In His Own Image

I would like you to go through a little exercise with you. An exercise in thinking…

I want you to clear your mind… No politics, no religion, no agenda, clear your mind… let yourself see what's there, and what’s actually going on… No more, just see what’s there…

This first is no more than a light box, it is covered with sand… sand… There is an intelligent being moving this sand about… With design to entertain, to tell a story, and least I forget, the show off the skills of the artist… But… remember, it is sand atop a light box.

http://youtu.be/8CHe9Am68wc

And this second one… Let’s just say, if you don’t get it…you’re not going to.

http://youtu.be/M1Q-EbX6dso

And He created them in His own image, male and female He created them…

George Henry Nichols  

Another letter by the teenage girl from Wales

I asked her for permission to print this letter, She made one stipulation: 
(Thank you for your response.

OK.  With one proviso.  Since things are changing by the minute, put the time and date I wrote it (4:22 am 2/27/14 my time (Donetsk) -- 6:22 pm 2/26/14 your time CST (US)).)

Since November of last year, I have been monitoring the Ukraine situation with deep interest and concern, especially the last three weeks plus.

          There have been three modes of information source available which I utilized to keep current with events.

          First, of course, are numerous relatives, friends and acquaintances "on the ground" in various parts of the country who are experiencing first hand what is transpiring.

          Additionally, thanks to the internet, there are various "news" outlets (TV, radio, print and websites) both in Ukraine and other parts of Europe which supply needed information.  However, you have to know which ones because of extreme bias.  Out of the United States, about the only reliable entity is Fox News.  And I can't leave out the various bloggers and tweeters.

          Then there are (were) a couple live web cams which showed overall panoramas of Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and Mariyinsky Park (Constitution Square), both in Kiev, 24 hours a day showing all that was happening.

          While most of the coverage concerns the actions in Kiev, protests and demonstrations were occurring all over Ukraine, including Donetsk.

          Of all those in Ukraine I worry about, the three you are most aware of are my grandparents in Kiev, and AK in Donetsk.

          So what is this all about ??  It is about alignment, personal freedom, political and economic corruption, and social degeneration.

          Of everybody involved, there are five names which you should focus upon:  (Ex) President Viktor Yanukovych, former president Yulia Tymoshenko, 
Minister of Internal Affairs Vitaliy Zakharchenko, Oleksandr Turchynov, speaker of the Parliament, and 
Vitali Klitschko, leader of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform.  (If Vitali Klitschko's name sounds familiar, he just recently retired as the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion.)          

          The beginning of all this actually goes back to the fall of the Soviet Union.  Then the Orange Revolution of 2004.  However, this is no time for a history lesson.
 
          Alignment.  The question:  Should Ukraine associate itself (economically, socially and politically) with the "European Union" and the West, or with Russia ??  A large majority of Ukrainians chose Europe and the West, as most still remember its long occupation and suppression by the USSR.  Through the democratic process, an agreement (contract) was passed stating Ukraine would join the EU.  Appeared everything was settled, however, President Yanukovych (long known as a puppet of Russia's president Putin) at the last minute discarded the agreement in favor of aligning with Russia.

          Personal Freedom.  Though Ukraine was no longer under the thumb of the USSR, government control had steadily crept back into people's lives under Yanukovych, mainly enforced by the Titushky, 
Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and the Berkut.

          Political and Economic Corruption.  I am ashamed to admit it, but Ukraine is one of the most corrupt nations of the world. 
          Social Degeneration.  Because of the government's involvement and protection of organized crime, Ukraine has become the center of sexual trafficking, prostitution, child pornography, smuggling, and other activity.     

          Seeing all this unfolding before my eyes, I could not stay away.  Fortunately, much has been resolved.  Yanukovych has been removed from office.  The Constitution has been restored to its prior status before he took power.  Yulia Tymoshenko has been released from prison (she is the former Prime Minister and leader of the Orange Revolution who was imprisoned byYanukovych's courts on false charges), couple days ago the Berkut was disbanded, all USSR monuments have been destroyed, close to a hundred governmental officials have been arrested and charged for "organizing the killing of protesters, and again making Ukrainian the official language of the nation.

          Euromaidan (anti-communist, pro European seizing of government buildings) "occupations" have taken place in most Oblasts.

          Yanukovych and several other officials are now fugitives.  He and some others tried to escape by flying out of Donetsk, but were denied.

