A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

 

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

 

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

 

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

 

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

 

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

 

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

 

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

 

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

 

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

 

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

 

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

 

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

 

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

 

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

 

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

 

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

 

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

 

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

 

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

 

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

 

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

 

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

 

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

 

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

 

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

 

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

 

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

 

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

 

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

 

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

 

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

 

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

 

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

 

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

 

WIKIPEDIA

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

 

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

 

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

 

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

 

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

 

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

 

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

 

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

 

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

 

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

 

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

 

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

 

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

 

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

 

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

 

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

 

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

 

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

 

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

 

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

 

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

 

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

 

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

 

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

 

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

 

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

 

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

 

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

 

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

 

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

 

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

 

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

 

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

 

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

 

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

 

WIKIPEDIA

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

 

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

 

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

 

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

 

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

 

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

 

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

 

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

 

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

 

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

 

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

 

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

 

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

 

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

 

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

 

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

 

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

 

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

 

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

 

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

 

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

 

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

 

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

 

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

 

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

 

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

 

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

 

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

 

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

 

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

 

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

 

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

 

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

 

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

 

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

 

WIKIPEDIA

This was shot by kids learning photography and who came here on an outing to learn about outdoor photography at Jijamata Udhyan our local zoo.. And their teacher Mr Malushte my photo guru would invite me to come and pose for them as a model.. I dress differently I look different and so the kids got a model hands-down.. and I always obliged as we have to teach our kids , and photography is an essential tool to see a world upside down down side up.

 

What I learnt from my 3 gurus and most of you on Flickr I taught my two granddaughters , those photographers who visited my house also added to the knowledge quotient of my grandkids ,, and there were many who came to my house , some I met on the streets and bought them home to use the Internet or the washing room as there are hardly any clean toilets in Bandra .. the stench the filth would drive you insane and toilets in Mumbai is a separate topic by itself at Allahabd during the Maha Kumbh the first class waiting room had the ladies toilet inside the gents loo and urinal.. at Murud Bus depot there is no ladies toilet and in a way I think women in India are second class citizens ..and I must tell you Mumbai folks are insensitive if a woman is being harassed in the bus or train all will watch from a distance but do nothing.. they avoid getting into a station where the cops will make them wait hours for their statement and God save you from Indian police stations ,,the only place where you have to prove your innocence before you commit a crime and sadly barring a few good officers most of the cops in India are badly outsourced have no compassion humanity and sometimes nothing in the head as the criteria for becoming a cop is your chest size your height and your weight ,

 

And I hope changes come soon even our cops are overworked , long hours no proper housing , and than we grumble when we read about cops taking bribes .. and this is where Swach Bharat should be applied and not taking a broom stolen from the Am Admi party to remove the litter on the roads .

 

And religion has done more harm than good , very few religions talk of humanity , one religion god wants another religion gods followers to be killed and than I say to myself despite all this we are better of than in Nigeria Pakistan or the ISIS held Arab territories ,, we have not allowed that sectarian poison to enter our DNA.

 

Photography should be taught to kids from the day they enter a playschool and I can assure that the kids who take a camera in their hands will change the way we see the world ,, and the camera is the most feared tool among temples police stations and in the offices of our politicians and I will not talk about Fabindia ..there camera backfired on them .. but does it matter ,,

 

First we shot pictures , showcased them now we shoot pictures and blog our inner angst , we become voluble we become writers though we never knew how to hold a pen I type with one finger so you can imagine how I have abused this overworked part of my anatomy ,,when I set out to become a photographer it was an alternative for having been an alcoholic for a very long time during the film shooting era and learning unlearning on slides BW .It was a great intoxication those early days now if I dont shoot pictures I will survive using an image from my archive , tweaking it trough Aviary , saving a new copy and than changing the EXIF data to present date and I have a new photoblog a new story a new thought and a new outlet for the dissipation of my thoughts ,,,

 

And as a blogger you can talk about so many other things beside the picture you shot and as a photo blogger you shoot your own pictures , it is called Original Content .An inveterate photoblogger wont rob another photographers picture ..he will shoot his own and with the mobile phone the subject is only a click away..

 

Although a still photographer catering to the Internet and without making a dime as an amateur photographer , the only reason why my old lady gets a short fuse ,,I think photography made me a tea drinker a teetotaler .. and I think a good humanbeing I dont rob steal or fornicate ,,Photography gave me a reason to add a smile on a beggar childs face ..Photography point and shoot helped me capture some great moments of various faiths including my own Shia Faith .. the Maha Kumbh the transgender and instilled an empty vessel with 10000 poems .. juggling with words within the soul of my pictures and I met some great folks like you .. and finally without Humility all the camera lenses is zilch.. Humility Simplicity and Sincerity and moderating your images before you post them so as not to hurt another mans faith or his beliefs ,, but still that does not save you from Trolls and Spams ,,And Flickr changed me completely ,, it made me Human.. irrespective of the Favorites and number of Views on My images ,,

Thank you all those I follow those who follow me and those who accidentally end up reading me cosmically .. you can only read or see pictures you were destined to see .. and you can only shoot what you were destined to shoot ,,

  

Side View

 

The all new 2013 Sangerati Di Lusso's concept was released in late November, but as feedback was given, it became apparent that it just wasn't good enough... so we stepped it up. Ladies and gentlemen...

 

The All New 2013 Sangerati Di Lusso X

From the concept you will see some significant changes.

Those changes include:

-Rear Wheel wells

-New and improved rear bumper, fascia, and exhaust system

-Improved dash and interior

 

The 2013 Di Lusso is just as spectacular on the boards as it is in style and looks. The overused, overworked X platform was thrown out the door for 2013 and in its place the new Y platform. But unlike the 2011 counterpart, we give you options. 5.0 v8 anyone? no? 350hp v6? We also offer a "doggy" four cylinder model... (that was a joke for the record).

6 speed tranny

dual exhaust

"The Works" - period

 

So this begs the question.... muscle car?

According to Top Gears definition, (2 doors, small car, large engine), yes....... but we'll leave that for you to decide.

 

*Sangerati is planning to release a convertible model late spring 2012*

Every Chinese Doctor I have been to says that I have cold energy in my stomach. So I am always willing to try anything to get rid of this cold energy. Rather than living a healthy life of constant physical activity, restricted computer use, and all the other modern things that we do to make us unbalanced creatures - I chose to put myself through ancient practices - like STOMACH FIREBURNING or MOXA (mugwart) steaming!!!!

 

So the philosophy behind fireburning is that the fire's heat will warm up your stomach - it will start moving the cold energy out and help you restore your yin energy. After 5 times of lighting a fire and putting the fire out on my stomach - I felt so wonderful. In between each fireburning, the doctor massaged my stomach - it's the best feeling in the world. It felt as if he was caressing every part of my large and small intestinal track and giving it lots of love and care. And the best part is that in the end- when the fire burning is done correctly - he takes off the saran wrap, medicine cloth, and starts Doggy Paddling down from the top of my stomach to the very bottom of my intestines - you can HEAR A RIVER of activity going on inside! it's totalllly FREAKY - I could hear a river gurgling - as if he was totally giving me a full plumbing system overhaul!

he said that when performed with the right type of fire shapes, the doggy paddling takes all the released coldness and moves it out.

 

the whole entire time I focused on using qi gong breathing techniques - because I am super sensitive to energy I could feel the cold air flowing out of the bottom of my feet.

 

But then for a few min before or after the process - sometimes I feel that I am inadequate as a human being when I do these things because it reminds me of how out of touch I am with my body, the earth, and the stars. So going to the Chinese doctor for me is like a form of rebirth and a bit of self-punishment (for not being healthy when I am living in the states). But then I think - is it only when I travel - when I'm farthest away from everything and everyone that I intimately know - is that the only time I feel that I can take care of myself without feeling guilty? Is it only when I am unreachable that I recover from everyday life in the states - when my family stuff is so far away that it is absolutely out of my control? Then I start thinking that's stupid tricia - peace is where you are - but sometimes I feel that the only way to really extract myself out of my own life is to leave the country and cross an ocean away. I wonder if this is a pattern of modern life now - middle class people overworking and then leaving for a few months every year or few years to prevent burn out and just to re-balance. It certainly has become a pattern in my life - is the amount of traveling we do equivalent to the amount of stress we have at home? sometimes I think so...

 

well anyways this is seriously the best form of self-punishment - when the doctor tells me that my yin-yang isn't balanced - it actually makes me really excited to become more balanced again. I am always excited for them to say - "ok here your energy is blocked, so that's why your hair is turning white or that's why your bowel movements aren't regular." When they tell me how unbalanced I am, I start thinking about how I can take better care of myself.

 

AFter fireburning, the doctor told me of all the herbs and foods that I should eat to heal my body. for example, I need to eat more lemon peels. This time the doctor told me that my health was pretty good, but my back and neck is messed up from years of sitting in front of a computer. Plus I haven't been meditating or dancing as much lately :(

 

So I love this herbal/ancient practice - only in china...only in china. In India I tried going to the medicinal doctor - I actually went to 3 of them because I really wanted to give it a chance - well each on told me that I was too much of a "pita" and they threw my naked body on a slap of hard wood and started dumping herbal oil on me and then the woman rubbed the oil on me forcing my bones into the wood table and I slid around like a dead fish - I tried to grab onto the wood but it was impossible! - may sound wonderful-(hmm hands + oil) BUT NOT!!!!!! it was painful and the worst part was that I didn't feel more balanced afterwards. SO I've decided China is the place for me to go for medicinal care.

 

...which, is his own fault.

Tuol Sleng museum, Phnom-Penh, Cambodia, 2010

Leica M7, Summilux 35, Fuji Reala

Red Khmer Genocide

Counterpunch Tells the Facts and Names the Names

Oct. 16, 2014 How the US Backed a Regime of Unrivaled Barbarism - Who Supported the Khmer Rouge? by Gregory Elich

"Out of a total population of just under 8 million, it is estimated that 1.7 million people died under Khmer Rouge rule from execution, hunger and overwork. During its four years of rule (1975-1979), the Khmer Rouge achieved a record of barbarism rarely equaled in history... The buildup of the Khmer Rouge is one of the more striking examples of the cynicism of the imperial mindset, in which the lives of others are sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical interests. That philosophy remains very much alive today."

www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/16/who-supported-the-khmer-r...

www.zixbook.com

We started moving again. Steph bugged the ever loving hell outta me that we take the old laugh factory. What use is that old hole in the ground to us? That's when she told me about the little run-in yesterday she had on the hospital rooftop. Jerrick Davao just so happened to be in the neighborhood, and he'll be having a happy family reunion with his old man right here tonight. Why she's concerned, I have no idea. And I don't like the idea of her being anywhere NEAR that nutjob. On top of that, his dad is apparently a scumbag, so do doubt Bloodfall's gonna do what he does best: Tear people apart. Me and Steph walked into the old factory. The place was broken and dilapidated, left to rot like an dead animal on the road. Old joke toys covered the ground like leaves. I was having fun playing with them. Steph just wandered on, talking about how bad she apparently felt for Jerrick. Give me a break.

 

"I mean, both our fathers are failures. It's so weird having something in common with him, y'know?"

 

"It's the only thing you two share. Oh cool! A rubber snake!"

 

"But he sounded...pained when he mentioned his dad. It's even stranger hearing his voice like that. I mean, big scary guy who kills crooks sounding like that..."

 

"It's not your concern, Steph. Let him solve his daddy issues by himself. Sweet, a disc gun!"

 

"But he's gonna be so hurt after this! So alone....he needs someone there. Just someone to comfort him, tell him it's alright..."

 

"Guy's got a million pets, he'll be alright....aw crap, it's jammed...."

 

"I know, but they can't talk to him. They don't know his pain. I do, though. My dad was almost never there for me, and neither was his. His sis is dead because of it...."

