Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 49

[cahn]

Celebrating 5 years very soon?! :D

Comments

Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version

[mildred_of_midgard]

Hiiiii now that I'm back home I am noodling around with this :D

Hiiii this is awesome to hear!

Turns out, er, singing without lots of errors is harder than I thought!

Omg, I had the same experience, and I wasn't even trying to carry a tune! I was just trying to pronounce the words right and get the same rhythm as the bardcore version. And it took surprisingly many tries to get it even mostly right! (Admittedly, it's a pretty fast-paced song, but still.)

I will leave poetic decisions to selenak :), but for historical background:

Slaves get dumped into the sea

Coming after "English colonies dodge tax," my brain wants to do the same as yours, *but*, I also happen to know that as part of the transatlantic slave trade, a lot of slaves did get dumped into the sea. Maybe there's a specific event Selena's thinking of that she will tell us about, but it was also just a *thing*. You died in the horrendous conditions of the crossing from Africa? Overboard your body goes. Okay, fine, probably better than keeping a rotting corpse on the ship. You were sick? Overboard, rather than infect the whole shipment. Injured and not likely to bring a profit upon landing? Not worth the cost of feeding you, overboard you go. You were a baby and your mother wasn't behaving like a proper submissive slave, but was trying to ~resist~? Overboard, pour encourager les autres! A baby won't make a big dent in the profit margin anyway.

The key here is that slavers were insured against drowned slaves, so anyone who went overboard could be replaced later. So the threshold for which it made economic sense to treat slaves as damaged merchandise and dump them in the Atlantic was appallingly low.

There's a reason I put "slave trade" next to "colonies" in my version. Lest we forget.

Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version

[selenak]

Poetic decisions later, but in addition to what you said, I was thinking of a very specific case, the Zong massacre, which in the long lung helped turning the tide against slavery in GB, where the owners of the ship which did the dumping were taken to court - not because they murdered 142 living but sick or otherwise deemed not profitable enough slaves, but for insurance fraud (as they wanted compensation from their insurance company, as was customary in "act of God" cases where the slaves actually did die of natural causes. This went through several instances, attracted a lot of publicity on both sides of the Atlantic and in the end was decided in the insurance company's favour.

ETA: also, the reason why I put this in was because it does symbolize the inhumanity of slavery and greed and I did want to include slavery in my version. So no Boston Tea Party as a replacement would do.

Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ahhh, thank you! I figured you might have something specific in mind, and I didn't know about the Zong massacre until now.

ETA: also, the reason why I put this in was because it does symbolize the inhumanity of slavery and greed and I did want to include slavery in my version. So no Boston Tea Party as a replacement would do.

The hive mind at work again. :)

Re: We didn't start the fire, 18th century version

[luzula]

Oof. Did not know this, thank you.