          Donetsk is in the eastern part of the country.  This eastern part is where the highest degree of Russian is spoken, though not necessarily supportive of Russia itself.

          The Kharkiv Oblast (province north of Donetsk) declared "separation" from Ukraine.  However, its governor (Mikhail Dobkin) and its city's mayor (Hennadiy Kernes) have fled to Russia.

          In the south (Sevastopol and Simferopol) pro-Russian separatists and Crimean Tatars(with help from the Russian military) have held protests to secede.   Russian soldiers have already been sighted in the Crimea.

          There are still huge demonstrations all over Ukraine, especially here in the east.  Thousands of protesters on both sides fought in Kharkiv and Donetsk just yesterday.  But the main tension all over Ukraine is the uncertainty of what Putin will do.  Rumors everywhere.  Most believe he will invade (at least in the East first) as he is not likely to lose Ukraine.  He did it in Georgia.  We all know the USA will do nothing because Obama is weak, cowardly, inept and incompetent.  All talk.  Probably as corrupt asYanukovych.  He is deemed more irrelevant than anything.

The Girl From Wales 

The Privateer

From the book

The Legend of Captain Outrageous

I must go down to the dock today, and watch the ship come in.

For its not just any ship, it’s the one which calls us friend.

He will bring us gold and bring us silver, and treasures from the east.

And for our Outrageous Captain, we will have to have a feast.

There will be a crowd at the dock today, to watch the ship come in.

There will be singing and dancing and merriment, and all will call him friend.

They will speak of the voyage and the dangers incurred and the crew which has no fear,

And they will speak in awe, of their Outrageous Captain, the famous privateer.

He will tell us stories of the pirates, and all the guts he spilled,

And he will speak of the Spanish ships he sacked, and all of those he killed.

He will speak of the heavy weather and how it tossed the ship about,

And the bravery of his crew, even the ones who got the gout.

He spends his gold and prepares his ship to make for the sea again,

For he knows his duty is to serve his King, and those who call him friend.

And when he goes among the ladies, you won’t find an eye without a tear,

For they all love their Outrageous Captain.  The Famous Privateer.

©

George Henry Nichols

Intelligent design (?)

Let us consider… “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth.”

As the story goes, God created Man in his image, and put him in a garden. The garden of Eden… With the sin of man, death was brought into the world… and man was driven from the garden…

Now… where was he driven too…?  onto the rest of the land mass…? what ever wasn’t Eden…?

Now if you consider the story, God created a perfect world.  What would be a perfect world be?

Let us consider what we see now, consider what we know about physics, and what we know (facts) about the rock record and what we know about intelligent design… and venture into what could be…

Now if you were going to set up a nice aquarium, you would set it up right, so that it functioned as you desired.

I am beginning to get a picture that tells me the pre-flood earth was quite different than today… A perfect world??? There would be no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no floods, no blizzards, no droughts, and no man eating animals…  That’s a tall order to fill.

Now it was about 2000 years from the time of creation to the time of the flood (Noah).  Interesting fact, man lived on average for six hundred years. After the flood, the life-span of man has dropped off sharply and is now under a hundred years… What could have been so different?

God also gave Noah the rainbow as a sign he would never destroy the world with water again, as though, the rainbow was something new. Baptist will tell ya, “There was no rainbows before the flood in the sky.” You ask them to explain that, and they can’t. But damn if their kids didn’t go to school and figure it out… Sure Enough, Noah was the first man to see a rainbow in the sky… 

Let us not put a limit on God, and kept in mind, chaos bigots’ chaos. Intelligence brings design… What we see, is not the way the earth was designed.

I believe when the earth was created, it was basically a perfect terrarium, complete with a canopy and watering system.

I’m seeing a crystal clear ice canopy… we were in a bubble of ice, held in place by a much stronger magnetic field.  This turned the earth as a whole into a terrarium. So the temperatures on the surface would be quite moderate and constant. 

I think the earth itself was pretty much just that, earth. As the story of creation goes, with maybe several small seas…

The inner core powers the planet. I’ll come back to this, on this spinning liquid core, a crust formed (basically the basalt rock) because it was being cooled, and the heat dissipated throughout a layer of water… an underground sea…Above the layer of water was a layer of granite, this crust (keep in mind the idea of design) stood on granite pillars.

