Category: Dear Grumpy Advice on Teaching in Today’s Classroom
On May 2, 1945, he was assigned to a rifle company of the 5th Marines during the invasion of Okinawa. That day, the 5th Marines were pushing uphill towards a ridge against determined Japanese resistance. The slope was strewn with Marine casualties, and Corpsman Bush moved unceasingly among them rendering aid despite the withering fire all around him.
When the attack passed over the crest of the ridge, he moved up to the top of the slope to aid a wounded Marine officer. A Japanese counterattack swept over the ridge just as he began administering blood plasma to his patient.
As the Japanese approached, Corpsman Bush gallantly held up the plasma bottle with one hand and fired a pistol at the Japanese with the other. Then he grabbed a carbine and killed six advancing Japanese. He suffered several serious wounds himself, including the loss of an eye.
He remained guarding his “officer patient” until the enemy were repulsed. Then, according to the official citation, he “valiantly refus[ed] medical treatment for himself until his officer patient had been evacuated…”
A seaworthy replica of the Batavia was built in the 20th century.Distilled to its essence, capitalism and communism fractionate based upon one overarching worldview. Now, I realize I’m oversimplifying. College professors and political scientists have built entire careers out of these nuances.
Despotic ideologues have slaughtered millions along the way. However, if you were called upon to compare and contrast the foundational differences between these disparate worldviews, I would propose that it is this: Capitalists believe that people are innately bad. Communists believe that people are innately good. Everything else stems from that.
By way of example, communists believe that, if left to their own devices, mankind will come together selflessly and work toward a common goal for the greater good. By contrast, capitalists espouse that humans will forever strive to improve their individual lot. As a card-carrying conservative capitalist myself, I can attest that communists are delusional and that human greed is the most powerful engine in the known universe.
Properly harnessed, however, capitalism has brought us such stuff as Mars robots, smartphones, supersonic airplanes, GPS-guided bombs and silicone breast implants. Now, to illustrate my point …
A 17th-Century Case Study
Launched in 1628, the Batavia was the flagship of the Dutch East India Company. On her maiden voyage, she carried 341 passengers and crew along with a dozen treasure chests full of silver and a load of precious gems. She was bound for Batavia, her namesake, in the Dutch East Indies. The mission was to deposit the passengers, swap the valuables for spices, and return to Europe, making the East India shareholders filthy rich in the process.
Unbeknownst to Capt. Francisco Pelsaert, an East India official named Jeronimus Cornelisz was plotting a mutiny. Cornelisz’s nefarious plan involved stealing the ship and associated swag and using it to embark on a newfound career in piracy. His ultimate life goal was to start a new nation someplace in his own image. Clearly, everyone involved was a devout capitalist.
The rumor was that Cornelisz sabotaged their navigation but legitimately screwed it up in the process. The Batavia subsequently struck Morning Reef near Beacon Island off the western coast of Australia. It took a while for the tides and surf to tear the ship apart. Of the 341 souls on board, 301 survived to reach the nearby island. The remaining 40 drowned.
A fair amount of the original treasure that remained in the Batavia wreck has since been recovered. Photo by Guy de la Bedivere.
Things Get Real
These small islands offered no fresh water and little protein, aside from sea lions and birds. The captain and a small contingent struck out in a 30-foot longboat in search of Batavia and help. The rest of the survivors were left under the command of Jeronimus Cornelisz, who turned out to be a psychopath.
Cornelisz, the aspiring pirate, consolidated all weapons and food under his personal control. He then dispatched the soldiers in the group led by a man named Wiebbe Hayes in another small boat to nearby islands, ostensibly to find water. His tacit hope was that these 20 or so guys would just die.
With limited resources and a lot of mouths to feed, Cornelisz then directed his subordinates to start killing the survivors. At first, he contrived legal charges against his victims like theft or hoarding. Eventually, however, they began killing for fun. When the dust settled, Cornelisz and his band of cutthroats had murdered 110 men, women and children. A few of the comelier lasses they kept on as sex slaves.
Much to everyone’s surprise, the Hayes expedition did indeed find food and potable water on nearby West Wallabi Island. They communicated this back to the main group via prearranged smoke signals. Now Cornelisz was in a bit of a spot.
Meanwhile, after an arduous 33 days at sea in their small boat, Cpt. Pelsaert actually arrived at Batavia. The local Governor-General, Jan Peterson Coen, immediately gave him command of the ship Sardam. While his mission was to rescue the shipwreck survivors, the good governor also asked that he perhaps bring back all that treasure while he was at it. It took Pelsaert a further 30 days or so to find the right islands again.
At least one survivor of the massacre on Beacon Island made it over to West Wallabi with the horrific news. Hayes and his men had no weapons. They were, however, trained soldiers, so they set about building a fort and fashioning implements of violence from materials that had washed up from the wreck.
By now, Hayes’ troops were relatively well-fed, while those of Cornelis were quite peckish. Despite only one side having access to muskets, Hayes’ men successfully withstood several amphibious assaults. It was, however, quite the iffy thing. Much blood was spilled and in a most brutal fashion.
