Eduardo Galeano - The Memory of Fire Trilogy - Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

Now he enters the city of Panama, advancing among the flames, with the English flag streaming from one hand and a cutlass grasped in the other. Two thousand men and several cannons follow him. The fire turns night into day, another summer overtopping the eternal summer of these coasts; it devours houses and convents, churches and hospitals, and licks the lips of the buccaneer who yells: “I’m here for money, not for prayers!”

After much burning and killing, he moves off followed by an endless caravan of mules loaded with gold, silver, and precious stones.

Morgan sends his apologies to the governor for the delay.

(61 and 65)

The White Man’s Burden

The duke of York, brother of the king of England, founded the Company of Royal Adventurers nine years ago. English planters in the Antilles bought their slaves from Dutch slavers; but the Crown could not permit the purchase of such valuable articles from foreigners. The new enterprise, set up for trade with Africa, had prestigious shareholders: King Charles II, three dukes, eight earls, seven lords, a countess, and twenty-seven knights. In homage to the duke of York, the captains burned the letters DY with hot irons onto the breasts of the three thousand slaves they carried yearly to Barbados and Jamaica.

Now the enterprise is to be called the Royal Africa Company. The English king, who holds most of the stock, encourages slave-buying in his colonies, where slaves cost six times as much as in Africa.

Behind the ships, sharks make the trip to the islands, awaiting the bodies that go overboard. Many die because there is not enough water and the strongest drink what little there is, or because of dysentery or smallpox, and many die from melancholy: they refuse to eat, and there is no way to open their jaws.

They lie in rows, crushed against each other, their noses touching the deck above. Their wrists are handcuffed, and fetters wear their ankles raw. When portholes have to be closed in rough seas or rain, the small amount of air rises to fever heat, but with portholes open the hold stinks of hatred, fermented hatred, fouler than the foulest stench of slaughterhouse, and the floor is always slippery with blood, vomit, and shit.

The sailors, who sleep on deck, listen at night to the endless moans from below and at dawn to the yells of those who dreamed they were in their country.

(127, 160, and 224)

Mandingo People’s Song of the Bird of Love

But let me, oh, Dyamberé!

You who wear the belt with the long fringes,

let me sing to the birds,

the birds that listen to the departing princess

and receive her last confidences.

And you, maidens, sing, sing

softly

“la, la”—the beautiful bird.

And you, Master-of-the-terrible-gun,

let me look at the bird of love,

the bird that my friend and I love.

Let me, master-of-the-splendid-tunic,

lord of raiment more brilliant

than the light of day.

Let me love the bird of love!

(134)

Morgan

He was almost a child when they sold him, in Bristol, to a dealer. The captain who took him to the Antilles exchanged him for a few coins in Barbados.

In these islands he learned to break with one ax blow any branch that hit his face; and that there is no fortune that does not have crime for father and infamy for mother. He spent years robbing galleons and making widows. Fingers wearing gold rings, he simply chopped off. He became chief of the pirates. Correction, buccaneers. Admiral of buccaneers. From his toadlike neck always hangs his buccaneers license, which legalizes his function and keeps him from the gallows.

Three years ago, after the sack of Panama, they took him to London as a prisoner. The king removed his chains, dubbed him knight of the court, and named him lieutenant governor of Jamaica.

The philosopher John Locke has drawn up the instructions for good government of this island, which is the headquarters of English buccaneers. Morgan will see to it that neither Bibles nor dogs to hunt fugitive slaves will ever be lacking and will hang his brother pirates every time his king decides to be on good terms with Spain.

Newly landed at Port Royal, Henry Morgan takes off his plumed hat, downs a shot of rum, and by way of a toast empties the bowl over his many-rolled wig. The buccaneers shout and sing, waving swords.

The horse that takes Morgan to the government palace is shod with gold.

(11 and 169)

Claudia the Witch

With her hand she moved clouds and brought on or held off storms. In the twinkling of an eye she brought people back from far-off lands and also from death. She enabled a magistrate of the Porco mines to see his native Madrid in a mirror; and she served at the table of Don Pedro de Ayamonte, who came from Utrera, cakes freshly baked in an Utrera oven. She caused gardens to bloom in deserts and turned the savviest lovers into virgins. She saved hunted people who sought refuge in her house by changing them into dogs or cats. For bad times, a bright face, she’d say, and hunger she’d beat off with a guitar: She played her guitar and shook her tambourine to revive the sick and the dead. If you were mute she could make you speak, if you talked too much she could stop you. She made open-air love with an extremely black devil right out in the countryside. After midnight, she flew.

She had been born in Tucumán, and this morning she died in Potosí. On her deathbed, she called a Jesuit priest and told him to take from a drawer certain lumps of wax and remove the pins that were stuck in them, so that five priests whom she had made sick could get well.

The priest offered her confession and divine mercy, but she laughed and died laughing.

(21)

The Olympian Steeds

James Bullocke, a tailor of Yorktown, has challenged Matthew Slader to a horse race. The county court fines him for his presumptuousness and warns him that it is contrary to Law for a Labourer to make a race being a Sport for Gentlemen. Bullocke must pay two hundred pounds of tobacco in casks.

People on foot, gentry on horseback: the halo of aristocracy is the dust cloud that hooves raise along the road. Horses’ hooves make and unmake fortunes. For races on Saturday afternoons, or for horsey talk in the evenings, the knights of tobacco emerge from the solitude of the plantation in silken clothes and curly wigs, and over mugs of cider or brandy discuss and make bets while dice roll on the table. They bet money or tobacco or black slaves, or white servants of the kind that pay their fare from England with years of work; but only on big nights of glory or ruin do they bet horses. A good horse is the measure of the worth of its owner, a tobaccocrat of Virginia who lives and commands on horseback and on horseback will die, flying like the wind to the heavenly gates.

In Virginia there is no time for anything else. Three years ago Governor William Berkeley could proudly remark: I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have either for a hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them.

(35)

The Ax of Battle

With the first snows, the Wampanoag Indians rise. They are tired of seeing the New England frontier run south and west on speedy feet, and by the end of winter they have ravaged the Valley of Connecticut and are fighting less than twenty miles from Boston.