Now don’t picture the pillars in Greece… Think about it. It was by design… The pillars were the walls of reservoirs and giant pumps (vanes). That is to say, as the earth spun, the water was pushed to the surface at the head of the rivers and ran down and was collected at the foot of the rivers, creating fountains, lakes and seas along the way, watering the surface continually. It was a terrarium. It was perfect.

It was lush; the green planet… The great Dragons roamed the earth, but did not bother with man. All were vegetarian… because the food was thick and water plentiful. There was no fear between man and animal… There were no man eating animals…

The canopy, as a bubble would have pressurized the atmosphere, causing a higher overall pressure with a much higher concentration of oxygen…. The canopy would also filter out all harmful radiation. Man may have grown to be giants. The fossil record shows a time when oxygen levels where as high as 35%. We have also uncovered the bones of people who where ten feet tall. You may very well have lived to be six to nine hundred years old…

God wasn’t playing hide and seek with Adam… the treasures were all laid out before him. It was made for him… The gold, the silver, the variety of rocks and ore…. Wood… all laid out before Adam… It could have been a single ruby, or sapphire or emerald, the size of a small mountain There it was… He need only to put it to use… A kid, with an Erector Set you might say… Up until sin entered the world (through man), God and man were buddies…

Think about your aquarium. God would not have given Adam this fractured piece of junk we look at today. But man had evil in his heart…

Think about it… We scream about intelligent design. Duhhh… Look at it, and think about it…

God drove Man from the Garden of Eden, not from the planet. (The Garden of Eden was a literal place where Man could sit in God’s presents. It was God’s dwelling place on earth.)  But the rest of the planet, the terrarium, continued to work fine.

The tragedy was losing the presents of God, but Adam was driven into a paradise… His kids were spoilt; hell…they killed each other…  

Working from, the fall of man… Things were pretty good… Lots of food, it was comfortable, lot of things to do, lot of things to work with, lot of things to fight over…

I have a feeling they built quite a culture, having forgot all about God… It came easy. They had a pretty good idea how it worked, Adam told them all he knew, and hell, he was buddies with God, and he was around a long time to teach and tell his stories.

I contend they had no oil and no coal. How did they power this great culture? Electricity. They were using the spin of the earth by using the flow of the waters…Production enhance by the stronger magnetic field.  Electricity drove everything, and mankind was living high on the hog in a terrarium given to them by God, whom they had forgotten…

Don’t forget, these are modern men, just like us, (but also keep in mind, they may have every well lived in an environment where oxygen levels were around 35% and with near double the air pressure, fellow could get pretty big, and be pretty smart),  doing the same things as us… I’m sure there were great empires built, and wars fought and rich people and poor people and free and slave…. And just like today, some of them consolidated much power and began to think themselves gods… So the struggles were between the great gods???

Remember, everyone came from Noah and his bunch.  If this is true, not only would these people tell the story of the flood, they would tell the story, as they saw it, of what was going on prior to the flood.

I say rethink your mythologies, they may be based in truth… as the stories came down, each to each, from their point of view. These stories of gods and dragons and sex and debauchery may not be myth, but remnants of the culture prior to the flood. And every rooted culture around the world starts with a story of the flood. 

There also seems to be a universal aura of a great lost culture…that fell into the sea….. The Golden Age.... Well duhhh… The story is vague, but persist… Much like the flood… Could the two legends be related? Generation after generation... 

It fell into the sea alright… Don’t forget, there were witnesses, those few who came across on the ark. And… They talked, you bet, and everyone in the world knew their stories for I’d say at least two-hundred years… and gradually it became hearsay… Twisted to fit the times and cultures, but the over-all themes persist… and haunt us to this day… It’s because it’s all true… There was a great culture (by our standards) and yes, it fell into the sea, so to speak.

So, we got this perfect little terrarium going here full of evil little people of which God’s ‘bout fed up with…

So... he finds this fellow Noah, you know the story and tells him to build a boat (Ark)…

I want to back track a little and bring in another element…which can’t be over looked. The sky… A marvel to behold, but isn’t truly visible except by telescope, and then Wow… I use to ponder the question, “Why would God make such a wonderful sky, and then put it so distance as not to be seen at all in detail without a telescope?” Why would the stained glass windows be so far away?