 

This is ridiculous. Steph is getting WAY too overworked on this guy. She needs to forget about it. Jerrick...he's not the guy you worry for.I mean, he survived getting his with a rocket launcher, for god's sake! Steph just needs to cheer up a bit. I think I see the solution. The greatest wig I've ever seen. I put it on and stood next to Steph, waiting for her to turn her eyes to me. She kept going on about Bloodfall, until.....

 

"I just have to be there, Tim. He'll need help, he'll need....."

 

Good! she's looking at me! Just gotta wait for the reaction. Any moment she'll be laughing her ass off and-

 

"Goddamn it, Tim! Why can't you take this seriously!?"

 

She ripped the wig off my head and chucked it aside like trash. Well, that worked well....

 

"Do you really want to be with that monster tonight? Do you have any idea what it'll be like when he just freaking snaps and goes berserk on his dad? There's no predicting what he'll do....

 

"I'm not scared. I'm worried. He needs help. Help from someone like him."

 

"You're nothing like him. Not even in the same universe."

 

"We're close enough that I can help him. And I'm going to one way or another."

 

"..............fine....I'll be with you though. If something goes wrong, you won't last alone. I don't anything to happen to you..."

 

Robin And Spoiler take #38 Old Laugh Factory.

    

Today, health care fraud is all over the news. There undoubtedly is fraud in health care. The same is true for every business or endeavor touched by human hands, e.g. banking, credit, insurance, politics, etc. There is no question that health care providers who abuse their position and our trust...

 

netmaddy.com/health-care-fraud-the-perfect-storm/ netmaddy.com

This drawing is from Stick News on The Daily English Show.

Show 1430

Transcript

 

You're welcome to use it. We like to share.

 

Please link to us: thedailyenglishshow.com

 

Details on how to credit us: thedailyenglishshow.com/image-credits

 

Namaste, brother. Larry and Sergey need another billion by tomorrow. Here, have this free organic lunch.

En España hay 6 millones de parados un 57% de paro juvenil 400.000 familias desahuciadas....... pero lo que muchos no conocéis es lo que esta ocurriendo a los que aun tenemos trabajo ,las empresas están sustituyendo a empleados por contratas, subcontratas de las subcontratas,,al final salarios de 700 euros por 12 horas de trabajo a los mandos les obligan adoctrinarse en el Opus Dei ,el exceso de trabajo esta empezando a llevar a compañeros ataques de ansiedad y ser hospitalizados,Si eso esta ocurriendo hoy en España y sino preguntar o quizás no queráis saber la verdad que ocultan TV y periódicos ?

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Spain there are 6 million unemployed 57% of 400,000 youth unemployed families evicted ....... but what many do not know is what is happening to those who still have jobs, companies are replacing employees by contractors, subcontractors of subcontractors, in the end pay 700 euros for 12 hours at the controls require them indoctrinated in Opus Dei, overwork is starting to lead to anxiety attacks and peers to be hospitalized, if that is happening today but in Spain and ask or perhaps do not wish to know the truth hidden TV and newspapers?

 

  

Pink is the color of happiness and is sometimes seen as lighthearted.

 

Brighter pinks are youthful, fun and exciting while vibrant pinks have the same high energy as red. They are sensual and passionate without being too aggressive.

 

Toning down the passion of red with the purity of white results in the softer pinks that are associated with romance and the blush of a young woman's cheeks.

 

It's not surprising that when giving or receiving flowers pink blossoms are a favorite.

 

For women who are often overworked and overburdened, an attraction to pink may speak to a desire for the more carefree days of childhood.

 

THE EFFECTS OF THE COLOR PINK

 

How the color pink effects us physically and mentally

 

Stimulates energy

Can increase the blood pressure, respiration, heartbeat, and pulse rate

Encourages action and confidence

Pink has been used in prison holding cells to effectively to reduce erratic behavior

From the website...

iagenweb.org/jasper/history/1912/history/victoria.htm

 

Past and Present of Jasper County Iowa

B.F. Bowden & Company, Indianapolis, IN, 1912

Transcribed by Ernie Braida in July 2003

 

The mineral springs of Colfax have greatly influenced the character of the life and growth of the city in recent years. Of the several establishments of different varieties which have grown up in order to bring to the people the wonderful advantages of the curative waters of these springs, special mention must be made of the Victoria Sanatorium, which has been in existence since 1904, when Florence Brown Sherbon, A. M., M. D., her husband, John Bayard Sherban, M. D., and her father James Brown, incorporated the Victoria Sanatorium and Mineral Spring. The Doctors Sherban are in charge of the sanatorium. Doctor Florence B. Sherbon is a native of Washington County, Iowa, graduated from the Keokuk High School, the Independence Training School for Nurses at the Iowa State Hospital, and in 1902 received the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy from Iowa State University. In 1904 she completed her medical education at the same institution, receiving the degree of Doctor of Medicine and the same year the degree of Master of Arts.

 

Doctor John Bayard Sherbon is a native of Iowa, and graduated in medicine from Iowa State University in 1904. Both he and his wife are members of the American, State and County Medical societies. Since 1904, when both Doctors Sherban located at Colfax, their history has been that of the Victoria Sanatorium.

 

The present home of the Victoria Sanatorium is a picturesque, red brick colonial building, with spacious white porches, situated on one of the beautiful wooded hillsides of Colfax. The corporation of physicians who own and control it have spared neither trouble nor expense to make it not only a credit to themselves and a boon to suffering humanity, but a credit to the state and to the Middle West. It began its career modestly in a little thirty-room brick hotel building; but was crowded out the first year. The building was then completely remodeled and enlarged, doubling its capacity and making it up to date and entirely modern in every respect. The new building proved as inadequate to meet the demand as the old, and the following year a thirty-room brick building was erected as an annex, and has been in daily use since the completion.

 

The sanatorium building is brick, with its long exposure north and south, making it warm in winter and cool in summer. It is steam heated, with electric lights, call bells and telephones, has an elevator and is well protected against fire, and is artistically finished and furnished, with all outside rooms and a pleasant outlook from every side. Although but five blocks from Main street and depots, the sanatorium building is located at the end of its street in a park of native trees, and as no traffic passes its doors there is an absence of noise and dirt.

 

The water from the Victoria spring is classified as a carbonated calcicsaline chalybeate, holds an unusual amount of sodium and magnesium sulphate in solution, and has strong aperient properties. Its use is greatly beneficial in many diseases of the stomach and bowels, in cases of diseased kidneys and bladder, and various blood diseases, and especially in cases of rheumatism.

 

The sanatorium is fitted for the care of many different classes of patients, such as those who are overworked and are in search of rest and relaxation; those suffering from nervous derangement, who are benefited by the rest cure and the baths and exercises; cases of chronic disorder of the organs of assimilation and elimination; rheumatic patients, in the curing of whom the sanatorium has had wonderful results; cases of valvular heart trouble, which are benefited by Nauheim baths, and appropriate exercises for certain cases, for the care of which the sanatorium is especially equipped; and many cases of acute, non-contagious diseases, which are given careful nursing and medical care. Tuberculosis and contagious diseases, as well as troublesome mental cases, are not admitted.

 

The institution has a staff of competent resident physicians who take all proper care of the patients, and who are not extremists, but use all legitimate therapeutic measures. The equipment consists of the newest and most approved apparatus, static machine, X-ray, high frequency coil, vibrator, hot air machine, galvanic and faradic batteries, leucodescent lamp, etc. A well-equipped clinical laboratory is in constant use for diagnostic purposes, and there is a well-arranged operating room and a small perfectly appointed hospital for the care of the more ill or helpless patients. The bathrooms are well equipped for giving all kinds of hydriatric treatment, and are in charge of a corps of skillful operators, who are thoroughly trained in both American and Swedish methods in massage, orthopedic exercises, medical gymnastics, etc.

 

It is not the purpose of the sanatorium to compete with local practitioners, but rather to co-operate with them in caring for such cases as need the advantage of sanatorium treatment in addition to regular medical aid.

 

The doctors in charge of this sanatorium are engaged in a much needed work for the benefit of suffering humanity, in providing for them the best of treatment which modern medical science can provide, and ideally sanitary surroundings, and their success has greatly encouraged their labors. And there can be no nobler and no higher work than to minister to the ills and sickness of mankind, to relieve them from pain and misery, and to prolong their days on this earth. The physician who follows his profession in its true spirit is the best friend of mankind, and the proprietors of the Victoria Sanatorium have during its existence been responsible for the return of hope to many lives from which it had been long shut out.

All homemade, too. Although the scones were not a disaster, they didn't turn out the way a scone is supposed to be! I think I overworked the dough.

 

My daughter decided that some freshly picked dandelions would be a good addition to the photo!

 

The strawberry and apple conserve is fabulous. It consists of a green apple, strawberries, sugar, lemon juice and the seeds from one vanilla pod.

 

The honey cream consists of honey, pouring cream and mascarpone that have been whisked to soft peaks.

 

Makes for a great afternoon tea; I enjoyed mine with a cup of Earl Gray.

 

Recipe from MasterChef Australia magazine, issue #3.

 

Read more at The Sweetest Kitchen...

Every Chinese Doctor I have been to says that I have cold energy in my stomach. So I am always willing to try anything to get rid of this cold energy. Rather than living a healthy life of constant physical activity, restricted computer use, and all the other modern things that we do to make us unbalanced creatures - I chose to put myself through ancient practices - like STOMACH FIREBURNING or MOXA (mugwart) steaming!!!!

 

So the philosophy behind fireburning is that the fire's heat will warm up your stomach - it will start moving the cold energy out and help you restore your yin energy. After 5 times of lighting a fire and putting the fire out on my stomach - I felt so wonderful. In between each fireburning, the doctor massaged my stomach - it's the best feeling in the world. It felt as if he was caressing every part of my large and small intestinal track and giving it lots of love and care. And the best part is that in the end- when the fire burning is done correctly - he takes off the saran wrap, medicine cloth, and starts Doggy Paddling down from the top of my stomach to the very bottom of my intestines - you can HEAR A RIVER of activity going on inside! it's totalllly FREAKY - I could hear a river gurgling - as if he was totally giving me a full plumbing system overhaul!

he said that when performed with the right type of fire shapes, the doggy paddling takes all the released coldness and moves it out.

 

the whole entire time I focused on using qi gong breathing techniques - because I am super sensitive to energy I could feel the cold air flowing out of the bottom of my feet.

 

But then for a few min before or after the process - sometimes I feel that I am inadequate as a human being when I do these things because it reminds me of how out of touch I am with my body, the earth, and the stars. So going to the Chinese doctor for me is like a form of rebirth and a bit of self-punishment (for not being healthy when I am living in the states). But then I think - is it only when I travel - when I'm farthest away from everything and everyone that I intimately know - is that the only time I feel that I can take care of myself without feeling guilty? Is it only when I am unreachable that I recover from everyday life in the states - when my family stuff is so far away that it is absolutely out of my control? Then I start thinking that's stupid tricia - peace is where you are - but sometimes I feel that the only way to really extract myself out of my own life is to leave the country and cross an ocean away. I wonder if this is a pattern of modern life now - middle class people overworking and then leaving for a few months every year or few years to prevent burn out and just to re-balance. It certainly has become a pattern in my life - is the amount of traveling we do equivalent to the amount of stress we have at home? sometimes I think so...

 

well anyways this is seriously the best form of self-punishment - when the doctor tells me that my yin-yang isn't balanced - it actually makes me really excited to become more balanced again. I am always excited for them to say - "ok here your energy is blocked, so that's why your hair is turning white or that's why your bowel movements aren't regular." When they tell me how unbalanced I am, I start thinking about how I can take better care of myself.

 

AFter fireburning, the doctor told me of all the herbs and foods that I should eat to heal my body. for example, I need to eat more lemon peels. This time the doctor told me that my health was pretty good, but my back and neck is messed up from years of sitting in front of a computer. Plus I haven't been meditating or dancing as much lately :(

 

So I love this herbal/ancient practice - only in china...only in china. In India I tried going to the medicinal doctor - I actually went to 3 of them because I really wanted to give it a chance - well each on told me that I was too much of a "pita" and they threw my naked body on a slap of hard wood and started dumping herbal oil on me and then the woman rubbed the oil on me forcing my bones into the wood table and I slid around like a dead fish - I tried to grab onto the wood but it was impossible! - may sound wonderful-(hmm hands + oil) BUT NOT!!!!!! it was painful and the worst part was that I didn't feel more balanced afterwards. SO I've decided China is the place for me to go for medicinal care.

