Episode 5 - $ugar: Let's Make Some Money. Oh, and a Little Dessert

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Listen to "005 $ugar - Let's Make Some Money. Oh, And a Little Dessert" on Spreaker.

 Link to the Episode

Episode 5 - $ugar: Let's Make Some Money, Oh and a Little Dessert

Spanish Galleon:

Stats: 92' Long.  
Could carry up to 2 Million Silver pesos along with porcelain, spice and silk from China. 
More information available at San Diego Maritime Museum.

For fun:  The boat that starred as the HMS Surprise is at the San Diego Maritime Museum



Designing Women:


Adorable mini marzipan fruits:

By Dani Lurie - originally posted to Flickr as marzipan fruits and vegetables at Harrods 02, CC BY 2.0


The Whole Windward / Leeward thing:

1st - Yes the pronunciation is funny.  

If you are in the lee - it rhymes with knee.  
E.g. from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH  
"Tell them," added the owl, "that I suggest moving the house into the lee of the stone."

But if you are on the leeward side - it rhymes with steward.

2nd - What does it mean?  

The trade winds - some fairly constant winds that blow east to west across that latitude of the Atlantic (and then Coriolis Effect their way north up the east coast of the US, and then West back to Europe) - are blowing into the Caribbean Sea.  So the Islands that are on the "outside" are the Windward ones.

Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada.... and all of their little islands.  

Caribbean general map.png
CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago are outside of the range.

The Leeward Islands are all "behind" those outer islands, sheltered, or in the lee.
Margarita, Bonair, Curaçao, Aruba - the southern Leewards, and then Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, Antigua, Barbuda, St. Martin, Anguilla are the rest.

As you can guess deciding which is windward and leeward around Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat and their little islands was pretty squirrely there for decades. 
All too often some poor ship captain with a broken watch (longitude got messed up), too many cloudy nights (astrolabe was useless, so latitude was fuzzy) and an uncertain log turns up at an island, just happy to be there.  He checks the sketch of the bay with his log... it's not clear he's in the right place.  And then sees the flag flying from the gun emplacements...

He's Spanish and its English. - Nuts! 
He's Portuguese, and he's blundered into a French bay. - Rats!
He left home and all things were hunky-dory between the Spanish and Portuguese courts, but after a stop in Africa, by the time he gets to where he's going the Spanish and Portuguese are not talking. - Why Me?

It was a tricky time.  And every other map between 1600 and 1880 places the division somewhere different.

Caribbean Swimming Pigs:

 

More information at Vale Magazine - Travel

Interesting Books/Media:

O'Malley, Gregory. Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America 1619 - 1807. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014 







 

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