Hayes eventually took Cornelisz hostage just as the Sardam arrived. With the assistance of the guns and crew of the Sardam, Cornelisz’s mutineers were subdued. Here’s where the real fun began.
Actions Have Consequences …
Cpt. Pelsaert was none too pleased to hear the sordid details of what Cornelisz and company had been up to in his absence. He held a cursory trial and then remanded Cornelisz and his primary henchmen to nearby Seal Island. There, his sailors chopped off the offenders’ hands and hanged them to a man.
Two of the lesser mutineers, one of whom was a cabin boy named Jan Pelgrom de Bye, were marooned on the Australian mainland and never heard from again. These were actually the first two European criminals to be abandoned on this curious continent. There would eventually be many more.
The remaining mutineers were transported to Batavia for proper trials. Five were hanged. Several others were keelhauled, flogged or dropped from the yardarm. This last punishment involved being suspended from the ship’s superstructure by a rope and dunked repeatedly into the ocean while underway. Think waterboarding on steroids. Cornelisz’s primary lieutenant, Jacop Pietersz, was broken on the wheel. Being broken saw one lashed to a wagon wheel and having your arms and legs crushed and then threaded through the spokes. That would suck.
Ruminations
Of the original complement, only 122 survived to reach Batavia in peace. A subsequent tribunal found Cpt. Pelsaert to have been partially responsible for the chaos. He, therefore, had his financial assets seized. Pleaser succumbed to disease within a year. Wiebbe Hayes was promoted to sergeant and rightfully hailed a hero.
Over the course of four years in the early 1970s, the Batavia was raised and subsequently preserved in the Shipwreck Galleries in Freemantle, Western Australia. Preservationists recovered 20 tons of timber, an anchor, multiple cannons and scads of other ore mundane stuff, including four navigational astrolabes. The sordid story of the Batavia and her crew serves simply to illustrate that, if left to our own devices, human beings are indeed reliably bad.
| Rollo Gillespie | |
|---|---|
Major-General Sir Robert Rollo Gillespie
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| Born | 1766 Comber, County Down, Ireland |
| Died | 1814 (aged 48) Kalunga, Dehradun, Nepal, (today part of India) |
| Allegiance |  United Kingdom |
| Years of service | 1783–1814 |
| Rank | Major-General |
| Battles/wars | French Revolutionary Wars Gurkha War |
Major-General Sir Robert Rollo Gillespie KCB (21 January 1766 – 31 October 1814[1]) was an officer in the British army.
Contents
Early life[edit]
Robert Rollo Gillespie was born and grew up in Comber, County Down, in what is now Northern Ireland.[2] He was educated at Kensington and near Newmarket[1] After turning down the opportunity of going to Cambridge university he joined the 3rd Irish Horse during 1783[1] as a Cornet.
In 1786 he was involved in a duel in which he killed the opposing duellist. Fleeing to a friend’s house in Narraghmore and then to Scotland, he returned voluntarily to stand trial in 1788. The verdict was ‘justifiable homicide’ and Gillespie was acquitted.[1] Later he earned the title “Strongest Man of Comber” after performing many feats of strength.
Active service[edit]
In 1792 he transferred to the 20th Light Dragoons with the rank of lieutenant and soon embarked with his new regiment for Jamaica. However, his ship was shipwrecked at the Portuguese islands of Madeira forcing Gillespie to come ashore by a small boat and he then contracted yellow fever[1] in his first night on the island. After recovery, he rejoined his regiment and fought against the forces of the French Republic in the Caribbean at Tiburon Peninsula, Port-au-Prince, Fort Bizotten and Fort de l’Hôpital.