 

The overworked through-platforms at Manchester Piccadilly

October 24 2016: Parents, students, and teachers are tired of having no decision making power in their own school district. So it was a packed house at the Legler Library on Chicago’s West Side

for a strategy meeting to plan how to get a bill for an Elected Representative School Board through the Illinois Legislature.

 

Chicago is the only place in Illinois that does not have an elected school board. Since the school board in Chicago is selected by the Mayor,that is sometimes called mayoral control. But that is really a misnomer. Mayor Emanuel represents the wealthy financial and corporate interests who dominate politics in the city and the state. Mayoral control is really corporate control.

 

Corporate control has brought us mismanagement and financial scandal. It has brought us high stakes testing and poorly conceived curricula. It has meant school closings, privatization, teacher overwork, and and general demoralization throughout the system. That is is why Chicago voters have voted for an elected school board in two non-binding referenda.

 

The Chicago school population is made up overwhelmingly of Black, Latino and other youth of color, many them living in poverty. The failures of corporate control are profoundly racist and insult to the people of the city.

I've always bought ready made puff pastry for my pies. But it didn't feel very chefy, and sort of felt like it was cheating. So I decided to give pastry a try. And it was sooooo easy to make! Here's how I made my classic chicken and leek pie. First, I sauted some pancetta in a pan and added diced chicken when the pancetta was crisp and caramalized. Next, add in chopped leeks and some single cream. Add corn flour to thicken the sauce, salt and pepper to taste. Then put the filling into your pie dish and add the puff pastry topping (made from recipe below). Bake in the oven until pastry has risen and is golden and flaky. Enjoy!

 

Here's the puff pastry recipe I used. Thanks Gordon Ramsay & BBC Good Food!

 

www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2403/roughpuff-pastry-

 

Puff Pastry:

 

250g strong plain flour

1 tsp fine sea salt

250g butter , at room temperature, but not soft

about 150ml cold water

 

1. Sift the flour and salt into a large bowl. Roughly break the butter in small chunks, add them to the bowl and rub them in loosely. You need to see bits of butter.

 

2. Make a well in the bowl and pour in about two-thirds of the cold water, mixing until you have a firm rough dough adding extra water if needed. Cover with cling film and leave to rest for 20 mins in the fridge.

 

3. Turn out onto a lightly floured board, knead gently and form into a smooth rectangle. Roll the dough in one direction only, until 3 times the width, about 20 x 50cm. Keep edges straight and even. Don't overwork the butter streaks; you should have a marbled effect.

 

4. Fold the top third down to the centre, then the bottom third up and over that. Give the dough a quarter turn (to the left or right) and roll out again to three times the length. Fold as before, cover with cling film and chill for at least 20 mins before rolling to use.

 

Speck and I went to an old abandoned house today in a very isolated spot. The house is for sale but would cost a fortune to restore. The trees have grown up around it so that it is completely hidden from the road, with only the real estate agent sign signifying that it is there. I overworked this terribly, but it seemed so spooky and scary to me that I kept making it darker and darker to fit how I felt about it. It looked much better before I started the reworking and redrawing. Another lesson learned. Wish I could have made this look like Winna makes her old houses look...

Once upon a time, Sunday morning for was doing anything other than working.

 

It was for:

Doing Nothing or

Shooting Zombies or

Having a mimosa or

Drinking coffee or

Checking out my bed head or

Making love or having sex (Oh there is a difference and no I'm not putting pictures of that up!).

 

But there is no rest for me.

 

I'm overworked and underpaid.

 

Year 3 - Upload 69

 

One Year Ago Today This was in Explore.

Two Years Ago Today

Jocelyn Olivier‎

The NeuroMuscular Reprogramming Network

 

Scoliosis Priority Protocols

 

Step 1. Torsion Imbalances Rt/Left at Hips and Lumbar

Test QL side to side with client supine and knees and hips flexed.

Test QL side to side with client prone and knees bent and hips neutral.

Find the top of QL weak in the open position on the side that lacks lordosis. Check for weak psoas on that side also.

Release the QL on the opposite side while engaging the QL that tested weak. Client learns to breathe and relax the side of the back that normally overworks, and, with this “hold/release” technique to re-engage the side that lacks lumbar curve and is not functioning properly.

 

Step 2. Right/Left Imbalances and Reactives along Lateral lines.

First check Quadratus Lumborum side to side in all reciprocal coordination positions.

Then Bottom of QL on short side to top of QL on over developed side (lacking lumber lordosis).

Lats on overdeveloped side of thorax will be weak, reactive to same side QL and/or upper trapezius.

 

Step 3. Sequencing Back Extensors

Disparities in development are clearly seen between 2 sides of erector spinae.

Test right to left side extensors—Release overdeveloped thoracic segment.

Re-do, refine test for superior segments : 1 Cervical 2 Thoracic

Test top to bottom for each side.

Test bottom to top. Then check diagonals.

 

Step 4. Torsion Imbalances Rt/Left at Shoulders:

All upper thoracic rotators (trapezius, rhomboids, latissimus dorsi and deep rotators and multifidi) will be weak on the side opposite the short side of the thorax, reactive to short side thoracic extensors.

Using arms braced together as a rudder to turn the thorax, notice the imbalances in twisting through the thoracic spine.

 

Step 5. Right/Left lateral flexion at neck, thorax and waist:

Next: Check Lateral Bending of thorax only (“the candle”)

Check Rt/Lt lateral cervical flexion for reactives.

Check cervicals to thorax and lumbar lateral flexion also.

 

Step 6. Right/left rotational imbalances in the neck

Check Rt/Lt rotation. Release the side that tests strong.

Check: scalenes to rotators and extensors. Release scalenes.

Check Upper thoracic extensors to rotation of the neck. Release thoracic extensors.

  

Step 4. Further explorations

All the extensor segments need to be checked with respect to the rotators. It will be found that some of the rotators are inhibiting the extensors and possibly the other way as well. (Eg., left rotation of upper thorax in preferred direction will inhibit right thoracic extension of the opposite side.

 

Other considerations with respect to the psoas:

Because the psoas has been disabled for so long it is predictable that thoracic flexion will be accomplished by the pec minor and internal obliques which pull the thorax forward thus inhibiting the mid and lower trapezius of the opposite side, creating the hump back look on one side of the thorax with a widening of the depth of the chest. Release right internal Obliques and left QL, along with the posterior inferior serratus.

 

Hip flexion on the side with the weak psoas will be compensated by tight rectus femoris creating the anterior tilt to pelvis on the same side and chronic pain in the same Sacro Iliac Joint. Test hip flexion to lateral flexion (QL to Psoas) on the flat side of the lumbar.

 

Once the psoas is firing reliably with respect to the QL it will be necessary to begin looking at the psoas function with the spine laterally flexed to one side or the other. In this “side bending” position, you may find the psoas once again inhibited.

 

Additional considerations

Thoracic Rotational stabilization while sitting

Problem: Right thorax weak rotationally.

Observation: thorax can’t rotate right without support from right inner thigh.

Therefore...

Test right upper thorax rotation to:

→Right adductors and flexors.

→Left post inf. Serratus

→Left Lower Trapezius and Latissimus Dorsi

 

Before right turning is functional and reliable these muscles will need to be released and re-programmed.

OSLER, Sir EDMUND BOYD, businessman, politician, and philanthropist; b. 20 Nov. 1845 near Bond Head, Upper Canada, fourth son of the Reverend Featherstone Lake Osler* and Ellen Free Pickton; m. first 1868 Isabella Lammond Smith (d. 1871), and they had two children who died in infancy; m. secondly 3 Sept. 1873 Anne Farquharson Cochran (d. 1910) in Balfour, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and they had three daughters and three sons; d. 4 Aug. 1924 in Toronto.

 

Unlike his brothers, Edmund Boyd Osler chose to forgo university and face the world with the education he received from his parents and the grammar school in Dundas, Upper Canada, where his father was the Anglican rector. In the late 1850s, still little more than a boy, he took a job at the Bank of Upper Canada, which was struggling with bad railway and land loans exposed by economic depression. Its demise in 1866 laid bare the price of mismanagement, a lesson Osler carried with him when he joined with fellow employee Henry Pellatt to launch a firm in Toronto that offered stockbroking, investing, and insurance services.

 

The new partners rode confederation’s wave of optimism to some success, and Osler gained a reputation as an enterprising and trustworthy broker. It was likely his standing that attracted a group of promoters trying to establish the Dominion Bank in 1869 and raise $400,000 in capital. When asked to find subscribers, Osler accepted the challenge. He understood the importance of the business connections offered by the Dominion’s principal founders, among them Whitby businessman James Holden, and saw too that financing for his own firm might be obtained by cultivating a close relationship with the new bank. His enthusiasm, however, was not enough to raise the capital. The bank’s promoters were themselves divided over whether to buy the Royal Canadian Bank, which was in trouble but had established branches and customers, or to build from the ground up. By 1870 the Royal Canadian was off the seller’s block and the Dominion’s promoters were again searching for capital.

 

A break appeared when a dispute erupted between William McMaster*, the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, and James Austin*, a leading director. Austin resigned and was soon approached by Holden to support the Dominion; by 1871 the bank had opened with Austin as president. Osler became a shareholder but, more important, he was now connected to an influential network of contacts, especially Austin, who was impressed by this aspiring financier and appears to have been his mentor. Osler in turn learned how a sound reputation could win the confidence of nervous investors.

 

Just as timely for Osler was the combination of large increases in banking capital and the development of an unprecedented level of share issues on the Toronto market. In September 1871 Pellatt and Osler joined the newly reorganized Stock Exchange Association. The firm published weekly stock and bond market reports, which provide some insight into its operations and Osler’s milieu. In 1874 the firm was enlarged to include Pellatt’s son Henry Mill* and Augustus Meredith Nanton.

 

During the trading boom of the 1870s Osler built a good business, gradually generated some wealth, and settled into Toronto’s elite. He began to associate his name and fund-raising talents with such public causes as the fledgling Hospital for Sick Children, which made him a trustee in 1878. Through much of his early years, it is not hard to imagine, Osler found success partly through his father, who had ties with the city’s Anglican establishment. What is certain is that his relationship with Austin flourished. Austin secured a directorship for him at the Dominion Bank after Holden’s death in October 1881. The position allowed Osler greater access to bank financing and gave standing to his new brokerage, Osler and Hammond, which he established in 1882 with Herbert Carlyle Hammond, former cashier of the Bank of Hamilton.

 

Osler’s capitalist activities sky-rocketed in the 1880s. He was quick to pursue interests that must have seemed the future of such a large country, especially western land development, railways, and navigational ventures. In 1882, for instance, he was a founder and the managing director of the Ontario and Qu’Appelle Land Company Limited. His first railway undertaking, that same year, was the Winnipeg Street Railway, a scheme largely devised by Austin and his son Albert William*. Osler’s job was financing. When he succeeded, interest in his abilities grew in Canada’s other commercial centre, Montreal. Soon he was advising George Stephen, a member of the syndicate responsible for building the Canadian Pacific Railway. The railway company sold a major portion of its western land grants in 1882 to a group of capitalists headed by Osler and William Bain Scarth*. A founder of the Canada Southern Steamboat Company Limited in 1883, Osler had also begun investing large sums in railway schemes in Ontario, where his expertise and connections brought him the presidency of the Ontario and Quebec Railway. Its takeover by the CPR in 1885 gave him a seat on the board of the transcontinental. Associated with a promising national railway system, he concentrated increasingly on western projects and the development of his Winnipeg branch, Osler, Hammond, and Nanton, which had been launched in 1884 by his protégé A. M. Nanton.

