for centuries by the pirates of the Barbary Coast of North Africa. They terrorized the shores of the Christian Mediterranean and sailed into the Atlantic as far north as Iceland to take slaves — over a million Europeans were taken captive from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Countries either paid protection money or suffered the constant assaults on their shipping and coastal towns. The newly-independent United States began by paying the extortion — amounting to 16% of the American federal budget — but finally, under Thomas Jefferson, the USA had had enough. The officials with whom the Americans had negotiated told them their piracy was a religious duty:

“It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.”

So in 1801 began The First Barbary War against these pirate nests. In October 1803 the frigate USS Philadelphia while engaging in this campaign went aground near the city of Tripoli and its crew taken prisoner by the local Muslim pirate king. The ship was too dangerous a prize to be left in the hands of the Bey of Tripoli, so Commodore Edward Preble ordered Lieutenant Stephen Decatur to try and repossess the ship or destroy it.

Sir, you are hereby ordered to take command of the prize ketch Intrepid. It is my order that you proceed to Tripoli, enter the harbor in the night, board the Philadelphia, burn her and make good your retreat … The destruction of the Philadelphia is an object of great importance. I rely with confidence on your intrepidity and enterprise to effect it.

The Intrepid, previously named Mastico, had been captured from the Tripolitans, and Decatur disguised the ship as a merchant vessel run by a small Arab-speaking crew; Decatur and most of the men hid below deck. Under the ruse that the ship had lost its anchor, permission was sought to tie up to the Philadelphia. When the two ships were aside one another, Decatur and the other men burst out and onto the Philadelphia, easily overcoming the crew aboard. In a matter of minutes, 20 of the enemy were dead and others had jumped ship. The Americans then proceeded to send the ship up in flames and quickly retreat to the Intrepid.

British Admiral Horatio Nelson called it “the most bold and daring act of the age.”

1493

Columbus issues a letter

Shortly before making landfall on his return from his first Voyage to the Indies, Columbus wrote this letter, excerpted below:

Since I know that you will be pleased by the great victory which Our Lord has given me on my voyage, I am writing you this letter, from which you will learn how in twenty days I crossed to the Indies with the fleet which the King and Queen, our most illustrious sovereigns, gave me. I found there very many islands inhabited by people without number, and I have taken possession of them all on behalf of Their Highnesses by proclamation and by unfurling the royal standard, and I was not contradicted.

To the first island I found I gave the name San Salvador in memory of His High Majesty who miraculously has given all this; the Indians call it Guanahaní. To the second I gave the name the island of Santa María de Concepción; to the third, Fernandina; to the fourth, Isabela; to the fifth, the island of Juana, and so on, to each a new name.

When I reached Juana I followed the coast to the west and I found it to be so large that I thought it must be the mainland, the province of Cathay; and since I found no towns or villages on the coast except small settlements with whose inhabitants I could not speak because they all immediately fled, I continued on that course thinking that I could not fail to find great cities or towns.

After many leagues, having seen that there was nothing new and that the coast was carrying me northwards, which was not the course I wished to take because winter was now drawing on and I proposed to make to the south, and as moreover the wind was carrying me forward, I decided to wait no longer and I turned round and made for a fine harbour. From there I sent two men inland to find out if there was a king or any great cities. They travelled for three days and found an infinite number of small villages and countless people, but no sign of authority; for which reason they returned. I understood well enough from some other Indians I had already taken that the whole of this coast was an island; and so I followed the coast one hundred and seven leagues to the east to where it ended.

I sighted another island to the east, eighteen leagues distant, to which I then gave the name Español… Española is a marvel; the sierras and the mountains and the plains and the fields and the land are so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing, for raising all kinds of cattle, for building towns and villages. The harbours are beyond the belief of anyone who has not seen them, and the many great rivers give good waters of which the majority bear gold. There are great differences between the trees and fruit and plants and those of Juana. On this island there are many spices and great mines of gold and other metals.

All the people on this island and all the others I have found or have learned of go naked, men and women alike, just as their mothers bear them, although some women cover themselves in one place with a leaf from a plant or a cotton garment which they make for the purpose.

