Join Us For Our Holiday Home Tour & Victorian Tea!

The charming Victorian seaport town of Fernandina Beach, FL will be the scene of the
3rd Annual Amelia Island Museum of History Holiday Home Tour
Friday & Saturday, December 4 & 5, 2009 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

The tour will feature five spectacular homes professionally decorated for the holidays. Docents will be stationed at each home to point out the rich history, architectural features, furnishings, and decorations. Good cheer and tidings of the seasons abound as Victorian carolers will add to the festive experience as they serenade guests with holiday music. Enjoy the spirit of the yuletide at this exceptional holiday event in historic Fernandina Beach, FL.

Victorian Tea

Enjoy a seated Victorian Tea in the fabulous Bailey House at the corner of S.7th and Ash Streets in historic Fernandina Beach. A choice of teas and an abundant assortment of sweet and savory treats will be served on the current owner's finest china. Adding to the festivities, Kate and Effingham Bailey, the original owners of the home, now portrayed by local residents, will greet and visit with guests to share stories of life in Fernandina in the late 1800s.

Reminiscent of Holiday Teas in the 19th century, this memorable event will enhance your holiday experience in old Fernandina. It is not to be missed!

Seatings are: Friday, December 4 at 2:00, 3:00 and 4:00PM and
Saturday, December 5 at 2:00, 3:00 and 4:00PM

This is a private home, seating is limited and advance ticket purchase is required. Tea Tickets are $15.00.

A Recommendation

Looking for a good history read, educational, but entertaining? A book you can carry to the Coffee House, and impress your fellow caffeine fiends with your erudition and intellect, even if you never read a word?

I recommend Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year

Alistair Horne who has to date specialized in British and French history has produced a clever book focusing on our Henry during that most difficult of years, 1973. Watch Henry out maneuver his rivals at the State Department and elsewhere, while managing the paranoid and mostly just plain nuts Dick Nixon. And, from time to time, also managing wars, peaces and assorted starlets.

And Henry’s old propensities can still lead him to strange places at age 83.

RUSSIA

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

-Winston Churchill

I was there for all of two weeks, and from that limited exposure to a tiny fraction of the country, I find Winston’s puzzlement still as true today as it was when he said those famous words. Russia is hard to get a handle on. Dynamic and backward, corrupt and direct, capitalist to the core, while pining for the old easy Soviet life.

We visited Kiev, now the capital of the vast new country of Ukraine, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tallinn and Helsinki. The best part of the trip was the thousand mile journey by river and canal from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

As we cruised north, few roads or settlements interrupt what is still a vast northern forest. Unbroken conifers and white birch crowd the banks. Occasionally an old wooden church came into view, usually in ruins. The air was cool, even on the sunniest of days, hinting at the savagery of winter here in one of the coldest places on earth.

I was listening to a podcast earlier today in which a professor at Berkeley made the point that all societies on earth have now made the transition from a traditional society, which may be very different from other traditional societies, to a modern society, which is like all other modern societies. In that sense Russia has made that transition completely. Its cities look like cities anywhere; its people behave like people anywhere, with a couple of exceptions.

One of those has to do with history. The average kid in the US has managed to remain blissfully ignorant of any real knowledge of history. He or she could not tell you anything about what happened in World War II except in the most general terms. Not surprisingly his teacher and parents know little more. Not so in Russia.

Every Russian and every Russian kid has seared into his or her brain two cataclysms in detail – the tyranny of Stalin and the devastation of World War II. Twenty million dead and the country destroyed. Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, half were Russian citizens.

Long before the fall of the Soviet Union, doing whatever is necessary to prevent recurrence is the highest priority. We cannot understand, I think, the intensity of these feelings. That insensitivity came very close to getting us all killed in a nuclear exchange.

It’s still all mulling, and maybe I will have some more thoughts when I get back from rafting the Salmon River in a week.

Six Russian Haiku

Basel’s onion domes ,

Guard the ancient Kremlin walls,

Waiting for the Tsar.

Mirrored Russian lake,

Angry gulls screetch overhead,

Soon the ice will rule.

Mother Russia lives,

Deep within the silent trees,

Waiting for the call.

Birches line the shore,

Volga flows on evermore,

Russian summer comes.

Russia’s soul runs deep,

Only Vodka plumbs the depths,

Truth comes glass by glass.

Bells ring clear and far,

Onion domes of red and blue,

Paint the Russian sky.

The Ukraine Today is a Mess

The Ukraine today is a mess. The Great Recession has devastated the economy, the political system is moribund and corrupt and the average person is desperately poor. On the other hand, this is a distinct improvement from the past. So people are pretty cheerful and optimistic. And it is summer.

