The Face of the Future

“I grow, I prosper: Now gods, stand up for bastards!”—Edmund in King Lear, act 1, scene 2

"It's hard to be a bastard!" / "Dis swaar om 'n Baster te wees!"—Baster/Griqua saying*

Hybrid vigor, heterosis,

Is the trigger of our gnosis

And the author of this rigor—

Humans of the bastard breed

Are a freer, wilder seed.

Sorry, then, you pure of will

Persisting not to know the drill!

It's plucking petals from the weed.

Still, let's make a frank confession:

There is outbreeding depression:

Oh, the threat of mingled themes,

If not bruited in the memes—

In supposing that the "pure"

Are too hapless to endure!

Though the pure are very few.

(Fewer than they think it, too!)

How, you ask, might all this scan?

Do things, not just what they can,

And is our hybrid fate to come

A mere conceding to the sun,—

A world of trial, much like this?

(What's for a pessimist to miss!!)

One thing is clear, my also ran:

The future's face is surely tan!

* I don't know where I first encountered this Cape Coloured saying. Perhaps in Kromboom at a fund-raising party for BARC, the Bus Apartheid Resistance Committee, in the late 1950s? Those were the days! On Basters, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basters and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griqua_people.

Thursday, October 22, 2026

Bellerophon

A Full, True, and Particular Account of the Execution of Robert Hartley, Who Was Hanged on Penenden Heath, Near Maidstone, in Kent, on Thursday Last, the 2d January, 1823, for Wilfully Stabbing Captain Owen, of the Bellerophon Convict Ship, at Sheerness, on the 29th of August Last, Where the Prisoner Was Confined as a Convict : Together With His Behaviour After Condemnation, and at the Place of Execution . . .

Some tales,—no, all!—are just too rich to tell,

Among them that of HMS Bellerophon

A third-rate warship in Britain's Royal Navy,

Whose sailors called her Billy Ruffian,

Pretending themselves too proud to pronounce Greek,

Which fought in the three great battles

Of the War at sea, and from the last of them,

Trafalgar, brought home the corpse of Admiral Nelson

Pickled in brandy in a cask, like peaches in a jar.

They fought in those days for Glory, la gloire.

If that were not enough for fame, ten years later,

Defeated Napoleon surrendered to her captain after Waterloo.

Then in the sniveling years of peace,

renamed Captivity in 1824,

She served as a ghastly prison hulk.

They broke her up in ’36.

To build a ship like that took four thousand trees,*

For hearts of oak must pay a price like these!

*Building an eighteenth-century ship of the line typically required between 2,000 and 6,000 mature trees, mostly oak. Smaller ships of the line used around 2,000 to 4,000 trees, while massive first-rate flagships like HMS Victory took up to 6,000 trees.—Gemini AI

On the life and lamentable end of this great ship, see David Cordingly's superb Billy Ruffian: The Bellerophon and the Downfall of Napoleon —The Biography of a Ship of the Line, 1782–1836 (London: Bloomsbury, 2003).

Saturday, October 17, 2026

The Cat of the Revenge

I am a Spanish cat of noble birth.

Saved from the sinkingTrinidad

at Trafalgar, on HMS Revenge I met

a naked lady named Jeanette

who’d leapt down from the burning deck

when French Achille went to heck.*

They dressed her in a shirt and trews.

We snuggled, never mind the news.

She took me with her to Toulon,

a city eastward on the Gulf of Lion.

I'm quite at home in Occitane—

Where no one cares from whence I came.

As things turned out, I live in state—

with such fine wine, the cat food's great!

*This part of the story is, or may be, true. See Noël Mostert,The Line upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793–1815 (New York: Norton, 2008), 506: "The woman's name was Jeanette and she was eventually reunited with her sailor husband." But the tale about being taken to France is wishful thinking on the part of the cat, which had grown old as the beloved mascot of the Revenge and was sick and tired of eating ship's biscuit (kibbles not yet having been invented).

Friday, October 16, 2026