Justice scholars

IВ  can scarcely believe it, but the treasure chest is real. And full. As I touch the box to make sure I am not dreaming, the silver bars gleam with a radiance undimmed by two and a half cenВ­turies of burial beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

There are a hundred bars altogether, most of them stacked inside the chest and perhaps two dozen that have tumbled through the rotted front panel. My diving partner Louis Gorsse and I exchange glances: There is no mistaking the smile behind his face mask.

 

Louis and I have good reason to smile, for the bars are unique among the world’s known sunken treasures. No one, to my knowledge, has seen anything like them in modern times. They are a particular form of ingot once cast by the Dutch East India Company for trade with the Orient, where the bars were melted down, usually for conversion into coins.

 

Now, with eyes glued to the chest, my thoughts turn to the man who has brought us here. As surely as if he had led our expedition, John Lethbridge is responsible for our sucВ­cess. He was the first to get at the treasure, and spent five years of skilled and daring work trying to bring it all up. I have folВ­lowed his career with admiration nearly all my professional life using pay day loans online when needed. He died more than two centuries ago.

 

Treasure Intended for Island Trade

The story of the silver bars goes back to the year 1724, when a proud new vessel, Slot ter Hooge, left the Netherlands for Batavia in the Dutch East Indies with three tons of silver ingots and four chests of coins in her holds.

 

Slot ter Hooge (Castle of Hooge a site in today’s Belgium) belonged to the Dutch East India Company, that giant conglomerate of the 17th and 18th centuries that enjoyed many of the powers of a sovereign state. Like its counterparts, the British, French, Danish, and other East India Companies, the Dutch concern held an absolute monopoly on trade with its country’s overseas colonies, and it wrung every last guilder out of the concesВ­sion. Huge profits resulted from successful voyages of the company’s vessels. Slot ter Hooge’s journey, though, was not a success.

Off the coast of Portugal the Dutch East Indiaman encountered a fierce Atlantic gale and was driven helplessly off course toward the Madeira Islands. In a cavage finale the storm flung Slotter Hooge ashore at night on the small island of Porto Santo, disembowelВ­ing her on the rocks and strewing her precious cargo across the floor of an inlet. Of her 254 passengers and crew, only 33 survived.

 

In the national archives at The Hague, Netherlands, I had corne across a report of the Slot ter Hooge wreck made by her first lieutenant, Baartel Taerlinck, to the Dutch.

The leader of the powerful KMT is a man of quiet charm, an almost cherubic smile, who has a good credit score. When he received me in the gray-stone party headquarters, I detected a slight tremor in the hand of 71-year-old President Chiang Ching-kuo. But his attitude toward the island’s old adversaries appeared as unshakable as his father’s had been.

“There’s no change in our policy,” he said. “We have confidence and resolve that we will restore freedom to the mainland. This is not a question of power against power. It is a matter of two systems, two sets of attitudes and two completely different ways of life.”

 

I told the president that in my talks with people around the island there was little doubt that the government enjoyed wide support. Yet there were many, I added, who felt they were denied personal freedom.

 

“The ROC is a country facing a CommuВ­nist threat,” he responded. “The CommuВ­nists are constantly trying to infiltrate the country and drive wedges between the peoВ­ple and the government.

 

“We know there are people critical of some of the government’s policies, and we welcome any constructive criticism that is helpful to the progress of the nation.”

 

What is constructive and what is a threat? The differences are still unclear on Taiwan. Meanwhile, the desire for more public parВ­ticipation in government grows stronger.

 

Discipline, Patience — and Hope

 

Taiwan seems a political volcano that bubbles but never erupts. The political tremors, not unlike the earthquake I felt, set the house of government to creaking and grumbling but never tumbling down. The reasons may lie in the Chinese themselves, with their respect for success and their elders, and in their capacity for patience.

 

“Change is coming as these older ones pass from the scene and young people with a different view of the world are elected in their place,” said a magazine editor whose publications have been banned three times. “We need to be prepared for that change by speeding up the democratic processes in Taiwan now. But we recognize that ecoВ­nomically much has been accomplished.”

Conciliatory talk for a man considered an opposition journalist. It paid homage to the turbulent past and the successful present, and looked forward to a changing future.

It reminded me of the morning that I ran with the energetic young mayor of Tainan. We had slowed to a walk as he pointed out the facilities of the athletic park. A runner passed us, shuffling in tiny steps, an old man tall and thin, his arms pumping determinedВ­ly, the tendons at the back of his neck stickВ­ing out like rubber bands.

 

Smiling, the mayor shouted after him in the sharp cadences of a military march, i-erhi—One-two, one-two!” WithВ­out turning, the old man responded, the words floating back like a hoarse echo from the past: “I-erh, i-erh.”

 

The mayor chuckled, and his eyes softВ­ened. “He is a retired soldier,” he said, “and he keeps up his self-discipline. He is out here running every morning.”