 

Osler staked the future of his wealth and business on western development and invested in land that promised to appreciate in value when railways reached across the dominion. The CPR’s completion in 1885 began the process that Osler envisioned and by 1896, when economic conditions dramatically improved and settlement was made more attractive, Osler began to realize profits from his real estate ventures. Newcomers needed land and an array of financial services, an opportunity not missed by Osler and Hammond, which developed a network that linked British and eastern Canadian investors with western borrowers. The North of Scotland Canadian Mortgage Company Limited, the Canada North-West Land Company, the Dominion Bank, and to a lesser degree the Trusts Corporation of Ontario all facilitated this flow of money. Branches of the Dominion Bank were opened after the turn of the century at points where Osler had business ties, while Osler, Hammond, and Nanton managed institutional investments in western mortgages and debentures. Osler’s firm also began offering insurance and serving development more broadly by selling the bonds and debentures of western municipalities to British investors. In addition, a good deal of the firm’s business followed the CPR’s drive into the Kootenay mining country of British Columbia, as did Osler’s private investments. In 1897, for instance, the Monetary Times (Toronto) identified him as a prominent shareholder in two stock exchange listings, the War Eagle mine and the Consolidated Cariboo Hydraulic Mining Company, which had its head office in Toronto.

 

In 1901 Osler became president of the Dominion Bank. He would, however, play almost no role within the Canadian banking system other than giving addresses at annual meetings. Rather, he was a capitalist in banking. On assuming the presidency, he turned over his seat on the stock exchange to his son Francis Gordon, who had joined Osler and Hammond in 1895. Osler Sr nonetheless remained in control of the firm, which continued to concentrate on western business. Having watched the west grow, he was always conscious of the vital role that foreign and eastern investment played in its development. When economic turmoil surfaced in 1907 and slowed progress there, Osler answered western critics of the banks by pointing to very large western loans, which far exceeded bank deposits in the western provinces. In 1913, when prairie farmers and others argued for subsidization of the Canadian Northern Railway, Osler, speaking from a CPR standpoint, denounced any support. Despite his belief in the future of the west, his business ties to Toronto, where he operated increasingly in concert with Wilmot Deloui Matthews*, weakened the currency of his opinion in many western quarters.

 

Success had brought calls for Osler to enter politics. He answered them for the first time in late 1891, when he joined the Toronto mayoralty race with the support of Goldwin Smith* and a team from the city’s establishment. His “silk stocking” candidacy fell flat and he was defeated by Robert John Fleming. A poor speaker, he had not warmed to popular demands for Sunday streetcars nor evidently, had he comprehended the commitment required because he had conducted his affairs as usual and even travelled to England on business. The observation made in the family history, that he “had little appetite for politics,” may help explain this behaviour. At the same time it raises questions about his return to the House of Commons as a Conservative for Toronto West in 1896, the same year he was president of the Board of Trade, and his success in four subsequent contests.

 

Osler’s political ideals are not easily discerned. During the 1896 election, when the Conservatives were divided over the Manitoba school question and party leader Sir Charles Tupper* had embraced remedial legislation to restore the rights of Catholic Manitobans to publicly funded education, Osler opposed Tupper’s position. Although he was said to “believe in all Conservative doctrine,” he had a streak of independence; he apparently defined his conservatism somewhat differently than the pragmatic side of the party, which expanded the common ground between French and English, Catholic and Protestant. The electoral victory of Wilfrid Laurier*’s Liberals prompted Joseph Wesley Flavelle*, a rising business Titan in Toronto, to suggest a rejuvenation fund for a Conservative party that he thought was falling into serious decline. Osler and the few other prominent Tories canvassed rejected the scheme. One wonders if Osler ever wished he had backed Flavelle’s initiative during the 14 years the Tories were in opposition.

 

Osler’s continued political success leaves many questions unanswered. Like his fellow businessman and Conservative counterpart in Toronto East, Albert Edward Kemp, he was not apt to “overwork Hansard.” He was more likely, it seems, to talk in the quiet of parliamentary lounges, avoid fracas in the house, and attend to regional concerns as chairman of the executive committee of the Ontario Conservative Association. Consequently, his tenure in parliament was largely uncontentious and uneventful. Near the end, a newspaper reported “after seventeen years in the House Osler speaks,” but this comment is somewhat misleading. In 1901 and 1903 he had tangled with finance minister William Stevens Fielding over budgets and railways. Osler, who sat on the CPR’s executive committee, was himself targeted in the house in 1903-4 as a representative of the undue influence of railways in Canadian politics. As well, he was at the centre of a controversy that would play a small part in the defeat of Laurier’s Liberals.

 

In December 1910 Osler shared the national spotlight with Fielding after the collapse of the Farmers Bank of Canada. Considered by some to be “well fitted” to be minister (had his party been in power), he had been a critic of the bank since its inception. When it applied to the Treasury Board to open for business in 1906, he privately warned Fielding that it was a fraud and that its application should be denied. More alive to the political price of refusing, the minister ignored the warnings of Osler and a good many others. On the bank’s failure, he headed for cover and blamed Osler for not giving him more evidence to work with. For Osler and his colleagues the collapse offered a useful tool to undermine the Liberals’ business credibility in the debate over reciprocity during the election of 1911. It was Osler’s last contest, for he declined to run in 1917; he was 68 and had had reservations about the Union government formed months before by Conservative leader Sir Robert Laird Borden*.

 

The start of World War I in 1914 had brought financial panic to Canada and a crisis in mortgage financing. The prime minister’s office was inundated with calls from across the country, and especially the west, for a moratorium on debts. Osler, afraid that Borden would succumb to the political pressure, reminded him that, since 1912, many British investors with mortgage securities from the west had not received payments and that a moratorium would likely scare off future investment, to the great disadvantage of western development.

 

By the time the war had broken out, Osler was well known in Toronto for his civic and philanthropic efforts as well as his discreet financial endeavours. He had helped fund the new Toronto General Hospital, and was president (1899-1921) of the Ontario Rifle Association. A major purchaser of art – in 1903 he had bought a large collection of works by Paul Kane* – he was a benefactor of the Art Gallery of Toronto, and in 1912, the year of his knighthood, he had been instrumental in the creation of the Royal Ontario Museum. Osler’s cultural tastes are reflected too in the selection of the Toronto architectural firm of Darling and Pearson to design the Dominion Bank’s magnificent head office at Yonge and King in 1913-14, and many of its new branch buildings.

 

In the early months of the war a less impressive side of Osler was revealed by the “German professors issue” at the University of Toronto, where he had been a member of the board of governors since 1906. The sons of a German-born professor at University College took exception to an anti-German speech by their school principal. The protest led two newspapers to demand the dismissal of all three of the university’s German-born professors. Osler and his fellow governors concurred but President Robert Alexander Falconer* claimed that they had done no wrong. After a compromise was found, placing the professors on leave, Osler tendered his resignation but it was not accepted.

 

His reaction in this issue was likely symptomatic of the single-minded determination throughout most of the dominion to defeat the enemy, a spirit that proved more productive, in Osler’s case, when applied to war finance. He was a major contributor to the Canadian Patriotic Fund. Through Osler and Hammond, and its Winnipeg branch, dominion bonds were sold to institutional investors, easing the burden of government debt that was piling up in New York. In the west, the firm’s influence was also demonstrated in the four Victory Loans campaigns of 1917-19, during which more than $246 million worth of bonds were sold through Osler, Hammond, and Nanton. When the war ended, Osler, one of Toronto’s richest men, turned his attention to the economic aftermath and preached a gospel of caution. To each board member of the Dominion Bank he distributed a copy of Poor Richard’s almanack, Benjamin Franklin’s homage to frugality.

 

Canada had been transformed by the war, and in its wake Canadian businessmen encountered an increasingly hostile public. Many wanted villains to blame for the economic and social woes that had befallen the country; money-men and banks were fair game. As a bank president and a financier who had served the needs of western agriculturalists and municipalities, Osler took offence at allegations that banks were not loaning farmers sufficient money. The fallout from the war made profits unseemly and Osler, like other presidents, found himself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of having to defend the profitability of Canadian banks, a situation that had arisen before the war and grew more pressing after it.

 

From the porch of Craigleigh, his 13-acre estate in the Rosedale area of Toronto, Osler looked out at a Canada that was very different from the one he had known as a boy and as a young businessman. He understood the changes that had taken place in business. Finance capitalism, in particular, had emerged as a critical component of national development. In 1921, at age 76, Osler retained a high corporate status beyond his bank and Osler and Hammond, as the president of three companies, vice-president of another, and a director of eight.

 

Within his family circle, his wife had passed away in 1910, and his brothers, Featherston, Britton Bath*, and Sir William*, predeceased him. Sir E. B. Osler died at Craigleigh in 1924. He left an estate worth almost $4 million and a most unusual will. In his final years he had evidently written letters to friends and acquaintances promising money in recognition of their support; a special fund was set up from his estate to cover these obligations. All claimants had to do was present Osler’s letter and his promise would be made good.

My first submission for the virtual sketch date- my favourite winter fruit. I was inspired to join in by some fellow artists!

I overworked the back, right peel segment unfortunately- that's what happens when you try to do Latin and Greek while drawing :-o

Arches HP Paper, Prismacolor Pencils, White Gelly Roll pen.

Hand held 3 exposure HDR / Photomatix Pro, Topaz Adjust, Nik Collection and Photoshop processed.

 

The next ten images are my record of a visit to Deer Lodge, Montana. Within the town is the historical structure of the territorial prison. All pictures are of the prison. Unfortunately the lighting inside the prison was very limited and most images are of the outside.

Facility history[edit]

In response to rampant lawlessness and the vigilante-style form of justice present in the newly formed Montana Territory, in 1867 the US Congress allotted $40,000 to Montana for the express purpose of constructing a territorial prison.[3] On 19 November 1867, the territorial government chose Deer Lodge as the site of the facility, and on 2 June 1870, the cornerstone was laid.[4] The original plans for the building called for a structure which held three tiers of fourteen cells, but due to the difficulty of acquiring materials, the cost to ship those materials, and the expense of hiring labor, the new building would house only one of the three tiers. On 2 July 1871, US Marshal William Wheeler took possession of the first nine prisoners to be incarcerated in the facility.[5]

 

It only took a single month before the prison was overcrowded; by August, six more prisoners had arrived.[6] The burgeoning population was quelled somewhat when, in June 1874, another tier of fourteen cells was constructed, and the civilians of Deer Lodge were calmed when a twelve foot board fence went up in 1875.[7] The prison's population continued to grow, so Congress allocated an additional $15,000 for the construction of another tier of cells, but the soft brick of the building could not support any more weight. Instead, the money went into an administration building with guard barracks, a warden's office, and a visitor's reception.[8] Finally, in 1885, $25,000 served to provide the prison with a three story cellblock with 42 double-occupancy cells which was completed in 1886.[9] The Montana Territorial Prison was finally completed to original specifications, just in time to be handed over to the new State of Montana in March 1890.[10]

 

Prison life[edit]

The system of managing inmates at the Montana Territorial Prison was intended to follow the Auburn system of penal reform, a method pioneered at Auburn Prison in New York state in the 1820s. The Auburn system, or the silent system, hinged on prisoners working in groups during the day, maintaining solitary confinement at night, and adhering to a strict code of silence at all times. This rehabilitation method was doomed to fail in Montana, primarily due to the severe overcrowding which plagued the facility from the start.[11]

 

Within a month of the prison opening its doors, the building was overcrowded. This state of affairs persisted throughout the territorial years, reaching its peak in 1885. In that year, 120 inmates were incarcerated at the institution which claimed only 28 cells, or four inmates per cell.[12] Inmates camped on the prison grounds, but it wasn't until the completion of the 1886 cell block with its 42 double-occupancy cells and a round of generous paroles that the prison felt relief.[9]

 

Although the completion of the cell block meant a roof over a prisoner's head, the amenities of the facility were sparse. The cells measured 6 × 8 ft (2.4 m), were constructed of soft brick, and had no plumbing or artificial lights. The building had no heating or ventilation, and, in a region which often experienced temperatures below −30 °F (−34 °C) in the winter and above 100 °F (38 °C) in the summer, this made for very uncomfortable tenants. To alleviate the discomfort, the administration used wood stoves to heat the building and oil lamps to light it, the smoke from which combined with the stench of bucketed human waste and unwashed bodies to make the environment rank.[13]

 

The prison hired a physician to keep the inmates somewhat healthy but provided no pharmaceuticals; any drugs required to administer to the inmates had to be purchased using his own salary. Between May and November 1873, the overworked doctor reported 67 illnesses in a population of 21 inmates, or about three maladies per prisoner during a span of six months.[14] These sicknesses can be mostly attributed to the crowded, unsanitary conditions of the prison itself and to the poor quality of food provided to the inmates. Since the prison was operating on a shoestring budget, it had to feed the inmates with what the territory could provide. Therefore, few fruits and vegetables found their way into the diet, and the inmates made do with a menu heavy in proteins and starch.[15]

These children hold out their swollen, calloused hands. They earn 11 cents an hour.