Summer is the season where Ukrainian women dress minimally and the whole city is a bar. The local genes seem to produce girls with endlessly long legs, which are required to be maximally displayed. Every few feet and in every park there is a little kiosk selling snacks, and more importantly bottles of beer for less than a dollar. People buy a couple of brewskis and hang out. Foreigners are quite welcome.

In the back of the Israeli museum in Tel Aviv there is a small wooden synagogue. As you enter, music starts to play. This is one of thousands of synagogues belonging to the three million Jews here in Ukraine who perished in the holocaust. After the war one of their neighbors who survived found a copy of music that this particular synagogue used, written by one of its members. Both the synagogue and the music ended up in Israel. This synagogue and this music are all that remain of the people who worshipped in this synagogue, slaughtered like animals, each and every one. Their village no longer exists even as a name on a map. Not even their names are known, nor who wrote this beautiful music or why.

Kiev is a city built on hills. One deep ravine is called Babi Yar and it was used to kill Jews early, before the death camps were up and running. Thirty, forty thousand taken here, and shot. Thrown into the ravine, sometimes not quite dead, other Jews forced to shovel on dirt to hold down the stench, knowing that witnesses would not be allowed to live

A handful of Jews here took to the forest and fought as guerillas, and a handful of those survived.

But of course we had our holocaust on Amelia Island when around 1600 every Timucuan on the island died. They died of the viral diseases that the Europeans brought. Not as morally fraught but as tragic and horrible nonetheless

But life goes on and those beer drinking, mostly naked young people have no or little knowledge of this particular tragedy among all those visited on these people or this world. Nor do we ever have a thought for those long dead Native Americans.

Two of the Civil War Wounds: A Hero & an Irony

I hope you caught Bill Birdsong’s talk at the museum on three human stories caused by three different Civil War wounds. Bill could make drying paint a fascinating subject, and he had good stuff to work with. He is also a very humorous guy.

His first story was the ironic death of Albert Sydney Johnson during the late afternoon at the first day of the battle of Shiloh in April 1862. The second was Joshua Chamberlain’s many wounds, including at Gettysburg where he arguably saved the Union Army from disaster by holding Little Round Top on the second day.

Many people have argued that Gettysburg was the most important battle of the Civil War and that The South might have won the war, if they had seized Little Round Top and rolled down the Union line in flank, or if Picket’s charge on the third day had succeeded. There is, in my opinion, no truth to one assertion and doubtful truth to the other.

Lee did not go off to invade Pennsylvania with the idea of destroying the Union in decisive battle. His plan was to take some heat off Virginia so crops could be harvested and try to sway Northern public opinion further against the war. He accomplished the first, but not the second. While many in the North were against the war, Lincoln had solid backing in Congress, and, most importantly in the army to finish the job.

Lee’s problem was that Meade had just too many men and resources, and Lee too little. If Lee had managed to rout Lee and scatter his army, there were still plenty enough union soldiers in position to prevent Lee seizing Washington. Moreover, at the end of the third day at Gettysburg, Lee’s army was much reduced in size from deaths and wounded. Even more critical, he was virtually out of ammunition. Had Meade attacked Lee in retreat the war might well have ended in 1863. Certainly had Grant been in charge instead of Meade, he would have attacked.

It might be that Chamberlain saved the battle, but Oates confederates attacking Chamberlain had taken heavy causalities, and couldn’t have pushed on much further. Longstreet was not in a position to exploit gains they made. It is one this to seize a position on the flank. It is another to drive a determined enemy from good defensive positions.

But Shiloh was a much more critical matter. Johnston had caught the union army by surprise, which is to say he caught Sherman and Grant by surprise. Grant was some miles away at Pittsfield Landing when the attack came, and didn’t arrive at the battlefield until late afternoon. He immediately began to sort out the mess in his unflappable way. But it was a near thing. Grant was close to being pushed into the river, and losing most of his army, and then, providentially, Johnson was killed.

He had not shared his battle plan with his second-in-command Beauregard who decided to stop for the night, and get organized to finish the battle in the morning. When the morning came, it was Grant who attacked and soon, Don Carlos Buell showed up with 40,000 fresh union troops. The Confederates were soon in a headlong retreat back to Corinth in Mississippi.

Had Grant and Sherman lost the battle of Shiloh decisively, they would have been busted out of the army. But instead the South was pummeled and took casualties it could not replace. It took Grant another 18 month to conquer The West of the Confederacy, but, at no time during that period, did the South have the men and material to stop him

The death of Albert Sydney Johnson was the critical turning point of the Civil War.

Gettysburg is easy to reach by car, and a fascinating place. I have been there at least twenty times. When the pressures of being a lawyer with lots of irons in the fire got to be too much, I would head there for the day and stay until dark. My own personal problems didn’t seem so important by the time I got back home.

Shiloh is hard to reach by car, but a moving experience. It’s tucked in the extreme southwest corner of Tennessee, very close to Mississippi. The battlefield is very well preserved – it looks just like it did when the battle raged – and the rangers are wonderful in evoking the events of those two days.

