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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