 

Check out the Video, read the full Report, or visit our Website for more information on these gemstone workers in India and ways to help.

Boomslang, taken with a DSLR in Summer 2006 and overworked to Black & White, except for the eye.

Taken in the "Reptilienzoo Nockalm" in Patergassen/Carinthia, Austria in summer 2006.

Canon 5D with Sigma 105/2,8 Makro f=4 1/60 ISO 1000

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

 

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

 

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

 

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

 

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

 

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

 

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

 

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

 

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

 

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

 

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

 

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

 

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

 

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

 

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

 

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

 

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

 

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

 

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

 

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

 

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

 

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

 

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

 

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

 

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

 

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

 

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

 

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

 

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

 

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

 

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

 

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

 

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

 

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

 

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

 

WIKIPEDIA

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

 

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

 

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

 

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

 

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

 

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

 

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

 

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

 

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

 

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

 

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

 

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

 

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

 

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

 

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

 

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

 

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

 

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

 

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

 

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

 

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

 

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

 

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

 

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

 

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

 

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

 

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

 

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

 

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

 

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

 

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

 

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

 

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

 

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

 

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

 

WIKIPEDIA

It felt like Vancouver came out of hibernation on this Saturday March 20, 2010. It was a great day for a photowalk.

businessman sleeping on his desk - Businessman sleeping on his desk at work, Model: Adam Mirani. To Download this image without watermarks for Free, visit: www.sourcepics.com/free-stock-photography/24724413-busine...

Just watercolor and way overworked! Started late and I was tired. By the time I went to bed the puddles of color were still quite wet. It needs more work, but the paper couldn't take it.

 

Reference phto: www.flickr.com/photos/nadinerobbinsportraits/5084327773/

A set of red vestments for use at Pentecost, once belonging to the Church Union and now in the care of Norwich Cathedral. It has been suggested that they were made by the Norwich outfitter H. Rumsey Wells, though there is no evidence to prove that. The red velvet ground is decorated with tongues of flame. The orphreys though mostly modern, do incorporate parts of some genuine continental Renaissance orphreys, although these have been overworked.

All homemade, too. Although the scones were not a disaster, they didn't turn out the way a scone is supposed to be! I think I overworked the dough.

 

My daughter decided that some freshly picked dandelions would be a good addition to the photo!

 

The strawberry and apple conserve is fabulous. It consists of a green apple, strawberries, sugar, lemon juice and the seeds from one vanilla pod.

 

The honey cream consists of honey, pouring cream and mascarpone that have been whisked to soft peaks.

 

Makes for a great afternoon tea; I enjoyed mine with a cup of Earl Gray.

 

Recipe from MasterChef Australia magazine, issue #3.

 

Read more at The Sweetest Kitchen...

I took all of these at work while I was working back late in order to finish something for the next day. The first was taken around 9.45, the next somewhere around midnight and the last at 1.30 ... just about finished for the night.

 

Obviously there comes a point of diminished capacity as you work later and later, but I actually find I do work well late at night. I'm certainly more of a night owl than a morning person!

 

Well ... that, and when I'm tired my brain slows down enough for me to actually stay on track instead of flicking between one thing and another all the time. I swear I have the attention span of a flea!

 

Best viewed large (or better yet, huge!).

As the 1960s dawned, the US Marine Corps needed a replacement for the Sikorsky HR2S (CH-37) Mojave that served as the USMC's primary heavy-lift helicopter. In 1962, the USMC issued a requirement for a new helicopter with a range of 120 miles and a capacity of 8000 pounds. Sikorsky responded with an expanded version of their S-61/CH-3, and fought off stiff competition from Boeing Vertol's CH-47 Chinook to win the contract. Named the S-65 by Sikorsky, the USMC named it the CH-53A Sea Stallion. The first entered service in 1966.

 

At about the same time, the USAF was also interested in acquiring a new heavy helicopter for combat rescue duties. Though the USAF was satisfied with the HH-3E Jolly Green Giant in the combat search and rescue (CSAR) role, the prospect of a larger helicopter that could fly further and faster, and carry more equipment and crew, would relieve some of the pressure on the overworked Jolly Green crews. After testing two Marine CH-3As, the USAF ordered a batch as the HH-53B. This was significantly different than the Marine version: it was heavily armored, armed three Minigun 7.62mm gatling guns for defense, and was equipped with a rescue hoist and air refueling probe. Naturally, because the S-65 design was something of a "suped-up" Jolly Green Giant, the HH-53B was quickly dubbed the Super Jolly Green Giant. The first HH-53Bs reached Vietnam in late 1967; they were quickly supplemented by the slightly improved HH-53C.

 

The "Super Jollies" were to quickly make their mark. Dozens of American pilots owed their lives to Jolly Green crews (who never had to buy their own drinks), and the Super Jolly Green was able to get into North Vietnam deeper than the HH-3s. They were used in the famous Son Tay Prison Raid of 1970, in the rescue of Captain Roger Locher after an epic 23-day odyssey in North Vietnam, and the final act of the Vietnam War, the rescue of the SS Mayaguez off Cambodia in May 1975.

 

Since the HH-53s were a superior helicopter, the fleet took over most of the CSAR duties from the HH-3 force. A lesson learned in Vietnam was that CSAR operations were greatly restricted in bad weather and at night. With this in mind, the HH-53 fleet was upgraded to Pave Low III standard. This was essentially a new helicopter, with FLIR, a modified A-7 Corsair II radar, and additional avionics. Because the USAF also took over the role of inserting US Army Special Forces units after the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, it was redesignated MH-53M as a "special duties" helicopter. In 1986, it was upgraded even further with the addition of GPS and uprated engines, creating the MH-53J.

 

The ultimate Jolly Green would be the MH-53M Pave Low IV. This included all of the MH-53J upgrades, but included datalinks to satellites, ground forces, and battlefield surveillance radar aircraft such as the E-8 JSTARS. Updated nearly in real time, this allowed MH-53Js to avoid any enemy concentrations.

 

Both the Pave Low III and IV were used in both Gulf Wars, and in Afghanistan, where its performance in "hot and high" and near blackout conditions was invaluable. By 2008, however, the MH-53M force was simply getting too old. Most had been flying since Vietnam. The USAF retired the type that year in favor of the HH-60L Blackhawk and the MV-22B Osprey.

 

The 40th Aerospace and Recovery Squadron (ARRS) flew the HH-53B Super Jolly Green Giant from 1968 and 1976, in the SAR role from Korat RTAFB. The squadron paid for their bravery, losing no less than eight helicopters during the Vietnam War, but 40th HH-53 crewmembers were thrice awarded the Air Force Cross. Today, the 40th ARRS is known as the 40th Helicopter Squadron, and flies from Malmstrom AFB; this model is part of a historical display for the squadron.

 

This HH-53 wears then standard Southeast Asia camouflage; this angle shows the rescue hoist on the starboard side of the helicopter. A "Rescue" stripe is carried on the tail.

The Postcard

 

A postcard that was published by Bamforth & Co., Publishers of Holmfirth and New York. The card was printed in England.

 

The angel on the left looks as though she is being applauded by an an unseen audience for having crossed the bridge.

 

The card was posted in Portrush, Northern Ireland on Saturday the 26th. August 1909 to:

 

Mrs. McAlister,

18 Charlotte Street,

Ballymoney.

 

The two towns are about 12 miles from each other.

 

The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:

 

"Dear Mother,

I hope you are well and

all the others.

If Sabbath morning is

fine you can go by the

nine train if I am not up

before that and leave

the key for Mo and I

can go out after you.

This is my last week

staying here, I will soon

be getting my holidays.

Tell them all I was asking

for them.

Maggie."

 

The words in the message have unusually been written from right to left.

 

Lead, Kindly Light

 

"Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom" is a hymn, with words written in 1833 by Saint John Henry Newman as a poem entitled "The Pillar of the Cloud."

 

It was first published in the British Magazine in 1834, and re-published in Lyra Apostolica in 1836.

 

It is usually sung to the tune Sandon by Charles H. Purday. It was however originally published by Oxford University Press to the hymn tune Alberta by William H. Harris; or alternatively as a choral anthem by Sir John Stainer (1886).

 

As a young priest, Newman became sick while in Italy, and was unable to travel for almost three weeks. In his own words:

 

"Before starting from my inn, I sat down on

my bed and began to sob bitterly. My servant,

who had acted as my nurse, asked what ailed

me. I could only answer, 'I have a work to do in

England.'

I was aching to get home, yet for want of a

vessel I was kept at Palermo for three weeks.

I began to visit the churches, and they calmed

my impatience, though I did not attend any

services.

At last I got off in an orange boat, bound for

Marseilles. We were becalmed for whole week

in the Straits of Bonifacio, and it was there that

I wrote the lines, Lead, Kindly Light, which have

since become so well known."

 

Notable Occasions Relating to the Hymn

 

The Burns Pit

 

The largest mining disaster in the Durham Coalfield in England was at the West Stanley Colliery, known locally as "The Burns Pit", when 168 men and boys lost their lives as the result of two underground explosions at 3:45pm on Tuesday the 16th. February 1909.

 

In the Towneley Seam 63 lay dead, in the Tilley Seam 18 lay dead, in the Busty Seam 33 lay dead, and in the Brockwell Seam 48 lay dead.

 

But incredibly, there were still men alive underground. A group of 34 men and boys in the Tilley Seam had found a pocket of clean air. They were led by Deputy Mark Henderson.

 

Sadly a few of them panicked and left the group, they died rapidly after inhaling the poison gas. The remainder sat in almost total darkness, when one of them began humming the Hymn "Lead Kindly Light".

 

In no time at all, the rest of the miners joined in with the words, "Lead kindly light amidst the encircling gloom, lead thou me on, The night is dark, and I am far from home". This was probably sung to the tune "Sandon" by C. H. Purday, popular with miners in the Durham coalfield. Before the hymn ended, young Jimmy Gardner died of his injuries.

 

These 26 men were rescued after 14 hours, and four others were later rescued.

 

The Titanic

 

"Lead, Kindly Light" was sung by a soloist, Marion Wright, on the RMS Titanic during a hymn-singing gathering led by the Rev. Ernest C. Carter, shortly before the ocean liner struck an iceberg on the 14th. April 1912.

 

The hymn was also sung aboard one of the Titanic's lifeboats when the rescue ship Carpathia was sighted the following morning. It was suggested by one of the occupants, Noëlle, Countess of Rothes.

 

The Western Front

 

On one occasion in February 1915, "Lead, Kindly Light" was sung by a group of British troops to the accompaniment of nearby artillery fire on the Western Front during the Great War at services held before going into the trenches the following day.

 

The Pirate Verse

 

Edward Henry Bickersteth (later Bishop of Exeter) added an extra 'pirate verse' for the poem's re-publication in the Hymnal Companion in 1870. Newman was not pleased, writing to the publishers:

 

"It is not that the verse is not both in sentiment

and language graceful and good, but I think you

will at once see how unwilling an author must be

to subject himself to the inconvenience of that

being ascribed to him which is not his own."

