Not long after the paroled prisoners arrived in New York, the defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown virtually ended armed conflict in the war. But it would be two more years until a formal treaty was signed. In the meantime Long Island was packed with idle British soldiers who needed to be fed. The paroled prisoners were put to work scouring the Long Island countryside for food, draft animals, firewood and other supplies to help sustain these troops.

During this period Bowles spent a good deal of time acting in stage productions, often in the starring role, sometimes as a female (this honor fell to ensigns, the lowest officer rank). He was court-martialed for taking scalps while dressed as an Indian in Pensacola, but was exonerated based on the testimony of his many admiring compadres. He also fought a duel during this period.

When it was clear in 1783 that the United States would get to keep its colonies and that the presence of the British army on American soil would no longer be tolerated, a mad scramble to get out of the country ensued. Soon-to-be ex-British soldiers had a few places to choose from, but none was really appealing. Many of William’s fellow Marylanders, no longer welcome in Frederick, chose to sail north to Nova Scotia, where they soon founded the city of Halifax. Native Brits went home to England. A few took their chances in more far-flung places within the Empire, such as Bermuda. William Bowles packed his books and his various costumes and joined a troupe of actors who had decided to try their luck in Nassau, on tiny New Providence Island in the Bahamas.

Nassau was an isolated, sleepy town in 1783. The inhabitants who lived there prior to the American Revolution, mostly fishermen and scavengers of shipwrecks, known as salvors, were intent on maintaining their current occupations. They came to be known in Bahaman politics as the “Old Settlers” to distinguish them from the “New Settlers” who brought African slaves and plantation agriculture from the American South. Friction between the two political factions became quite heated as the islands filled up with exiled Tories.

Bowles was given 500 acres of land on the nearby island of Eleuthera in exchange for his service to the Crown. There he was expected to settle down and produce crops to sustain himself. Nothing could have been more repugnant to the ambitious young Bowles, now 19 and eager for adventure.

The next several years of William’s life are hard to trace with precision. He was usually in the Bahamas, but often in Georgia or with his Indian families near the forks of the Apalachicola. He is known to have painted portraits for cash in Savannah, and is thought to have frequented the seat of government in Augusta, probably serving as a spy for the Creeks as the Georgia Assembly conceived schemes to deprive the Indians of their ancestral lands.

By 1785 William Bowles, by birth an upper-class Englishman, was nearly always dressed as an Indian. The tribe that had adopted him as one of their own had conferred upon him a rank of distinction. He was not one to let that fact go unnoticed.

“Frequently he wore a knee-length hunting jacket and buckskin leggings, but on formal occasions, since after his return he was made a chief, he donned his cloth turban with an ostrich feather plume, a half-moon silver gorget hanging from his neck, and a white man’s shirt and breeches. At his side was a ceremonial silver pipe tomahawk signifying he was a war chief.” (Wright 24-25)

What the Georgians were up to was ever on the minds of the Creeks. They were pushing further west into Indian country, encroaching on traditional hunting grounds. The land they were pushing into, which today makes up much of the states of Alabama and Mississippi, was claimed by both the United States and Spain. And Spain, as you remember, possessed Florida, which at that time stretched all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans.

It was in everyone’s best interest to keep the Indians happy. American settlers needed docile, friendly Indians as neighbors if they hoped to live in peace on the frontier. The Spanish needed to maintain a healthy alliance with the tribes so they would continue to serve as a buffer against American encroachment. If the Georgians pushed their settlements all the way to the Mississippi it would be nearly impossible for the Spanish to control trade on that river. And whoever controlled the Mississippi controlled the vast interior of the continent.

Waiting in the wings, poised to take advantage of any opportunity to get back in the game, were the British — still smarting from defeat by the colonials, but firmly in control of Canada, much of the Caribbean, and closely allied with many tribes on American soil.

For their part the Indians wanted desperately to continue their way of life and to have access to the resources that had always been available to them. They understandably had a difficult time distinguishing between white, English-speaking Americans and white, English-speaking Britons. The outcome of the Revolution was of little consequence to them, as long as they had access to their traditional deerhunting grounds and a convenient place to trade the deerskins for manufactured goods.

In the two decades preceding the American Revolution Great Britain had indirectly transformed the economy of the southeastern Indians by becoming their sole source of now indispensible goods. British-American traders had penetrated deep into Indian country, often marrying Creek women, fathering children, and installing their own mixed-blood sons as representatives, or factors, in the villages. The livelihood of Creek men, and also of Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee men across the South, had become inexorably linked to their ability to obtain deerskins to trade with the British in exchange for cloth, tools, iron pots, rum and weapons. The southeastern Indians, once sedentary farmers and subsistence hunters, had been transformed, in the course of a single generation, into large-scale commercial hunters.

When the United States kicked the Tories out of the country after the American Revolution they inadvertently expelled their leading Indian experts. The same thing happened when Galvez took over the Floridas in 1781. The individuals who had controlled the lucrative Indian trade were now exiles in Halifax, London or Nassau. It didn’t take long for the Spanish governors of East and West Florida to realize they were not up to the task of supplying the Indians the way their British predecessors had. So in 1783 the Spanish swallowed their pride and awarded an exclusive contract to the British firm of Panton, Leslie and Company to supply the southern Indians on behalf of His Catholic Majesty, Carlos III.

