Anthropologist of Gor, Book 1, Preparations (3)

 

Extracts from a letter from Chloe Chegwidden to her sister Caroline.
4^th 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[1] 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

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[1] See Attar of Talendar

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[i] See Tales of Drysdale House Tale 1 and Tale 2