 

This verse is not commonly now included as part of the hymn.

 

The Words to Lead Kindly Light

 

'Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th'encircling gloom,

Lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.

 

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou

Shouldst lead me on;

I loved to choose and see my path; but now

Lead Thou me on!

I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

 

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still

Will lead me on.

O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till

The night is gone,

And with the morn those angel faces smile,

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

 

Meantime, along the narrow rugged path,

Thyself hast trod,

Lead, Saviour, lead me home in childlike faith,

Home to my God.

To rest forever after earthly strife

In the calm light of everlasting life.'

 

A Flash Flood in Monterey

 

So what else happened on the day that Maggie posted the card to her mother?

 

Well, on the 26th. August 1909, a flash flood in Monterey, Mexico, caused the crest of the rain-swollen Santa Catarina river to reach the city shortly after midnight.

 

The flooding resulted in 1,200 people drowning and 15,000 being left homeless.

 

Los Angeles

 

Also on that day, the California cities of San Pedro and Wilmington were consolidated with Los Angeles.

 

Ravensbrück Concentration Camp

 

"Lead, Kindly Light" was sung by Betsie ten Boom, sister of Corrie ten Boom, and other women as they were led by the S.S. Guards to the Ravensbrück concentration camp during the Holocaust.

 

Ravensbrück was a German concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück (part of Fürstenberg/Havel).

 

The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States.

 

More than 20,000 (15%) of the total were Jewish. 85% were from other races and cultures. More than 80% were political prisoners.

 

Many prisoners were employed as slave labor by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments on Ravensbrück prisoners in order to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.

 

In the spring of 1941, the SS established a small adjacent camp for male inmates, who built and managed the camp's gas chambers. Of the female prisoners who passed through the Ravensbrück camp, about 50,000 perished; some 2,200 were killed in the gas chambers.

 

History of Ravensbrück

 

Construction of the camp began in November 1938 on the orders of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler. It was unusual in that it was intended exclusively to hold female inmates.

 

Ravensbrück first housed prisoners in May 1939, when the SS moved 900 women from the Lichtenburg concentration camp in Saxony. Eight months after the start of World War II, the camp's maximum capacity was already exceeded.

 

The camp underwent major expansion following the invasion of Poland. By the summer of 1941, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, an estimated total of 5,000 women were imprisoned, who were fed gradually decreasing hunger rations.

 

By the end of 1942, the inmate population of Ravensbrück had grown to about 10,000. The greatest number of prisoners at one time in Ravensbrück was probably about 45,000.

 

Between 1939 and 1945, some 132,000 female prisoners passed through the Ravensbrück camp system. About 50,000 of them perished from disease, starvation, overwork and despair; some 2,200 were murdered in the gas chambers.

 

On the 29th. April 1945, some 3,500 prisoners were still alive in the main camp when it was liberated.

 

Although the inmates came from every country in German-occupied Europe, the largest single national group in the camp were Polish.

 

There were children in the camp as well. At first, they arrived with mothers who were Romani or Jews incarcerated in the camp, or were born to imprisoned women. Although there were few children early on, including a few Czech children from Lidice in July 1942, later the children in the camp represented almost all nations of Europe occupied by Germany.

 

Between April and October 1944, their number increased considerably, consisting of two groups. One group was composed of Romani children brought into the camp with their mothers or sisters after the Romani camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed.

 

The other group included mostly children who were brought with Polish mothers sent to Ravensbrück after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Most of these children died of starvation.

 

Ravensbrück had 70 sub-camps used for slave labour that were spread across an area from the Baltic Sea to Bavaria.

 

Executions at Ravensbrück

 

Among the thousands executed at Ravensbrück were four members of the British World War II organization Special Operations Executive (SOE): Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo.

 

Other victims included the Roman Catholic nun Élise Rivet, Elisabeth de Rothschild (the only member of the Rothschild family to die in the Holocaust), and the Russian Orthodox nun St. Maria Skobtsova.

 

Also executed was the 25-year-old French Princess Anne de Bauffremont-Courtenay, Milena Jesenská, lover of Franz Kafka, and Olga Benário, wife of the Brazilian Communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes.

 

The largest single group of women executed at the camp were 200 young Polish members of the Home Army. A number of lesbians were imprisoned and murdered at the camp, including Henny Schermann and Mary Pünjer.

 

Survivors of Ravensbrück

 

Among the survivors of Ravensbrück was the author Corrie ten Boom, arrested with her family for harbouring Jews in their home in Haarlem, the Netherlands. She documented her ordeal alongside her sister Betsie ten Boom in her book The Hiding Place, which was eventually produced as a motion picture.

 

Polish Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, an art historian and author of Michelangelo in Ravensbrück, was imprisoned there from 1943 until 1945.

 

SOE agents who survived were Yvonne Baseden and Eileen Nearne, who was a prisoner in 1944 before being transferred to another work camp and escaping.

 

Englishwoman Mary Lindell and American Virginia d'Albert-Lake, both leaders of escape and evasion lines in France, survived. Another SOE agent, Odette Sansom, also survived, and is the subject of several biographies documenting her ordeals. Among the Communist survivors of the camp was French Resistance member Louise Magadur.

 

Maisie Renault, sister of Gilbert Renault, wrote about her captivity in Ravensbrück in La Grande Misère which won France's Prix Verité in 1948.

 

Other survivors who wrote memoirs about their experiences include Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, as well as Germaine Tillion, a Ravensbrück survivor from France who published her own eyewitness account of the camp in 1975.

 

After liberation, Anna Garcin-Mayade, French painter and member of the French Resistance, painted works illustrating prisoners and the terrible conditions of the camps; these were recreations of works she had created while in the camps.

 

In 2005, Ravensbrück survivor Judith Sherman published a book of prose and poetry titled Say the Name. Sherman writes of her childhood home in Kurima, Czechoslovakia, and of several deportations, hiding in homes and in the forest, undergoing torture, and witnessing murder in Ravensbrück before her final liberation.

 

Approximately 500 women from Ravensbrück were transferred to Dachau, where they were assigned as labourers to the Agfa-Commando; the women assembled ignition timing devices for bombs, artillery ammunition, and V-1 and V-2 rockets.

 

A male political prisoner, Gustav Noske, was incarcerated in Ravensbrück concentration camp after his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. Later Noske was freed by advancing Allied troops from a Gestapo prison in Berlin.

 

Ravensbrück Personnel

 

Johann Schwarzhuber introduced the gas chamber in the camp.

 

In addition to the male Nazi administrators, the camp staff included over 150 female guards assigned to oversee the prisoners. The term for a female guard in a Nazi camp was an Aufseherin, 'overseer'.

 

Ravensbrück also served as a training camp for over 4,000 female overseers. The women either stayed in the camp or served in other camps as block overseers (Blockführerinnen) or chief wardresses.

 

Several dozen block overseers accompanied by dogs, SS men and whips oversaw the prisoners in their living quarters in Ravensbrück, at roll call and during food distribution.

 

At any single time, a report overseer (Rapportführerin) handled the roll calls and general discipline of the internees. Rosel Laurenzen originally served as head of the labour pool at the camp (Arbeitdienstführerin) along with her assistant Gertrud Schoeber. In 1944 Greta Bösel took over this command.

 

Head wardress at the Uckermark death complex of Ravensbrück was Ruth Neudeck (January 1945 – March 1945). Most of the SS women met their prisoner work gangs at the gate each morning and returned them later in the day.

 

The treatment by the female guards in Ravensbrück was normally brutal. Elfriede Muller, an Aufseherin in the camp was so harsh that the prisoners nicknamed her "The Beast of Ravensbrück".

 

In 1945 nurse Vera Salvequart used to poison the sick in order to avoid having to carry them to the gas chambers.

 

In 1973, the US government extradited Hermine Braunsteiner for trial in Germany for war crimes. In 2006, they expelled Elfriede Rinkel, an 84-year-old woman who had lived in San Francisco since 1959 after it was discovered that she had been a guard at Ravensbrück from 1944 to 1945.

 

Life in the Camp

 

When a new prisoner arrived at Ravensbrück she was required to wear a colour-coded triangle (a winkel) that identified her by category, with a letter sewn within the triangle indicating the prisoner's nationality. For example, Polish women wore red triangles, denoting a political prisoner, with a letter "P." By 1942, Polish women had become the largest national component at the camp.

 

Soviet prisoners of war, along with German and Austrian Communists, wore red triangles; common criminals wore green triangles; and Jehovah's Witnesses were labelled with lavender triangles.

 

Prostitutes, Romani, homosexuals, and women who refused to marry were lumped together, with black triangles. Jewish women wore yellow triangles but sometimes, unlike the other prisoners, they also wore a second triangle for the other categories. For example, quite often it was for rassenschande ("racial pollution").

 

Some detainees had their hair shaved, such as those from Czechoslovakia and Poland, but other transports did not. In 1943, for instance, a group of Norwegian women came to the camp, and none of them had their hair shaved. This was because Norwegians/Scandinavians were ranked by the Nazis as the purest of all Aryans.

 

Between 1942 and 1943, almost all Jewish women from the Ravensbrück camp were sent to Auschwitz in several transports, following Nazi policy to make Germany Judenrein (cleansed of Jews).

 

Based on the Nazis' incomplete transport list (Zugangsliste), documenting 25,028 names of women sent by Nazis to the camp, it is estimated that the Ravensbrück prisoner population's ethnic structure comprised: Poles 25%, Germans 20%, Jews 15%, Soviets 15%, French 7%, Romani 5%, other 13%.

 

The Gestapo further categorised the inmates as: political 84%, anti-social 12%, criminal 2%, Jehovah's Witnesses 1%, rassenschande (racial defilement) 1%.

 

The list is one of the most important documents, preserved in the last moments of the camp operation by members of the Polish underground girl guides. The rest of the camp documents were burned by escaping SS overseers in pits or in the crematorium.

 

One form of resistance was the secret education programmes organised by prisoners for their fellow inmates. All national groups had some sort of programme. The most extensive were among Polish women, wherein various high school-level classes were taught by experienced teachers.

 

In 1939 and 1940, camp living conditions were acceptable: laundry and bed linen were changed regularly, and the food was adequate, although in the first winter of 1939/40, limitations began to be noticeable. The German Communist, Margarete Buber-Neumann, came to Ravensbrück as an inmate after nearly two years in a Russian Soviet Gulag. She described her first impressions of Ravensbrück in comparison to the Soviet camp in Karaganda:

 

"I looked across the great square, and could not

believe my eyes. It was surrounded by manicured

lawns, covered by flower beds on which bloomed

bright red flowers. A wide street, which led to a

large open area, was flanked by two rows of wooden

barracks, on both sides stood rows of young trees,

and along the roadside ran straight flower beds as

far as the eye could see.

The square and the streets seemed freshly raked.

To the left towards the watchtower, I saw a white

wooden barrack, and beside it a large cage, the

size of a birdhouse like you see at a zoo. Within it

paraded peacocks, and on a climbing tree dangled

monkeys and a parrot which always screamed the

word "Mama".

I wondered: 'This is a concentration camp'?"

 

Buber-Nuemann wrote how her first meal in Ravensbrück exceeded her expectations, when she was served sweet porridge with dried fruit (backobst), plus a generous portion of bread, margarine, and sausage.

 

However conditions quickly deteriorated. Elsie Maréchal, a young Belgian was a prisoner at Ravensbrück from 1943 to 1945. She described the conditions as follows:

 

"They didn't shoot the women. We were to die of

misery, hunger and exhaustion. When we arrived

at Ravensbrück, it was the worst. The first thing I

saw was a cart with all the dead piled on it. Their

arms and legs hanging out, and mouths and eyes

wide open.

They reduced us to nothing. We didn't even feel

like we had the value of cattle. You worked and

you died."