Charles III

William Panton had been in the Indian trade since arriving in South Carolina from Scotland in the early 1760s. He started as a clerk in Charleston and by the late 1770s, having been expelled from the Carolinas because of his Loyalist sympathies, was in St. Augustine running the Indian trade for Governor Tonyn of East Florida. Pushed off the continent altogether when Florida was lost to the Spanish, he and his partners, including John Forbes, John Leslie, Charles McLatchy and William Alexander, became influential members of the New Settler faction in Nassau.

Panton, Leslie and Company was launched in 1783 and went to work for the Spanish government. By the mid-1780s the firm had connections throughout the disputed no-man’s land west of the Chattahoochee, including resident factors in every major Indian village.

William Panton was wildly successful as an Indian trader; it has been claimed he was North America’s first millionaire. But the road to that success was very bumpy. One of his larger obstacles was William Augustus Bowles, who was determined to get a piece of Panton’s trade for himself. But Bowles would not stop there. The Indian trade was only a means to an end. Bowles was determined to become the greatest Indian leader in history, to push the Spaniards back into the sea, and to take the Floridas back as a gift to King George.

What is disturbing about our addiction to broadcast entertainment in this context is that many Americans think it is real. Robert Tilton made millions in the 1980s selling tickets to see God. The political apocalyptists on Fox News sell fear and paranoia.

The rhetorical lynching of President Obama taking place in the popular media today is perpetuated by what has been called the “bandwagon effect,” a well-documented phenomenon in behavioral psychology. In essence, it means that “people do and believe things merely because many other people do and believe the same things.”

In other words, people are much like sheep. That is why the result of the bandwagon effect is often called the “herd instinct.” The greed of the herd is behind our stock market bubbles. The fear of the herd is behind the crash.

As any good shepherd will tell you, compelling the herd to move in unison requires only the introduction of a stimulus, say fear, along the margins of the flock. The flight instinct takes over at that point, and the herder can just sit back on his horse and watch.

In the political arena, when the herd instinct reaches critical mass, elections can be won. That is why the best shepherds – political pundits on popular TV shows — are worth so much to those who live and die by elections. In today’s political climate it is the Republican National Committee who is in that position. (Bill O’Reilly is probably the best shepherd they have in the pasture. I’m surprised he doesn’t wear cowboy boots.)

Last month an RNC PowerPoint presentation was found in a hotel room in Boca Grande, Florida, where a group of party leaders had gathered to discuss fundraising strategies. The 72-page document, which was intended to be used to entice donors to open their wallets, contained cartoons depicting the President, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as the Joker, Cruella de Ville, and Scooby-doo, respectively. The presentation encouraged fundraisers within the party to play on the negative feelings among right-leaning Americans toward the Obama administration and their fear of Socialism to raise money.

Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for the opposing team, the Democratic National Committee, responded this way: “If you had any doubt, any doubt whatsoever, that the Republican Party has been taken over by the fear-mongering lunatic fringe, those doubts were erased today.” He added, “Republicans across the country have cheered on crowds where these very images appeared.”

Criticism of public figures through political cartoons is an honored tradition in free society, so I don’t begrudge the RNC for that. What I am concerned about is not that the RNC has been taken over by “the fear-mongering lunatic fringe,” but that the results of the next election might be determined by a stampede of spooked sheep.

The RNC’s job is to raise money to win elections. Whatever they have to do to achieve their goals within the law is fine by me. Bill O’Reilly’s job is to attract viewers to his network by exercising his right to free speech. At that, he is a master. Your job, as a voter in the American electoral system, is to help decide who gets to sit around the government table and make decisions for the rest of us. You are not doing your job if you let others take that away from you.

Don’t be a sheep.

Criticism ranged from astonishment that I am not a Christian to fears that I might be a Buddhist (and the guy who said it is not from China).  One person, knowing that I had written an article critical of Fox News, proclaimed that I was wrong before reading what I had to say.

Yes, religion and politics are touchy subjects.  Especially religion. But the point I’d like to clarify with everyone, at least for those readers who have not already deleted my URL from their computer, is that my article wasn’t about religion.  It was about politics.

My message was that Brit Hume’s sermon did not do Fox any favors.  The network already has the attention of the religious right.  Hume’s moralizing only confirms to them that Fox is the “right” vehicle for their collective message.  The Republican Party already has the votes of the evangelical bloc locked in.  It’s the votes of those on the fence that are in jeopardy here.  And it’s the votes on the fence that will decide the next election.  My criticism of Brit Hume is that he is hurting his network and his political party (one would assume he is a Republican) by lending credence to the view of many that Fox, ostensibly a news organization, is “unequally yoked together” – to borrow a phrase from St. Paul – with a religious lobby.

This kind of marriage scares Americans who, liberals and conservatives alike, feel that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is an important piece of legislation.  This is the part of the Bill of Rights that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with religious proselytizing.  As I said before, Brit Hume is doing exactly what he is supposed to be doing as an evangelical Christian.  He is witnessing for Christ.  My point was that he could have picked a more appropriate venue for sharing his beliefs with the American public.  Until his retirement in 2008 he had been the trusted news anchor of the Fox network.  A person very close to me who happens to be a die-hard Fox fanatic said after viewing the video clip of Hume’s statements that she “didn’t know he was like that.  I always thought he was fair and balanced.”