They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they that way inclined, not because they are not well built and of fine bearing, but because they are amazingly timid. They have no other weapons than those made from canes cut when they are in seed, to the ends of which they fix a sharp stick; and they dare not use them, for many times I have happened to send two or three men ashore to some town to speak to them and a great number of them have come out, and as soon as they see the men coming they run off, parents not even waiting for children, and not because any harm has been done to any of them; on the contrary, everywhere I have been and have been able to speak to them I have given them some of everything I had, cloth and many other things, without receiving anything in exchange; but they are simply incurably timid.

The truth is that, once they gain confidence and lose this fear, they are so lacking in guile and so generous with what they have that no-one would believe it unless they saw it. They never refuse to give whatever they have, whenever they are asked; rather, they offer it willingly and with such love that they would give their hearts, and whether it is something of value or of little worth, they are happy with whatever they are given in return, however it is given …. I gave them thousands of pretty things I carried with me so that they would be well disposed and, moreover, would become christians, inclined to the love of Their Highnesses and the whole Castilian nation, and help us by giving us the things they have in abundance and of which we have need.

They knew no sect and were not idolaters, except that they all believe that power and good come from heaven, and they believed very firmly that I and these ships and crew came from heaven and in this belief they received me everywhere, once they had overcome their fear. And this is not because they are ignorant; rather, they are of subtle intelligence and can find their way around those seas, and give a marvellously good account of everything; it is only because they have never seen men clothed or ships of that kind. When I arrived in the Indies, at the first island I found I took some of them by force so that they could learn and give me information about what there was in those parts, and in that way they soon understood us and we them, whether by word or by sign; and they have been very useful to us. I still have them with me, and they still insist that I come from heaven, in spite of all the exchanges they have had with me, and they were the first to announce this wherever I went, and the others would run from house to house and to the nearby towns shouting: “come, come and see the people from heaven.” In this way they all flocked in, men and women alike, great and small, once they were confident about us; none were left behind, and they all brought something to eat and drink, which they gave with marvellous affection….

So I have found no monsters, nor heard of any except on an island here which is the second one as you approach the Indies and which is inhabited by people who are held in all the islands to be very ferocious and who eat human flesh. These people have many canoes in which they sail around all the islands of India robbing and stealing whatever they want; they are no more malformed than the others except that they wear their hair long like women and they carry bows and arrows made from the same cane stems with a small stick at the end for want of iron which they do not have. They are ferocious with these other people who are excessively cowardly, but I take no more account of them than of the rest.

In conclusion, to speak only of what has been achieved on this voyage, which was very rapid, Their Highnesses can see that I will give them as much gold as they require if Their Majesties will give me only a very little help; as much spice and cotton as Their Majesties may order to be shipped, as much mastic as they may order to be shipped, which until now has only been found in Greece, on the island of Chios, and the Genoese government sells it for whatever it likes, and as much aloe as they may order to be shipped and as many slaves as they may order to be shipped, and who will be from among the idolaters. I believe that I have found rhubarb and cinnamon and that I will find a thousand other things of value which the men I have left there will have discovered; for I have not delayed at any point whenever the wind gave me the opportunity to sail, except at the town of Navidad for as long as I might leave it safe and secure. And in truth I could have done a great deal more if the ships had served me as reason demanded.

That is enough. Eternal God, our Lord, gives to all those who follow His path victory over things which appear impossible, and this was a very notable example. For, although these lands may have been spoken or written of, that was all conjecture, without eye-witness, and those who heard the stories listened to them and judged them more as fables than as having the least vestige of truth. Therefore, since Our Redeemer gave to our most illustrious King and Queen and to their famous kingdoms this victory in such great matters, the whole of Christendom should be joyful and hold great celebrations and give solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity with many solemn prayers for the great exultation they will have when so many people return to our holy faith and for the temporal benefits which will bring solace and profit not only to Spain but to all christians. This is a brief account of what has been achieved.

Dated on board the caravel, off the islands of the Canaries, 15 February in the year 1493.

Your obedient servant. The Admiral.