Activist and his sign interpreter working a small crowd in Puerta del Sol, downtown Madrid.

An interpreter with the U.S. Army adjusts the cap of an Afghan boy near the Zhari District Center outside of Forward Operating Base Pasab, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, Dec. 17, 2011. The boy had received some new winter clothes from the Female Engagement Team when he and his mother visited the women's center. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Kristina Truluck/Released)

 

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Part of the War Memorial Display, “a Village at War” in the lane approaching the church.

 

Second Lieutenant Roland La Fontaine Whittall (Picture)

Roland La Fontaine Whittall was the third son of Frederick Edwin and Adelaide Whittall of Constantinople. At Cape Helles, in the Dardenelles, he was wounded in four places by a high explosive shell and died six days later on 6 August 1915, aged 22. The General of the 52nd Division wrote: “He was a plucky lad, who would have made a good soldier had he lived. I saw him immediately after he was wounded and he showed great courage.”

 

That officer on the Commonwealt War Graves Commission website is:-

 

WHITTALL, ROLAND WILLIAM

Rank:……………………........Second Lieutenant

Date of Death:……………06/08/1915

Regiment/Service:……..Special List

…………………………….........attd. 52nd Div. H.Q.

Panel Reference:……….Panel 202.

Memorial:…………………..HELLES MEMORIAL

CWGC: www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/682272/WHITTALL,%20RO...

 

SDGW records that 2/Lt Roland William Whittall Died of Wounds on the 6th August 1915 whilst serving on the Special List. As with all officers no place of birth or residence is shown.

 

The Medal Index Card for Second Lieutenant Roland William Whittall, Special List, is held at the National Archive under reference WO 372/21/142667

discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D5848573

 

A distant relative who retained the Turkish connection mentions him very briefly in her writings.

www.levantineheritage.com/testi18.htm

 

The Catalogue entry for his Service Records at the National Archive lists him as 2nd Lieutenant Roland William La Fontaine Whittall, Interpreters Corps, (which, given his families Turkish connections would make a lot of sense).

discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C1090495

 

No match on Picture Norfolk, the County Image Archive.

 

There is no obvious match for Roland on any of the likely censuses of England and Wales. Nor are there any birth records in England and Wales. However, given the information contained in the “levantineheritage” piece above, it seems likely that Roland could well have been born in Turkey and educated at an International School.

 

His Division

 

The Lowland Division was a formation of the Territorial Force. It was formed as a result of the reforms of the army carried out in 1908 under the Secretary of State for War, Richard Burdon Haldane and was one of 14 Divisions of the peacetime TF.

 

1914

 

The units of the Division had just departed for annual summer camp when emergency orders recalled them to the home base. All units were mobilised for full time war service on 5 August 1914 and moved to their allotted positions on the Scottish coastal defences by mid August 1914.

 

Several of the Division’s units left in the period November 1914 – March 1915,

 

1915

 

On 5 April the Division was warned that it would go on overseas service; on 7 May this was confirmed, with the destination being Gallipoli. The units embarked at Liverpool and Devonport between 18 May and 8 June. Two of the field artillery brigades and the heavy battery remained on the Forth defences. The first units landed on Gallipoli (Cape Helles) on 6 June. The Division was then involved in the following moves and engagements:

Gully Ravine (28-29 June)

Achi Baba Nullah (12-13 July)

www.longlongtrail.co.uk/army/order-of-battle-of-divisions...

 

From “The Fifty-Second Lowland Division 1914-1918” by R. R. Thompson.

 

(Page 133) The Turks must have known about the arrival at Mudros of the army destined for Suvla Bay, and they probably regarded the last two battles as the preliminaries to larger assaults on the Achi Baba position. The Turks were expecting the landing of fresh divisions at Cape Helles, and, accordingly, they shelled the beaches, the roads, and the “Rest Camps” regularly, particularly the two former. The fire from the Asiatic guns, (the ones on the other side of the Dardenelles that overlooked much of the Allies positions), was deadly, and casualties among men of the administrative and non-combatant services became numerous. Usually the while of the road or track could be seen by the Turks, but they seemed to watch definite lengths, and when a gharry, with its pair of mules and an Indian driver, reached one of these areas they would put a large H.E. shell into it. In a moment the gharry and mules would disappear in the huge black cloud of smoke and dust which burst up from the explosion. Very often, when the cloud had drifted on, the driver with his mules and gharry would reappear, still jogging along, quite uninjured. But sometimes they did not, and many of these brave Indians paid the utmost price for the faithfulness with which they stuck to their duty.

 

lib.militaryarchive.co.uk/library/divisional-histories/Fi...

 

The commanding officer of 52nd Lowland Division at the time was Major General G Egerton. His private diaries for the period June to September 1915 are held at the National Archive.

discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C628075

 

EGERTON, MAJOR GENERAL GRANVILLE (1859-1951) CB. Egerton commanded the 52nd Lowland Division , Territorial Force, in 1914. He had been commissioned into the 72nd Highlanders in 1879 and subsequently saw active service in the Afghan War of 1879-80 in which he took part in Roberts's march to Kandahar where he was wounded. He saw further action in Egypt 1882 as adjutant of the Seaforth Highlanders at the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, in the Sudan (battles of Atbara and Omdurman) before returning to England where he took command of the 1st Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment (Green Howards). He was commandant of the School of Musketry at Hythe 1907-09 where he introduced a number of innovative training methods to improve rifle shooting in the army. After commanding an infantry brigade in Malta he returned to command the Lowland Territorial Division. On arrival at Helles his troops, totally unacclimatised and many still wearing their winter serge uniforms, were pitched piecemeal into a series of costly attacks. When he openly voiced his discontent at their handling by the acting corps commander (De Lisle) he was first reprimanded by Hamilton, then removed from his command; he was Inspector of Infantry 1916-19 when he retired, to spend the rest of his life waging a campaign against Hamilton's handling of the 52nd Division.

www.gallipoli-association.org/campaign/whos-who/

 

.... Interpreters in authentic period costume re-enact everyday pioneer life in 1860’s Ontario ....

"Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1755, or 1757 – July 12, 1804) was an American revolutionary, statesman and Founding Father of the United States. He was an influential interpreter and promoter of the U.S. Constitution, and was the founder of the Federalist Party, the nation's financial system, the United States Coast Guard, and the New York Post newspaper. As the first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton was the main author of the economic policies of the administration of President George Washington. He took the lead in the federal government's funding of the states' American Revolutionary War debts, as well as establishing the nation's first two de facto central banks (i.e. the Bank of North America and the First Bank of the United States), a system of tariffs, and the resumption of friendly trade relations with Britain. His vision included a strong central government led by a vigorous executive branch, a strong commercial economy, support for manufacturing, and a strong national defense.

 

The parish of Trinity Church has three separate burial grounds associated with it in New York City. The first, Trinity Churchyard, is located in Lower Manhattan at 74 Trinity Place, near Wall Street and Broadway. Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, and Robert Fulton are buried in the downtown Trinity Churchyard.

 

The second Trinity parish burial ground is the St. Paul's Chapel Churchyard, which is also located in lower Manhattan (roughly 440 yards (400 m)), six blocks north of Trinity Church. It was established in 1766. Both of these churchyards are closed to new burials.

 

Trinity's third place of burial, Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, located in Hamilton Heights in Upper Manhattan, is one of the few active burial sites in Manhattan. Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum is listed on the National Register of Historic places and is the burial place of notable people including John James Audubon, John Jacob Astor IV, Mayor Edward I. Koch, Governor John Adams Dix, Ralph Ellison, and Eliza Jumel. In 1823 all burials south of Canal Street became forbidden by New York City due to city crowding, yellow fever, and other public health fears.

 

After considering locations in the Bronx and portions of the then-new Green-Wood Cemetery, in 1842 Trinity Parish purchased the plot of land now bordered by 153rd street, 155th street, Amsterdam, and Riverside to establish the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum. The cemetery is located beside the Chapel of the Intercession that Audubon co-founded in 1846, but this chapel is no longer part of Trinity parish. James Renwick, Jr., is the architect of Trinity Church Cemetery and further updates were made by Calvert Vaux. The uptown cemetery is also the center of the Heritage Rose District of New York City.

 

A no-longer-extant Trinity Parish burial ground was the Old Saint John's Burying Ground for St. John's Chapel. This location is bounded by Hudson, Leroy and Clarkson streets near Hudson Square. It was in use from 1806 to 1852 with over 10,000 burials, mostly poor and young. In 1897, it was turned into St. John's Park, with most of the burials left in place. The park was later renamed Hudson Park, and is now James J. Walker Park. (This park is different from a separate St. John's Park, a former private park and residential block approximately one mile to the south that now serves as part of the Holland Tunnel access.)

 

New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over 300.46 square miles (778.2 km2), New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. The city is within the southern tip of New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area – the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous megacities, and over 58 million people live within 250 mi (400 km) of the city. New York City is a global cultural, financial, and media center with a significant influence on commerce, health care and life sciences, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, dining, art, fashion, and sports. New York is the most photographed city in the world. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy, an established safe haven for global investors, and is sometimes described as the capital of the world." - info from Wikipedia.

 

The fall of 2022 I did my 3rd major cycling tour. I began my adventure in Montreal, Canada and finished in Savannah, GA. This tour took me through the oldest parts of Quebec and the 13 original US states. During this adventure I cycled 7,126 km over the course of 2.5 months and took more than 68,000 photos. As with my previous tours, a major focus was to photograph historic architecture.

 

Now on Instagram.

 

Become a patron to my photography on Patreon.

Edith Rimmington, Leicester 1802 - Bexhill 1986

Acht Deuter des Traums - Eight interpreters of the dream (1940)

 

In 1936, Rimmington attended the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Here, the young and already highly influential Spanish artist, Salvador Dalí famously turned up in a diving suit and claimed he would be "diving into the human subconscious." This performative gesture and clear statement had a profound and lasting impact on Rimmington, who four years later, in this painting, featured eight diving suits hung out to dry in the arched niches of a classical colonnade. In place of diving helmets, however, Rimmington has included a series of severed sheep heads, which are scattered and propped up here and there. Indeed, as much as the hanging suits resemble diving attire, they also look like skinned animal carcasses strung up on meat hooks.

 

Intentionally flesh-colored, the suits also resemble decapitated bodies, or artificial limbs, and it is thus significant that the work was painted just a year after the start of WWII. However, the title of the work, along with Dalí's diving reference, opens the work up to deeper interpretation, linking it to the world of dreams and the subconscious mind, both of which were key subjects for the Surrealists. By painting headless bodies Rimmington separates body from mind, a reminder that the two can be read as distinct entities. The idealised, classical setting here reinforces the dream-like, otherworldly nature of the painting, and resembles the strictly composed architectural paintings by the forefather of Surrealism, Giorgio de Chirico.

 

French art historian and avid supporter of British Surrealism, Michel Remy has explored Rimmington's complex relationships with the human body, which, as he points out, she often depicts as disjointed, divided, or fragmented, as if "suspended in-between" states such as living/dead, imaginary/real. In doing so, she emphasises the blurred boundaries between the internal and external world of human existence, an idea that formed an integral aspect of Surrealist thought; poet André Breton aptly summarised it as "the liberation of the imagination."

 

Source: The Art Story (www.theartstory.org)

Designed by Román Díaz from "Origami for Interpreters"

 

Colonial Williamsburg Joinery Shop

(Al-Thukair's guests) From right to left: Maurice Richard, Cartier's sales assistant, Yusuf Kanoo, Jacques Cartier, host Mugbil Al-Thukair, and an unknown guest at Al Thukair's house in Manama, according to Jacques Cartier's travel diary, this luncheon occurred before Cartier and his assistants, accompanied by their host Al-Thukair and his trusted friend Kanoo, who acted as an interpreter, paid a courtesy visit to the ruler of Bahrain, Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (r. 1869-1932) on Muharraq island, the country's capital back then, on Thursday afternoon, the 16th of March 1912.

