Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [8]
And it had all passed so quickly. The fate of the crumbling Ottoman Empire worried European politicians for the best part of a century: the British Empire’s illness was speedy and fatal and carried it off in a few decades. The British came out of both world wars on the winning side, and so never had the need to reimagine themselves as anything other than what they had once been, nor the need to think much about the legacy of their actions. All that was required was a readiness to accept themselves much as they had been beforehand, but in a diminished state. How much better it might have been to have had the chance to devise another destiny.
Chapter One
‘To plunder, to slaughter, to steal – these things they misname empire’
Tacitus, c. AD 98
There is not much to Port Royal these days, just a scrabble of streets, a couple of bare-shelved stores and an open sewer running down to the sea. It is certainly not royal, and – apart from the odd fishing boat pulled up on the black beach – not much of a port either. Half a dozen barefoot boys play cricket in the dirt, their wickets a plastic beer case and an up-ended table with two legs missing. There is a policeman, but nothing for him to do, for nothing much happens in Port Royal. A young man pushes a trolley through the rutted streets, a bowl of goat stew kept warm on some glowing charcoal. He has ambitions, he says: one day he plans to have his travelling restaurant mounted on full-sized bicycle wheels. Apart from a betting shack where improbable numbers of dollars are staked on unlikely outcomes, the poverty-stricken fishing village of today bears little relation to what went before. For once this collection of dilapidated buildings at the south-eastern tip of Jamaica was one of the most notorious places on earth. A couple of earthquakes, a terrible fire and numerous hurricanes – each said to be God’s judgement on the loose morals of earlier residents – have removed most traces of its time as ‘the wickedest city in the world’.
‘This town is the Sodom of the New World,’ wrote a seventeenth-century clergyman who made the mistake of visiting the newly established English colony, ‘and since the majority of its population consists of pirates, cutthroats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world, I felt my permanence there was of no use and I could better preach the Word of God elsewhere among a better sort of folk.’ He departed on the same ship that had brought him, leaving the place to its vagabonds, escaped jailbirds and prostitutes such as the notorious ‘No Conscience Nan’, ‘Salt-Beef Peg’ and ‘Buttock-de-Clink Jenny’. The place floated on a sea of rum – by 1661 the town had stirred itself to acquire a council, which, in the month of June alone, issued over forty new licences for drinking dens. (There was no need of visiting clergy because the rum they served was so strong it was known as ‘Kill Devil’.) A governor of Jamaica drily observed that ‘The Spaniards wondered much at the sickness of our people, until they knew of the strength of their drinks, but then they wondered more that they were not all dead.’ Port Royal made the wild towns which grew up around nineteenth-century gold strikes seem like quiet country villages, for one simple reason. It was built not on digging gold out of the ground but on stealing it. This tropical Klondike flourished on maritime gangsterism. Jamaica lay ‘in the Spaniard’s bowels and in the heart of his trade’.
The parasitic process went like this. The Spanish robbed the Aztec and Inca empires of Central and South America, and then transported the precious metals under armed guard to the Caribbean coast, where they were loaded on to ships to be carried back to Spain. The thugs of Port Royal simply put to sea, mugged the Spanish and then scuttled back to Jamaica as fast as possible. The British were not the first into this uncertain but often immensely profitable business, for French pirates had begun falling upon Spanish convoys soon after they started to sail for