Thursday, September 7, 2017

Lectures of South America by Professor Jim Drumond/Carlos Pueblo

Lectures of South America by Professor Jim Drumond/Carlos Pueblo

There were three lectures at sea days provided by the cruise program director
about South America which interested me very much. The professor was also a
passenger, a retired professor of English literature in the state of Michigan. He
gathered all his information from Google Search very basic yet interesting. It
all started in 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered America financed by
Spanish Kingdom to find gold in the new world. He said that Columbus was actually
failed that mission and died in jail somewhere. There are 12 nations total in South
America divided by the Catholic Pop into Spain and Portugal mainly Brazil and the rest.
After 17th century, the new European power ignored such order and invaded to
Caribbean Antilles and then the independent movement after the collapse of both
Kingdoms.

His talk of piracy of Caribbean and the beginning of current day navy connected my
understanding of some major sea battles in the Europe among England, France, and
Spain. Pirate got paid by booty after a successful raid; therefore, it was very reasonable
that Queen Elizabeth I didn’t pay her Armada, a new combination of pirate ships. We
did see many movies about pirate life in Caribbean, mostly were male pirate; however,
he did mention a female pirate in Chinese legend history, Cheng I Pao who was not
appeared in any of the story tellers’ legendary topic. Google does have one female
pirate on the record meets his description.

The professor would briefly introduce one or two points of significance of event before
we landed to the nation’s ports, i.e. Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile, Falkland war
between Britain and Argentina, the sunk battles ship of Admiral Graf Spee of WWII to make
the trip more interesting. Bachelet’s father used to work for Salvador Allende before the
coup of Augusto Pinochet. Later, I had had a taxi ride at one of the Chilean port city, the
driver showed us the public housing project done by her. At Falkland Islands, I walked
through a harbor road with memorial of that War and a statue of Margaret Thatcher, of
course there was a newly elected president of Argentina.

At the top deck of the ship. I tried to located where the sunk battle ship was. An British
passenger smiled and pointed to one direction and said that it was not important any

longer that the world should pay more attention to tourism. 

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