American Demons

Successful Failure

In England, the Norwegian and Danish aristocrats retained their original habitus and were called Harald and Sven until the bitter end. See Sven Forkbeard and Harald Bluetooth. In France, Vikings become Normans. They adapt the superior culture. Their dukes are called William Longsword, Richard the Fearless and Rollo with the Shorts. They strengthen and threaten the Frankish dynasty, from which - from Hugo (940 - 996) to the last Louis (d. 1793) - every French king originated.

Now we are approaching something that still excites me today as much as I was enthralled by it as a child. I'm talking about the history of the Empire Plantagenêt. Anyone who loves England as much as France, who became a knight of his own grace in Brittany, Normandy, on the Îles Anglo-Normandes and in Kent, affected by Richard the Lionheart, all kinds of burlesque Chevalier memorabilia and the legends of the Northmen, who had precariously different careers as invaders in England and France, must feel as I do. 

More on this later. Let's take a leap in time. While the French Revolution is providing the genre of frenzy with new panel paintings, Berman von Pechstein is traveling the Frobisher road on the Exception. Martin Frobisher (c. 1535 - 1594) has already been mentioned, but I feel compelled to focus the auditorium's attention on a larger-than-life figure in the presence of even larger figures. Frobisher's importance did not depend on success. He failed in all the highly anticipated and consequently popular explorations of a (north-western) passage to the oriental markets. Nevertheless, Frobisher seemed enormous in his time. He was among that dirty dozen declared enemies of the state who became brilliant in a rehabilitating/nobilitating relationship with Elizabeth I. I don't think our historians have shed enough light on this favoritism and Argonaut patronage of the unmarried queen. Who adored whom. How heart and calculation were balanced.

The Spaniards and the Portuguese, who initially outnumbered them, had escaped Arab blackmail and price gouging on a sea route to India. To avoid getting in each other's way any further, they had appointed Pope Alexander VI, aka Rodrigo Borgia, to divide up the world from pole to pole in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

Borgia was the face of his era, he was the Renaissance prince. When it came to the question of how power works, Borgia's son Cesare B. Niccolò Machiavelli offered himself as the central star of inspiration. But what happened to the royal church mouse Elizabeth Tudor in her poorhouse England? If she wanted to avoid quarrels, she needed her own route to the Spice Islands and all that was fabulous in the Far East. Her pilots suspected a passage in the Arctic archipelago of the Arctic Ocean. The northern explorations were subject to the same errors as the southern ones. Again and again, Atlantic estuaries were mistaken for the Pacific and rivers for roads to the Pacific. Frobisher began his career as a brigand on the Channel Islands. He saw the horrors of Portuguese dungeons, sailed as vice under Francis Drake, married beyond his means, almost single-handedly defeated the Spanish in a naval battle, received a knighthood and, as Walter Raleigh's right-hand man, lost an eye in battle.

This was everyday excellence in the 16th century; we would know less if Frobisher had not set out three times from 1576 onwards to secure the Northwest Passage for his queen. Then came John Davis, who followed Frobisher in failure and yet went further in his no-nonsense, scientifically inclined way.