The power and influence of Fox News is formidable.  Their winning formula of bombastic entertainment and caustic political commentary has Americans transfixed and in a lynching mood.  There is a fear among the level-headed that some modern-day Savonarola will ride that wave of rhetoric all the way to the White House.

Girolamo Savonarola

Speaking of paranoia, I would now like to address those of you who are concerned about my soul.

I am not a Buddhist. Brit Hume’s statements were directed towards Buddhists.  That is why Buddhism became a topic in my post.  I am not a practicing member of any organized religion, because I believe that one’s relationship with God (The Universe, All That Is, Mother Nature) is a profoundly personal, subjective process.  If I had to pick a religious institution to participate in – which I have no intention of doing — it would probably be a local congregation of the Baha’i Faith, since I am very intrigued by most of the founding tenets of their doctrine, or “platform,” to use a political analogy.  The Baha’i Faith’s website lists the following as their core beliefs.

All humanity is one family.

All prejudice – racial, religious, national, or economic – is destructive and must be overcome.

We must investigate truth for ourselves, without preconceptions.

Science and religion are in harmony.

Our economic problems are linked to spiritual problems.

The family and its unity are very important.

There is one God.

All major religions come from God.

World peace is the crying need of our time.

Am I proselytizing? I don’t know.  I’m not a member of the Baha’i church nor am I certain that I agree with all of their professed beliefs, but I am in agreement with most of them. I will say that I am not actively trying to recruit people for this organization nor am I fishing for souls to do my part in protecting them from Hellfire.  I am simply offering information that I find intriguing to the handful of readers who stumble upon my website.  What you do with the information is a personal matter.

You may argue that I am proselytizing because I have chosen to highlight on my blog the beliefs of the Baha’i over the beliefs of another religion, say Islam.  Well, give me time.  All great thoughts will have their moment in the sun on my blog, as long as the American Taliban are not allowed to infiltrate the FCC and make blogging a target of religious censorship.

The Emerald Coast at Destin

It has come to my attention that there are a couple places in the world claiming to have sand that is whiter than our beaches here on the Emerald Coast.  I take issue with that, and would like to settle the matter.  Since I’ve only had 350 readers of my blog so far, and as far as I can tell not one of those readers lives anywhere near the offending beaches, we’ll just talk about them behind their backs until they catch on and decide to argue with us.

First I’ll define some terms for my many readers in Michigan, a state where beach sand comes in the form of large, round, fossil-pocked rocks called Petoskey stones.  The Emerald Coast is a stretch of Gulf of Mexico coast in the Florida panhandle.  It’s roughly the strip of beachfront property between Panama City on the east and Pensacola on the west.  This is where THE WHITEST SAND IN THE WORLD has accumulated over countless eons and is now lying pristine in the hot Florida sun, tempting people to take off most of their clothes and absorb UV radiation. The beaches of the Emerald Coast appear white from a distance but are actually composed of polished quartz crystals that are transparent when observed under magnification.

Emerald Coast dune vegetation

The other term I would like to define is “Redneck Riviera.”  This is not a term that has anything to do with THE WHITEST SAND IN THE WORLD, but merely refers to the Emerald Coast’s proximity to Alabama.

Now let’s briefly mention the competition.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Hyams Beach, on Jervis Bay in New South Wales, Australia, holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for the whitest sand in the world.  I searched the Guinness website and I could find no such record.  Also, suspiciously, the photo in the newspaper article making this claim shows an admittedly very white beach under an unnaturally blue sky.  A blue the color of toilet bowl cleaner under a black light.  Something is not right here.  I am no photographer, but I do know how to make white look whiter using Photoshop.  Come on mates!

Another serious claimant to the title is much closer to home. Geologists from Harvard University supposedly tested the sand from Siesta Beach, on Siesta Key, just south of Sarasota, Florida, and declared it to be 99% pure quartz.  So what? The beaches of the Emerald Coast are at least that pure (at least in the months before and after spring break) and it doesn’t take a Harvard scientist to attest to that.  And I think size should play some role in this contest.  With a total area of only 40 acres, Siesta Beach is about the size of one of our middling dunes on Santa Rosa Island.

It is true that in 1987 Siesta Key won the distinction of having “the whitest and finest sand in the world,” as a competitor in the Great International Beach Challenge, judged by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.  What most people don’t know is that the contest was conceived by the convention and visitors bureaus of the neighboring Florida counties of Sarasota and Manatee, and as far as I can tell they were the only entrants. (I would have to obtain a trial membership to HighBeam Research to read the rest of the source article.)

As for the quartz on our Emerald Coast beaches, don’t let anyone tell you it was all washed down from the Appalachians by the Apalachicola River. Some of it was.  But the Apalachicola, which drains most of western Georgia, and whose main tributaries, the Chattahoochee and Flint, reach well into Blue Ridge country, did not even exist during the time most of the sand was making its slow tumble to the sea. 250 million years ago the Appalachians were jagged, snow-covered peaks as high as, some say maybe even higher than, the Himalayas.  They grew that tall over a period of about 100 million years, as Africa, North and South America, Europe and Antarctica crunched together to form the supercontinent of Pangaea.  When Pangaea broke apart the Appalachians were torn apart too. Today you can find the missing pieces of the Appalachians in such places as Morocco (the Anti-Atlas Mountains), Scotland and Norway.

