History Play Project

Pascual Cervera, the man of Philippines Cádiz is the cradle of great sailors, which is not strange either. Two seas meet in Cádiz and there, in the bay that bears the name of its capital, the main base of the Navy has been located for centuries. That Pascual Cervera y Topete came into the world in Cádiz has, therefore, a certain Cartesian logic. He did so at the end of the regency of María Cristina de Borbón, shortly after the province was created. His father was a soldier, he had fought in the War of Independence against the French, but on land. What called his son Pascual was the sea. At only 13 years old he entered the Naval Academy, at 19 he was already a first-class midshipman, and at 21 a ship's second lieutenant. The Spain of Isabel II preserved a small but very dispersed overseas empire. To the west the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico. To the east, the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands on the edge of Asia, to which were added countless islands, islets, ...

Little Ice Age In the winter of 1620 a person could cross from Asia to Europe across the Bosphorus on foot and not exactly on a bridge. At that time no bridge had been built over the Bosphorus. It could be done for a couple of months because the Bosphorus froze. In the even harsher winter of 1657, the Sund Strait between Sweden and Denmark also froze over. It was not a superficial layer. It froze long enough for the Swedish army to march from Skåne to Copenhagen. In 1683, the winters were already so cold that from December to February it was not possible to navigate the River Thames in London. Instead of barges, horse-drawn carriages and sleighs circulated. Sometimes it was so thick and firm that Londoners held street markets in the middle of the frozen riverbed. These extraordinary frosts occurred during the so-called "Little Ice Age", a global climate anomaly that occurred between the years 1400 and 1850. At its peak, the Little Ice Age left Europe and much of the world con...

The Bering Strait About 15,000 years ago (up millennium down millennium) the Bering Strait, an arm of water about 80 kilometers wide located at the northern end of America, was, after the end of the last ice age, flooded by the waters of the Pacific. This detail would be unimportant if it were not for the fact that a prehistoric human community was isolated on the eastern bank of the newly formed strait, which had been arriving on foot from Siberia thanks to the fact that the sea level was about 120 meters lower than today. These two parts of humanity, one in the old world and the other in the new, both oblivious to the existence of the other, remained separated for 16,000 years or, in other words, about 700 generations. To put the figure in perspective, remember that the pyramid of Cheops was built 4,500 years ago or that the Roman Empire reached its maximum territorial extension less than two thousand years ago. The history of human beings in America begins with ancient isolation, an...

Conquering the Pacific I have just finished reading a book, magnificent, by the way, about the return voyage of the Pacific in the mid-16th century, specifically in the years 1654 and 1565. The book in question is titled “Conquering the Pacific” and is by a Mexican historian named Andrés Reséndez. It is in English because Reséndez, a professor at the University of California, wrote it in English and they have not yet had the detail of translating it into Spanish. The book came out at the end of last summer. The topic interested me so I decided to wait for it to be translated because I prefer to read books in my own language, but nothing, three months later it had not been translated nor did it seem that any publisher was going to do so, so I downloaded it to the Kindle and I read it in one sitting. It is not very long, in its paper version it has only 300 pages, something that can be managed in a few afternoons. The book tells of one of the most fascinating voyages in the history of na...