Pandemic Reads 4-7
The Dodo and the Solitaire; The Indian Ocean in World History; What is your race?; Aloha Rodeo
This is a long overdue review of books which I’ve been reading during the quarantine at home, and my recent return to Boston.
Indian Ocean
I saw the dodo book in Mauritius (one and only home of the dodo) and was impressed, but this hefty book is not travel-friendly. The author uses primary sources for a comprehensive record of the European navigators’ first visits to Mauritius, encounters with dodos, a few attempts at putting dodos on display in Europe and India, and the abrupt extinction.
I was impressed with the author’s ability not only to find letters and journals, but to factcheck them (correcting details of landings, islands, wildlife, even the flavor of dodo (tough and oily — egg-eating rats were their downfall)).
This critique also shows how publishers would exaggerate records and illustrators would copy each other’s work or blindly draw dodos as penguins or ostriches. This segued into details of popular illustrations and paintings of dodos. Biology was not an exact science in the early 1600s, so surprisingly little was ever recorded. Some modern biologists theorize that the few dodos that made it to Europe might have been sick or overstuffed on the taxidermist’s table. The book discusses which paintings might be based on a live dodo, and whether the ‘white dodo’ was artistic license, a subspecies, a juvenile, a male/female divide…
The book also covers the much lesser-known but equally extinct solitaire from Rodrigues (a distant island part of the country of Mauritius, mapped below).
Toward the end I was only skimming the sections on evolution, fossilized remains in southeast Mauritius, and other details. There are a few references to the human history happening on Mauritius — such as escaped slaves eating dodos in caves — but only a few.
This book is perfect for someone who is interested in extinction or dodos, but also it is A LOT to take in.
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The Indian Ocean in World History was a more typical short history book, part of a movement called Indian Ocean World, focusing on the continuity and relationship of events around the Indian Ocean. I’ve been lucky to visit museums in Qatar, Malaysia, India, and the Maldives, and was totally unprepared for the variety of artifacts, coins, and tools from millennia of global trade.
To start out, though, did you know that Madagascar’s language is closely related to Indonesian? People made the trip almost 2,000 years ago.
The book covers the gradual progress from short coastal hops, and trade protected inside the Red Sea or Persian Gulf (linking to the Tigris and Euphrates), to the discovery and re-discovery of the monsoon winds across the open ocean. These provided an annual ebb and flow to cross-ocean trade. There aren’t as many primary sources in this book, but they draw from several historical finds and even murals showing the evolution of sailing dhow ships and languages.
Crews traveled the world but were still highly segregated, with different nationalities living apart on land, keeping their own books, deploying pirates against rivals, and raiding any shipwrecked visitors.
Links and frequent travel between East Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the South China Sea were first illustrated by the spread of Islam. One of Muhammad’s first followers built the Huaisheng Mosque in 627 — just inland of Hong Kong and 4,600 miles from Mecca. You can see many Chinese scrolls in the Islamic Arts Museum of Malaysia.
I found it difficult to keep track of different groups when the book began covering European colonization. The French, Portuguese, Dutch, and Armenians all built communities in India. Now there were more sources and records of political interactions. Again, colonists were not good records of history — Vasco da Gama was taken to a Hindu temple but reported it was a Christian church:
https://indianexpress.com/article/news-archive/web/when-vasco-found-indian-christians/
Cities would become highly important for trade and colonial forts, then fade through changing alliances, unfriendly policies, or new technologies. For example, Aden in Yemen was good for Red Sea traders to exchange with cross-ocean traders, then with the Suez Canal it would become useful again as a British-controlled refueling stop, and in recent years it is rarely visited.
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Statistical Race
What Is Your Race?, by a former director of the Census, was published in 2013 but is topical again now. I work on a redistricting app and use Census data constantly at work, so this was a good read for me.
The author covers the connection between the Census, race, and American history from the start— the Three Fifths Compromise. For the calculation to work, it was necessary for the Census to ask about race. Each decade, the Census got tied into conversations about slavery and abolition, racist fears about multiracial children, and restricting immigration based on existing proportions. The Census bureau did nothing to critique this thinking, and readily printed questions about ‘quadroons’, cranked out statistics, and moved people in and out of the White category. I’d describe this part of the book as a mini-1619 Project centered around census-takers.
In the modern era chapters toward the end of the book, the author talks about whether there is a biological, coding-DNA basis to race, the current phrasing of Hispanic ethnicity on the Census, and a plan to phase out race questions. The author acknowledges that Black and Indigenous people have good reason to ask for a more complete count on the Census, and to have this data available to help analyze inequity. Intermediate steps would include keeping these two checkboxes on the Census for the near future.
I wasn’t sure where these later sections of the book were going. It didn’t anticipate the 2020 Census almost adding a question on immigration. It didn’t explain so much how we’ve used race in the data science and redistricting worlds. We weren’t criticizing the old Censuses for asking about race — that provides crucial information about how people lived, settled, and migrated over the years.
If you’re interested in this topic, I would recommend these two free articles:
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Hawai`i is Metal
Aloha Rodeo is a fun, short book about the paniolo cowboy culture on the island of Hawai`i. I’ve passed through Waimea before but totally missed out on the larger history of the place. The author describes scenes that I never anticipated: the first cows being presented to Kamehameha, the pockmarked slopes of Mauna Kea populated by terrifying feral longhorn cattle, South American vaqueros arriving in Hawai`i to train cowboys, and driving cattle into the surf.
There were no deepwater ports, so the paniolos had to tie cattle to small whaler boats and then hoist them onto ships, avoiding the dangers of the ocean surf and reef sharks. YouTube has it:
The story arc of the book covers the founding of paniolo culture in Hawai`i, and the best of the best venturing to Wyoming to participate in a headliner rodeo championship. The story was smart about critiquing European visitors’ accounts, and the story of Hawai`i’s annexation. There were little snapshots of life on the northern coast and the loss of the Hawaiian language.
My one complaint would be — at first I understood a chapter explaining how Cheyenne was founded and became a hotspot of the American West, but this build-up turned out to be about half of the book? The two parallel stories met at the end, but Wyoming was not equally interesting with equal characters.