The supercontinent of Pangaea

It takes a long time – in this case a quarter of a billion years – for Himalayas to become Catskills.  Ground down by glaciers and carried to the sea by ancient rivers, the once lofty peaks created over time a massive shoulder of sediment at their bases.  At the very end of the process, the very, very end (the final .ooo4% of the depositional event, to be generous), pretentious hominids known as humans gave a name to this broad expanse of detritus: they called the part under water the continental shelf, and the part above the water they called the Atlantic coastal plain. And they saw that it was good.

It makes sense that the leading edge of the continent is draped in shifting quartz.  Silicon dioxide, or silica, is the most abundant mineral in the earth’s crust, so the huge mountain range now known as the Appalachians is substantially comprised of silica.  Quartz is the crystalline form of silica.

Sand beaches form where there is an abundance of wave action and a source of sand.  The source of the sand making up THE WHITEST BEACHES IN THE WORLD is the ancient coast of Florida itself.  As sea levels rose and fell during multiple ice ages over the last two million years the Gulf of Mexico took bites out of the coastline. Whether attributed to global warming or just the natural increase in sea level between ice events, the Gulf today is chewing up sand along the bluffs between Destin and Cape San Blas, and depositing it as fresh sand along Santa Rosa Island to the west.

The rise and fall of the sea over thousands of years is also evidenced by ridges of sand that were once barrier islands but are now part of the mainland.  One such remnant barrier island is now the peninsula separating Choctawhatchee Bay from the Gulf on which the City of Destin sits.  The same ancient landform continues west, forming the north bank of Santa Rosa Sound all the way past Navarre.

Now that you are armed with a little background on our beautiful beaches, please go forth and issue a challenge to beach dwellers around the world.  We of the Emerald Coast have THE WHITEST BEACHES IN THE WORLD.  Send this to everyone you know in Australia, South Florida, the Seychelles, Bora Bora, and the Harvard Geology Department.  Tell them we’re ready to take them on.

Sources:

“Gazing onto the World’s Whitest Sands.” Sydney Morning Herald. January 1, 2006.

Kwon, H.J. Barrier Islands of the Northern Gulf of Mexico Coast: Sediment Source and Development. Louisiana State University Press. Coastal Studies Series Number 25. 1971.

“Woods Hole Expert to Judge ‘International Beach Sand Challenge.’”  PR Newswire. August 18, 1987.

Wikipedia.com: Appalachians; Caledonian orogeny; Florida Platform; Quartz; Hyams Beach, New South Wales; Siesta Key, Florida; Beach

I don’t knock Brit Hume for being a Christian.  I respect his beliefs as much as the next man’s beliefs.  As an evangelical Christian he is using his chosen pulpit to serve God in the best way he knows how.  He truly BELIEVES that Jesus is the only way to Heaven.  He truly BELIEVES that Tiger Woods will sail through this crisis much easier if he would only repent and ask his (Brit Hume’s) savior for forgiveness.

The problem is not that Hume decided to express his heartfelt convictions in the hopes that he might help a fellow human being along on the road to redemption.  The problem is that he did it on Fox.

Fox News has been the highest rated cable news network in the United States for a number of years.  Last month (January 2010) it was the highest rated basic cable channel in primetime.  Also last month a leading polling firm reported that Fox News was the country’s most trusted news network, with 49% of respondents saying they trust Fox News. For those of us who strive for thoughtful, open-minded governance, believe that smart people should run the country, and who value cultural diversity and freedom of religion, these statistics are frightening.

Late last year Fox News was accused by White House communications director Anita Dunn of being “either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.”  It is no secret that Fox has, at the very least, a conservative “slant” in its reporting coverage. And recent opinion polling seems to indicate that it is slanted more to the right than its competitors, MSNBC for example, are slanted to the left.  An October 2009 Pew Research poll revealed Fox News to be the most ideological network in America.

If these things are true, Fox News will play a huge role in upcoming Congressional elections and in the next race for the presidency.  With so many Americans depending on the network as their only source of information about the world around them, the brain washing delivered each day by conservative pundits on such programs as The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Glenn Beck will have a profound impact on the balance of power in Washington.

This, of course, does not make liberals happy. In fact, it scares the Hell out of them.  The thought of self-righteous, fundamentalist , militant oligarchs (think of a Dick Cheney – Pat Robertson ticket) deciding our fate is enough to turn a moderate liberal into a socialist, and a centrist republican into a voting democrat.

The majority of those who have not yet been blinded by the glare of Fox’s headlights can still see the truck coming.  Not everyone is willing to follow the other lemmings over the cliff.  The voters who are going to decide the next election are the fiscal conservatives like me who are willing to concede a little tax here and a little privacy there in order to prevent a slide toward theocracy or fascism (now picture Dick Cheney wearing a monocle).  It will be decided by people who do not know which candidate they will be voting for until they have actually seen the debates.

I have a feeling those who refuse to watch anything but Fox News already know who they are voting for.  They don’t know the candidate’s name yet, but that’s not important.  They’ll listen to Fox about the time the election comes around.  Then they’ll know.  And ain’t nobody gonna change their mind.  “Now get off my property!”