 

(In this luncheon, Cartier and his companions experienced traditional Arabian hospitality, typified by the customary dish of pot-roasted whole lamb known as ''Quzi'' stuffed with several well-cooked chickens, which in turn are stuffed with hard-boiled peeled eggs, blanched almonds, cashews, raisins, and black peppercorns, as the slow-roasted lamb marinated both inside and out with seasonings such as turmeric and cumin, served on top of a bed of saffron and cardamom rice infused with rose water and garnished with tender cooked dried chickpeas, golden raisins, blanched almonds and cashews, along with a variety of classic Bahraini dishes, including lamb and chicken stews, chickpea flour dumplings filled with lamb mince and dried prawns cooked in a savoury light tamarind sauce, and egg-battered flat round-shaped fried lean lamb Kofta seasoned with fine herbs and spices, among other mouthwatering delicacies)

 

The two long excerpts below are firsthand accounts of Jacques Cartier's visit to the Gulf in March of 1912 obtained from two separate letters written during his second extended Gulf exploratory pearl-purchasing trip, with Bahrain as the focal point taken from a series of declassified British archival personal letters written by the Anglo-Irish Dublin-born Oxford-educated multilingual, multidiscipline journalist, linguist, political analyst, writer, editor and translator, Emily Overend Lorimer (1881-1949) to her parents, Thomas George Overend and Hannah Kingsbury the letters describe the lives of Emily and her husband, David Lockhart Robertson Lorimer (1876-1962) (referred to by the pet name 'Lock' in the said letters) when the couple were living in Bahrain from October 1911 until November 1912 during her civil servant husband's tenure as a British Political Agent, there is also mention of Samuel Marinus Zwemer (1867-1952), the well-funded American missionary and religious scholar who arrived in Bahrain in December 1892 as a tireless young missionary imbued with evangelistic zeal; almost immediately after arriving, he and his equally enthusiastic small team of missionaries established a small clinic, dispensary, English school and Christian bookshop in a modest rented building by the sea in Manama, eventually leading up to the opening of the first fully-fledged modern hospital in Bahrain, the American Mission Hospital, and the first English school in the country on the 26th of January 1903, both were built on two separate plots of land purchased from the ruler of Bahrain, Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (r. 1869-1932) and pearl merchant Abdulaziz Bin Hassan Algosaibi (1876-1953) in Manama, the former commercial capital and the bustling current political and commercial capital within a decade of his arrival in the tiny archipelago British protectorate regardless of the ulterior missionary motives behind their creation these institutions have played significant roles in improving the lives of Bahrainis to the present in particular in the pre-oil era nevertheless, it is worth noting that neither the hospital nor the school was intended to be philanthropic enterprises from the outset and this has remained the case ever since; in any case the Lorimer mentioned above should not be confused with his elder brother, civil servant John Gordon Lorimer (1870-1914) the esteemed diplomat and historian who compiled the declassified seminal encyclopaedic work "The Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia" as his younger brother, the noted linguist, was also a colonial officer since the Scottish Lorimer family was renowned for producing numerous high-calibre civil servants who primarily served as colonial military officers and administrators, a clear testament to the dedication this family had to the British imperial enterprise and colonial service however, readers of these excerpts should be cognisant of the racist casual undertones and sentiments of their author and those of the other major Western characters involved in the amusing, gossipy, nonchalant and witty anecdotal events that Emily Lorimer is recounting whether tacitly or explicitly including Jacques Cartier, the young inquisitive self-assured French bourgeoisie jeweller with the keen anthropological eye who serves as the centrepiece of the excerpts, her reserved colonial officer husband David Lorimer and the Protestant theologian missionary Dr. Samuel Zwemer from the then racially segregated United States of America who was closely cooperating with British colonial authorities in Bahrain, the Arabian Gulf and Egypt on his so-called holy mission to civilise the wayward Muslims by preaching the true gospel of Jesus Christ to them in every way possible preferably through the printed word ultimately leading to the abandonment of their errant notion of monotheism and towards embracing the doctrine of the Trinity as manifested in Jesus Christ the son of God as their saviour and redeemer and her parents the recipients of these detailed letters, a clear reflection of the prevalent attitudes in Europe and the West on the whole towards non-white peoples of the Orient, Africa and other parts of the world who were predominantly living under the yoke of Western colonialism at the time when such attitudes were considered culturally normal and widely accepted among ordinary Westerners let alone among the colonial officer class, such as the Lorimers who intrinsically espoused the colonial ideology in its purest form, an ideology theorised and promulgated by some of the most brilliant minds in modern Western thought, among them two of the greatest German philosophers Kant and Hegel, the French orientalist and Aryan racial theorist Renan, and the eminent French aristocratic imperialist politician and nationalist liberal thinker Tocqueville, who advocated for the cultural assimilation of the Algerian people through invasive and passively abusive social engineering in a manner more brutal than typical of French colonialism, resulting in the death of well over a million Algerians from the start of the military invasion in 1830 and throughout the subsequent long genocidal pacification of the sprawling spans of the Algerian terrain lasting until the turn of the twentieth century Algeria became legally part of France when it was officially annexed by the French National Assembly (Parliament) in 1848 with France thereafter seeing Algeria as a natural southern Mediterranean extension of itself, paving the way for over one and a half million French and European colonists to settle and cultivate the confiscated large swathes of Algeria's fertile arable plains alongside its long coastal area until the end of the occupation, thereupon hundreds of thousands of settlers fled the country in droves in the wake of the hard-won independence of Algeria in 1962 after one hundred and thirty-two years of settler colonial occupation following an eight-year bloody guerrilla war of independence starting in 1954 after nine years of uneasy abeyance as a result of the Sétif and Guelma punitive massacres these began shortly after the announcement of the end of World War Two on the 8th of May 1945 when tens of thousands of Algerians took to the streets in peaceful demonstrations celebrating the end of the war and calling for independence from France in the cities of Sétif and Guelma as Algeria was one of the major battlefields of the North African allies' campaign and instead of allowing demonstrators to proceed peacefully they were mown down in a hail of bullets when French police and colonial forces opened fire indiscriminately killing thousands, together with savage reprisals meted out against native villages by French and European settlers in the Algerian countryside so by the end of the bloody crackdown between fifty and seventy thousand natives lost their lives according to independent sources creating an irreconcilable rift between the Algerian people and colonial France, it was evident to the French and other worn-out European colonial powers that their days as colonial powers were numbered in the post-World War Two new bipolar world order where the real victors of the war, the United States of America and the Soviet Union were keen on liquidating European obsolete classical colonialism for their own ambitions of world dominance however, the French ferocity in dealing with the demonstrations illustrates the sacrosanct uniqueness of French Algeria in the collective French consciousness by juxtaposing the insignificance of Algerian lives to the inviolable French whose entire existence as people was to be in service of their French masters, sending a clear message to all concerned parties internally and externally of France's unwillingness to give up Algeria at any cost as an indivisible part of the French nation, setting it apart from any other colony in the French Colonial Empire, expressing the French unwavering resolve after the humiliating four-year German occupation of France during the war, in addition to being a stark rebel deterrent for the infantilised wayward natives who should be content with the status quo realities of French colonial rule as these massacres were preliminary exercises for future transgressions in the Algerian war of independence witnessing the so-called civilised French commit untold atrocities consisting of bombing villages, summary executions of combatants and civilians alike and systematic torture intended as a collective punishment for Algerians, whom the French had frequently portrayed patronisingly in official documents as ungrateful indolent capricious childlike barbaric Muslims, inherently monolithic in nature unwilling to adopt the auspicious civilising methods imparted to them by their highly civilised French colonisers, and also regurgitated in numerous French civilian narratives and reports throughout the colonial period further these degrading stereotypes, tropes and cliches were consistently invoked in French orientalist racist discourse in unison with the prevailing European orientalist discourse of the time despite contradictory accounts from the two opposing sides of the disproportionate armed struggle, Algerian death toll estimates of the conflict plausibly indicate more than one and a half million Algerians perished on the altar of freedom considering the French bloody track record since their first landing on Algerian soil in 1830 while the just Algerian armed independence struggle was officially branded as a terrorist insurrection against France by the French state and media but also by the vast majority of French people at the time whose prosperity had relied for generations on the extracted natural riches of their colonial Empire particularly after industrialisation in the mid-nineteenth century and on as with other European imperial powers, conspicuously Britain, the largest Empire in history and last but not least, the reactionary to a fault white supremacist French diplomat, scholar, anthropologist and aristocratic royalist Gobineau whose writings on Aryan racial supremacy became an inspirational beacon for his contemporary American white supremacist counterparts, to mention a few, and also prominent nineteenth-century English polymaths, biologist Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, the father of eugenics and polymath philosopher Herbert Spencer as the trio utilised and co-opted the cutting-edge scientific revolution in natural biology, the Malthusian theory of population, attributed to influential English economist Thomas Malthus, and the groundbreaking evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, coupled with the pseudo-science of scientific racism falsely informed via the prevalence of human comparative Craniometry measurements embraced and disseminated by several Western thinkers and scientists to various extents, giving rise to the development and circulation of the coined term "Social Darwinism" in Britain in the 1870s soon spreading throughout Europe and the rest of the Western world including the United States to rationalise the frantic unyielding concurrent European colonial rush and in many cases the enslavement and genocide of tens of millions of native populations in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia at the peak of European global colonial expansion, one of the best examples of this colonial rapacity is the louche "Opium Wars" when Britain at last succeeded in tipping the long-contentious issue of the trade imbalance with China in its favour by the devious, unethical state-sponsored trafficking of industrially processed mass-produced Indian-grown opium to China via the stupendous opium factories and warehouses of the piracy-rooted origins of the far-reaching long colonial arm of the British East India Company, with disastrous repercussions for tens of millions of Chinese, resulting in two uneven wars in which the pre-industrial self-isolated and proud old China was humiliatingly routed by the modern technologically advanced industrial Britain in the first between 1839-1842 and later by the combined might of Europe's two major maritime powers, Britain and France, in the second between 1856-1860 leaving an indelible mark on the Chinese collective psyche to the present, concurrently, a malevolent uniquely British Ménage à Trois of Social Darwinism, Malthusian economics and free market dynamics was formulating in the minds of the British ruling class, gradually becoming part and parcel of their worldview, demonstrating the profound influence of these ideas on broad sectors of the public schooled Oxbridge-educated British ruling elite back then, where they were regarded as widely held axioms and what a better place to put these ideas into practice than the heavily populated British India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century during a series of famines that hit India claiming the lives of nearly thirty million people as a result of natural environmental and manmade causes, the latter are mostly attributed to the self-serving highly specialised cash crop agricultural policies of the British Raj government as these cash crops, namely sugarcane, cotton, rice, wheat, indigo and jute, were mainly intended for export to Britain and its global Empire, North America and the rest of the world, putting an end to thousands of years of indigenous agricultural diversity in India, to the detriment of ordinary Indians, especially amid one of the worst purposefully concealed famines in Indian history, the devastating Great Indian Famine between 1876 and 1878 coinciding with the start of the tenure of the ruthless Social Darwinian poet and diplomat Lord Lytton (1831-1891) who served as Viceroy (The Governor-General of India) from 1876 to 1880 and whose insensate handling of the famine could not be more revealing than in his unapologetic statements of complete disregard and dismissal of calls to alleviate the suffering of millions of starving Indians, exhibiting a glaringly shocking colonial sense of entitlement, for Lytton a quintessentially imperialist byproduct of Britain's fully developed industrial revolution overwhelming free market capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century any form of intervention would be an attempt to derail the natural order of things through the basic evolutionary mechanisms of natural selection by displaying irrational sympathies towards expandable racially inferior overbreeding peasants, of course from a Malthusian-Darwinian dynamic economic perspective, however in a sardonic twist of fate while millions of Indians were dying of starvation, Viceroy Lytton and British Raj state officials were up to their ears in overseeing the undertaking of the colossal "Delhi Durbar" (lit. "Court of Delhi") possibly one of the largest formal banqueting celebratory parties in recorded history where over sixty thousand Indian guests from the highest echelons of the British Raj society were served the best foods and beverages the British Empire had to offer in an extraordinary feat of refined catering beginning on the 1st of January 1877 and lasting for a whole week, this lavish pomp and circumstance celebration was organised to proclaim Queen Victoria as Empress of India and as a stunning tribute to British imperial power in India, the centrepiece of the British Empire, nearly twenty years after quashing the great Indian rebellion of 1857 and less than three years after the dissolution of the odious East India Company in 1874 where Lord Lytton as Viceroy (representative of the British sovereign) seated on his lofty throne basking superciliously in an air of impervious imperial confidence, presided over the event receiving homage from Indian princes and maharajahs representing the Princely states of India on behalf of the Queen as the newly crowned absent overseas Empress of India, succeeding the majestic centuries-old Indian Mughal Emperors, underscoring the status of Britain as the undisputed world power in the second half of the nineteenth century arguably Lord Lytton's actions, or more accurately, inactions, may have contributed to the deaths of about ten million Indians in less than two years, given that these terrible events were a small part of the global European colonial expansion which intensified in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued sporadically in force until the early part of the twentieth century in the aftermath of the First World War and the division of the near-eastern legacy of the vanquished Ottoman Turkish Empire in the secret 1916 infamous Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement, with the consent of the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy in exchange for a share of the Anatolian spoils, especially for the Russians who had been yearning for a sea outlet on the Mediterranean since the reign of Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725) but were thwarted by the ignominious defeat of their Pré-industrial feudal Russian Empire in the Crimean War (1853-56) at the hands of the technologically and socially advanced industrial powers of Britain and France, thereby finally resolving the "Eastern question" of the feeble Ottoman Empire, the "Sick Man of Europe" once and for all, however, the Russian popular revolution in March 1917 and the subsequent Bolshevik coup in October of the same year altered the primarily Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement by reneging on the British and French allies' promises to Tsarist Russia, refusing to grant the new revolutionary hostile communist regime in Russia the previously agreed-upon Anatolian access to the Mediterranean anyhow, the Anatolian section of this secret agreement did not see the light of day due to the valiant efforts of the Turkish national military commander and World War One military hero and statesman, the father of the Turkish Republic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) (it should be noted that Mustafa Kemal was conferred with the revered surname "Atatürk" or "Father of the Turks" by the Turkish parliament in 1934 for his monumental role in foiling the Western allies' insidious plans for the Turkish people), leading the remnants of the Ottoman imperial army to victory over the Western allies, despite the fact that Western colonial expansion reached its zenith with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the industrial West's incessant need for raw materials of all sorts has continued unabated in varying forms from subtle to insidious to outwardly aggressive as evidenced by Western efforts to undermine any attempts at economic independence by some of the postcolonial non-corrupt patriotic regimes in Africa, Asia and other parts of the world by fomenting societal unrest and political instability using covert subversive operations fronted by loyalist local actors, prolonged debilitating economic sanctions and a series of staged mostly bloody military coups in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, such as Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Congo in 1960, and Chile in 1973, to name a few and in some cases direct military interventions, as the Suez crisis of 1956, and the more recent unprovoked catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, this Western gluttony for natural resources was the impetus for the surge of Western colonialism in the second half of the