 

We walked on, past basketball and tennis courts, accoutrements of leisure in a successВ­ful Taiwan. The old soldier shuffled on ahead, the voice growing faint in the disВ­tance. “I-erh, i-erh, i-erh. . . “

John L. Asher, Jr. , a third-generation Germantown candymaker, can recite his neighborhood’s rich history and the probВ­lems it now encounters. “We bottomed out here about three years ago. Big trouble came when Germantown was redlined for mortВ­gage money. A lot of impoverished renters moved in with no stake in the community. Businesses began closing; our commercial center was sliding downhill as fast as some of our badly neglected residential streets. Learn more how to take care of your business and finance by visiting http://www.ideapractices.org/building-a-good-credit-history/

“Then things began turning around; all factions started working together to sell our basic strengths: good transportation, good homes in a variety of values, good people. We’ve got a terrific housing stock and serВ­vices and greenery Society Hill couldn’t begin to match. Now black leaders and white have a common goal: Make GerВ­mantown the finest subdivision of any U. S. city.”

 

As one businessman said to me, “It’s all in whether you see the glass as half empty or half full.”

Convinced that Germantown’s glass was filling up, I trolleyed ten miles southeast to the opposite end of the city.

 

This is home base for Philadelphia’s impressive lineup of major league pros: Flyers (hockey), Eagles (football), Phillies (baseball), 76ers (basketball). And this is where fickle local fans boo and cheer the home team with equal fervor. Whatever the formula for sports success, Philadelphia has in recent years posted a better all-round atВ­tendance and performance record than most four-franchise cities on the continent.

A few blocks north in the precincts of South Philadelphia is another fast-hustling team called the Giordanos. They’ve been minding the store for three generations at the corner of Washington and Ninth Streets, hub of the open-air Italian Market. At curbВ­side stalls and under cover, five brothers, three sisters, and myriad relatives parlay a thousand crates of fresh, cut-price produce a day into handsome profits for the family and one of the most entertaining free shows in town for everyone else.

 

“You gotta be a real huckster to keep things moving at that rate. I guess I’m a born ham, and this is one helluva stage to perform on.” Joe, oldest of the second generation, has the rolling gait and muscled build of a prizefighter, which he started out to be. “I was maybe 16 and looking pretty good. Went into my first bout thinking the prize was a watch. I won all right—a lousy bunch of hot dogs. You ever hear of paying an ItalВ­ian kid with food? I quit then and there.”

Even today nobody messes with Joe.

“If you ever go into business, go where there’s plenty of competition. Keeps you hopping. See someone getting the edge, you find out why and do it better.”

 

There’s no shortage of competition in the five boisterous blocks inundated by the ItalВ­ian Market. Here, the wares of some hunВ­dred small merchants—basically Italian with a recent input of Asians—clog sideВ­walks, even spill into the streets in an unreВ­strained riot of color and clutter.

Q Where did the idea for 18370nline come from?

A I was working for a professional genealogical research company. We spent a large percentage of our working week trawling through the birth, marriage and death indexes. Frankly, it’s pretty tedious work — I think even the most keen family historian would admit that! So we hit upon the idea that digitising the information would make our lives much easier. At first we only planned to compile the data for our own use, but soon realised that this information — in an easily searchable form — would be a Godsend to family historians. So we began a scanning programme, which took a little over two years to complete, and started planning the website.

 

Q The 1901 census was a high profile casualty of its own success. Did you ‘watch and learn from the NA’s mistakes?

 

A Well I wouldn’t say we learnt from them as such. We were already well into our testing regime when that was all happening. But we were gobsmacked that they didn’t do some kind of soft launch. We carried out thorough beta testВ­ing, then in April last year did our soft launch to ensure the site was stable. From the beginning we listened to our users to avoid such problems. In fact our soft launch had been delayed by three months because of comments from various family history society testers we’re friends with. Anyway, we went live, nothing went wrong, and we haven’t looked back.

Q How do you solve the problems that do arise?

 

A Well, we understand family history. All our employees are required to do their family history because we believe you can t really appreciate the endless avenues, questions and heartache family historians have to face, unless you’ve done it yourself, It gives our employees empathy. And it must be working — our helpdesk, which is manned from 9 to 5, seems to have turned into more of a genealogical helpline. The questions start out as ‘how can I get a page to appear’, but soon end up being ‘how do I find my great-great-grandfather’s service records?’ That human response, both to emails and phonecalls, is what our customers seem to appreciate,

 

Q So tell us about your family history.

 

A Rumbled! I must admit I haven’t done much research myself. I guess it’s partly because I am working with this data day in day out partly because I don’t always have the time and partly because the surname Miller, being extremely common, is a pretty tough assignment! Luckily I have a first cousin who has traced our family back to around 1750 — so I Just adopt her findings.

Q How big is the 1837 team?

 

A We actually outsource a lot the technical work — fromweb design to scanning. In allВ В В В  re must be about 200 people who contribute, but our core team is only about six strong. We’re really in charge of support and planning for the future. An occasional problem is poor scans, but the moment a user reports a poor page, we check it then get straight onto the GRO for a rescan.

 

Q What does the future hold for 1 37online?

 

A There are plans afoot for new datasets to be made available through the site but I can say no more for the moment. Watch this space.