A great deal of attention has been paid to Tiger Woods’s lack of expression and insincere body language during the delivery of his recent public apology for infidelity. I admit I don’t know anything about body language cues beyond what I picked up tonight from Wikipedia, but take a look at the expressions and body language of the panelists in the Fox News Sunday clip above.  Run it back and forth in slow motion and observe.  At the beginning of the video, Chris Wallace and the others seem to be in a jovial, bantering mood.  By the end of Brit Hume’s short sermon their attention has been averted (disbelief), their fingers are locked together (contemplation), and there is stony silence (I’ll go out on a limb and say this indicates speechlessness).

Not only did Hume scare away a few thousand potential Republican votes with his proselytizing lecture, he managed to greatly insult Buddhists everywhere.  As a Buddhist, Tiger is not seeking forgiveness and redemption from a supernatural being, but from his fans, his sponsors, and his wife. Buddhists rely on attention to their own actions and compassion for the feelings of others to keep them from getting in trouble. The Dalai Lama himself, in the United States this week to meet with the President, summed it up this way when asked about Tiger’s indiscretions: “Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that’s important.  Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.”

Tiger Woods doesn’t need to pray for forgiveness because Tiger Woods is not a Christian, he’s a Buddhist. His path to redemption is not the same as Brit Hume’s.

I’ll give the last word to Karen Maezen Miller, a Zen Buddhist priest who has a simple, unpretentious website from which she expounds in a simple, unpretentious manner.  This is what she had to say about Woods and Hume.

Both of them are equally eligible for redemption. Atonement starts with apology: the simple act of seeking forgiveness for the harm caused by one’s own selfish ignorance. Atonement is central to all great religions and all religions are great. They teach us to transcend the false supremacy of one’s own ego. No matter what faith we profess to have, our own persistent self-righteousness gives us the occasion to atone many, many times a day. Forgiveness, in a sense, is easy. I would imagine, though, that the next step in Buddhism would be equally difficult for either of them: to forget oneself.

… It’s clear that Woods doesn’t practice the selfless compassion that is at the heart of Buddhism. It’s equally clear that Hume doesn’t practice the selfless compassion that is at the heart of Christianity. Sadly, I call the situation fair and balanced.

Ailsa Craig, the World's Largest Curling Stone

1.  Seventy percent of all curling stones ever made in the history of the sport come from the island of Ailsa Craig, a massive “volcanic plug” of granite emerging from the cold waters of the Firth of Clyde, halfway between Glasgow and Belfast by sea, like the smooth hump of a monolithic whale frozen in mid-spout.  It is hard to imagine the circumstances under which some nameless Scotsman, probably a fisherman with nothing better to do, made the discovery that the stone of Ailsa Craig was the best stone for making curling projectiles.  From the photos I have seen there doesn’t appear to be a single smooth rock or horizontal surface on the island.

2.  The granite from Ailsa Craig is prized because it is so dense.  Water cannot penetrate its tight crystalline structure, so it is less prone to cracking and pitting over time from the effects of freezing.  The rock is so special it has its own name – ailsite.  Ailsa Craig is only 104 acres in area.  The United States, by contrast, contains 2.3 billion acres.  Strangely, nowhere in the United States has a granite been found that is suitable for making curling stones.

3.  The meteoric rise in the popularity of curling since the 2002 winter Olympics has put a lot of pressure on stone manufacturers.  The source island for ailsite is now a protected puffin sanctuary.  Quarrying is no longer allowed, although stone manufacturer Kays of Scotland has exlusive permission from the Marquess of Ailsa, whose family has owned the island since 1560, to gather loose stones lying around on the cliffs.  They do this as often as the Marquess, and the birds, let them.  As recently as 2001 Kays of Scotland hauled off 1350 metric tons of curling cobbles.

4.  Curling clubs are popping up all over the world, wherever water can freeze and the startup costs can be found.  A single ailsite stone can cost up to $1500.  Outfitting a neighborhood curling club with stones and sheets, as the 150-foot ice lanes are called, is prohibitively expensive.  The stones alone can easily run as high as $40,000 per club.

5.  The popularity of curling is growing despite hindrances that seem designed to prevent outsiders from participating.  The cost of stones has already been discussed.  But the language used by curling insiders is equally off-putting.  For instance, swingy ice may compel the skip to call a kizzle kazzle.  In this situation there are many possible outcomes.  Depending on the pebble of the sheet, the sweepers, using their brooms and a stopwatch, will attempt to steer the pancake to the button.  Heavy ice may cause a rock to lose its handle, which may result in a hogger.  Too many of those could lead to your rink losing the bonspiel.  On the other hand, a rock encountering pick on the sheet may lead to an unexpected wicky wacky woo, in which case it’s time to celebrate.  But not too much, as it is considered bad form to gloat.

6.  Curling did not become an official Olympic sport until the Nagano Games in 1998, despite the fact that Scots have been wearing out corn brooms on local ponds since at least 1511.  Nagano was also where snowboarding was introduced to the Games.  The first snowboard wasn’t even conceived until 1965, four-and-a-half centuries after curling.