I contend the sky, the whole of it, was much smaller and much closer. That Adam and Eve saw it all… The moon, right there, huge, as we dream of it in our art. They could see the bands of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn and Neptune.    The Milky-Way must have been like a flame in the sky. They could see all the clouds of dust, each its own color… They could see the spinning galaxies and their spiral arms glistening in the night sky…  Before the flood, it wasn’t very dark at night, the sun just wasn’t up. Why would God, who was man’s buddy, leave man without a night light, least he stumble. God even says he gave man a night light…. With the moon to rule over it.  No… it wasn’t very dark at night…

I lean heavily on Dr. Humphrey’s model of the universe, which he says, is based on known numbers alone, no conjecture, and has passed peer review… Very interesting model it is…

Have a look

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCK8y4RBeWI

Based on Dr. Humphrey’s model… We have this wonderful paradise, which God made, just a perking away…. And the workers run amuck… they think the garden belongs to them… They are gods…

God, who is fed up with this bunch, throws a rock, a little rock, no bigger than Texas… it comes through the canopy, knocking a huge hole in it and then striking the granite surface, shattering it along with the basalt foundation. Nothing moved; gravity held it together… So nobody noticed….except it began to rain, over the whole earth, as the canopy came apart and fell though a warm atmosphere, it melted and it rained and it rained and it rained, for forty days it rained. When Noah and the ark were safely afloat a hydraulic cushion, God stretched out the universe, perhaps near its size today, suddenly….

This ripple in the fabric of space, opened up the cracks from the fracture suffered just weeks earlier… and a piece, a big piece of the undersea floor dropped into the mantle, along with most everything above it. And the water runs to this low…the mantle, where it meets the water cools suddenly and begins to solidify creating a new sea floor, and because its hot and less dense, it begins to rise, pushing all the water (to include now the canopy) up and away. The massive currents and expanding space cause the cracks to start working against each other, washing out the pillars, the network of channels and reservoirs that made the earth a pump, and the granite foundations collapse and another chunk of the sea floor drops.

Massive areas of the earth just drop away into the mantle and is replaced with sea floor. The process is causing currents which cannot be described, capable of Grinding many of the fractures into mountain ranges and carrying billions of cubic miles of debris thousands of miles, turning the surface over and washing it clean, and in the process, spreading and hiding all the gifts given to Adam, gold, silver ect… this to include the night sky.

When Noah’s family came out of the ark, the earth was all together different. The canopy was gone, much of the air was gone, the watering system was replaced with a rain cycle, soon the poles where frozen nearly a third of the way to the equator and the air cold… There was nothing to eat.

One of the gifts taken from man was his relationship with animals. In order for man to survive now, in this barren wasteland, was if he ate the animals, and thus, God struck fear into the hearts of the beast. For the first time, the animals ate each other, in order to survive… 

Two thirds of the land was gone and had been replaced with great oceans, left undrinkable from the cleansing… God’s gift of water was reduced greatly…

The land masses which remained were shattered and scattered, and were being pulled apart as the earth attempted to come back into balance, as equilibrium was restored (as best as could be), the process slowed and the plate edges settled, and the whole of it, began to harden in place…Leaving the rock record we have today.

I’ll tell you something else…. I think the oil and coal deposits are the graves of that pre-flood culture and world… They powered their world with God’s genus (whom they had forgotten) and fittingly enough, through our burnt offerings of their arrogance (coal, oil & gas) we power ours…  (Yes, I think we are suppose to burn it to power our world, I think  it’s just what God had in mind for the pre-flood world of debauchery)

The whole of it much more mystic than you ever thought..?

Everything I have laid out above, is disputed by every theory presented, but as facts go…. What I say emerges, because the history has been written…

You’d better rethink, “In the beginning God Created the Heavens and the earth.” And your American Ideal…

George Henry Nichols 

Chances are, I got a Ticket

From the collection (Letters to Jo Ann)

Hey from Bangor,

The weather man said it was going to be ten below zero. What the hell good is a ZERO, if we godda get ten below that! It’s so bloody cold I stopped to take a leak and had to use a cork screw to find my ahhh… then I peed a stalagmite. The state is so hard up for money, on my way back I noticed a sign said, “See natural amber formation, $1.00

Ya know when I bought this truck, they said it had 13 speeds, well I can  find ‘R’, ‘N’ and ‘L’ but I be damned if I can find one that says ‘D’. But one good thing, as an old man, they can’t tell if I’m shiftin’ gears or passin’ gas….???? And….Uhhhhhhhh….. Well???... I ain’t sayin’.