 

Nazi Medical Experiments

 

Starting in the summer of 1942, medical experiments were conducted without consent on 86 women; 74 of them were Polish inmates. Two types of experiments were conducted on the Polish political prisoners:

 

-- The first type tested the efficacy of sulfonamide drugs. These experiments involved deliberate cutting into and infecting of leg bones and muscles with virulent bacteria, cutting nerves, introducing substances like pieces of wood or glass into tissues, and fracturing bones.

 

-- The second set of experiments studied bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, and the possibility of transplanting bones from one person to another.

 

Out of the 74 Polish victims, called Kaninchen, Lapins, or "Rabbits" by the experimenters, five died as a result of the experiments. Six with unhealed wounds were executed, and (with assistance from other inmates) the rest survived with permanent physical damage.

 

Four such survivors—Jadwiga Dzido, Maria Broel-Plater, Władysława Karolewska, and Maria Kuśmierczuk—testified against Nazi doctors at the Doctors' Trial in 1946.

 

Between 120 and 140 Romani women were sterilized in the camp in January 1945. All had been deceived into signing the consent form, having been told by the camp overseers that the German authorities would release them if they complied.

 

Forced Labor at Ravensbrück

 

All inmates were required to do heavy labor ranging from strenuous outdoor jobs to building the V-2 rocket parts for Siemens. The SS also built several factories near Ravensbrück for the production of textiles and electrical components.

 

Ravensbrück was the main supplier of women for the brothels set up at many major Nazi camps toward the end of the war. Although women often volunteered for these positions, hoping they would be spared the most difficult physical labour and perhaps receive better rations, most in fact died quickly due to sexual abuse and the rampant spread of venereal disease.

 

For the women in the camp, it was important to retain some of their dignity and sense of humanity. Accordingly they made necklaces, bracelets, and other personal items, like small dolls and books, as keepsakes.

 

These personal effects were of great importance to the women, and many of them risked their lives to keep these possessions. Some of these items can be seen at the exhibition "Voices from Ravensbrück," hosted by Lund University Library, Sweden.

 

The bodies of those killed in the camp were cremated in the nearby Fürstenberg crematorium until 1943, when SS authorities constructed a crematorium at a site near the camp.

 

In January 1945, the SS also transformed a hut near the crematorium into a gas chamber, where they murdered several thousand prisoners before the camp's liberation in April 1945. In particular, they executed some 3,600 prisoners from the Uckermark police camp for "deviant" girls and women, which was taken under the control of the Ravensbrück SS at the start of 1945.

 

Death March and Liberation

 

In January 1945, prior to the liberation of the remaining camp survivors, an estimated 45,000 female prisoners and over 5,000 male prisoners remained at Ravensbrück, including children and those transported from satellite camps for gassing, which was being performed in haste.

 

With the Soviet Red Army's rapid approach in the spring of 1945, the SS leadership decided to remove as many prisoners as they could, in order to avoid leaving live witnesses behind who could testify as to what had occurred in the camp.

 

At the end of March, the SS ordered all physically capable women to form a column and exit the camp in the direction of northern Mecklenburg, forcing over 24,500 prisoners on a death march.

 

Some 2,500 ethnic German prisoners remaining were released, and 500 women were handed over to officials of the Swedish and Danish Red Cross shortly after the evacuation. On the 30th. April 1945, fewer than 3,500 malnourished and sickly prisoners were discovered alive at the camp when it was liberated by the Red Army. The survivors of the death march were liberated in the following hours by a Soviet scout unit.

 

The Ravensbrück Trials

 

The SS guards, female Aufseherinnen guards, and former prisoner-functionaries with administrative positions at the camp were arrested at the end of the war by the Allies and tried at the Hamburg Ravensbrück trials from 1946 to 1948.

 

Sixteen of the accused were found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death.

 

Having fled to Bavaria, Fritz Suhren (camp commandant) and Hans Pflaum (chief of the labor section) were caught by the American troops in 1949 and were sent to the French occupation zone. The trial and appeal took place from February to May 1950.

 

The jury comprised representatives from the French, Dutch and Luxembourg governments. Several dozens of former prisoners were subpoenaed. Suhren and Pflaum were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and were sentenced to death. They were executed on the 12th. June 1950.

 

The Ravensbrück Memorial Site

 

At the site of the former concentration camp, there is a memorial. In 1954, the sculptor Will Lammert was commissioned to design the memorial between the crematorium, the camp wall, and Schwedtsee Lake.

 

Up to his death in 1957, the artist created a large number of sculpted models of women. On the 12th. September 1959, the Ravensbrück National Memorial was inaugurated outside the former concentration camp on an area of 3.5 ha between the former camp wall and the shore of the Schwedtsee Lake.

 

Rosa Thälmann, a former concentration camp inmate and widow of the politician Ernst Thälmann, gave the opening speech. Compared to Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, it was the smallest of the three National Memorials of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

 

For the inaugural opening of the Ravensbrück National Memorial site, a scaled-up version of Tragende (Woman with Burden) was created and exhibited. This central symbolic figure, also known as the "Pietà of Ravensbrück", stands atop a stele on the peninsula in Lake Schwedtsee.

 

The Zwei Stehende (Two Women Standing) monument also has its origins in Lammert's models. Other statues, which were also originally created for Ravensbrück, have been on display at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Berlin Mitte since 1985, in commemoration of the Jewish victims of fascism.

 

Since 1984, the former SS headquarters have housed the Museum of Anti-fascist Resistance. After the withdrawal from Germany of the Soviet Army, which up to 1993 had been using parts of the former camp for military purposes, it became possible to incorporate more areas of the camp into the memorial site.

 

Today, the former accommodation blocks for the female guards are a youth hostel and youth meeting center. In the course of the reorganization, which took place in the early 1990's, the Museum of Anti-fascist Resistance was replaced by two new permanent exhibitions:

 

-- "Women of Ravensbrück", which displays the biographies of 27 former prisoners.

 

-- "Ravensbrück. Topography and History of the Women's Concentration Camp." This provides information about the origins of the camp, describes daily life in the camp, and explains the principle of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (extermination through work).

 

Since 2004 there has also been an exhibition about the female guards at the Ravensbrück Women's Concentration Camp, housed in another of their former accommodation blocks. Additionally, temporary exhibitions of special interest are held regularly at the memorial.

 

On the 16th. and 17th. April 2005, a ceremony was held in order to commemorate the 60th. anniversary of the camp's liberation. Among those invited were approximately 600 survivors from all over the world, mostly living in eastern Europe.

 

At the same time a new, permanent outdoor exhibition was opened, on the theme of the train transports to Ravensbrück. Its central exhibit is a refurbished goods wagon. The exhibition's information boards describe the origins of the transports and how they developed over time. They also explain the different types of trains, where they arrived, and the part played by the local residents. It is probably the only exhibition so far at a German memorial which is dedicated solely to the subject of the transports to the camp.

 

Ravensbrück Archaeology and Artifacts

 

Ravensbrück did not have its own burial site, so most of the bodies were kept nearby at the site of their cremation.

 

In 1989, a mass grave was accidentally found in the Fürstenberg cemetery. In 2019, the remains of Polish women were found in the cemetery.

 

Nine urns and two plaques were discovered. Their ashes were found buried with metal plaques that had once been part of their urns. The urns had since broken down in the soil, but the plaques still revealed the identities of those who were buried there.

 

In more recent excavations, archaeologists have found human body parts that were never fully burned in cremation. Ravensbrück archaeology is hard to come by from the actual site itself, as most of its artifacts escaped with its survivors.

 

Many of these artifacts were lost once some of the survivors reached Sweden. Survivors kept them hidden in the waistbands and hems of their clothes. As the women were being cleaned, their clothes were burned.

 

While the women showed hesitation in getting rid of their clothes, no one voiced why they were upset about it. They didn't yet trust the people taking care of them after all that they had endured.

 

Karin Landgren Blomqvist helped the survivors, but regrets this detail:

 

"The clothes one was to take care of proved to be

dirty rags, infested with lice, which were according

to Swedish standards too worn down to be worth

cleaning.

The consequence was that they were all burned.

Many survivors protested, but few dared to say why.

They dared not believe we were fully without German

influence.

We had been too naïve and unsuspecting.

Inseams, hems, and waistbands, many had with great

effort and danger for life during internment in camp

managed to save personal souvenirs and treasures.

Now, when liberation was a fact, they lost these very

last objects from their original lives."

 

These were mainly items secretly made in the camp. Prisoners could be punished if caught, but many disregarded camp rules and continued to make art in secret, such as dolls for orphaned or lost children.

 

Prospects were not good for children at Ravensbrück. Many lost their mothers, and as a result lost what little protection they did have. Many were medically experimented on or killed. Children on their own would not survive in the camp, but women would step forward and behave as surrogate/adoptive mothers, making dolls and taking care of them.

 

The creation of art or personal belongings in the camp was strictly prohibited. Despite this, there are still artifacts found today that display resistance. A sprig of the lily of the valley is a prime example. While only a piece of plastic, if caught could be considered an act of "sabotage" and largely punishable.

 

In an interview done just after liberation in Sweden, Interview 420 describes:

 

"The smallest infractions were elevated to the level of 'sabotage', which brought the highest possible sentences: whipping, the bunker, and even execution by shooting.

For making toe-warmers with camp wool for her stockings

in the winter, a prisoner would get 25 blows and two weeks

in the bunker".

 

Many of the items were made of spare bits of plastic, wood, or cloth.

 

In 2017, 27 secret letters were gifted to the Museum of Martyrology in Lublin. These letters describe the camp in detail, including the doctors practicing medical experimentation. Concealed in the sofa of Krystyna Czyż, they spent decades hidden away until their donation.

 

In September 1941, sisters Janina and Krystyna Iwańska, Wanda Wójtasik, and Krystyna Czyż were sent to Ravensbrück for assisting the Polish Underground. In 1942, medical experimentation was introduced and included the four letter-writers.

 

As detailed in the letters, their legs were sliced open with glass or wood before the doctors introduced bacteria and test medicine. If the wounds did not heal, they later found out that it would result in execution. The four survived and lived to write the letters.

 

Once a month, prisoners were allowed to write letters to their families. These messages were monitored by the guards. The women wrote a message in visible ink, and then in between the lines, they wrote in their own urine. This worked as a version of invisible ink. When held over a heat source or ironed, the message would appear.

 

Cyż communicated this with her brother by referring to a children's book. It instructed him to look for a message using the first letter of every line. It spelled out: "list modem" which translates to "letter in urine".

 

The women delivered intelligence from Ravensbrück about the medical experiments. In 1943, one of the many letters read:

 

"Further details of operations. Up to 16 January

1943, 70 people in total have been operated on.

From this, 56 from the Lublin September transport,

of which 36 were infection operations (without

incision), 20 bone operations. In bone operations,

each cut is re-opened.

Bones are operated on both legs or just one."

 

Another letter stated:

 

"We are worried that they will want to get rid of the

ones who have been operated on as living proof.

Bear in mind that in the course of 20 months about

a quarter of all the Polish women from political

transports have been shot.

On the 30th. April, five more were shot under the

guise of being sent to Oświęcim."

 

Not only did the letters detail medical experiments, but brothel work as well. The letters and their information made their way into the Polish Underground, the International Red Cross, the Vatican, and the Polish government-in-exile in London. Eventually, the letters were used as evidence in the trials.

 

When Ravensbrück was liberated, a note was found on the body of a dead girl. It read as follows:

 

"O Lord, remember, not only the men and women

of good will, but also those of ill will.

But do not remember all the suffering they have

inflicted on us; remember the fruits we have borne,

thanks to this suffering:

Our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our

courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart

which has grown out of all this, and when they

come to judgement, let all the fruits we have borne

be their forgiveness."

Carla's suggestion to call this one Monet's Garden inspired this.I used watercolours, some thick like gouache and some more watery. This was beginning to be overworked so I just stopped and left it fairly loose and resisted the temptation to finish with black pen marks.

 

Reviews from Pink Me: Children's books reviewed for grownups.

