[DL] Re: Britiain (Again)

[Michael Robert Blair <pellinoire@yahoo.com>]

A lot of early Atlantic traffic ended up in Bristol
which is quite an interesting city, my history
lecturer had done work on it and kept using it as an
example, it was a merchantile city and would do almost
anything for a profit - a lot of slave ships were
based there for example and a lot of POWs in the Civil
Wars were shipped from there to work as not quite
slaves in the Barbados and America to be plantations.
There are also mysterious tunnels under the city.

While most of the worst slums had been cleared by our
period, the old rookeries for example, as part of the
health reforms British cities still had a lot of old,
poor quality housing. And who knows what horrors might
stalk the smog filled alleys of the North, preying on
cotton workers finding their way home in the gloom.

The scale is very different to America but there
should be an almost clastraphobic feeling in the
cities.

Oh yes, some Welsh farmhouses used to have scythe
blades set in the chimneys to stop 'things' coming
down them. One idea was that the things were
Amerindians who had drifted across the Atlantic.
Another idea was that the selkie stories originated
with an innuit like people, the 'seal skins' that
allowed them to go to sea being their kyak like boats.

Michael

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