DUST OF THE PAST

Taranaki Daily News, 28 April 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

DUST OF THE PAST

ADVENTUROUS DAYS

(By

“Historicus”).

On April 27, 1521, Fernando Magellan met his end at the hands of natives of the Philippine Islands. For him the voyage of discovery was finished, but the work he had accomplished was destined to keep his name for ever in the front rank of intrepid adventurers. Although he made his famous voyage on behalf of Spain, Magellan was a Portuguese. His family were “hidalgo,” and his boyhood was spent in the atmosphere .of the royal court. Magellan's secession from Portuguese interests was brought about by a monetary dispute with the King. Impelled by injury and insult he renounced his nationality and offered his services to the Court of Spain. Territorial ambitions of Spain and Portugal were antagonistic. Both were scrambling for new lands and the glory of their discovery. The Portuguese King tried hard to recover Magellan’s services, but without success. He was commissioned by Spain to sail round the world and take anything he. might discover en route. Nobody had been to the end of South America; there lay a field of mystery. Magellan sailed boldly for this unknown sphere, to get round or through; to find a western route to the Spice Islands. With the tiny ships of the day, and crews saturated with superstitious fears, the mere discovery of strange places was not the hardest task. He had to deal with mutiny, terror of the unknown, and, of course, terrible weather conditions. At last was reached a break in the coast that harboured possibilities. For over a month Magellan fought the fears of his crews and the weather of the unknown passage. Then before them stretched a vast ocean, calm and peaceful after the tempestuous waters of the Straits. He .called it the Pacific. For three months he continued across its waters, discovering the Philippines, and meeting his death. Of the five ships and men who started the voyage, only one ship returned to Spain, with eighteen men. That ship was the first to have sailed round the world, completing a voyage of nearly three years.

There are many stupid ways of settling a quarrel. To-day we go to law! Back in the. days before our blue clad guardians paced the streets, bellicose citizens sometimes had a shorter way with each other. It may have been less expensive, but, if anything, it was sillier. In the very early days of time there were probably few other means of justice than hitting your opponent over the head with a club. Thus probably began the first duel. Later it began to take on formalities, and draped its follies in a romantic mantle of injured honour. In France it became a mania —any excuse was good enough. Night and day, by moonlight and torch, in the streets and public squares, high spirited gallants were busy making life romantic, often getting in the way of traffic. Pedestrians were for ever going up side turnings to avoid the gallants. Richelieu rather cooled the ardour of the time by hanging a few, but it was a difficult business to kill by decree. In England it became a fashionable vice, until more enlightened public opinion, and not a little ridicule, was brought to bear on the subject. Fox, Pitt, Cannings, Wilkes, Gratton and Daniel O’Connor, were among the famous men who turned out in the early morning complete with pistols and animosity to settle their grievances; the Duke of Wellington was rather a fireeater on the subject. But it was a foolish game only equalled by some of the excuses for the combat. Perhaps the silliest of all duels was fought on May 3, 1808, near Paris, when two gentlemen, M. de Granpre and M. Le Pique, ascended in balloons with blunderbuses and banged away at each other in the clouds. M, Le Pique lost! Incidentally this must have been the first aerial combat.

On May 1, 1851, in a blaze of dithyrambic eloquence, with which the writers of the day thought fit to announce the memorable event, the Great Exhibition was opened in Hyde Park. For the Victorians it was an event in capital letters; a new departure; a field whereon the Englishman was going to' rub shoulders with the foreigner in a perfect spirit of business amity. The choice spirits of the world of trade who were to meet in harmonious co-operation were, by many, expected to prevail significantly in the councils of world peace. A few there were who rather doubted the foreigner. One, Col. Sibthorp, M.P., a rather eccentric gentleman, waxed red in the face in his denunciation of a scheme that would admit them in bulk to the sanctity of Old England’s shores. “Take care of your wives and daughters,” he exclaimed in the Commons. “Take care of your property and.your lives.” But nobody took any notice of him, and the Exhibition opened with its great glass roof, its fountains and palm trees and statuary; its produce, ores and lace work, a supreme spectacle for the people of its day.

The Indian Mutiny broke out on May 10, 1857, at Meerut, now officially called Mirat, a garrison town on the Ganges Plains, a day’s march from Delhi. Actually, the outbreak at Meerut was only the last of several local mutinies here and there in Upper India, the earliest having occurred in. January. Greased cartridges, the despatch of a high proportion of white troops to the recently occupied Punjab, the fine showing which the Sikh armies had made against Europeans a few years before, the rumours, perhaps, of British mismanagement in the Crimea—all these things inflamed the Sepoys, who were then recruited from high castes in the Bombay Presidency, and were correspondingly proud, and, to use a word then unknown, classconscious. Moslem agitators played on Hindu prejudices at the same time that they recalled the ancient glories of Indian Moslem rule under the Moguls.

British administrators and commanding officers were blind to all this. The troops had always been loyal. Many of them were hereditary soldiers, to whom the regiment was their clan, and the colonel their chief. That they could ever turn on their officers scarcely one European ever conceived. The earlier mutineers of January were treated like naughty children, disbanded and sent home—but no one troubled to inquire why they had been naughty. At Meerut there was a mutiny of high caste cavalry on April 24. The men were disarmed, tried and sent to prison on Saturday, May 9. Next day, May 10, the whole native garrison broke out while the British were at church. The mutineers shot all the officers they could catch, marched off to Delhi, raised the city, and proclaimed the Mogul Emperor. White troops who could have pursued and dispersed them were held idle at Meerut. Two years’ hard fighting were needed to retrieve that mistake, and the contest has left its mark on Anglo-Indian relations to this day. When a British battalion attends divine service in India, it takes its rifles with it—an invariable rule since 1857,