7.  Curling was introduced to this country in 1830 by Scottish immigrants to Michigan in 1830.  The Orchard Lake Curling Club used blocks of hickory rather than granite stones, so I’m not sure this really counts.  (Incidentally, Michigan also produced the sport of snowboarding when a man named Sherman Popper in Muskegon lashed two skis together for his eleven-year-old daughter.  The contraption was a hit with the kids and Popper soon began to market his “Snurfer.”)

8.  The town where U.S. curling got its start seems an unlikely place to have such a distinction.  Curling traditionally was the perfect sport for poor Scottish people, since all you needed to play it were a few big rocks, a corn shuck broom, and ice.  Orchard Lake Village today is a posh suburb of Detroit.  Local promoters claim Oakland County, in which Orchard Lake Village is located, is the wealthiest county in the Midwest and the fourth wealthiest in the nation.

9.  Orchard Lake is the current home of iconic rock musician Bob Seger, who is to Michigan what Jimmy Buffett is to the Gulf Coast. I feel strongly that in homage to Bob Seger, whose late townmates introduced this country to the sport, the U.S. Olympic curling team should change its name to the Silver Bullets.

10.  As if these distinctions weren’t enough for a town of just over 2000 people, Orchard Lake Village has a higher percentage of ethnic Assyrians than anyplace else in the country. Assyrians are people whose ancestors come from the Fertile Crescent, the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.  Not a place typically associated with ice sports.  I checked Google and confirmed that Syria does not yet have an Olympic curling team. Who knows? Maybe the Assyrians of Oakland County will one day export curling to Damascus as the Scots did to Detroit.

He spent most of the year 1780 with his adoptive tribe, but not all of it. Either because of a temporary falling out with the tribe, disillusionment with the Indian way of life, or just for a change of scenery, Bowles spent some time during the warm months fishing and hunting alone on Pensacola Bay, his transportation a crude boat he fashioned out of an abandoned barrel and a piece of cloth.  At some point he secured room and board from a baker in Pensacola in exchange for his assistance baking bread.  He returned to the wilderness after an argument with the proprietor over his work habits.

In the meantime the political climate in British West Florida was turning stormy. Spain had allied itself with France against the British in the summer of 1779.  By the end of the year the energetic Louisiana governor, Bernardo de Galvez, had taken the British posts of Fort Bute and Baton Rouge.  And during the following spring, while William Bowles was planting a crop near the Chattahoochee River to consummate his first marriage, Galvez’ troops took the port city of Mobile.  There was nothing left standing in his way now.  Pensacola was next.

Major General John Campbell was desperate.  As commander of all West Florida troops he has spent the last two years trying to obtain the matériel needed to simply maintain a presence on the coast, and arguing with the colonial governor, Peter Chester, over who should be giving orders to the volunteer militia.  A secret communique addressed to Campbell from the King himself, demanding the capture of New Orleans from the Spanish, was intercepted by the enemy, tipping off Galvez about British designs.  It was this letter that set Galvez on a course to re-conquer the Floridas.

With few troops at his disposal, Pensacola fortifications not yet in the condition he would like them to be, and Galvez’ fleet expected at any moment, General Campbell appealed to the Indians for help.  Motivated by a real fear that the deerskin trade with their British neighbors would wither if the Spanish gained control of Gulf ports, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw war parties began arriving from the hinterlands.  At the head of one of these war parties, dressed in a long Creek hunting jacket, was former ensign William Augustus Bowles.

The long-anticipated attack from the west took much longer than expected.  In the meantime morale had to be maintained among a thousand Indians in addition to the regular troops.  In mid-winter Campbell sent a force of a few hundred to Mobile to surprise and perhaps even capture the Spanish garrison there.  It was a long shot, but at least it would keep the men on their toes and help preserve the dwindling rum supply by giving them a mission.

The surprise attack was an utter failure.  All of the Hessian officers in charge of the attack were killed and the soldiers returned to Pensacola defeated.  Bowles had been one of the last to leave the scene, firing point blank into the Spanish fort until a cannonball shattered the tree he had been crouching behind.  His impressive conduct at Mobile and obvious leadership skills were enough to convince Campbell to reinstate him as an ensign in his Maryland regiment.

When Galvez finally arrived in March of 1781 he approached his task cautiously. The town itself was quickly overrun, but the British defenders were able to hold the Spaniards at bay because they controlled the heights.  Just north of town on a small hill was the recently reinforced Fort George.  Here the British hunkered down and awaited Galvez’ next move.  Beyond Fort George were two slightly taller hills.  On these Campbell had constructed smaller forts, or redoubts, to guard Fort George itself.  On the loftiest of the three hills stood the Queen’s Redoubt, a seemingly impregnable bastion bristling with artillery that also contained the British powder magazine.

On the morning of May 8, 1781, the six-week siege of Pensacola ended when a rogue shell from a Spanish gun penetrated the magazine in the Queen’s Redoubt in exactly the right spot.  The explosion was horrendous, completely destroying the building and blowing 85 soldiers to pieces.  Bowles, who had been standing only a few yards away, somehow walked away unharmed.

In the space of a few minutes Spanish troops occupied the position and began laying fire on Fort George below.  Within a few hours General Campbell raised the white flag, and West Florida was once again a Spanish colony.