eighteenth century to fuel the burgeoning under way industrial revolution in Europe, principally in Britain the first modern industrial capitalist economy in the world, followed gradually but surely in industrialisation in subsequent decades by the other continental European nations of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Austria and backward Russia, not to mention the newly formed nations of Germany and Italy, among others, succeeded by the resources-rich robust United States of America on the other side of the Atlantic in the second half of the nineteenth century progressing in a more potent force throughout the ever-changing socioeconomic landscape of the early unregulated labour market, characterised by the harsh and exploitative working and living conditions of unfettered industrial capitalism, as child labour was a common and abhorrent practice in all major Western industrial nations, where children as young as three were employed in low-paying, often dangerous jobs, this situation was exacerbated by the severe societal implications of increasing technological advancements in mechanisation within industrial workplaces from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, setting the stage for the gradual implementation of the foundational great ideas of the rationalist philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke and its more concrete and practical successor thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment decidedly Voltaire, Hume, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau and Kant immensely influencing the highly learned founding fathers of the United States of America, chiefly Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison as the first three were members of the committee of five that drafted the United States Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July 1776 leading to the independence of the united principal thirteen colonies from Britain on the 3rd of September 1783 after seven years of a ferocious revolutionary war of independence against the might of the British Empire, meanwhile forging a distinct American Protestant Anglo-Saxon English speaking white identity in its wake, excluding Native Americans entirely from the white mainstay of the nascent republic who would be displaced from their expansive lands in the Midwest of the United States of America more aggressively than before and, to a great extent, exterminated in their millions in the following century as an annoying obstacle standing in the path of the divinely preordained "Manifest Destiny" of the English-speaking Old Testament Protestant-steeped racially indoctrinated gun-toting Pacific westward expanding white American settlers on their long horse-hauled rickety waggon trains, epitomised in the famous mid-nineteenth-century proverb, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" driving the vast majority of natives to the brink of extinction as a nation where they would end up on the out-of-sight fringes of America, in a few designated secluded economically deprived reservation pockets akin to those of endangered species and, to a lesser degree, the forcefully converted to Christianity African emancipated slaves who were both pagan and Muslim in their African homeland prior to being sold into chattel slavery in America who suffered beyond measure from the moment of bondage in Africa through the abominable conditions of the high mortality slave trade flagrant middle Atlantic passage journeys of unimaginable cruelty on the special purpose slave ships where human beings of all genders and ages were shackled and stacked as inanimate goods without the ability to move or relieve themselves as the dead were disposed of at sea with the survivors embarking on a lifelong of servitude and for almost a century of limited emancipation after the end of the American Civil War under Jim Crow enforced racial segregation laws whereas whites frequently used various intimidation methods of terror to instil fear in the hearts of African Americans most commonly through the extrajudicial killing of grisly mob lynchings (public hangings) spectacles intentionally staged for large crowds of spectators including children where souvenir mementos of the victims were taken as well as photographs, sometimes professionally taken and collected as postcards as these macabre tactics were meant as a form of subjugation and deterrence to prevent former slaves and their African American descendants from demanding equal rights, with the American Anglo-Saxon whites as previously stated, regarding themselves as the godly chosen people with the sole right to populate the promised land of the entire North American continent passed down to them from the first devout Calvinist Protestant Puritan English settlers in the New England colonies during the Jacobean and Caroline eras of the sixteenth century as a divinely sanctioned Manifest Destiny, not dissimilar to how the Biblical Israelites viewed Canaan in the Old Testament until the end of legal segregation in 1964 and the granting of voting rights the following year, despite this the majority of African Americans remain a disenfranchised racial minority to this day, with the spectre of law enforcement horrific brutality looming over their heads, replacing the preceding common old tactics of mob violence by white terror supremacist organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan to maintain white racial and economic hegemony for as long as possible while those momentous events of the American Revolution were taking place on the other side of the Atlantic, the French monarchy under the ineffective and weak Louis XVI and his equally inept unfairly demonised consort Queen Marie Antoinette, was rushing to exact revenge on the British by supporting the American revolutionary government in full strength militarily and financially, in its republican democratic struggle to achieve independence from France's imperial adversary Britain, even though it was in diametric opposition to the French absolutist monarchy political doctrine as it was part of the traditional age-long protracted Anglo-French animosity and world dominance rivalry particularly after the Seven Years' War which the French decisively lost to the British, resulting in France ceding most of its North American colonies to Britain, making Britain the unequalled world naval superpower for the better part of the next two centuries, putting insurmountable pressure on the already exhausted French economy owing to the crushing defeat of the Seven Years' War over a quarter century earlier, contestably the first war on a global scale, financially bankrupting France in the process, compounded by the chronic wealth inequality of the French absolutist monarchy's mediaeval feudal three-estate system, helmed by the aloof and typically unsympathetic uncompromising aristocratic nobility who lived self-absorbed decadent and parasitic idle lives in their rural opulent châteaux, a far cry from the mostly impoverished lives of the peasants working on their extensive lands, causing widespread discontent among the toiling peasants who comprised the vast majority of the rapidly growing French population along with the expanding self-made energetic urban dwelling bourgeoisie middle-classes who were trying to carve out a niche for themselves in eighteenth-century France whose salon culture was one of the primary sources for the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas among the young educated bourgeoisie and reformist elements within the old aristocracy as those salons were originally incepted by the aristocracy to fulfil their cultural recreational needs before being taken over by the rising bourgeoisie as a clear expression of the acute awareness of their self-important new socioeconomic position in society in contrast to the landed aristocracy who traditionally acquired their inherited wealth and titles through royal favour and patronage of considerable land grants for their allegiance via rendering a sundry of services to the sovereign as the rest of Europe then including military services in some instances dating back to mediaeval times interestingly the tremendous success of the American Revolution's principles of republican democracy across the Atlantic which the French monarchy unwittingly supported sowed the seeds of revolution among notable French figures from the bourgeoisie and aristocracy alike who cooperated with their American revolutionary counterparts indirectly through being assigned as part of the French military assistance to the American revolution leading to its triumph in 1783 in the restive five years preceding the official outbreak of the French Revolution on the 5th of May 1789 as attested by the participation of two giant revolutionary figures from both sides of the Atlantic, the scholarly Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America and its third president and the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocratic military commander and highly respected revolutionary in the formulation of "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" on the 26th of August 1789 followed by a number of key historic milestones most significantly the abolition of slavery in the French colonies on the 4th of February 1794 and also in the adoption of secularism principles of separation of state and church and the dissolution of feudalism inspired by the Age of Reason ideas of Voltaire, Locke and Rousseau as opposed to the symbiotic association reactionary French Catholic Church's, theological doctrine advocating the legitimacy of the divine right of Kings, contradicting Locke's and Rousseau's social contract theory and Montesquieu's conclusive theory of the separation of powers in government which was enthusiastically applied as the pivotal foundation of the revolutionary founding fathers of the United States of America's fledgling democracy and was conducive to democratic proliferation in the West at large and the unfolding of abolitionism in the early nineteenth century and inevitably the rest of the world as well as the emergence of the great progressive socialist ideas of utopian socialism represented by its most prominent proponents Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Fourier (1772-1837) and Owen (1771-1858) and the more comprehensive, highly developed and practically applicable socialist theories of their successors Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his close friend Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) and yet despite all of this as centuries of European colonialism, enslavement and genocide of non-white peoples since the Christian devout Columbus and his brutal conquistador holy warrior successors enslaved and exterminated Central and South American Indigenous peoples ostensibly in the name of Christianity, those conquistadors and the state's official Spanish Catholic clergy for the most part dehumanised and treated Indigenous natives as nonhuman animal-like beasts of burden or at best, heathen primitive savages as their French and British successors would in the following centuries in North America intertwined with the generational condensed accumulation of distinctly Franco-Germanic European racist thought in the West significantly reinforced the falsely vindicated rampant white racial supremacy hypothesis mainly during the scramble for Africa and the mass exploitation of the natural resources of the hitherto unexplored interior of the immense continent following the ill-boding Berlin conference of 1884-1885 to officially partition Africa between Western powers, initiating grotesquely unheard-of levels of atrocities of senseless cruelty in the Congo River basin by Leopold II (r. 1865-1909) of Belgium's ruthless voracious greed in plundering the untapped abundant natural riches of his massive central African privately owned dominion by giving it the ridiculously ironic euphemistic name "The Congo Free State" under the spurious ruse of bringing Western civilisation and modernity to the allegedly primitive savages of the African hinterlands through Christian missionary work and the purported stamping out of local indigenous African slavery controlled by local leaders and chieftains in collaboration with Arab slave traders from the East African coast, Leopold was given free rein with the implicit approval of the major Western powers at the said conference who benefited the most from this scandalous arrangement where Leopold II transformed it into the largest privately held slave colony in modern history complete with its own private murderous mercenary army "Force Publique" (Public Force) with Leopold remaining its legally designated sole owner from 1885 to 1908 a year before his death when he finally considered loosening his tenacious grip on his African fiefdom in the face of mounting international pressure, owing to the undeniable harrowing photographic evidence of the ongoing Congolese genocide victims' charred human remains and the mutilated living survivors with dismembered mangled limbs including those of children, brought to the fore in numerous press reports and various other official reports, namely the decisive official Casement British report of 1904 which was instrumental in Leopold II's relinquishing of the Congo, paradoxically becoming a veritably shameful embarrassment to other European colonial powers particularly Britain, this tragic chapter of Congolese colonial history was even immortalised in literature in the lauded semi-autobiographical novella "Heart of Darkness" by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, hailed ever since as an early anticolonial modernist masterpiece, all the while when these reports began to surface, the population of the Congo was declining at an alarming rate from approximately twenty million prior to Leopold II's Congo blithe appropriation to around eight million by the time of his death at which point he was understandably the richest man in the world as a consequence of all of this, it was becoming increasingly obvious by democratic Western standards at the turn of the twentieth century that it was untenable for a monarch of a constitutional parliamentary European monarchy to retain an overseas bloodstained, immensely lucrative private colony of such vast expanse he had never visited for much longer, so he reluctantly transferred its ownership to the Belgian government, to become known henceforth as the Belgian Congo until it gained independence in 1960 aside from the arrival on the African scene of a slew of staunchly imperialist adventurous fortune-seeking explorers, such as Leopold II of Belgium's African agent, the Welsh-American Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) who claimed the huge Congo basin region as private property for the Belgian king, the wily Italian-French Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (1852-1905) the French colonialist founder of the city of Brazzaville (named after its colonialist founder) the capital of the French Congo (Republic of the Congo) and the controversial Oxford-educated British-born maverick imperialist industrious businessman and South African politician Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) where he was involved through his British South Africa Company in founding the southern African territory of Rhodesia which bore his name (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) and also founded the internationally famous De Beers Diamond Consortium in South Africa in 1888 the largest diamond company in the world until the early twenty-first century and to some arguably the architect of the notorious institutionalised system of racism "Apartheid" a modern reinvention of slavery in South Africa, underpinning existing forms of racial segregation since the late eighteenth century in the country, one of several milder variances in other European-controlled parts of the world after the abolition of colour-based slavery in the West but his most enduring legacy is the reputable Oxford Rhodes postgraduate scholarship as many Rhodes Scholars have gone on to become heads of state, heads of government, or distinguished in their respective fields, moreover as for the Germans who were among the newcomers along with the Belgians and Italians on the global imperial stage, though similar in cruelty, under the direct orders of the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888-1918) the German Empire committed appalling atrocities in Africa, in line with its then other Western counterparts around the globe, specifically the 1904-1908 "Herero and Namaqua genocide" the first ethnic genocide in the twentieth century intended as a form of collective punishment and ethnic extermination for the Herero and Namaqua peoples of German South West Africa (present-day Republic of Namibia) for their insurgency against German settler-colonial rule which subjected them to intolerable relentless pressure for nearly two decades to wrest control of their arable agricultural lands, pastoral grounds and water resources, coupled with a viciously disproportionate racially discriminatory judicial system, leaving them with little choice but to rise up against their German colonial overlords since the Germans first set foot in Namibia in 1884 as part of their newly carved large oversees Empire in Africa as a consequence of the earlier alluded to Berlin conference of 1884 under the astute tutelage of master statesman Imperial German "Iron Chancellor" Otto Von Bismarck, the armed uprising represented a golden opportunity for the Germans to implement "Lebensraum" or "living space" to create a living space for the superior German people to thrive and prosper to the detriment of lesser races, an inspired distortion of Darwin's survival of the fittest theory, coined and popularised by the German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) who introduced concepts contributing to Lebensraum and Social Darwinism, Ratzel's theories would become an integral component of Nazi ideology in the two decades following his death, in particular with regard to the predominantly Slavic-populated Eastern Europe as German South West Africa became a testing ground for all of these various forms of racist theories, a mishmash of Lebensraum, scientific racism, eugenics and ableism, was emerging principally engendered by Darwin's seminal game-changing theory of evolution as this theory became the gift that keeps on giving to all Western European colonial powers including Tsarist Eurasian Imperial Russia, with ramifications reaching to the present in some Western academic circles in a quest to subtly justify white racial hegemony over other races as part of the German imperial authorities' attempt to permanently resolve the vexing issue of a racially inferior African population therefore following the inevitable conclusion of the grossly asymmetrical conflict, influenced by breakthroughs in biology, notably Darwin's evolutionary theory and the apathetic determinism of its evil spawn "Social Darwinism" as previously referred to, German imperial colonial authorities saw it as an invaluable platform for German doctors and scientists to test hitherto untested pseudo-scientific racial theories on living human beings for the first time where deadly medical experiments on expendable resistance prisoner fighters and their families were carried out in the Shark Island concentration camp, the first death camp of its kind in the world by a select team of doctors under the direct supervision of celebrated professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics, Eugen Fischer (1874-1967) an ardent future member of the Nazi party (acronym for the National Socialist German Workers' Party) and one of the main influencers of Hitler on Germanic racial superiority as clearly manifested in Hitler's manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle) with a special focus on Fischer's role in studying the mixed-race offspring "Basters" (a derogatory Dutch term for mixed-race Afrikaners) of early German and Boer (Dutch) settlers to highlight the risks of interbreeding with perceived inferior races, pushing for the sterilisation of their progeny to avert the transmission of undesirable traits to future generations as these proposals regarding the prohibition of interracial