Being made Adjutant-General of St. Domingo, he was at home alone when eight men broke into his house to burgle it. Armed only with his sword, he killed six of them while the other two fled.[3]
India, Java, Sumatra, Nepal[edit]
In 1804 he was honourably acquitted[1] by a court martial of suspected involvement in a fraud scandal – he had permitted the regimental surgeons, in the interests of their patients, to exceed the regulation allowances. At his court martial it was pointed out that these regulations did not necessarily apply to a regiment which was paid not by the British government, but by the local government of Jamaica, which already had passed his accounts; many of its members and of his senior officers wrote letters to the court martial highly commending him and his care for his regiment.[4]
He then transferred to India, traveling initially to Hamburg where, though both were in disguise and had no political principles in common, he was warned by Napper Tandy to flee to Danish territory in Altona.[5] He continued overland through Germany, Austria, and Serbia, to the Euxine where he felt obliged to force his ship’s captain at gunpoint to take him to Constantinople as agreed, rather than a corsair port for murder or slavery.[6] He passed through Greece without recorded incidents, and took ship for Aleppo. He narrowly saved his own life, and his servant’s, in the desert by curing the chief of a band of Arabs, who were planning to murder and rob him.[7] He stayed for some time in Baghdad, where he was presented with a valuable Arabian horse by the Ottoman governor. From Basra he took ship for Bombay, then travelled overland to Madras. He was soon appointed to the command of the 19th Dragoons at Arcot, some 16 miles from Vellore.[4]
A few days after taking up his new post, Gillespie was warned of the Vellore Mutiny of 1806. He immediately collected about twenty dragoons, with galloper guns, and he set out ahead of a relief force within a quarter of an hour of the alarm being raised. Dashing ahead of his men, he arrived at Vellore within two hours, to find the surviving British troops within minutes of extinction by some hundreds of mutineers. About sixty men of the 69th, commanded by a sergeant (who recognized Gillespie from the West Indies) and by two assistant surgeons, were holding the ramparts but were out of ammunition. Gillespie was unable to gain entry through the gate (which was controlled by the mutineers), so the sergeant lowered a chain of soldier’s belts to allow Gillespie to climb the wall onto the battlements.[8] To gain time for the rest of his men to arrive Gillespie led the 69th in a bayonet-charge along the ramparts, engaging in close combat with the enemy. With the rest of the 19th arrived Gillespie ordered them to blow in the gates with their galloper guns and then made a second charge with the 69th, clearing the space just inside the gate to permit the cavalry to deploy. The 19th and Madras Cavalry then charged and slaughtered any enemy who stood in their way; about a hundred fugitives, captured within the fort, were summarily executed. Gillespie arrested the sons of Tipu Sultan, who were suspected of fomenting the mutiny, and sent them under guard to Madras. The mutiny was thus suppressed.[9]
In 1811 he commanded forces in the Invasion of Java[1] and took the city of Batavia. He was subsequently appointed Commander of the Forces in British-occupied Java and in 1812 he deposed the Sultan of Palembang in Sumatra, and took the royal Javanese city of Yogyakarta. On his return to India he speared a tiger that escaped from a cage and prowled on Bangalore racecourse.[10]
Two years later, at the beginning of the Anglo-Nepalese War, he led a column to attack a Nepalese hill fort at Khalanga, in the Battle of Nalapani, repulsing a Gurkha counter-attack. Gillespie then tried to follow them back into the fort with a dismounted party of the 8th Dragoons. Although this failed, Gillespie renewed the attack with companies of the 53rd Foot. Thirty yards from the fort he shouted the words, “One shot more for the honour of Down” and charged with the men when a Nepalese sharpshooter shot him through the heart and he died within seconds of falling. With his death the attack faltered causing the next senior officer to call a retreat.[1]
He was posthumously knighted with a K.C.B. on 1 January 1815.[1]
Memorial[edit]
A large statue of Major General Sir Rollo Gillespie was constructed under the oversight of John Fraser, the first County Surveyor of Down, and was unveiled on 24 June 1845 (St. John’s Day) in the Town Square of Comber. Fifty lodges of the Masonic Order were present, in what is believed to be the biggest Masonic gathering in Irish history. It was calculated that 25,000 to 30,000 people crowded into the town to witness the ceremony and celebrate the life of “The Strongest Man In Comber”. The column is 55 feet high. At the foot of the column are many Masonic symbols and his famous last words “One shot more for the honour of Down”.
The Gillespie Memorial
References[edit]
- ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i Dictionary of Indian Biography; Charles E Buckland p166 (1906)
- Jump up^ Sandford, Ernest (1976). Discover Northern Ireland. NI Tourist Board. p. 197. ISBN 0 9500222 7 6.
- Jump up^ A memoir of major-general sir R. Rollo Gillespie by Major Sir William Thorn. 1816. Printed for T. Egerton, at the Military Library, Whitehall. Pages 38-39. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JEgVAAAAQAAJ
- ^ Jump up to:a b A memoir of major-general sir R. Rollo Gillespie by Major Sir William Thorn. 1816. Printed for T. Egerton, at the Military Library, Whitehall. Pages 65-83. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JEgVAAAAQAAJ
- Jump up^ A memoir of major-general sir R. Rollo Gillespie by Major Sir William Thorn. 1816. Printed for T. Egerton, at the Military Library, Whitehall. Page 87. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JEgVAAAAQAAJ
- Jump up^ A memoir of major-general sir R. Rollo Gillespie by Major Sir William Thorn. 1816. Printed for T. Egerton, at the Military Library, Whitehall. Page 91. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JEgVAAAAQAAJ
- Jump up^ A memoir of major-general sir R. Rollo Gillespie by Major Sir William Thorn. 1816. Printed for T. Egerton, at the Military Library, Whitehall. Pages 93-95. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JEgVAAAAQAAJ
- Jump up^ A memoir of major-general sir R. Rollo Gillespie by Major Sir William Thorn. 1816. Printed for T. Egerton, at the Military Library, Whitehall. Page 102. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JEgVAAAAQAAJ
- Jump up^ A memoir of major-general sir R. Rollo Gillespie by Major Sir William Thorn. 1816. Printed for T. Egerton, at the Military Library, Whitehall. Page 106. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JEgVAAAAQAAJ
- Jump up^ Thornton, Leslie Heber (1925). Campaigners Grave & Gay: Studies of Four Soldiers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The University Press. p. 105.
Further reading[edit]
- A Memoir of Major-General Sir R. R. Gillespie
- Hernon, Ian. (2001) Blood in the Sand: More Forgotten Wars of the 19th Century, The History Press.