          I passed a trooper pointin’ a hair dryer at me (you know all them troopers got a hair dryer these days) and then he pulled me over. “Can’t you read?? That sign back there says trucks and trailers 55 mph!” I said, “sure I saw it, I got one of each, that’s 110 mph, and I was only doin’ 85.” He said, “Boy! Where did you get your license?” I said, “The Jack Daniels’ School of Truck Drivin’, Coke was my sponsor.” He wrote me a ticket.

          You know I weigh eighty thousand pounds, Eighty thousand pounds goes down hill real good, those little econo cars go pretty fast too when they all pile up on your front bumper going down a steep grade. A trooper pulled me over and said. “You know you’re shoven all them cars down this mountain.” “Just doing my part to conserve energy, sir.” He wrote me a ticket.

          The trouble with those little econo cars, they’re hard to wash off your grill.

I just love to teach them how to spell ‘Peterbilt’ backwards (as it appears in their rear view mirror) right before they’re sucked up into my fan.

          I got lost in a residential neighborhood and picked up a thump, thump, thump. A cop pulled me over and said, “You just ran over a little kid on a tricycle and he’s stuck in your duals!!” I said, “That’s all right. I saw him, he had on a safety helmet, and when I pick up some speed, it’ill throw him out.” He wrote me a ticket.

          A lot of trucks have a sign on them that say, ‘No lot lizards’.

I got one on my truck says, ‘Lot lizards welcome, I need a new pair of boots’.

          I bought a 500 watt CB for my truck, it’s got this button on the mike, when you push it a purdy little lite comes on says “on the air” and everybody can hear ya. But when you let lose of it, a bunch of crappy truck drivers start yakin’. So I got me some duck tape and I just tape that button down, now that purdy little lite stays on all the time, and I just sings my heart out going down the hyway. I know they all like it ‘cause they wave when they pass me by. Some of them use a finger, some no finger at all, but they all wave.

You know this thing got 18 tires. I can blow out 15 before I godda stop. I can scatter rubber and alligators over seven counties, (seven states if I’m up north). A trooper pulled me over and said, “You know you’ve blow’d out all your trailer tires and you’ve been plowin’ up pavement and leavin’ ruts for ten miles!! The road behind you is a mess!!” I said. “That’s okay, the road in front of me is fine.” He wrote me a ticket.

          I pulled onto a scale in West Virginny, and was told to pull to the side and come in. So I did, he said, “you’re 1200 pounds over gross, do you know how much you weigh?” I said, “Now look here! I may not be no prize, but I damn shore don’t weigh no 1200 pounds!” He wrote me a ticket. So trying to lighten things up a little I said, “Show is a purdy state you got here. Satellite Dish yor state flower?” He wrote me another ticket.

          I got stopped by a trooper down south, he got out and said, “Boy, don’t you know you’re in Atlanta!” I said rubbin’ my chin, “Atlanta? Atlanta? I’ve heard of Atlanta, now, now don’t tell me?? It’s a little town, let me think, in, oh yea, in east Texas, in a??? No, wait, give me a minute. In a county?? I know, I know. In a county we call, mmm Georgia.” He wrote me a ticket

          I was sittin’ at a counter in a diner havin’ a bowl of chili, when a trooper came in and sat down next to me. Just about then I ripped a stinker, ‘thubleeeeeiup’ I looked at him and smile while fanning the air a bit and said, “Missed a gear, I guess”. The trooper was looking rather pale and fannin’ the air quite a bit, mumbling something about methane pollution in the 3^rd degree, and wrote me a ticket.

          So darlin’, if there is anywhere you want to go, or some’m you want to see, give me a call, chances are I got a ticket.     ©

                                                          George Henry Nichols 

A Bit O Justice or Of Tar and Feathers

From the book

The Life, Times & Adventures of

Sir George Henry Nichols

or

The Legend of Captain Outrageous

The July moon was on the rise when our third attempt at an escape came to a blazing finish. The first attempt was a raft that appeared to be a fine craft, until we put it in the brine and found that it moved on the water, like a piece of cloth, that it to say, it was not at all rigid and soon worked itself to pieces.