Not long after, Bowles sailed past Morro Castle into Havana Harbor as a prisoner of the Spanish, the vision of his fellow Marylanders being blown to bits still fresh in his mind.  The events at Pensacola would mark the beginning of a deep hatred for the Spanish that would eventually turn into a personal war waged around the world.

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William Bowles was born in the British colony of Maryland in the 1760s.  Several members of his father’s family were involved in the bookselling business back in London, and William grew up reading and quoting the classics, in literature, drama, science; but he was especially fond of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment – Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke – whose writings gave impetus to the American and French revolutions.

But unlike many of his educated contemporaries in the American colonies, his immersion in revolutionary ideas did not lead to his joining the cause. His father was a staunch Loyalist, a fierce defender of the Mother Country and the King.  The influence of the father’s politics on the son would take on an extreme expression in the years to come.

Just as influential to young William as the books his father supplied him were the stories told by some of his neighbors in the town of Frederick – dramatic tales of bloodthirsty Indians and French scoundrels.  William was born only a year after the end of the Seven Years’ War, a conflict between Britain and France which was referred to in the colonies as the French and Indian War.

It is said that William’s father was tarred and feathered for his loyalty to the old regime.  If you’ve ever seen the miniseries John Adams, based on the biography by David McCullough, you know that tarring and feathering is no laughing matter.  Soon after this incident, William’s family moved out of Frederick to a farm on the western Maryland frontier. Bitter over the treatment of his family by the upstart rebels, William, age 14, presented himself for service to His Majesty at the great city of Philadelphia, a recent British acquisition.

While Washington and his armies endured some of the harshest winter weather in Pennsylvania history, General Howe’s Philadelphia troops enjoyed the best the city had to offer.  Bowles and his cohorts discovered that the young Marylander had a flair for the dramatic.  He became a star of the stage, excelling especially in the role of the hero.  His artistry extended also to visual media.  In later years he would paint portraits to supplement his acting income.

In 1778 Bowles first saw the Caribbean Sea, as part of a flotilla of British regulars sent to Jamaica to await further orders from the Crown.  By December Ensign Bowles and his troop of Maryland Loyalists were in Pensacola, the capital of West Florida and an important way-station in the growing deerskin trade with the southern Indians.

The troops were sent to Pensacola to defend the small garrison from a Spanish attack from the west.  Although Spain had not yet entered the war being waged between Britain and her wayward colonies, she did control the mouth of the Mississippi, arguably the greatest prize in any struggle over territory in this part of the world. During the hot summer of 1779, as a great number of Bowles’s companions lay sick and dying from yellow fever and malaria, Spain and Great Britain were each devising secret plans to attack the other on the Gulf Coast.  The British needed Louisiana in order to control transportation on the great river; Spain wanted to take Florida back from the British, who had won it in a treaty negotiation at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763.

It was also in 1779 that William Augustus Bowles lost patience with a superior officer, was stripped of his commission without a court martial for insubordination, befriended a passing Indian pack train, and disappeared into the wild interior to become a Creek warrior.

The rest of his short career is even more bizarre.  The whole “pirate” thing is especially controversial to those of us on the Gulf Coast.  But that’ll have to wait till the next post.

It’s been a day and a half since my first post and I must say that the experience has been anticlimactic. Seventy unique visitors have pointed their browsers at my blog to date. I even had a handful of hits from such places as Canada, Germany, Japan and Taiwan. It was thrilling to call up my AWStat statistics page and see those little colored flags representing seekers of knowledge from distant cultures. Was it my use of the keyword “Taoism” that attracted them?

Hardly. A lonely graphic on that same statistics page has a column for how many readers found my page using keywords. The adjoining column lists those keywords. Both columns were empty.

Another table reveals that several spiders and robots visited my site. But very few people.

The most telling statistic was the table on duration of page views. Yes, I had 70 people visit my website after my first blog post. But 75% of them spent less than thirty seconds viewing it. Only 14% spent between five and fifteen minutes on the site, which I have calculated is the amount of time needed to read to the end. I suppose I should have included more pictures.

Just for fun I typed in the word “Taoism” using the Google Blogs search engine. It was quickly obvious I needed to pick a more obscure term. William Augustus Bowles is my biography subject. I have spent enough time with Bowles to know that he is not a common subject of inquiry. I figured his name might come up in a blog or two occasionally, so I didn’t expect to be near the top of the first page.

Typing his name into Google Blogs yielded fifty results on five pages. There are some interesting results in there to check out later, but my blog doesn’t show up at all. I don’t know much about search engine optimization (SEO) yet, but obviously using an obscure term three or four times in a single post ain’t good enough to get recognized.

The fanfare generated by my first post was not what I had imagined, but I am told by people in a position to know that I did pretty well for a newbie. The most satisfying part was receiving positive feedback. I got three comments on my blog the first day. My first comment was from a complete stranger named Alan who apparently specializes in the sale of faucets for recreational vehicles. Alan, if I can ever afford an RV I will purchase the bathroom fixtures from your website.

My good friend Jan responded with her usual facetiousness that I should blog about stinky cheese. Jan and I share a love for pungent foods. She has been known to sprinkle truffle oil on her Frosted Flakes (something that would make my late cousin W.K. Kellogg snap, crackle and pop in his grave). She gifted me last summer an expensive round of French soft cheese that tasted heavenly but would scare off all but the most brave by its smell. I took the unopened package home and put it in the refrigerator. Then I packed, got up early, and went away for a long weekend.