unions, euthanasia of the handicapped, mentally ill and sterilisation of racial inferiors would form the basis of the Nuremberg race laws in 1935 as would the deliberate starvation to death of the non-combatant civilian population including children in the arid Namib coastal desert by denying them access to drinking water on the direct orders of extermination by General von Trotha, on top of working many others to death as forced labour, encompassing men, women and children as young as six in public works projects such as railway construction and so on, the fortunate few thousand survivors were offered up as slaves to German settlers on the confiscated lands of the enslaved themselves as this horrific and until the early twenty-first century remained deliberately obscured, premeditated genocide in Africa served as a rough draft precursor to the colossal Nazi atrocities of death camps monstrosities a quarter-century later, conducted by Fischer's and his African team colleagues' apt students, such as the exonerated of war crimes due to a lack of evidence Otmar Freiherr von (Baron of) Verschuer (1896-1969) the human biologist and eminent geneticist and the Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Münster until his retirement in 1965 and the close mentor to the fiendish young Nazi ideologue physician Dr. Josef Mengele (1911-1979) who was given the appellation "Angel of Death" by his victims as the unrepentant Mengele was one of a handful of senior Nazi war criminals who managed to evade justice for the remainder of their lives, similar yet far less publicised ethnic cleansing atrocities were committed by both the Kingdom of Italy at the onset of the Italian colonial invasion of Libya in October 1911 and Mussolini's subsequent brutal Fascist settler colonialism in Libya where nearly all of the Libyan urban population of the five major urban centres and their livestock were forcibly displaced to sixteen massive death camps in the Libyan desert to be starved to death in just one of these documented genocidal operations from 1929 to 1934 almost seventy thousand Libyans perished as these camps served as another source of inspiration and a prelude for the German Nazis' dreadful concentration camps, in addition to Germany's own previously mentioned African imperial experience, many in the West still tentatively perceive Italian fascism as moderately less dogmatic in comparison to the horrors of German Nazism, most likely owing to the fact that the majority of Italian Fascist victims were North African Arabs and Ethiopians fortunately for the Libyans these genocidal operations ended in 1943 with the Axis's North African defeat in World War Two, ending thirty-two years of Italian settler colonial occupation during which the Libyan population was reduced from around one and a half million prior to 1911 to less than half in 1943 as it was quite plausible for the Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini to endure with the undeclared acquiescence and cooperation of the American-led capitalist liberal democratic West had Italy remained neutral as Franco's Spain, with fascism acting as a necessary evil bulwark against Soviet communism by staving off the powerful Italian left, analogous to that of Spain, from democratically gaining power through tyranny and oppression under the pretext of the ensuing Cold War, while Mussolini's genocidal demographic replacement plans for Libya would have come to fruition, turning the desert nation into a southern Mediterranean extension of Italy, with at least fifteen million Italian settlers displacing the decimated Indigenous population as referred to earlier, over four centuries of European overseas colonialism, racial slavery and genocide in the Americas, Asia, Australia and Africa, aided by apologetic reasoning, apathetic pragmatic rational thought, scientific racism pseudo-science and eugenics and in earlier cases Christian religious justifications, as Western imperialist powers employed these justifications on multiple occasions to lend meaning to their largely insatiable imperialist projects and in other instances to assuage their gnawing consciences, forging the catalyst that paved the way for the emergence of German Nazi Aryan racist ideology in the aftermath of World War One, German defeat and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles by giving rise to the rowdy racially suffused polemics of the charismatic insubstantial Austrian corporal demagogue Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and his cohorts, a multifaceted Fascist totalitarian ideology affecting the lives of everyone living under its scourge, resulting in the unleashing of atrocities of unparalleled proportions, reflecting the unique vile extremism of this spartan-like militaristic ableist racial hierarchical ideology by perfecting the callous technology of mass murder embodied in the state-of-the-art, highly methodical and extremely efficient Nazi concentration and death camp killing machine apparatus of the gruesome gas chamber and crematorium ovens, along with the mostly lethal medical human experiments on prisoners of all ages and genders, in tandem with extermination by starvation, the Nazis were able to massacre more than twenty million people, roughly six million of whom were European Jews, in what became known as "The Jewish Holocaust" or the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" a crime exemplifying the centuries-long deep-seated anti-Semitism in Europe and across the Christian West in general from the time of Constantine the Great (r. 306-337) the first Christian Roman Emperor, until Emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) made Christianity the only official religion of the Empire in the year 380 AD onwards, to the mediaeval period when Jewish people in Christian Europe were viewed with suspicion as interloping enemies of Jesus Christ these sentiments reached their highest point during the Crusades where entire Jewish communities were wiped out and their properties and valuables looted and confiscated in England, France and Germany and also as fair game easy targets in the Balkans for the self-proclaimed holy Christian warriors on their way to the Levant and the Biblical Holy Land in the east before facing the Saracen (Muslim) enemy, while Jews suffered the most in both England and France under the tacit orders of Richard I (r. 1189-1199) known as Richard the Lionheart of England and his cousin Philip II (r. 1180-1223) of France, both Kings were motivated by expediency rather than religious zealotry in dealing with their respective mounting fiscal crises, specifically the French monarch who targeted defenceless French Jews for their material wealth under the guise of religion by rallying unruly mobs of his Christian subjects as in England against their fellow Jewish neighbours who were designated as a non-citizen restricted special status community using Christian traditional anti-Jewish polemic tropes despite these tragic events, the English Jewish community continued to exist and prosper, albeit in smaller numbers, for another century until another unscrupulous warrior Crusader king, Edward I, byname Edward Longshanks (r. 1272-1307) came along in the final stages of the Crusades and issued an edict of expulsion on the 18th of July 1290 expelling all Jews from the Kingdom of England and sequestering all of their property, the plight of English Jews could not have been more aptly symbolised than by its tragic conclusion whereby a chartered ship laden with valuables belonging to wealthy Jews was craftily seized by its English captain at the behest of the King leaving the Jewish passengers stranded at low tide at the mouth of the river Thames estuary to drown once high tide arrived, it would take almost four centuries for Jews to be allowed back into England under Cromwell's fanatical Puritan Old Testament-inspired ascetic commonwealth dictatorship in 1657 and two centuries after their expulsion from England another tragedy awaited them when Granada the last Muslim Kingdom in Iberia, fell to the Catholic Castilians in 1492 both Muslims and Jews became the target of merciless terror under the newly established Spanish Inquisition in 1478 by the officially devoutly married Catholic joint sovereigns of their respective kingdoms, Monarchs Ferdinand II King of Aragon and Isabella I Queen Regnant of Castile whose marriage union in 1469 resulted in the birth of the last major political and territorial union in the Iberian Peninsula since Visigothic Spain in 1479 and in their quest to establish a socially and religiously homogeneous national identity in the newly united Catholic Spanish Kingdom after the removal of the last tolerant Andalusian multicultural multi-ethnic Arab Muslim polity hurdle represented by the culturally vibrant centre of learning of the Kingdom of Granada, effectively ending nearly eight centuries of "Dhimmi" (people of the covenant or the book) Islamic jurisdiction where Christians, Jews and other minorities lived in relative harmonious peace with very little friction under Muslim jurisprudence protection by unleashing an unmatched systematic wave of persecution by the Inquisition court as hundreds of thousands of Muslim and Jewish Spaniards were forced to convert to Catholicism over the next two centuries and an equal number fled for their lives to North Africa and Ottoman-held territories, with some Jews opting to flee to the more tolerant progressive protestant Dutch Republic after it declared independence from the Spanish Empire in 1581 and last but not least the recurring pogroms (massacres in Russian) of Jews in the Russian Empire from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, accumulating about sixteen centuries of virulent anti-Semitism in Christian Europe's collective consciousness, engendering this inveterate hatred for Jews to reveal itself in myriads of ways throughout all Nazi-occupied Europe where most of those occupied European countries witnessed some level of complicity with the Nazis in facilitating and perpetrating the heinous crime of the Holocaust genocide of nearly six million Jews by some of the local officials and ordinary citizens alike acting of their own free will, without being enticed by materialistic monetary reward or subjected to duress as in Vichy Fascist France under Marshal Petain, Romania under Antonescu's military dictatorship and Hungary, accompanied by more than fourteen million other victims who were largely overlooked, forgotten and unaccounted for until recently, merely treated as a collateral footnote in history, consisting of an amalgamation of disparate peoples, many of whom the Nazis considered racial inferiors, as Romani people (Roma Gypsies), Slavs, mixed-race Germans, or those with severe physical disabilities, chronic mental illnesses, carriers of hereditary diseases and anyone else who defied Nazi ideology, for example political opponents, intellectuals and others regardless of racial background, or was deemed incompatible with the Nazis' exceedingly narrow and dull uniform exclusionary vision of the world, a brutal conflagration villainy on an unprecedented industrial scale, utilising all of Germany's advanced technological and industrial capabilities to its nefarious goals beginning soon after the ominous Nazi party with its feared paramilitary divisions the SA and SS, hijacked power to which it was elected in free democratic elections in the midst of Germany's quite hard-hitting remorseless economic throes of the Great Depression in 1933, transforming Germany into a despotic one-party state dictatorship led by the self-proclaimed Führer (Leader) Adolf Hitler with a personality-worshipping cult dedicated to him as an infallible leader, lasting until the end of the Second World War and the unlamented downfall of the Third Reich in 1945, it is important to bear in mind that had Nazi Germany won the war the world as we know it today would have been unrecognisable, with meticulously selected fair-haired fair-skinned Germanic European Aryans as the dominant master race, leading inexorably to the steady systematic enslavement and annihilation of all other human races on the planet, ironically it took tens of millions of deaths mostly of white Europeans by the Nazis, for scientific racism and eugenics to fade from popular consciousness in the West furthermore the Emily Lorimer letters provide a glimpse into the mindset of some of the highly educated middle-class members of both genders of the rapidly growing socially mobile industrialised British society particularly women, in pre-World War One as some of these well-educated but partially enfranchised restless women became involved to varying degrees in women's emancipation activism initially in the less successful decades-long struggle of the miscellaneous peaceful women's suffrage movements since the first woman suffrage committee saw the light in Manchester in 1865 and later in its more successful radically violent militant famous offshoot the suffragette movement, founded and led in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) and her shrewd organisationally skilled 23-year-old daughter Christabel as those movements and their numerous splintered groups collectively fought for the inalienable equal right of women to vote in public elections, until it finally bore fruit in the aftermath of the First World War through consecutive acts of Parliament in 1918 and 1928 after the enormous sacrifices made by the staunch and courageous suffragist heroines, ranging from being verbally abused, physically roughed up and sexually assaulted by police during demonstrations to imprisonment, hunger strikes and the mounting to torture cruel response of police authorities forcefully feeding female imprisoned hunger strikers and for some even paying with their lives to advance such a noble cause as the iron-willed and highly committed Emily Davison (1872-1913) the first martyr of the movement, though not the conservative intransigent British imperialist ideologue well-off empowered woman, Emily Lorimer who unsurprisingly was adamantly opposed to granting women the vote, deeming such a move as a subversive attempt against the traditional ruling establishment as was her legendary contemporary the solitary, steely, upper-class, conventional gender role-challenging and perhaps the first stalwart heroine of the British Empire in modern times, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) a fierce opponent of British female suffrage and emancipation the multifaceted, remarkably industrious, Oxford-educated, highly empowered, extremely privileged Arabist political and intelligence officer, administrator, and grand and military strategist, to name a few of her many preoccupations and interests, and the de facto ruler of Iraq until her sudden most likely suicide drug-induced death after being informally delegated to her by Iraq's High Commissioner Percy Cox an admirer of her who held her wise judgement in high regard, ruling the country via her formal position as the advisor and mentor to the newly British-appointed Hashemite King of Iraq Faisal I in 1921 who was under her total tutelage wielding immense power and influence through him as the real power behind the throne and thus garnering such status among the Iraqi elite that she was given the Turkic female honorary title "Al-Khatun" (The Queen) strikingly she was the first female to hold such positions within the merit-based male-dominated British administrative system including the army, Bell unexpectedly became a champion of women's rights in Iraq, playing an important role in the enfranchisement of Iraqi women by lending her support to already existing local Iraqi women's emancipation initiatives in accordance with the forcibly imposed British colonial grafting process policy in the colonies once the necessity arose to apply urgent reforms to create needed stability as in Bahrain and also to establish an Indigenous popular power base for Britain among marginalised Iraqi women and liberal educated Iraqi elites particularly in Baghdad and other urban centres following the partial granting of the vote to British women in 1918 not to mention her significant contribution to the successful execution of the inextricably linked Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration on the ground, against her justified reservations on the latter begetting future geopolitical tumultuous changes with unremitting disastrous consequences for the peoples of the region until now at the 1921 Cairo conference, alongside T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Herbert Samuel, Percy Cox, Field Marshal Allenby, among others along with the aristocratic resolute colonialist Winston Churchill who masterminded, convened and chaired the conference as the then colonial secretary, other than her above-mentioned anti-suffrage stance, Emily Lorimer was naturally opposed to Arab independence despite her fondness for Arabic literature and language as a British imperialist advocate and the loyal wife of a colonial officer, she firmly believed in the British Empire as a benevolent global force for good, a provider of civilisation and modernity as was the case with other European colonial powers in a world riddled with ignorance and backwardness to say the least as one would expect from a Eurocentric perspective back then, so giving Arabs independence was an unthinkable travesty and even more so to a limited form of Irish self-government, falling short of full independence for the freedom-hungry Irish people who had endured in excess of seven centuries of foreign Anglo-British oppressive feudal exploitation since the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 until independence from Britain in 1922 a relentlessly demeaning and humiliating discriminatory colonial and partially settler multi-layered occupation where the Irish had to bear the brunt of the cultural and socioeconomic changes and upheavals occurring in their English overlords' homeland throughout the long occupation, most notably the so-called "Tudor conquest of Ireland" during the volatile and violent Tudor epoch of Henry VIII's (r. 1509-1547) dramatic religious cataclysms of English reformation and those of his fickle Tudor successors' sixteenth century English monarchs particularly his religiously opposing daughters and equally ruthless half-sisters Mary I (r. 1553-1558) the short reigning devotedly raised Catholic dubbed "Bloody Mary" for her persecution of English Protestants and Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) the strong independent-minded, highly intelligent, multilingual, unwed, long reigning Protestant the founder of the maritime piracy-based English Empire what would become known more than a century later in the early eighteenth century as the British Empire, Cromwell's grim Puritan Anti-Catholic draconian conquest of Catholic Ireland and culminating in the partly British-incurred and exacerbated devastating Great Famine also known as the Irish Potato Famine which occurred from 1845 to 1852 due to the unbridled, industrial liberal-driven free market economics of the British ruling liberal (Whig) party cabinet in the mid-nineteenth century, Britain treated the famine afflicting their colonised Catholic white Gaelic Irish neighbours no differently than the series of famines that struck their brown Indian counterparts thousands of kilometres away in the earlier part of the nineteenth century where the British were equally just in being unjust in their indignities towards both colonised peoples, with the only advantage the Irish had was an escape route through the Atlantic since the Biblical-like seven-year Irish famine resulted in over a million fatalities and nearly twice as many emigrating to North America the majority of whom went to the thriving rapidly industrialising United States, forming a large prosperous community in the following century with a small minority heading for the French-speaking Catholic Quebec in Canada and notwithstanding all of this, the Anglo-Irish Emily Overend Lorimer remained an apathetically steadfast British imperialist, viewing the long-proposed meagre Irish self-government (home rule) after centuries of exploitative and occasionally cruel Anglo-British colonialisation of Ireland as a superfluous luxury.