The second attempt was a piragua, which we cut from one of the larger trees up the creek a little ways. It was a very large tree, which was felled with the carpenters saw. In fact we had gotten a good many of his tools from the wreck, including an adze, which was very useful in this endeavor. After the tree was felled, all limbs were trimmed from it and hauled away, and an area cleared out around it. It was decided how long the craft should be, the top then cut from it to give us the proper length. We removed the bark and were ready to hollow it out and to give it shape.

With much chopping and burning it was cleared out quite well which indeed gave us a right nice piragua of about twenty-five feet in length, and sitting about seventy-five yards from the creek we were to use to float it down to the sea. But with much effort, and all seven of us at the strain, could not budge it in the slightest. In fact, we couldn't even pick up one end of the damn thing. It seems in an attempt to pick a good stout tree able to carry all of us safely, we had picked one all together too large, for if the truth be known, the piragua lay in the exact place it fell as a tree, and was now no more than a monument to our enterprise. This was something Bob felt he had to point out time and again. 'Pick a tree, the King's own army couldn't move, and shape it into a canoe, wit'out ever realizing it's too 'eavy. What bunch of dunderites are you.' This didn’t set well with those who had done most of the work.

I should point out all this work did pay off in one respect, our living quarters had improved greatly within the pail, as our huts grew in size and tables and chairs were fashioned, though they were crude, for none of us proved to be a carpenter, something Bob found joy in pointing out, most all the time, 'you dunderites couldn't build a chair if it fell out of a tree.' I began to sense that the bunch of us were just about to give Bob something to repine about, he liked it so much.

I, being quite the youngest of the group had little to say, mostly because I wasn't heard when I spoke, spent much time up one of the shoreline palms as a lookout for ships, and was part of the hunting and gathering party along with Willie Wimmer and John Blanchard. The other four did most of the work on the vessels, except Bob who was too busy telling us how it was all but a failed effort, 'We'll all drown, do all this work, build our ‘opes, then we'll drown, you'll see, you'll all see!'

On one of the hunting excursions, shooting small chicken like birds, which had made quite good eating, we ran across the ship's long boat. It was beat up a bit and half buried in the sand, but otherwise appeared to be all there. So John, Willie and I dug the sand from it, in order to free it up and have a closer look, and indeed, it appeared to be in right fine shape. So finishing our hunting, we returned to the pail with the good news of what we had found, along with a good many birds and some fruit.

With the word we had found the ship's long boat, there was much mirth in the camp that night, a bright, cool night as I remember it, with the rising June moon. The birds were roasted and the fruit passed about while we spoke of Jamaica. "Bah! We'll never see Jamaica, tis our fate to grow old and die 'ere on this God forsaken sandbar, you'll see, we'll all see!" Bob kept insisting, he reminded me of that dreadful bloke on the Wizard, and who met his fate in the maelstrom. I thought what an appalling way to view life. For the most part he was ignored, and he shut up for awhile after Lt. Chester told him, "Pipe down ya ole goat for I 'ave ya on a picket and roast ya up for the rest of us to eat, then we'll all 'ave a lit'le peace, and a bit of ole goat, hey." With that, we all did a little cheering, and had a good laugh at ole Bob's expense.

So the next day started our third effort to build a means of escape, except this time we didn't have to build it, just repair one the good Lord had chosen to bless us with. It took all seven of us to carry her from the beach, which was about three miles to the north of the southern point, back to the pail for repairs. She was about seventeen feet long and quite the heavy craft. I for one never dreamed it would be so heavy, it was no wonder we couldn't move the piragua.

The main problem with this craft was it had dried out, and there were gaps between the planks, and it leaked as though it wasn't a boat at all. To remedy this, we brewed up a vat of pitch, which we made from the sap of one of the local trees, which had a very sticky quality about it, and appeared to inure with age. We used this pitch along with coconut husks to make a caulking to fill these gaps between the planks, and seal the boat up. We had her bottom’s up across two logs so we could see and seal all the leaks there along her bottom.

So, after a couple of days, we were just about ready to put this boat in the water for trials, and if it held up, the plans were to rig it with a sail and rudder in order that we may determine a course, which was most desirable, for otherwise we would be at the will of the sea, or we should have to row it to Jamaica.

Bob, while stirring the pitch, was again telling us how this boat would never carry us all, and that we would most likely drown at sea. When he pulled the paddle from the mixture, he dragged a bit of the pitch into the flame, instead of scrapping it from the oar, as we all knew to do. This of course set the oar on fire, which gave Bob the fright. He began to run around, swinging the blazing paddle about in a most disconcerting manner. As he came around the vat of pitch he tripped over one of the tripod legs, and fell face first into the sand, sending the blazing oar flying thru the air and onto the boat, which set it to flaming right quick, for it was covered in fresh pitch, and burned quite hot indeed. All efforts to put it out failed, including water, which seemed to just roll off of it as though it were a blazing duck.

