The Lawless Navy, American Camels & The Long Titled Sage

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Illustration by- Pronoy Mukherjee

Can you believe that the English sponsored pirates to attack Spanish ships!


After Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, the Spanish sent out more expeditions to the Americas. Now let us fast-forward to Elizabethan England. In the early 1600s the Spanish were the strongest colonial power in the Americas and were sending ships laden with gold, silver, tobacco etc. back to Europe. The English at this time had not set up any colonies in the Americas as they were busy controlling their own kingdom at the time. The reason they were so busy was that Ireland was rebelling against their rule and wanted to be a free nation. This led their treasury to go empty so, instead of setting up colonies in the Americas the crown hired “privateers”- the fancy name for pirates to attack Spanish ships.

Illustration by- Pronoy Mukherjee








Illustration by- Pronoy Mukherjee










Here is something you may not have heard of, there were camels in the Americas in the Stone Age!

In the Stone Age the climate had started becoming warm. This allowed animals like camels to migrate to the Americas on the land bridge formed between Alaska and Siberia. The camels thought that they had found a nice new home, but this wasn’t the case, humans too migrated on the land bridge. And soon hunted the camels to extinction. Imagine if humans found a way to go to a planet in the Milky Way and when they landed, they found out there were human-eating aliens! 

 Here is something I read in a book called Let’s Go Time Travelling by Subhadra Sen Gupta:

Illustration by- Pronoy Mukherjee
In the British colonial period, many famous Europeans visited India and one of them was Mark Twain. Samuel Langhorne Clemens or Mark Twain as he was known as visited India in 1898. While he was in India, he met a sadhu or sage who he thought had the longest title in the world. Here is the title: Sri 108 Matparamahansa-parivrajakacharya-swami-bhaskarananda-saraswati. Would you have liked such a long title or name?

       
   

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