 

Skippyjon Jones and the big bones by Judy Schachner

Last year, Big Man's kindergarten teacher said of the Skippyjon Jones books, "I feel like I'm sort of being manipulated to like these books, and I really just don't." She couldn't put her finger on what she didn't care for, and it's a tough call - LOVE the chalky, colorful, detailed illustrations that are both quirky and technically accomplished; I like the title character, who is both independent and imaginative, and his tattletale little sisters and no-nonsense mom, with their fun names; and I adore Schachner's use of Spanglish ("Hola, dudes!") throughout. Hell, there's even a song or two. I think what always bugs me about these books is the plot, weirdly enough. Accompanied by his crowd of Chihuahua friends, Skippyjon Jones assumes his alter ego, Skippito Friskito the great sword fighter, and goes on an imaginary adventure in his closet. And I swear, it's the adventure story that always falls apart. Even my kids get confused looks on their faces during the part where Skippito battles the giant bee / dances with the dinosaurs / whatever. I keep reading these books though, because Skippyjon and his family are great characters and I love saying their names. You guys want to start calling me Mama Junebug Jones, you go right ahead.

 

A closer look, by Mary McCarthy

A neato book about observation and scale for the youngest pairs of eyes. VERRY reminiscent of Steve Jenkins, with strong colors and paper collage art.

 

Water Boy by David McPhail

A nice, weird book about a boy's relationship with water - the water in his body, the water in his bath, the water in the environment. Like a caring teacher, David McPhail's characteristically quiet, rich watercolors get right down in front of the boy to observe his reactions to the ordinary and extraordinary manifestations of water in his world.

 

Calendar by Myra Cohn Livingston, illustrated by Will Hillenbrand

The sparse text here was a little abstract for my four year old, but the energetic, slightly minimalist illustrations almost made up for that.

 

Meet the meerkat by Darrin Lunde, illustrated by Patricia Wynne

Patricia Wynne keeps showing up as the illustrator of books produced by employees and alums of the American Museum of Natural History, and while her somewhat clumsy mice and hominids in books such as Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle's Bones, Brains and DNA make you feel like maybe she's overworked, the keenly observed drawings of meerkats in this book by mammalogist Darrin Lunde show you what she can do given a single subject. This is a great little book about a popular little beast, a rare item in the Easy nonfiction area.

 

Bean Thirteen by Matthew McElligott

The faux-woodcut illustrations in this buggy book about division are just fantastic. Chunky, hip, and expressive, with a sophisticated, punchy palette. The story? Meh.

 

Phooey! by Marc Rosenthal

Where Once Upon a Banana does cause-and-effect with road signs, Phooey! does it with onomatopoeia. A bored kid kicks a can, which disturbs a cat, who jumps on an elephant, etc. All the while the kid, complaining that nothing every happens around here, walks right past all the exciting action. Rosenthal, who calls Celesteville "my utopia" in his dedication, displays a love of clean line and clear color worthy of Babar.

 

Tap dancing on the roof by Linda Sue Park, pictures by Istvan Banyai

Linda Sue Park here does for sijo what Andrew Clements recently did for haiku - her clear, funny examples of this short poetic form in effect show kids how it's done. After reading poems like

 

Pockets

What's in your pockets right now? I hope they're not empty:

Empty pockets, unread books, lunches left on the bus - all a waste

In mine: One horse chestnut. One gum wrapper. One dime. One hamster.

 

...it's almost impossible to not want to try it yourself. And Istvan Banyai? Do I really have to say it? The Goran Visnjic of illustrators.

Every Chinese Doctor I have been to says that I have cold energy in my stomach. So I am always willing to try anything to get rid of this cold energy. Rather than living a healthy life of constant physical activity, restricted computer use, and all the other modern things that we do to make us unbalanced creatures - I chose to put myself through ancient practices - like STOMACH FIREBURNING or MOXA (mugwart) steaming!!!!

 

So the philosophy behind fireburning is that the fire's heat will warm up your stomach - it will start moving the cold energy out and help you restore your yin energy. After 5 times of lighting a fire and putting the fire out on my stomach - I felt so wonderful. In between each fireburning, the doctor massaged my stomach - it's the best feeling in the world. It felt as if he was caressing every part of my large and small intestinal track and giving it lots of love and care. And the best part is that in the end- when the fire burning is done correctly - he takes off the saran wrap, medicine cloth, and starts Doggy Paddling down from the top of my stomach to the very bottom of my intestines - you can HEAR A RIVER of activity going on inside! it's totalllly FREAKY - I could hear a river gurgling - as if he was totally giving me a full plumbing system overhaul!

he said that when performed with the right type of fire shapes, the doggy paddling takes all the released coldness and moves it out.

 

the whole entire time I focused on using qi gong breathing techniques - because I am super sensitive to energy I could feel the cold air flowing out of the bottom of my feet.

 

But then for a few min before or after the process - sometimes I feel that I am inadequate as a human being when I do these things because it reminds me of how out of touch I am with my body, the earth, and the stars. So going to the Chinese doctor for me is like a form of rebirth and a bit of self-punishment (for not being healthy when I am living in the states). But then I think - is it only when I travel - when I'm farthest away from everything and everyone that I intimately know - is that the only time I feel that I can take care of myself without feeling guilty? Is it only when I am unreachable that I recover from everyday life in the states - when my family stuff is so far away that it is absolutely out of my control? Then I start thinking that's stupid tricia - peace is where you are - but sometimes I feel that the only way to really extract myself out of my own life is to leave the country and cross an ocean away. I wonder if this is a pattern of modern life now - middle class people overworking and then leaving for a few months every year or few years to prevent burn out and just to re-balance. It certainly has become a pattern in my life - is the amount of traveling we do equivalent to the amount of stress we have at home? sometimes I think so...

 

well anyways this is seriously the best form of self-punishment - when the doctor tells me that my yin-yang isn't balanced - it actually makes me really excited to become more balanced again. I am always excited for them to say - "ok here your energy is blocked, so that's why your hair is turning white or that's why your bowel movements aren't regular." When they tell me how unbalanced I am, I start thinking about how I can take better care of myself.

 

AFter fireburning, the doctor told me of all the herbs and foods that I should eat to heal my body. for example, I need to eat more lemon peels. This time the doctor told me that my health was pretty good, but my back and neck is messed up from years of sitting in front of a computer. Plus I haven't been meditating or dancing as much lately :(

 

So I love this herbal/ancient practice - only in china...only in china. In India I tried going to the medicinal doctor - I actually went to 3 of them because I really wanted to give it a chance - well each on told me that I was too much of a "pita" and they threw my naked body on a slap of hard wood and started dumping herbal oil on me and then the woman rubbed the oil on me forcing my bones into the wood table and I slid around like a dead fish - I tried to grab onto the wood but it was impossible! - may sound wonderful-(hmm hands + oil) BUT NOT!!!!!! it was painful and the worst part was that I didn't feel more balanced afterwards. SO I've decided China is the place for me to go for medicinal care.

 

Grunge image of a stressed overworked man studying

businessman loaded with paperwork - Businessman loaded with paperwork over white background, Model: Adam Mirani. To Download this image without watermarks for Free, visit: www.sourcepics.com/free-stock-photography/24724435-busine...

Frustrated Woman at Computer With Stack of Paper --- Image by

Per Wikipedia:

 

"The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial is a presidential memorial in Washington (DC), honoring American Civil War general and U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.

 

It sits at the base of Capitol Hill (Union Square, the Mall, 1st Street, between Pennsylvania Avenue and Maryland Avenue), below the west front of the United States Capitol.

 

Its sculpture of Grant on horseback faces west, over the Capitol Reflecting Pool and toward the Lincoln Memorial, which honors Grant's wartime president, Abraham Lincoln.

 

In addition to Grant's statue, which rests on a pedestal that include bronze reliefs of the infantry, are bronze statues of protective lions and of the Union cavalry and artillery, also on pedestals.

 

The Memorial includes the second-largest equestrian statue in the U. S., and the fourth-largest in the world.

 

The Grant and Lincoln Memorials define the eastern and western ends, respectively, of the National Mall.

 

Work on the Grant Memorial was begun in 1902 as the largest ever commissioned by Congress at the time.

 

It was created by sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady and architect Edward Pearce Casey. Sculptor Edmund Amateis assisted Shrady as the monument neared completion in 1921. Shrady spent 20 years of his life working on the Memorial and died, stressed and overworked, two weeks before its dedication in 1922.

 

The sculptures were cast in bronze at the Roman Bronze Works in New York.

 

Construction on the site of the Memorial began in 1909 when the marble superstructure and the four bronze lions were installed.

 

The Artillery Group was installed in 1912, the Cavalry Group in 1916, and the bronze equestrian statue of Grant in 1920.

 

The Memorial was dedicated on the 100th anniversary of Grant's birth, April 27, 1922.

 

Shrady having died, the infantry panels on the base of Grant's pedestal were completed by sculptor Sherry Fry based on Shrady's sketches and installed in 1924.

 

The Grant Memorial is the center of a three-part sculptural group including the James A. Garfield Monument to the south and the Peace Monument to the north."

 

DSC_0142

He was wearing his Argentina shirt and sporting his Argentina moves (I guess? No one really knows). We made these burgers and they were unbelievably good:

 

Super Delicious Tender Grilled Burgers (courtesy of Cooks Illustrated.)

 

This recipe requires freezing the meat twice, for a total of 65 to 80 minutes, before grilling. When stirring the salt and pepper into the ground meat and shaping the patties, take care not to overwork the meat or the burgers will become dense. Sirloin steak tips are also sold as flap meat. Serve the burgers with your favorite toppings or one of our grilled-vegetable toppings.

 

INGREDIENTS

 

1 1/2 pounds sirloin steak tips, trimmed and cut into 1/2-inch chunks

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

Kosher salt and pepper

1 (13 by 9-inch) disposable aluminum pan (if using charcoal)

4 hamburger buns

 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Place beef chunks and butter on large plate in single layer. Freeze until meat is very firm and starting to harden around edges but still pliable, about 35 minutes.

 

2. Place one-quarter of meat and one-quarter of butter cubes in food processor and pulse until finely ground into pieces size of rice grains (about 1/32 inch), 15 to 20 pulses, stopping and redistributing meat around bowl as necessary to ensure beef is evenly ground. Transfer meat to baking sheet. Repeat grinding with remaining 3 batches of meat and butter. Spread mixture over sheet and inspect carefully, discarding any long strands of gristle or large chunks of hard meat, fat, or butter.

 

3. Sprinkle 1 teaspoon pepper and 3/4 teaspoon salt over meat and gently toss with fork to combine. Divide meat into 4 balls. Toss each between hands until uniformly but lightly packed. Gently flatten into patties 3/4 inch thick and about 4 1/2 inches in diameter. Using thumb, make 1-inch-wide by 1/4-inch-deep depression in center of each patty. Transfer patties to platter and freeze for 30 to 45 minutes.

 

4A. FOR A CHARCOAL GRILL: Using skewer, poke 12 holes in bottom of disposable pan. Open bottom vent completely and place disposable pan in center of grill. Light large chimney starter filled two-thirds with charcoal briquettes (4 quarts). When top coals are partially covered with ash, pour into disposable pan. Set cooking grate in place, cover, and open lid vent completely. Heat grill until hot, about 5 minutes.

 

4B. FOR A GAS GRILL: Turn all burners to high, cover, and heat grill until hot, about 15 minutes. Leave all burners on high.

 

5. Clean and oil cooking grate. Season 1 side of patties liberally with salt and pepper. Using spatula, flip patties and season other side. Grill patties (directly over coals if using charcoal), without moving them, until browned and meat easily releases from grill, 4 to 7 minutes. Flip burgers and continue to grill until browned on second side and meat registers 125 degrees for medium-rare or 130 degrees for medium, 4 to 7 minutes longer.

 

6. Transfer burgers to plate and let rest for 5 minutes. While burgers rest, lightly toast buns on grill, 1 to 2 minutes. Transfer burgers to buns and serve.

Monteau dress

Forever21 boots

thrifted cardigan

 

Lately I've been a bit tired and feeling overworked... I guess that's the life of a mother.

 

...read/see more here.