Word: upon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ulysses Nudged. This is a list, like the criminal archives of the homicide bureau, for the social anthropologist and the moralist to brood upon. Many of the items on these dolorous statistics may make one skeptical of universal literacy...
...Benito Cereno, Herman Melville's parable about slavery, the moody, vaguely ailing captain of a Spanish slave ship is asked: "What has cast such a shadow upon you?" He replies simply: "The Negro." In the long aftershadow of centuries, that answer, says James Pope-Hennessy, still holds true...
...scrupulous that they took oaths not to gamble, drink or swear-have no scruples at all about their terrible profession? How could the almost offensively respectable Englishman. John Newton, who eventually switched from slave captain to clergyman, pack chained human beings into a suffocating hold as tightly as "books upon a shelf," and then retire to his well-appointed cabin to read the Bible and pray...
...same motive: profit. Shipbuilders in Liverpool, French sugar planters in the West Indies, rum manufacturers in Massachusetts (there were 63 distilleries there in 1750), coffee growers in Brazil, to say nothing of owners of cotton, rice and tobacco plantations in the South-all were dependent, directly or indirectly, upon the slave trade. All their quoted comments, says the disapproving author, ring with "the eternal voice of the middleman, the levelheaded, grating speech of money...
...before long, European heads of state were getting their share of the action by way of taxes, if not by direct participation. When Queen Elizabeth heard about the first African voyage of John Hawkins, she called it "detestable" and prophesied that it "would call down vengeance from Heaven upon the undertakers." When she learned how handsomely the shareholders made out, she invested in the second expedition herself...