This upset all of us quite, and David Mitcham shouted, "you dunderite, I'll 'ave your 'ead I will, I'll not stay 'ere with the likes of you." Then picking up one of the swords, made a move for Bob.

That's when Chester stepped in and said, "Now David, we don't 'ave to 'ave 'is 'ead"

Then William said, "Let's tar 'im up like a big bird, and see if 'e don't suit us better!" Everyone froze, this idea played well, as they all mulled it over, I didn't know of what he spoke, but I could tell the rest did, and it appeared to suit them quite.

Then William looked at me and said, "George, go and get t’at sack o’ feat’ers in the ‘ut, we goin' 'ave some justice we are!" So I ran to the pail and got the sack of feathers, (from all the birds we'd been eating), as I did this I heard Bob start screaming. When I returned, they had him stripped down to nothing and was smearing him with hot pitch, Bob for his part was screaming and trying to put up a struggle, but they were angry indeed and not to be denied. When they had him covered in pitch, from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet, they hit Bob with the feathers, and the feathers stuck to him fast. By the time they turned him loose, he looked a bit like a battered wild goose, truly an amusing sight he was, as he ran about screaming what a bunch of heathens we all were, and this put us all in a better mood, save Bob, as our third attempt came to a blazing conclusion. ©

George Henry Nichols

As Panama Burns

From the book

The Life, Times & Adventures of

Sir George Henry Nichols

or

The legend of Captain Outrageous

As we were trying to regroup before the city, someone shouted "Smoke!" and soon many of the buccaneers were shouting smoke.

"Those damn cowards!" Henry was growing red in the face, "don't let them cowardice dawgs burn it! There'll be nothing to loot!" he shouted as loud as he could. "Don't let them burn it!"

And so we advanced on the city quickly, they had the streets barricaded, many with cannons, but no one there to man them, the city was deserted. Morgan sent Major Searle and some men down to the water front to stop any ships from escaping, and we set out to deal with the fires.

By the time we got across town to where it was burning, several blocks were engulfed. Henry started to try and move water to the fire along a line of men. I took some men and started working the houses not yet caught, and moving as much of the goods into the streets as we could. But the place was burning furiously, and consuming one house after another. With the forest being so thick and the ground soft, most of the city was built of wood, and burned quickly. One effort was made, using powder from a local magazine, to blowup enough houses in a block before the line as to create a fire break, but the wind was blowing and the hot cinders rose high into the air, carried along by the draft, raining fire over the whole of the town, starting fires, were there were no fires. We worked hard trying to get as much into the streets as we could.

By dark, it was a spectacle, made me think of the eternal flames of hell, for the fire was all around, stretching high above my head, licking at the sky, as though the whole of the place was ablaze, and so it was. I could walk about it, inspect it, and touch it, if I dare. I watched it burn, I saw it consumed, I thought of London, and how it must have been.

It was a shame, what kind of people burn their own city? Henry hadn't burned cities, we hadn't burned cities. There was no reason to think he would now, without cause, without looting it. This I failed to understand, they burned it themselves, to burn it just so we can't take it? Is this not despair, a loss of hope, for as long as it remained whole, one can hope to recover it, but to burn it, is to give it over. How can a city like this lose all love of its women, its children, how can the fear of a king erase all hope? The ancient City of Panama, the city of gold, the anchor of New Spain, the city of myths and tales of yore, and here I stood within it, as it is consumed.

This put me into a bit of a daze, spellbound by the towering flames, sweat dripping from nose, my chin, pouring from me, as though I were a pitcher. I stood there, half naked, my clothes torn to tatters, my spirit down. I had come half way round the world for this. High adventure, wasn't it? Boys dream of high adventure, don't they? And here I was living it, in the bowels of the great empire Spain, with its dead, like a sacrifice, spread out at the city gate, and the flames of an empire stretching towards the sky, in the City of Gold, Panama.

I had a strange feeling about my being, my presents, as though I was one with the moment, with what had happened, as though the moment here would be somehow larger, a space in time that would forever be remembered. ©