 

17 March 1912.

 

We had an amusing invasion of three weird-looking Frenchmen the other day.

 

They came up the Gulf on a tour - possibly prospecting for commercial openings - with only a few days to spare and without making any enquiries about conditions. They chose to travel on an Arab steamer - which must in itself be a strange experience. They were greatly disconcerted to learn that if they went on to Bushier their boat would then be in Quarantine and they would not be allowed to land at other ports - not even to sightsee.

 

They decided then to stay at Bahrain till their boat should call again on its downward way, so they landed here to look for a hotel!

 

They had introductions to an Arab merchant here and he is generously giving them quarters - otherwise pretty well unprocurable but we wonder how they will like native houses and native food for 10 days. They then came on to us to ask could not Lock arrange that they should be exempted from Quarantine if they went on; he had to explain that this was not in his power nor in anyone else's that he would, if necessary, have to go into Quarantine himself. On this they thought they would like to go and telegraph home; we had to break it gently to them that there was no Telegraph but that they would enjoy like their betters postal communication once a fortnight. Dr. Zwemer was with us when they called and as soon as they were gone, we had a very hearty laugh over their dismay. We have asked them to dine on Thursday next; they ought by that time to be ready to enjoy European food even if our cooking etc. is not quite up to the best Parisian standards. We are longing to know how they communicate with their host who knows nothing but Arabic while one of them knows a little Hindustani!

 

28 March 1912.

 

We had the Frenchmen to dinner one evening; they were very pleasant; M. Cartier the spokesman of the party appears to be the scion of a large firm of jewellers (the name one doubtless ought to know) who have houses in New Bond St., 1 Rue de la Paix and Fifth Avenue, his companion M. Richard was much quieter and more gentlemanly but was scarcely allowed a word in edgeways so it wasn't easy to judge, the third was a Parsi gentleman who was acting as interpreter.

 

They were all much amused at the contrast between the native lunch they had had, squatting round the orthodox sheep's corpse, and the civilized dinner! As a matter of fact, they did not suffer so much for lack of a hotel as they might have done, for they had their own bedding, etc., and their own cook and they seemed to be enjoying their enforced stay.

 

Our tennis party on the 19th. Was a great success; it was the first of our At Homes that unquestionably did not at any moment hang fire. When the guests arrived Lock took the only three real players down to a men's four while I gave the others tea; after this, we sat on the veranda watching what for Bahrain was quite decent tennis, then the players had tea and I sent off a set of amateurs to pat ball to each other. The cook had again surpassed himself in cakes and Jafar managed the recurring hot teapots etc. very well.

 

Since then, we have been playing almost every day; most often Messrs Macpherson and Holst arrive to join us; two afternoons M. Cartier turned up; he must be a pretty useful player, as Archie calls it, when in form and even as it was / on the strange court with a borrowed racket he gave a good account of himself, though I am happy to say that Lock gave him a good beating. Over his whiskey and soda afterwards he was talking about the charms of chess and to my great dismay, Lock offered him a game with me. I was afraid he might be really good and ''stuffy” over my amateur play, so I went very gingerly at it at first; but I soon found that his knowledge of it was not very deep and had the pleasure of giving him a nice mate, which I repeated twice the following evening.

 

It was good fun to play again though not so much fun as if he had been a less easy victim.

VA (Grayson County)

 

This log cabin was originally built by the Pendry family on nearby Shippies Branch. It was moved into the park in 1973 and restored. The oak logs and natural stone chimney have been chinked with clay and the roof is of hand-rived oak shingles. The cabin is presently providing housing for the interpreter at Grayson Highlands. (from local signage)

Korea, 1946-'47

Photographer: Major Cecil B. White, US Army

 

Interpreters Ranger Cabin at Grayson Highlands State Park

Interpreter's cabin.

Interpreter's cabin.

An Iraqi interpreter working with the British army in Basrah. He hides his identity because he is local - and therefore likely to be recognised. His work comes with great risk attached to it, but in an area of high unemployment his command of English is the key to a very good wage. October 2006.

Interpreters work during President Joe Biden’s and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s joint press conference Thursday, July 15, 2021, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Erin Scott)

A park interpreter shows a day user a water feature. Photograph taken by Brock Ogilvie @ the Day Use Beach

Interpreter Benjamin Wilkinson tells U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry the name and age of 24-year-old Ba Thanh, a Viet Cong soldier the Secretary killed in a battle on February 28, 1969, as he speaks with 70-year-old Vo Ban Tam - who was part of a team that attacked the Secretary's Swift Boat - as they meet on January 14, 2017, at the Nam Can Boat and Bus Station in Nam Can, Vietnam, while the Secretary visited the place where he started his career in public service as a U.S. Navy officer, and learned about war reconciliation efforts and work to curb environmental damage in the broader Mekong River Delta. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

fine photo of dry plant taken with sony a57 and wallace heaton 135mm bellows macro lens on manual setting

Interpreters are a crucial part of the legal system. Check out these great "Tips for working with Legal Interpreters"

Secretary of State John Kerry And Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio de Aguiar Patriota - After Their Meeting

   

FOREIGN MINISTER PATRIOTA: (Via interpreter) I was mentioning that he has a good knowledge of Portuguese in function of Mrs. Teresa Kerry. She’s also Portuguese.