So now you know the rest of the story.

All For the Want of Silver

Did you know that the history of Amelia Island was largely determined by the fact that Chinese people 500 hundred years ago really liked silver? No? What an oversight!

It all goes back to Chris Columbus. Now Chris himself is not very important. If he had not discovered The New World in 1492, someone else would have done so within the next few years, likely the Portuguese. In fact, the existence of a large land mass to the west was well known in Europe. When Chris set sail, there were Danish and Irish fisherman on the Grand Banks, and drying their cods on the coast of Labrador.

The big deal is that within a few years after Columbus, the Spanish had figured out how to get rich from what they found. That’s why they built an empire here, which included Florida in general and Amelia Island in particular. And for the first century after Chris it was the lust for gold and silver and the successful discovery of lots of both that created the wealth. No money, no empire. It’s that simple.

Now gold has always been considered to have great value, and its scarcity ensures that will always be the case. I saw an exhibit in Quebec last year on gold and among other things I learned that all the gold that has ever existed in the world and that will ever exist can be fitted into a cube 3 meters on a side. That is not a very big box.

Silver is gold’s poorer cousin. It has never had the cachet of gold, in part because there is a lot of it around. It was used as coinage in the ancient world, but then so was copper and other metals and alloys.

The Spanish within a few years had seized all the gold that the Incas and Aztecs had accumulated over a very long time. They faced loss of the cash flow needed to carry on the conquests, but, by that time, they had discovered the incredibly productive silver mines of Mexico. The world supply of silver almost instantly went up by several times What should have happened is that the price of silver should have crashed, to the point that most of it wouldn’t have been worth mining. Had that happened, the Spanish might well have abandoned what was now an unproductive conquest, and just went home. No more Spanish Florida.

But, by coincidence, the Chinese economy was expanding at this time, and the Chinese people had a real love for silver, a love not shared in the same way by anyone else in the world. China at this time had 25% of all people on the planet and 40% of the world economy.

So the Chinese started buying up the Spanish silver, and that kept up the price, so Spain continued to enjoy cash flow that could support its conquest. The Spanish founded Manila largely as a place to manage the sale of silver to the Chinese, and buy their products in return.

Part of that silver bought textiles and other goods which were bartered in Africa for slaves, who mined the silver and eventually created the great estates in Mexico and elsewhere in the Spanish New World. But without that Chinese price support, the history of our little island would be very different indeed

We are off to Russia by the time you read this, what Churchill called a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” My plan is to send back blogs from time to time, whenever I find WiFi or an Internet café. I hope to find that critical connection between Amelia Island and Russia. That may take some searching.

Well, it finally had to happen. I been censored!

Last Saturday we had specialists at the museum all night testing for ghosts. Personally, I don’t believe in ghosts, but polls consistently show most Americans believe otherwise. Anyway, it was reported to me second or third hand that they found a ghost, and it was an African-American boy (I’m not sure I got this right)

I got to thinking if there is a ghost, what could have been the circumstances that trapped it there, something horrible that happened at the museum. So I sat down at my computer and wrote a ghost story. I tried to make it as gory and scary as I could. I will never be Stephen King, but I can aspire. I called it “Ghost Story” (Okay, its not a very original title)

I circulated it to a few friends, and the reactions I got were fascinating. Some loved the piece, while others described it as gruesome and repulsive. Mostly the break was along generational lines. No one under forty thought this was anything bad, mostly they liked it. In general, the older you are the more repulsed you were. But sadly that tags me as either a perpetual adolescent, or a culture omnivore. Probably right.

Moreover, Ghost Story wasn’t censored because we don’t do ghost stories. We do ghost tours, and spin regularly the tale of Aury’s nephew who was decapitated during hanging. That’s pretty gross. It wasn’t censored for its sexual content, because it has none (Maybe next time)

My Ghost Story got censored because it is a really, really good ghost story.

I took even the negative comments as a complement, albeit a clearly unintended. I am not all that secure about my writing, and this was rave stuff, so I submitted it as my next blog.

Censored.

I didn’t even get my story reproduced with that big “CENSORED” stamp over it.

But this may be a great thing.

When I was a kid in the fifties, I watched the censorship battles over Lady Chatterley Henry Miller (Remember Tropic of Cancer? That one was an eye opener), Fanny Hill and lots more. I grabbed them and read them cover to cover the minute they were available.

I am hoping this censorship will make everyone want to read my little Fernandina Ghost Story.

So if you think you are tough enough, drop me an email at jrlpatent@aol.com, and back will come the whole tale (UNCENSORED). And this week only, if you order within twenty four hours, you get at no extra cost, a new ghost story on Halloween eve, guaranteed to scare the beejesus out of you.

Now, don’t you want to read it?

Ciao