The World полностью

* Yet as James processed southwards, a conspiracy of noblemen, in correspondence with Madrid, planned to acclaim his cousin Arbella, great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII. This ‘main plot’ was mainly talk, but it implicated Walter Raleigh, whom James sentenced to death. He later pardoned Raleigh but kept him in the Tower. James recognized Arbella as fourth in line to the throne, but when in 1610 she tried to marry another royal cousin he imprisoned her for the rest of her life. Dying in the Tower aged thirty-nine, unmarried and childless, she was another female victim of a power family.

* Peter Chamberlen was a surgeon and accoucheur, a Parisian Huguenot, who arrived in England in 1596 around the time he invented a new instrument that revolutionized childbirth – an obstetrical forceps that gripped the skull of babies. Peter was the first of four generations of the family, who delivered most of the Stuart babies while disgracefully keeping their device secret, arriving at births with the simple contraption in a large gilded box, insisting that midwives were blindfolded. Untold numbers of women died because they did not share their invention: the Chamberlens became rich, buying a country house where centuries later their device was found hidden under floorboards.

* ‘My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; / If snow be white why then her breasts are dun, / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head / … And yet by heaven I think my love as rare, / As any she belied with false compare.’

* Raleigh was said to have brought the first tobacco to England. James grumbled that tobacco was ‘hateful to the nose, harmful to the braine, dangerous to the lungs and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomless’. Later, when the Stigian stinking fume became the only profitable crop grown in Virginia and increasingly popular in England, James granted himself the lucrative tobacco monopoly.

* These quasi-governmental war companies were invented by the Dutch. They were not totally new, reviving the armed commercialism of the military-religious orders of the Crusades and the Reconquista and of the semi-state companies like Genoa’s Bank of St George that ran its colonies in Crimea. Nor were they particularly European: the Chola rajas had allied with the Ainnutruvar and other privateering guilds, while networks of Chinese privateers ruled parts of China and Japan, most prominently the Shuangyu syndicate. The new version was forged in the wars against Spain as trade and conflict fused at a time when European sovereigns and states were too weak to compete in foreign adventures. Instead Protestant leaders Elizabeth and William the Silent invested in the expeditions of Drake and the Sea Beggars. The companies were a compromise that enabled the monarchs, as shareholders, to participate but spread the risk and cost.

* Not everything went well. In June 1629, one of the VOC’s first voyages to Australia, on board the ship Batavia, went spectacularly wrong when, after a shipwreck on the Abrolhos Islands, off Australia, its deputy captain Jeronimus Cornelisz mutinied and launched a demented terror against his crew out of personal megalomanic and Calvinist righteousness, killing 120 people in a orgy of stabbing, bludgeoning, drowning, hanging while the seven surviving girls were turned into sex slaves – until his reign was ended by the arrival of another VOC ship: Cornelisz had his hands amputated by a chisel then was beheaded. A little later, another tough VOC Dutchman, Abel Tasman, reached islands off Australia, first a small one which he named Van Deiman’s Land after the governor-general in Jakarta, who planned the conquest of Great Southland – Tasmania – and then a larger one that he called Staten-Landt after the States-General back in Holland – Aotearoa, today’s New Zealand – where Maori warriors in canoes killed several of his men.

* One of Prince Khusrau’s supporters, Guru Arjun, was the leader of the Sikh religion in Punjab, founded in the 1530s by the poet-saint Guru Nanak, who created a movement independent of Islam and Hinduism. Sikh just means learner in Sanskrit. Nanak preached against Brahmin exploitation and Muslim oppression in favour of one God, one community, abolishing caste – a sect that blossomed under his successors, the nine gurus, who developed a sacred city, Amritsar, a shrine (the Golden Temple) and a scripture (the Adi Granth). But their independence clashed with Mughal authority. Now Jahangir tortured then executed Arjun, whose son Guru Hargobind responded by fostering Sikh martial culture: his wearing of two swords symbolized miri piri – the union of spiritual and temporal power. Savagely repressed by the Mughals, the Sikhs thrived in adversity.