   

But I would like to say that we had a meeting, a working meeting, this morning in this, which is the first visit of Secretary of State John Kerry to Brazil, to South America actually. He had a stopover at Bogota, which we consider to be very positive. It is our second meeting. I have kept a meeting with the Secretary of State in D.C. the past 20th of May. And moreover, the – aside from the meeting we had, we will receive him now for lunch in a short while, in which we will have also representatives from the legislative, the presidents of the foreign relation committees, as Senator Kerry has been, himself part of, also journalists, representatives from the civil society, and as all of you know, Secretary of State will be received by President Rousseff later this afternoon at the Planalto Palace.

   

Secretary of State John Kerry requires no presentation. He’s a known character to Brazil, a former candidate to the U.S. presidency, a senator of – from 1985-2013, president of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate between 2009-2013. And when he came to be the Secretary of State in the second term of President Obama, he is bringing with himself a commitment but several causes, which are extremely valued throughout Brazil: a commitment to sustainable development, all the agenda related to climate change, also a decisive support to the retaking of peace efforts in the Middle East, and we would like to congratulate the Secretary of State for his own efforts, which shall take us to a process within nine months’ time to be producing results.

   

In the last meeting this morning, we examined items in the bilateral agenda, which present, as all of you know, a robust trade and investment agenda. The U.S. are still the country with the largest stocks of investment in Brazil, the second largest partner of Brazil now with a growing deficit on the Brazilian side. We’ve also talked about that for over 30 bilateral mechanisms involving areas which go from energy to racial equality, gender equality, contact with the private sector, the universities, the civil society. Today, the United States is the largest destination of Brazilians within the Science Without Borders program. It’s 5,800 students. That is increasing every day.

   

Anyways, the potential of the relationship is even greater, especially now in a moment in many observers are referring to the relationship between Brazil and the U.S. as a relationship which is growing more and more. It’s getting more mature. But this maturity includes encompassing more relevant themes, especially in a moment we are about to redefine our contacts with a strategic partnership. President Obama in his letter to invite President Rousseff to visit, which will take place in October this year, referring to a strategic partnership with Brazil, President Rousseff responded with the same terminology.

   

At the same time, I should not forget to mention that we’re now facing a new type of challenge in our bilateral relationship. It is a challenge which has to do with wiretapping, telephone calls. And in case these challenges are not solved in a satisfactory way, we run the risk of casting a shadow of distrust on our work. We have established technical communication means, political channels are open as well. We have clarified everything that was requested. But these are not an end in themselves, so this doesn’t meet – accept the status quo. We need to discontinue practices which are an attempt to sovereignty in the relationship between the states and which can violate the individual freedoms that both of our countries are very much fond of.

   

Let me make it very clear that there is a broad space for us to advance. We have recently received the Secretary of Agriculture. We will receive the Secretary of Energy in a few days’ time. The mechanism with economic and commercial cooperation TECA is going to be meeting in September at the level of vice ministers. In September as well, we will have the third conference for innovation, Brazil and U.S, the working group for the scientific and technological committee. On the same theme and at the same time, we should not minimize the relevance acquired so far regarding espionage.

   

Within a few moments, we’ll keep on talking to Secretary Kerry in an environment which I believe is a symbol to our commitment with democracy, freedom, a good government, freedom of the press, opening with the civil society. And so this will be an occasion for us to hear a bit more of the last developments in this retaking of the peacemaking process between Israelis and Palestinians. Also, we had an opportunity to talk about Syria and other situations on my part.

   

As well, I shall be ready with a dispositioned and even interested of making an updated snapshot of a region, which as I have mentioned to Secretary Kerry today, I think we’re distinguished for being a space of democracy, economic growth, social justice with enough conditions which are unprecedented worldwide.

   

Thank you very much. Mr. Kerry.

   

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, bom dia. I’m happy to be here with everybody. Thank you very much. Thank you, Foreign Minister Patriota for hosting me here today. I’m very happy to be back in Brazil. I have great memories of my first trip here in 1992 to the Earth Summit in Rio, and I’m happy to be back here now and very grateful for the opportunity to continue the good dialogue that Antonio and I have had since the day we first talked on the telephone when I was appointed to this job.

   

Even when I came to Brazil back in 1992 for the Earth Summit, I could sense this incredible energy in Brazil, and I could feel firsthand the amazing commitment of Brazil to try to grab the future and particularly back then to address the issue, which was then even urgent, of climate change. I’m pleased to see that over the years Brazil’s commitment to environmental stewardship has continued right up until this day, and there have been very important efforts on the reduction of deforestation problems, alternative renewable energy problems, biofuels, other kinds of initiatives, but also very important, last year’s hosting of Rio+20.

   

And for those of us who have been involved in the challenge of climate change for all of that time, I think it was a bittersweet moment to measure 20 years, when the hopes of 20 years before we had to acknowledge had not yet been realized. So the challenge is ahead of us, for all of us, and I know that the United States has a great commitment under President Obama to take our own initiatives, not even to wait for congressional action, but to move administratively in order to do our part. I know we can continue to work with Brazil on this issue of climate, and we look forward to doing so.

   

Our mission is very, very clear. We need to inspire meaningful reform and action within the Major Economies Forum. We need to lead the effort to phase down hydrofluorocarbons in the Montreal Protocol. And together, Brazil and the United States need to join with other countries in an effort to negotiate a climate agreement in 2015 that is ambitious and flexible and that works for all of us.

   

Now, obviously we have also had some moments of disagreement, and I’m sure I’ll have an occasion in the questions to be able to address some of that with you. But the United States and Brazil – I want to emphasize, rather than focus on an area of disagreement – the United States and Brazil share a remarkable and dynamic partnership. Every single day we work together to advance economic opportunity, human rights, environment protection, regional peace and security, democracy, as well as major global challenges in the Middle East and elsewhere – Syria for instance and the question of the humanitarian challenge in Syria.

   

The United States respects and appreciates that Brazil is one of the world’s largest free market democracies, and our partnership is only made stronger as all of the world continues to grow. The United States recognizes and welcomes and greatly appreciates the vital leadership role, the increasing leadership role, that Brazil plays on the international stage – excuse me – and that ranges from its participation in global peace initiatives to its stability operations and promotion of human rights and its efforts to try to help either promote the peace or keep the peace in certain parts of the world.

   

Through the Global Peace Operations Initiative, we are working with Brazil and the United Nations to build the capacity of countries to be able to contribute themselves to peacekeeping operations. Brazil has provided more than 1,400 uniformed personnel to the stabilization mission in Haiti. We’re very grateful for that. And we’re also exploring opportunities for closer collaboration on peacekeeping in Africa.

   

It’s fair to say that protecting universal rights is at the very heart of the shared values between Brazil and the United States. And together, we remain committed to advancing those rights and to advancing the cause of equality for all people.

   

The United States also supports a very vibrant and active Organization of American States, and the OAS Charter reminds us of our responsibilities to offer our citizens liberty and to create the conditions in which all people can reach their aspirations, can live their aspirations. We believe that it is important that Brazil engage fully with the OAS and use its strong voice for a hemispheric vision of democracy and fundamental freedoms.

   

Now, our relationship is not only rooted in shared values, it is literally strengthened every single day by our citizens. Each year thousands of people travel between the United States and Brazil, forging new ties between our countries. Student exchanges under President Rousseff’s Scientific Mobility Program, which I had the privilege of visiting this morning and sensing firsthand the amazing energy and excitement and commitment of these young people, that’s something we share in common. And together with President Rousseff’s program and President Obama’s 100,000 Strong in the Americas Initiative, we are encouraging together approaches to address the shared concerns of our young people to include social inclusion and to work towards things like environmental sustainability.

   

Our exchange programs also ensure that today’s generation is going to be ready to respond to the enormous challenges of tomorrow and of the future. The vibrant and the growing connection between the United States and Brazil, between our governments and our citizens, is absolutely one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century. I said to Antonio, and I believe this and I know President Obama believes this and he communicated this when he came here recently, the future belongs to young people. Our job is to lay the groundwork for them, is to provide the opportunity for them to make the most of education and of the technologies and jobs that will define the future.

   

So I look forward, as President Obama does, not only to growing this partnership but to finding ways to work on our common values, our common interests, and our common hopes for our peoples. And we very much look forward to welcoming President Rousseff to Washington, D.C., for her meeting and a state visit with President Obama and our country in October. And with that, I’d be happy to answer any questions.

   

MODERATOR: (Inaudible.)

   

QUESTION: (Via interpreter) Secretary Kerry, we wanted – if you could, we wanted you to speak briefly about this issue of espionage and if by any chance Brazil – the United States will stop spying on the rest, and what guarantees the U.S. Government can give if the answer is no that you’re not going to stop spying, please what will you do? Do you think you can have deteriorated or hampered this relationship with Brazil?

   

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, obviously, first of all, I did not think it would be a surprise if I got a question on that subject, so I wanted to have a chance to be able to share some thoughts with you, and now I’m happy to address that and other things.

   

But very, very important, I ask the people of Brazil – and I will answer the question very directly. But I ask the people of Brazil to stay focused on the important realities of our relationship, the bilateral relations between our countries which continue to grow stronger and stronger. We share democratic values and we share a commitment to diversity and we share a determination to improve opportunities for our people. And the U.S.-Brazil relationship has the opportunity to provide extraordinary positive global impact if we continue to work together on these kinds of issues, on the environment and science and technology and sustainable energy, nonproliferation, on access to education, on disaster management, and our strong trade ties, our strong investment ties, our energy cooperation, our sustainable development cooperation. All of these things need to remain in the forefront of people’s minds as you consider this question of the national security revelations that have upset some people and created questions in others.

   

Let me be crystal clear: I can’t discuss with you operational issues, but I can tell you very definitively the Congress of the United States passed on a law after 9/11 when we were attacked by al-Qaida, and we began a process of trying to understand before they attacked us what these kinds of plots might be. The executive department of our government, after a law was passed by Congress which met our legal standards and passed the muster of law, then implemented the program with the supervision of our judiciary. So all three branches of the American Government have been involved in reviewing this particular program.

   

Now, we have engaged with the Brazilian Government very, very directly, and I want to express my appreciation to the Foreign Minister and to Brazilian officials who have visited with us in Washington, and we are here now and we will continue to have this dialogue. And we will have this dialogue with a view to making certain that your government is in complete understanding and complete agreement with what it is that we think we must do to provide security not just for Americans but for Brazilians and for people in the world.

   

Over the last years, regrettably, a number of countries – a number of groups – not countries – a number of groups in the world have individually targeted not just American interests but free interests in the world. There have been bombings in many places in the world. Innocent people have lost their lives. And what the United States has been trying to do is prevent these things from happening beforehand by knowing what others might be plotting.

   

So I would respectfully say to everybody that the United States, as the President said last Friday, the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations in order to protect their citizens, in order to protect our citizens. And our activities are firmly based on law and they are subject to oversight by all of the branches of our government. We are convinced that our intelligence collection has positively helped us to protect our nation from a variety of threats, not only protect our nation but protect other people in the world, including Brazilians.

   

And so we have engaged now with the Brazilian Government, we will stay very closely engaged with the Brazilian Government, and I can promise you that President Obama is determined that the United States will live up to the highest standards both of cooperation, of transparency, and accountability, in keeping with our ability to be able to protect ourselves and to protect others in the world.

   

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, Mr. Foreign Secretary, you have said that all the South American ministers are united in condemning the alleged spying, and Brazil was asked for a formal explanation from the United States on this. What explanation have you received today? And also, you mentioned that if this situation is not resolved in a satisfactory manner that it risks perhaps more distrust in the relationship. So what are you looking for the United States to do?

