-- Posted Sunday, 10 May 2009 | | Source: GoldSeek.com
By R. D. Bradshaw
Most of us have been exposed to the Mutiny on the Bounty (c1789). At least two Hollywood movie versions have been made of this historic event. The thing that really stands out in the movies is the cruelty and tyranny of the Bounty’s skipper, Captain Blight. It was bad enough that Bligh was cruel and mean to the crew but he also was a thief who had a habit of misappropriating some of the crew’s food rations for his own family.
Bligh stole some of the ship’s cheese/other food items before the Bounty sailed from England to Tahiti on its historic mutinous trip. When a member of the crew revealed Bligh’s theft, he punished the person. The ultimate fall out of Bligh’s wickedness was a curtailment of the crew’s rations. Thus, he stole some of the crew’s food and they had pay for it by living on reduced rations.
While Bligh’s criminality was bad enough, there was still another worse feature of the theft. Like Bligh told his first mate, Fletcher Christian, it was routine for sea captains to steal a portion of the crew’s rations when in port. In his view, it was a captain’s preoperative or benefit.
Bligh’s mean spirit and harshness with the crew ultimately resulted in a mutiny by the crew. Bligh and some 17 of his supporters were set adrift in a small boat in the South Pacific. They eventually made a 3618 mile trip to Timor before being rescued. Many of the mutineers found ultimate safety on a small island in the South Pacific called Pitcairn.
The point of the story was that sea captains of those days ruled supreme at sea. They generally did whatever they wanted to and there were no exceptions or repercussions. About the only practical alternative for a crew with a bad captain was mutiny. But this option held the death penalty if they got caught. So it was a catch-22 situation.
America as Well
Modern Americans need not lose sight of the fact that US ships at sea were much like the British in allowing ship captains to do about whatever they wanted to with no recourse—unless it was mutiny.
This backdrop then sets the stage for a book by Richard Henry Dana on his experience as a seaman on an American ship called the Pilgrim in 1834-1836. Per an Alan Ladd movie on the matter, back in the 1940s, the Pilgrim was owned by a wealthy shipping magnate named Gordon Stewart. The ship in the 1830s was used to transport goods back and forth from Boston to the California West coast.
The ship would load up with US manufactured goods in Boston and sail around Cape Horn and proceed to California where the US goods were unloaded and Mexican goods were then put on board for the trip back to Boston. In the Dana trip, the Mexican goods were cow hides, being shipped to Boston where shoe makers and leather manufacturers would buy the hides for their businesses.
The movie version of Dana’s story started with the Pilgrim approaching the Massachusetts coast with a load of cow hides headed for Boston and the ship’s owner Gordon Stewart. Interestingly, Stewart had much in common with today’s plutocratic financial market manipulators. He was smart and tough to deal with in his financial dealings with others. Too, he was a classic financial market manipulator and insider as will now be shown.
Besides his ownership of one or more ships, Stewart also liked to speculate and/or trade on the local Boston commodities exchange where the exchange participants bought and sold commodity imports (and presumably exports as well). Cow hides were one of the commodities bought and sold on the local Boston exchange.
But Stewart had an advantage over many of his competitors because he was in the shipping business. Since he had this insider information on imports coming into Boston Harbor, it gave him a head’s up (so to speak). In order to take advantage of the situation and make as much money as possible, Stewart had worked out a clever little scheme to give him an edge at the Boston exchange.
Stewart hired a man with a telescope and would from time to time station him as a spy or lookout at a high overlook along the coast of Massachusetts. Since Stewart knew the approximate time of the sailing of the Pilgrim in California and its arrival along the Massachusetts’s coast (and perhaps any other ships of interest to Stewart), he stationed his man on this lookout point just before the Pilgrim was to arrive—in order to scan the distant ocean and try to pick up the first sighting of the ship.
In the case of the Alan Ladd movie, this lookout did spot the Pilgrim out in the ocean. He immediately mounted his horse and sped to downtown Boston and his employer Mr. Stewart. On arrival, he informed Stewart that he had sighted the Pilgrim. Stewart instructed him to not tell anyone about the ship. Stewart then immediately went down to the Boston commodity exchange to do some trading.
As the owner of the Pilgrim, he knew the ship’s cargo; he knew about when it sailed from California and about when it would arrive in Boston. With the sighting of the ship, while it was still at sea, Stewart had the advantage of knowing almost exactly when it would stand down at the Boston port. He came to the exchange with much valuable information or manipulating intelligence which was simply not available to the typical trader.
On checking the most recent quotes on hides, Stewart could make his decision on what he would do with his incoming cargo of hides. In the case of the movie, the price was high because of a shortage of hides, coupled with a high demand for hides. So Stewart began selling his hides (for a soon delivery) even before his ship reached the port.
The point here is that Stewart was clearly one of the earliest of the insiders who knew how to work the local commodity market and make a barrel of money in the process. He held all of the cards, in contrast to the other exchange traders who either didn’t hold any cards or held cards from a marked deck which was readable by Stewart.
For sure, the other exchange traders probably knew little or nothing about the Pilgrim’s cargo and even the approximate time of its arrival in Boston. But Stewart knew and knew almost exactly when the Pilgrim would dock at the port. Stewart was a classic insider or manipulator who had secret information which the other exchange traders simply lacked.
He was in the envious position of selling his hides at a desirably high price (which could have went down in the next several hours/days by the time the Pilgrim docked and especially once the word was out that the Pilgrim had docked with a load of hides); sending his hides to anther port; or unloading his hides to a warehouse and holding them until a better selling opportunity arose. He had much in common with today’s team/Cabal of market manipulators.
The principles brought out on the hides is the same whether the commodity is gold, silver, wheat, corn, cotton, lumber, orange juice or whatever. The insiders can always manipulate and control the market to rip off the suckers and amass a huge sum of money.
Finally
One final word must be said here about Dana’s book. It told about the cruelty and meanness of American sea captains at sea. The book, “Two Years Before the Mast,” was published in 1840. It has been credited in alerting the American public about some of the bad things going on at sea. As a result of the book, changes were initiated to improve the lives of American seamen at sea.
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Besides the revelations contained in the Goldsmiths’ articles, the work of the plutocratic financial market manipulators to conspiratorially manipulate and control the financial markets (to make more profits and install a world government under their management) is also addressed at length in the periodic analysis of the news and in other articles produced at www.analysis-news.com. This website has an article of interest to any person interested in understanding the market Manipulators. It is the Hidden Secret of the Manipulators, why they succeed and how to follow their manipulations.
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-- Posted Sunday, 10 May 2009 | Digg This Article
| Source: GoldSeek.com
