Extracts from a letter from Chloe Chegwidden
to her sister Caroline.
4th January 2017.
Dear Caroline,
How
surprised you will be to receive a handwritten letter from me., particularly
since I am such a terrible correspondent even with email! You will never guess where I am! I am in the
San Francisco Airport, waiting for my British Airways flight back to London.
What am I doing in San Francisco, you ask? Well it had to do with Mother and
her always asking when I am going to get married and do I have a boyfriend yet.[i]
Yes,
her asking became so intense over Christmas that on Boxing Day, I fled a
continent and an ocean away to the west coast of America. You may remember me
speaking of Nigel, my friend who is on a post-doctorial fellowship at the University
of California, Berkeley? He said I could stay with him and his girlfriend
Cecily Salisbury. She is a High School teacher whom we met on a walking architectural
history tour last summer. Nigel solved his housing cost problem by wooing and
moving in with her. Very convenient for Nigel. He gets bed and breakfast at the
cost of satisfying a silly American. Not that she isn’t good looking, but very
silly. She is obsessed with the San Francisco Barbary Coast and the idea of
smugglers using hidden tunnels to sneak in opium and sneak out shanghaied sailors
and kidnapped women for sale in Asia. She goes on constantly about the ancient
history of a City barely three hundred years old!
It is good to catch up with you like
this now that we are both adults; we were such good friends when we were kids
even though we were nine years apart. You were my hero and model when I was growing
up, and I wish you hadn’t moved to Australia with your husband; I would like to
know more about your life now you are thirty-two and I am almost twenty-three.
Do you remember how you read Treasure Island to me when I was seven? I still
have a low-grade fascination with pirates to this day – I blame you for that.
But the role of piracy in spreading ideas and goods is underrated. Pirates even
showed up in my History of Textiles degree course. How was that, I can hear you
ask. My degree will be in textiles, with a concentration on the History of
fabrics. Which lead to the trading of cloth and silks across the Mediterranean Sea
from antiquity to the end of the Renaissance. Which lead to fleets of pirates in
the time since the decline of the Greek city states and the end of the Roman
Republic. Dull to most people I know, but really the pirates of the Caribbean
had nothing on the pirates of Mediterranean. Massive fleets! Huge raids!
Betrayal of Spartacus! The kidnapping of Julius Caesar and their defiance of
Pompey! All true, and mostly untold
these days.
I can almost hear you saying, Chloe,
forget about the dead and gone pirates and tell me about your actual life. Well
Derek and I broke up. We are still friends and really that is all we really
were. We never even really slept together. Sadly, but ironically given my
interest in fabrics, I am still an old spinster of almost twenty-three and
never been ‘kissed’ if you get my meaning. Never, not even once. I must be
unique in my generation. I just never found a man I wanted rooting around in my
‘secret garden’ as granny used to call it. Not that I am looking at women. I
want a man, a husband, but I never found one I felt that way about. Maybe all
the modern men I meet are too modern; too civilized. The choice seems to be
between a modern polite man, and some kind of alpha male. But the latter are to
busy explaining about how alpha they are, and posing for pictures and looking
for the admiration of other manly men to notice a shy girl with glasses.
Speaking of real men, how is that husband of yours with the sheep station? Too
bad Ross doesn’t have any brothers!
I wish I could make people
understand about my fascination with my pirates. What they did was disrupt the
trade routes, high jacking ships and cargos to new destinations which created
demand and opened up new markets. They actually stimulated trade and shook-up
old networks. What cargos did they steal I can hear you not asking. I am going
to tell you anyway. The ships carried three main categories: valuable liquids,
fabrics and clothes, and something that is glossed over in history.
The first thing is valuable liquids:
quality wine, good olive oil, and perfumes. (Talking of perfumes, have you
heard of Attar of Talendar All the rage in select
circles, but too slutty for me, I fear.
The second thing they stole was
fabrics. Everyone needs clothes, from shepherds to the high and mighty in society.
In those days, all kinds and grades of woolen goods, from homespun to fine woolens
were needed and coveted. Loose cottons from Egypt for hot places, and then
silks, silks from China from along The Silk Roads, silks for luxurious women and
weak men. Silks for wives and silks for whores and mistresses. Speaking of silk
for bad women, one of the things I wanted to do while in San Francisco was to
interview for a job with K-Girl, an American maker of slutty lingerie. However,
the interview fell through – the company has apparently had some reverses
recently. I have had an interview with Dior and one with Versace, they will
keep me on file but aren’t hiring right now as they are still recovering from
the big crash. They were impressed by my knowledge of fabrics and cuts. There
will be a job at one of those places in about a year or eighteen months, but
nothing until then. I am pleased though that there are jobs, Father was quite
worried that a degree in fabrics and their history would lead nowhere. I just
need something to tide me over for the year between graduation and gainful employment.
Emma R, who works in fashion in London, has been very encouraging about my
prospects towards the end of 2018.
The third thing the Pirates of the Mediterranean
dealt in, the one the histories don’t talk about? Enslaved people! Particularly
enslaved women. Shocking, I know. Hardly mentioned. One of the experts on
period, Dr Oliver McQueen of the City University of New York is very reticent
to discuss the topic. He goes into great detail in his three-volume work,
Pirates of the Greek Mediterranean (New York, 2002) on the trade in oil, wine
and cloth, but buries the trade in slaves, especially women, mostly in
footnotes. It seems it is not a topic he likes to discuss. But until our recent
more civilized times, such trade was normalized and common throughout the
world! Strange to think that even as recently as two hundred years ago, you and
I might be considered items of commerce instead of thinking, intelligent full
persons! How horrible such a fate would be! Reduced to an animal groveling at
the feet of someone who owned you! Used however they want with no say!
Horrible.
Such
trade existed in Europe until recently. Until the fall of the Ottoman Empire,
in fact. And on the real Barbary coast until the 1800s. Even English girls were
not exempt. Such raiders even landed in our beloved Cornwall and carried away
slaves from Penzance in 1640. Ove4 3000 English people ended up slaves in Algiers
and other cities. So yes, I find the Pirates of the Mediterranean interesting.
Interesting but scary.
Speaking
of scary, do you remember the summers we went to stay with Aunt Celia when
father was sick? Remember when Aunt Celia would take us around the county
showing us the fine houses and estates (finer than ours, even). I recall you
really liked the look of the Palmer estate with its lovely grounds. We couldn’t
get in of course; they were very private and exclusive. But what we could see
through the fence was lovely. Aunt Celia looked up to the Palmers, because ‘they
were so genteel and refined’. Well Celia tells Mother that the Palmers have
just disappeared!. That’s right; the whole family. It is a nine-days wonder in
the village. One day, they were there, the next day Evan Palmer and his whole
family, including the daughter just weren’t there. You remember the daughter,
nice girl, younger than me, being led around on her pony. The whole family gone
and questions definitely not encouraged by the rough men who have taken over
the estate. Aunt Celia thinks Mr Palmer might have been involved in some Crypto-currency
scam, or the upheaval at Steel Worlds Inc but nobody really knows. It is frightening
to think that people can just disappear like that, and people are afraid to ask
why.
The
just called my plane for boarding. I will post this before I leave. I will
write again from London. I will be busy with revising for my exams and looking
for something to tide me over for the year between graduation and finding a
position in fashion. I will write again.
Your
loving sister,
Chloe.
PS. My fascination with pirates has nothing to do with that trashy novel, Raiders of Gor you found in my flat when you visited last fall. C