   

FOREIGN MINISTER PATRIOTA: (Via interpreter) Well, in a summarized way I believe that you do know of the fact that ever since the first moment when these news came to be, we did get in touch with the U.S. Government by means of Ambassador Thomas Shannon here in Brasilia, and also the Embassy in D.C., and we opened dialogue channels, communication channels, both technical and political, And at the same time, there have been individual protests in Brazil and other countries in the region, as you all said, and on July 12th, a meeting by MERCOSUR adopted a decision which did instruct the countries – Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, who had subscribed – to start with the UN Secretary General taking this to the Security Council at the UN.

   

These demonstrations took place. They do reflect a considerable concern, and I think it’s legitimate, by the region and the international community in general, what practices which may be an attempt to the sovereignty of the very countries and to the rights of individuals. There have been demonstrations regarding the violation of human rights, especially from the High Commissioner of the UN for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.

   

And as a matter of fact, this clarification process, as I have mentioned, it’s not an end in itself. What we do consider is that the United States will never find a better partner in the fight against international terrorism and several other threats to homeland security as they are taking forth in a transparent way. International partnerships, when they’re done fully transparently, they do strengthen the trust. And when there is a lack of knowledge or lack of information on the country they may weaken this trust, so what we want to avoid from happening.

   

SECRETARY KERRY: Can I just add, if I may, to that? We’re not surprised and we’re not upset that Brazil would ask questions. Absolutely understandable. And Brazil is owed answers with respect to those questions, and they will get them. And we will work together very positively to make certain that this question, these issues, do not get in the way of all the other things that we talked about. And we will guarantee that Brazil and other countries will understand exactly what we’re doing, why and how, and we will work together to make sure that whatever is done in a way that respects our friends and our partners, and that is what we’re going to achieve.

   

QUESTION: (Via interpreter) Flavia (inaudible) Sao Paulo. Let me change the subject here a little. I would like to know if the topic regarding the issue on some visas in – to Brazilians, did you two talk about it? And is there a deadline for the waiver of the visa, or exception from a visa? And if the visit – President Rousseff to D.C. in October can be decided on her trip coming October?

   

FOREIGN MINISTER PATRIOTA: (Via interpreter) Well, briefly I mentioned that there are several initiatives and also meetings that are programmed for the next few months, which are included within those prospective preparation of the state visit to the U.S.

   

In one of the works that we’re going to be developing will be exactly this issue of exempting the visas to Brazilians. As you all know, there is a proposal which is known as the Global Entry – in English – which is being discussed between the two sides, and I understand that the last counterproposal of Brazil of a language to accommodate a few of the issues we have over here is under exam right now. And a declaration can be agreed upon in September, coming September, in which we’ll then have a text during her visit. So we do consider that. In this term, progress has been encouraging, satisfactory, and we will have some results soon to come.

   

Now related to the elimination or the exemption of the visa itself is a more complex issue, which we’ll need more time for discussion.

   

SECRETARY KERRY: Let me just say that we are – is that on? Yes. We’re committed to as vast a visa application processing process as possible. And we’re very proud that we have streamlined our operations over the course of the last year. We very much want to see more Brazilians coming to the United States for business, for tourism, for study, visiting friends, relatives, and so forth. So it’s very much in our interest to facilitate this.

   

Last year, we processed about one million visa requests all across Brazil, and we have managed to make the appointment times – the wait for those visas is down to either five days or under – less than five days. We have spent millions of dollars to upgrade our facilities in order to try to make this happen more effectively, and we’re going to be opening new consulates in Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre. So we’re moving as much as we can to facilitate this.

   

And finally, we want to continue to consult very closely with Brazil in order to make sure we have legal statutory requirements that have to be met to allow for a reciprocal free visa travel under the visitors program. And we hope to get there. I’m confident we can, but we just need to continue to work together. But I promise you, we welcome as many people to come and visit and be able to move freely back and forth as is possible, and I’m confident we’ll get to the day when we have an open visa program.

   

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, we understand that earlier today you spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu, including presumably about the settlements, which by some counts have reached 3,100 new or advancing units appeared in recent days. What can you tell us about that conversation and your message to the Prime Minister? Have you had a similar conversation with President Abbas? Are the Palestinians still on board for the peace talks? And finally, what would you say to those who say that the Israelis are doing this – they’re playing along with their initiative – but that they’re really too divided to make the hard decisions for peace? Thank you.

   

SECRETARY KERRY: No. Well, I – thank you. It’s a very appropriate question. It’s timely, obviously. Yes, I did speak with Prime Minister Netanyahu this morning, and I, first of all, conveyed to him my hopes for his speedy recovery. As you know, he’s just had surgery, and he’s dealing with these issues in the middle of that, and I can tell you that’s obviously not easy.

   

We had a very frank and open, direct discussion about the question of settlements. Let me make it clear: The policy of the United States of America with respect to all settlements is that they are illegitimate, and we oppose settlements taking place at any time, not just the time of the peace process.

  

But – here’s the but – that said, Prime Minister Netanyahu was completely upfront with me and with President Abbas that he would be announcing some additional building that would take place in places that will not affect the peace map, that will not have any impact on the capacity to have a peace agreement. That means that it is building within the so-called blocs in areas that many people make a presumption – obviously not some Palestinians or others – will be part of Israel in the future. He has specifically agreed not to disturb what might be the potential for peace going forward.

   

Now, we still believe it would be better not to be doing it, but there are realities within life in Israel that also have to be taken into account here going forward. President Abbas understood that coming into these talks. That’s why these talks are pressed into this time period of nine months. That’s why we all understand there is urgency, as I said yesterday, to getting to the discussion of borders and security. If you resolve the borders of Israel – and you can only do that also resolving the security issues for Israel – you have resolved any questions about settlements, because then you know what is in Israel and what is not. And so the sooner we get to that discussion the better.

   

I will be talking to President Abbas today. We have a call scheduled for later. And he is committed to continue to come to this negotiation, because he believes the negotiation is what will ultimately resolve this issue, not a temporary decision or restraint. So we will continue to work this very, very closely with Israelis and we will continue to work it very closely with Palestinians. And our hope is that we get to the real issues on which we ought to be focusing, which are the final status settlement – the final status issues. And I’m very hopeful we will get there very, very soon.

   

FOREIGN MINISTER PATRIOTA: (Via interpreter) Just briefly, at the same time that we support the efforts of Secretary Kerry and we are bringing up to the table the Israeli and Palestinian negotiation, we do – we do – we are against the Palestinian settlements, which are done against the UN Security Council resolutions, and they do represent a violation of the international law. We do consider that this kind of fact will not contribute for creating a propitious environment for the understandings of the whole international community, and Brazil specifically would love to see coming at the end of this nine month period time upon which negotiators will be working.

   

Let me also mention that I have encouraged Secretary Kerry to give more relief to the participation of the civil society in Israel and the Palestine along this peacemaking process. I was well impressed when I visited the region last year in October and when I saw that in the – among the civil society on both ends there are voices that are quite committed to peace and they do convey messages which are a bit different from the ones we’re used to seeing. These messages are in repudiation of violence and consumed facts and the establishment of settlements, which are not favorable for the understanding for peace.

   

SECRETARY KERRY: That’s it. Okay.

   

FOREIGN MINISTER PATRIOTA: (Via interpreter) Thank you.

 

# # #

August 13, 2013

 

Itamaraty Palace

Brasilia, Brazil

  

Papel Kraft 25x25cm

 

Diagrama em: Origami for Interpreters

U.S. Army interpreter, Mohamed Said, instructs soldier of the Djiboutian Army’s 1st Quick Reaction Regiment his sector of fire during a training scenario at Camp Ali Oune, Djibouti, Feb. 2, 2011.

 

Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Lindsey

 

ALI OUNE, Djibouti– Under an overcast sky, nearly 200 members of the Djiboutian Army’s elite 1st Rapid Action Regiment honed their infantry skills, mentored by members of the U.S. Army National Guard’s 2nd Combined Arms Battalion, 137th Infantry Regiment.

 

The training included instruction on squad movements, convoy operations, contact drills, camp security and marksmanship, and was part of a one-month course which began Jan. 16 and culminated with a graduation Feb. 10. The instruction included mortar crew training and a combat engineering course, according to U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Nelson Perkins, mission commander and member of Charlie Company.

 

“Our mission here is to mentor the Djiboutian military as they prepare for upcoming missions. We’re trying to help them so they are capable of preventing conflict, establishing regional stability, and protecting coalition interests here,” said Staff Sgt. Travis Elder, an infantry squad leader with the 137th, who is a sheriff’s deputy in his hometown located near Topeka, Kan.

 

“My team and I are out here mentoring the soldiers and helping them along, basically giving them more tools for their toolbox. We’re showing them things that have helped us get through certain operations, and we want to help them so they can get through their future missions without any problem,” he said.

 

One of the biggest challenges the instructors faced was the language barrier due to few Djiboutian soldiers speaking English, according to Sgt. Jonathan Moyer, a team member with Echo Company. Instructors relied heavily on 2nd Lt. Omar Ali, Djibouti Army 2nd Company commander, who is fluent in four languages, and Mohamed Said, a Somali-born U.S. Army interpreter.

 

Throughout the morning, the small groups practiced team movements, and communicated contact and direction of fire. Loud whistle bursts signified enemy contact, and the Djiboutian soldiers moved succinctly, went into the prone position and assumed their staggered firing positions.

 

The regiment, which was established in 1991 and is comprised of a number of 20-year combat veterans, is the first unit in the Djiboutian Army called to deploy during a contingency, according to Ali. The regiment also provides border security on the Somaliland border located approximately seven miles from the camp.

 

“The goal for my soldiers is to prepare them for their mission and especially for a deployment under the United Nations, like they did in Haiti and Central Africa,” Ali said, who has been in the army since 2001. He attended an officer’s course with Germany’s mountain troops from 2004-2008 and will soon attend the Infantry Career Captain’s Course at Fort Benning, Ga.

 

According to Ali, the training is part of a continuation of training that began in September 2010 that included effective methods of instruction, commander operation skills course, a command post exercise, and company grade and noncommissioned officer courses.

 

Just one month ago, the newly-formed training camp consisted of just six concrete pads. Today the camp consists of about 12 tents, a mosque and a large covered classroom area.

 

“Camp Ali Oune is actually the first of its kind. The Djiboutians don’t have any bases here on the Somali border, and this camp is supposed to be here for quite a while. They will be utilizing the camp as a training area and for continuing operations to keep this region safe,” he said.

 

About two miles away in the shadow of a steep hill, other members of the Rapid Action Regiment sharpened their marksmanship skills using the Russian PKM 7.62-mm machine gun, which is the equivalent of the M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon. Automatic gunfire and the ricochet of rounds echoed from the large rock-covered hill as each two-man team practiced firing in staccato bursts of three and five rounds.

 

“Very well done,” one of the instructors exclaimed after seeing a bullseye on the target of one team.

 

Ali said the training and mentoring provided by the 137th is beneficial because the cadre of instructors bring real-world operational experience.

 

“We already had a good relationship with the U.S. Army, and I have to say it’s a good thing and we have a good image of the U.S. Army,” Ali said.

 

To learn more about U.S. Army Africa visit our official website at www.usaraf.army.mil

 

Official Twitter Feed: www.twitter.com/usarmyafrica

 

Official Vimeo video channel: www.vimeo.com/usarmyafrica

 

Photo Shoot on first day in costume.

NW Parks Interpreters - Artifact Display

Interpreters at work during the first day of the General Assembly's seventy-third general debate.

 

UN Photo/Loey Felipe

25 September 2018

United Nations, New York

Photo # 777492

Great Northern Steam Fair 2015, Beamish Museum

 

Beamish - The Living Museum of the North

 

Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum is an open-air museum located at Beamish, near the town of Stanley, County Durham, England. The museum's guiding principle is to preserve an example of everyday life in urban and rural North East England at the climax of industrialisation in the early 20th century.

 

Much of the restoration and interpretation is specific to the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, together with portions of countryside under the influence of industrial revolution in 1825. On its 300 acres (120 ha) estate it utilises a mixture of translocated, original and replica buildings; a huge collection of artefacts, working vehicles and equipment; as well as livestock and costumed interpreters.

Stirling Castle

Stirling, Stirlingshire, Scotland, UK

Interpreters - working hand in hand with MPs. Ranghild “Georgie” Curth works on a translation for MP investigators. (May 1979) Photo courtesy of Schweinfurt PAO Crusader

Secretary Bird from Origami for Interpreters by Roman Diaz.

 

Folded from a 10 inch sheet of Strathmore 41gsm tracing paper.

photo © Michael Malyszko

Following a competition, thirteen artists were selected to paint life-sized model horses, basing their design on the name of a 2000 Guineas winner.

