Commonwealth Nations
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Commonwealth Nations’
Four years before the bloody American civil war, Dr David Livingstone proposed a peaceful way to rid the world of slavery.
In 1861-65, America went to bloody civil war over (among other things) the issue of slavery in the South’s cotton and sugar plantations, and upwards of a million people died. A few years earlier, Scotsman David Livingstone proposed a far less destructive answer: establish cotton and sugar farms in Africa, employ local labourers on good wages, and strangle slavery by the cords of the free market.
Welsh journalist Henry Stanley is despatched by head office in New York to find a missing British explorer.
In 1865 explorer David Livingstone went in search of the sources of the Nile. Three years passed with no word of his fate, so Welsh journalist Henry Stanley of the New York Herald was despatched to track him down. By the Autumn of 1871 the errand seemed hopeless, but then word came of a white man in Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.
After two years in South Africa, a Scottish civil servant began turning out best-selling adventure tales.
John Buchan (1875-1940), 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, was a man of many talents: classicist, barrister, writer of serious history and rattling adventure yarns, influential member of the Church of Scotland, high-flying Westminster MP, and from 1935, Governor-General of Canada.
John Buchan was moved by the way the nations of the British Empire volunteered for service in the Great War.
John Buchan, novelist, Governor General of Canada, and leading historian of the Great War, reminds us that the countries of our Commonwealth and Empire played a decisive role in frustrating the ambitions of the German Empire – all without having to be asked.
James Cook describes his first sight of a beloved Australian icon.
James Cook captained ‘Endeavour’ on a round trip to New Zealand and Australia from 1768 to 1771. Between June and August 1770, the ship lay at the mouth of the Endeavour (Wabalumbaal) River in north Queensland, undergoing repairs. Cook kept a meticulous journal, in which he described some of the animals he saw.
What George Stephenson was to the railways of England, Sandford Fleming was to the railways of Canada.
At the start of the nineteenth century, railways brought a handful of struggling colonies together to form a great nation, and Sandford Fleming (1827-1915), then just a young Scottish surveyor from Kirkcaldy, played as important a part in that as any other man.