The World полностью

* Necker was a bold speculator who made a series of fortunes on the bourse and in the Compagnie des Indes Orientales. As he made his money during the 1760s, he paid court to a French widow, Madame de Vermenou, who had hired a young Swiss governess, Suzanne Curchod, a pastor’s daughter. Suzanne had fallen in love with a young British gentleman, Edward Gibbon, a child of the Enlightenment, on his travels and become engaged. When both families vetoed their marriage, Gibbon returned home. Not unlike one of his trades, Necker switched out of Vermenous into Curchods and married Suzanne: their daughter would be the writer and provocateur Germaine de Staël. Now, just as Necker became Louis’s finance minister, Gibbon published his elegantly written and entertaining Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, recasting history with the Enlightened idea that the superstitions of Christianity had undermined the pagan pragmatism of Rome, while implying that modern Europe was the heir of Roman civilization.

* Bligh’s career was a chronicle of naval stupidity. Ten years later, in 1789, as captain of HMS Bounty, he was ordered to Tahiti to gather breadfruit saplings which Sir Joseph Banks believed would serve as food for Caribbean slaves. There he was overcome by mutineers, who were partly dazzled by the idyllic Tahitian life, and set adrift, surviving a journey of 4,160 miles. In Tahiti the mutineers aided a chieftain named Pomare to unite the islands as a single kingdom which they ruled until a French protectorate was imposed. Sailing on, they settled on the uninhabited Pitcairn Island, named after a British officer later killed in battle with the Americans at Bunker Hill. As for Captain Bligh, he was promoted to vice-admiral and appointed governor of New South Wales. That did not go well either.

* In death, Cook was treated like a chieftain by the Hawaiians. He was scalped, his heart excised, his body eviscerated and some flesh preserved, then the rest was placed in a traditional underground oven, and the bones collected to preserve his mana, sacred charisma.

* While others were fighting, Jefferson, once his term as governor was over, worked on his Notes on Virginia on race and slavery, reflecting on the inferiority of black reasoning, which could be improved by white blood. He argued that hurried liberation of slaves would unleash a race war against whites.

* Joseph also enjoyed being mistaken for his own servant. Asked what services he provided the emperor, he said straight-faced, ‘I sometimes shave him.’ Although his brother Leopold, grand duke of Tuscany, was his heir, Joseph trained his conscientious but lumpy nephew Franz for the future, complaining that the ‘stunted’ boy was ‘backward in bodily dexterity’ and ‘a spoiled mother’s child’.

* The Ottoman carve-up was not Joseph’s only scheme. His main one was to swap the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) with Bavaria to create an even larger German monarchy. But twice the plan was foiled by Frederick, who mobilized his army, and by Joseph’s brother-in-law Louis failing to back him despite Antoinette’s lobbying. Instead, Louis settled the dispute by paying millions to Joseph, payments that would cost Antoinette dearly.

* Yorktown was the harbinger of modernity in a different way too: among the young French aristocrats fighting with Lafayette was Henri, comte de Saint-Simon, an American general at twenty, who forty years later developed the idea of socialism.

* To win leverage in negotiations, Washington ordered the kidnapping of George III’s son Prince William (the future William IV), who was still with the navy in New York, but his commander bungled the plan.

* In 1783, when the US became independent, north America contained around three million people; Spanish America fifteen million. Britain’s population was nine million; Spain’s ten million. The Spanish world was twice as large as the Anglo-world. Yet the Brits were catching up: between 1640 and 1820, 1.3 million migrants – British, French and German – settled, around 70 per cent of them British. In the next long century massive migration to north America, as well as to Australia and South Africa, completely reversed the trend: by 1930, the Anglo-world was twice the size of the Spanish.

ACT THIRTEEN

990 MILLION

Arkwrights and Krupps, Habsburgs, Bourbons and Sansons

THE IRON -MAD TITAN, CANAL DUKE, DANDY BEAU, OWD WOODEN LEG AND MOLL HACKABOUT