When I got home I reached for a beer and discovered the frig had been scoured clean in my absence. My roommate, George, a fastidious person, explained that something went rotten and he couldn’t figure out what it was. Apparently he couldn’t sleep the night before because the smell had pursued him into his bedroom. He got up in the middle of the night and threw away an entire week’s worth of pre-cooked food. The smell was so bad, and the source was so elusive, that he was reluctant to even open the containers to sniff for the culprit. His Tupperware went to the curb with the cheese.

I also got a great comment from a high school acquaintance, Cyndy Kalinowski, who lives on a farm in Michigan with her husband and kids, but spends time in Burkina Faso, in Africa, helping to care for “adopted” families less fortunate than hers. She has a very interesting blog of her own which is worth visiting. I’d provide a link if I knew how. Go to the comment on my website and click on her name.

All in all I am pleased with blogging so far. It’s a lot more work than I expected. The writing is easy compared to the housekeeping. We should all do it, if for no other reason than to create a tangible record of our passing.

Mark Stanley has been writing stuff that very few people read since he learned to read about four decades ago.  He finds it depressing to think that his only creative outlet for the last 16 years, as an archaeologist at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, has been trying to get “fancy” with business emails. What’s worse, they were GOVERNMENT business emails. Not the best venue for an aspiring creative nonfiction writer.  He thinks forcing himself to write a blog post every day may change his mood.

His topics of interest range from the microscopic to the spiritual, but with a strong emphasis on the historical.  He was educated in anthropology because it was the most eclectic subject in the university catalog.  He was trained in archaeology because that’s the only way, practically speaking, that a person can survive as an anthropologist.  He hired on as an Air Force archaeologist to pay the bills, and to avoid spending protracted periods of time in the Florida sun, hunched over an artifact screen.

From his air conditioned office, hunched over his computer screen, he has dreamed of far off places, obscure historical personages, and mysterious phenomena.  He plans to begin writing freelance articles for magazines to feed his research habit.  These writings will almost certainly be related to travel, history, and ethnography.

His job has exposed him to some interesting things.  Eglin AFB is half the size of the State of Rhode Island.  More than 2000 archaeological sites have been found there so far, and there are many more still to be found.  Most of them are prehistoric Indian sites, dating back as far as the last ice age.  Many others are 20^th century homesteads, turpentine camps, old grist mills or military sites, like the remains of two JB-2 missile launch sites from World War II.  As Eglin’s cultural resources manager, he also manages 13 historic districts, including the Camp Pinchot District, which in 1908 was the headquarters compound for the Choctawhatchee National Forest.

Research for a biography of Florida adventurer William Augustus Bowles has dictated his reading choices in recent months.  That trend will continue for many years if he doesn’t figure out how to earn extra income.  That same project will color the topics emphasized in this blog:  Southeastern Indian history and culture, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw; the American Revolution in the South; the deerskin trade; history of the Bahamas, Spain, Florida, Mobile, New Orleans, Pensacola, St. Augustine, Charleston, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Barbados, Nassau, Jamaica, and Canada in the 1790s; Tory Maryland; Philadelphia and Long Island during the Revolution; and biographies of key characters – Esteban Miro, William Panton, Lord Dunmore, Alexander McGillivray, Benjamin Hawkins, Bernardo de Galvez, Sir Guy Carleton, and John Graves Simcoe.

Previous research obsessions have included his father’s Stanley genealogy.  This is a project he would like to resume.  Last time he checked his trail went cold somewhere in Kent, southeast of London, in the 1630s.  Through family history research, he discovered tantalizingly that he is a first cousin four times removed of W.K. Kellogg, the inventor of breakfast cereal; a direct descendant of one of the founders of Hartford, Connecticut; distant kin to those Stanleys who make the little tools; and a cousin of an iconic Chicago photographer, Harry Callahan.

There are other interests that may warrant a post or two in the coming months.  Mark is very fond of food. He likes to eat it, of course, but is even more fascinated with the history and geography of ethnic cuisine.  He is willing to share his knowledge of food origins with readers capable of giving practical tips on how to prepare it.

He has no problem singing in public, especially after a few microbrews at the karaoke bar, but must be nearing catatonic drunkenness before he will dance.  He will not be blogging about dance but has, at 45, come into the possession of an acoustic guitar, and would like to learn how to use it to accompany his singing.

And now a little on mysterious phenomena.  Raised without religion, Mark has made a point of collecting and reading everything he can on religion – Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, animism, Mormonism, shamanism, atheism, scientism, New Age-ism, and all the other isms.  He delights in pointing out the similarities between seemingly divergent belief systems to the frustration of the true believer.  He is not an atheist.  On the contrary, he believes somewhere out there is Universal Truth.  To attempt a closer approach to that Truth he feels it is important to learn all he can about quantum mechanics, crop circles, parallel universes, ghosts, lost civilizations, anachronistic archaeological discoveries, the Holy Bible, and evolution – for starters.

When not basking in the air conditioning at his desk, Mark shares his free weekends with his two young daughters, India and Siena, and, alternately, his best friend, Tracy Matlack, who lives in North Georgia.