The 13 horses, which have been painted by artists using the theme of Guineas winners, are part of the project Horse About Newmarket, an initiative organised by Newmarket Town Council and the brainchild of town councillor Joy Uney.

Sixteen smaller horses were painted by local schools, youth organisations and charities

The project has been sponsored by local businesses, Forest Heath District Council and Suffolk County Council with painting materials supplied by the art department of Newmarket store Tindalls.

They were on display at the racecourse the weekend of the QIPCO Guineas Festival.

After that they were moved to locations round the town where they will remain throughout the summer before they are sold to raise money for charity in a silent auction at Tattersalls, with 80% of the profits being shared between two local charities, Racing Welfare and St. Nicholas Hospice, the remainder going to the artists.

At a gala evening held at The Severals sports pavilion, the horses were judged and the winning three chosen. Top prize went to Emily Jarvis for her Interpreter, in second was Frances Wray with See The Stars and third was Esther Albone with Wizard.

Competition judges were Lloyd Hughes, art teacher at Scaltback Middle School, Lorna Peck, head of art at Newmarket College and Julia George, a trainee teacher at the college.

Full-Sized Horses

1 ‘Only For Life’ Jac Butt

2 ‘Sea The Stars’ Rachel Drury

3 ‘Atlantic’ Jacquie Jones

4 ‘Nectar’ Kevin Yarrow

5 ‘Cockney Rebel’ Chris Winch

6 ‘Ten Winners In Blue’ Jilly Cunningham

7 ‘Sea The Stars’ Stuart Roy

8 ‘Shadeed’ Kirsty Sharman

9 ‘Wizard’ Esther Albone

10 ‘Mystiko’ Stella Frangleton

11 ‘Sunstar’ Anne Ward

12 ‘See The Stars’ Frances Wray

13 ‘Interpreter’ Emily Jarvis

 

Small Horses:

All Saints CEVA Primary School

Ditton Lodge First School

Fairstead House School

Houldsworth Valley Community Primary School

Laureate Community Primary School

Moulton CEVC Primary School

Paddocks County Primary School

St Louis RC Primary School

St Felix CEVC Middle School

Scaltback Middle School

Newmarket College

Foley House Children’s Centre

Forest Heath District Council Play Rangers

Forest Heath District Council Youth Forum

Racing Welfare

St Nicholas Hospice

 

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Language interpreters provide translation of testimony during the 787 battery fire investigative hearing.

Nana Asuo Gyebi Festival is an annual Ghanaian Akan spiritual and cultural practiced in the United States. According the website modernghana.com the festival is a celebration of life, natural living and thanksgiving to Almighty God, the deities and the ancestors. Held annually at an outdoor space and part of the International African Arts Festival in Brooklyn, New York, OBAATANPA House of Hope Intl Inc. has been organizing the festival for over 25 years.

 

Here, following drumming, singing, and dancing, the spirit of Nana Asuo Gyebi has possessed his initiate and is delivering important messages to those in attendance through an interpreter.

Language interpreters provide translation of testimony during the 787 battery fire investigative hearing.

Presentación de su última película

Interpreters as Mrs. Ariana Randolph and her daughter, Susannah in a Revolutionary City scene.

Colonial Williamsburg, 2010

 

For more, please visit our blog, A Fashionable Frolick:

fashionablefrolick.blogspot.com

Interpreters in 18th-century Attire

Courthouse, Trimmed for Christmas

Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

 

I love the simple decorations and the warm sunlight in this photo, taken within an hour of sunset on Monday, a great afternoon for being out: high temperature of 62 F (over 10 degrees above average for the date) and enough clouds to make the sky interesting. For such a beautiful afternoon, the number of people was surprisingly small. The courthouse dates from the colonial period, and is one of the 88 original buildings remaining when Colonial Williamsburg restoration commenced in the 1920s.

 

Press "L" for larger image, on black

London, 11th July 2012.

 

British aid will save the life of a woman or girl in the developing world every two hours for the next eight years, Prime Minister David Cameron said today at the London Summit on Family Planning.

 

The British Government and co-host the The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation brought together representatives from governments, the private sector, donors and civil society groups who pledged to halve the number of girls and women in developing countries who want - but lack access to - modern contraception.

 

Britain’s support, which comes from the existing aid budget, will provide an additional 24 million girls and women with family planning services between now and 2020. This will prevent the deaths of around 42,000 girls and women for whom an unintended pregnancy carries the risk of fatal consequences.

 

Developing countries at the summit made commitments to strengthen and promote women’s rights to family planning and increase access to information, services and supplies.

 

For the full story please, visit: www.dfid.gov.uk/News/Latest-news/2012/family-planning-sum...

 

Picture: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development

 

Terms of use

 

This image is posted under a Creative Commons - Attribution Licence, in accordance with the Open Government Licence. You are free to embed, download or otherwise re-use it, as long as you credit the source as Russell Watkins/Department for International Development'.

Mr. Abdul Manaf, Governor Nawa District, greets a local Afghan interpreter outside the local administrative building where the Marines assigned to Battery I, 3rd Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment (3/10), were having a scheduled meeting with the local village elders in Shorshorak, Afghanistan, April 29, 2010. The Marines and sailors assigned to 3/10 are currently deployed to Afghanistan in support of the International Security Assistance Force. (U.S. Marines Photo by SSgt. Ezekiel R. Kitandwe /Released)

In memory of

Charles Oliver Bond DAVIS

Born at Sydney 1817

Died at Auckland June 28 1887

 

He came to New Zealand

in 1830, and having attained

proficiency as a Maori

scholar, entered the service

of the Government, and

for many years held the

position of chief [sic] inter-

-preter. He was a stanch [sic]

Friend of the Maori people

And was learned in Maori

Lore of all kinds.

 

Hei Whakamau Wahara

ki a

Hare Rewiti

I whanau ki poihakene

A.D. 1817

I hemo ki akarana

28 hune A.D. 1887

I U mai ki niu tirani

A.D. 1830.

Akona ana kit e reo Maori

Mohio rawa. Ka whakaturia

Hei kaiwhakamaori ki te

kawanatanga. A maha noa

atu ona tau I tera mahi.

He hoa aroha pono ia ki te

Iwi Maori. He tohunga rawa

Hoki ki nga korero A namata

Waiata aha A te tangata

Maori.

 

WESLEY DIVISION A Row 1, Plot 21

 

His probate is available:

archway.archives.govt.nz/ViewFullItem.do?code=21444589

  

BIOGRAPHY [from Te Ara – see ref at end]:

Charles Oliver Bond Davis was born in Sydney, Australia, probably in 1817 or 1818, one of five children of Irish migrants Ann Calder and her husband, Joseph Davis, a cutler. His parents named him after the Irish patriot leader Oliver Bond. On the death of Joseph and Ann Davis, their eldest child, Elizabeth, took charge of her four brothers. She and her husband, Captain William Young, brought Charles Davis and his brother Edward to New Zealand in 1830 or 1831, to settle in Hokianga with the Wesleyan mission. Charles, who had some formal schooling, was tutor to the children of the Reverend William Woon. He also acquired great facility in Maori.

In 1840 Charles Davis assisted in the meetings at Hokianga at which the Treaty of Waitangi was debated and signed. In 1842 he was appointed clerk and interpreter to the Auckland office of the Protectorate of Aborigines. When Donald McLean joined the protectorate in 1844, the two struck up a rapport; Davis liked to 'talk over Maori matters' with McLean, and showed him poetry he was writing.

When the native secretary's department was created in 1846 Davis remained as clerk and interpreter, assisting in the Auckland courts with land purchases and native affairs generally, and in the production of the official Maori newspaper Te Karere Maori ( The Maori Messenger ). He was by now well known to Maori in the Auckland area, who increasingly approached him to assist in commercial and land disputes. In 1847 his acceptance of a fee from some Maori clients brought him a reprimand from Thomas Beckham, resident magistrate at Auckland.

Complaints by settlers aggrieved by advice Davis gave to Maori clients, and his superiors' disapproval of his tendency to take time off for private work, culminated in a board of inquiry in 1855, and a summons over an alleged debt. Davis won that case but resigned from the Native Department about 1857 because of jealousies and factionalism. This did not, however, involve a breach with McLean, now native secretary and chief land purchase commissioner.

In 1855 Davis had published a biography of the chief Kawiti, and compiled Maori mementos, a translation of Maori songs and addresses to Governor George Grey. After leaving the Native Department he published a few issues of newspapers entitled Te Waka o te Iwi and Te Whetu o te Tau, believing in the urgent necessity of better informing the Maori people about settler and government intentions. In this context he became acquainted with Wiremu Tamihana Tarapipipi and Waikato chiefs, attending several of the meetings which culminated in the selection of the Maori King, and collecting money for a Maori printing press. These actions brought Davis further official suspicion and displeasure.

Davis defended his actions before a parliamentary committee in 1860. He genuinely liked the Maori people, respected them for their 'very high sense of natural justice', and considered them ill served by officialdom. However, while supportive of the Waikato leaders' efforts to better themselves, he was opposed to the nationalist tendencies of the King movement. He believed that the powerful anti-government feeling spreading throughout the tribes could be allayed by more efficient administration and better information, and that 'obedience to the Government…would be cheerfully yielded' if Maori knew that their interests were regarded. He believed that resistance to land-selling would come and go, and himself began to acquire land.

Davis remained out of official favour, although he was employed temporarily in 1862 with McLean in negotiations for the Coromandel gold lands. He considered the government's attacks in the Waikato and Tauranga districts to be unjust, and early in 1865 assisted some Tauranga Maori to publish a pamphlet critical of 'te Arawa mangai-nui' (the big-mouthed Arawa), who were then allied with the government. Davis was charged in the Supreme Court with seditious libel, the prosecution contending that the pamphlet would incite other tribes against Te Arawa. Leading Maori scholars gave evidence, mostly for Davis, and the special jury took less than half an hour to find him not guilty.

With the introduction of the Native Land Act 1873 Davis began a career as land purchase agent. With his patron McLean as minister for native affairs, he was once more given official employment. Once more he provoked controversy. Working with Henry Mitchell in the Bay of Plenty and Taupo, Davis made many 'preliminary agreements' with hapu he considered to be 'recognised owners' of land, paying deposits on over a million acres, 'thereby binding the Tribes, and shutting out private speculators.' He intended then to elucidate the customary title through public tribal meetings. This evoked a series of disputes and a steady flow of letters and telegrams to the Native Department from angered Maori. Davis protested the rightness of his actions, claiming that most opposition came from 'big-mouthed Arawa', Ngati Whakaue, who asserted that their supremacy gave them rights to land where they had no ancestral claims.

Davis's view was eventually supported by an investigating officer, G. S. Cooper, although both Cooper and H. T. Clarke, the under secretary of the Native Department, believed that Davis's purchases should have been confined to a smaller area. But Davis's methods accorded with those of his political patrons, J. D. Ormond and Donald McLean, who supported them until near-violence in 1876 forced McLean to suspend land negotiations. In the last analysis Davis, like McLean, would not let his scholarly interest in Maori and periodic concern for them stand in the way of government land purchasing. In 1875 he recorded his satisfaction at reducing a 100 acre reserve to 5 acres to prevent the Maori owners from privately letting an important mineral springs area.

Davis had meanwhile joined the temperance movement, and composed and published some Maori temperance songs. His best-known work, The life and times of Patuone, was published in 1876. In his last years he became progressively blind. He worked with Auckland charitable organisations and became more religious. He contracted bronchitis while attending faith healing services in an effort to recover his sight. He died in Auckland on 28 June 1887, leaving considerable sums to charities, notably the Salvation Army, and his Maori artefacts to the Auckland Institute and Museum.

Davis was described by his contemporary H. B. Morton as 'a diminutive man of mummified appearance with a thin squeaky voice, destitute of one atom of personal charm.' He remains a contradictory figure, gifted but lacking in judgement, frequently supportive of Maori interests but also using them to advance his own, contemptuous of official incompetence and hypocrisy, but a time-server for McLean. His writings are a worthy memorial to a more determined believer in a bicultural future than most of his contemporaries.

Alan Ward. 'Davis, Charles Oliver Bond', from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 30-Oct-2012

URL: www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/1d3/davis-charles-oliver...

excellent portrait

www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/649/charles-oliver-bond-d...