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Vasco da Gama

Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira ( ; c. 1460s – 24 December 1524), was a Portuguese explorer and nobleman who was the first European to reach India by sea.

His initial voyage to India by way of Cape of Good Hope (1497–1499) was the first to link Europe and Asia by an ocean route, connecting the Atlantic and the Indian oceans. This was a milestone in Portuguese maritime exploration as and marked the beginning of a sea-based phase of globalization. Da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India opened the way for an age of global imperialism and enabled the Portuguese to establish a long-lasting colonial empire along the way from Africa to Asia. Traveling the ocean route allowed the Portuguese to avoid sailing across the highly disputed Mediterranean Sea and traversing the dangerous Arabian Peninsula. The sum of the distances covered in the outward and return voyages made this expedition the longest ocean voyage ever made until then.

After decades of sailors trying to reach the Indies, with thousands of lives and dozens of vessels lost in shipwrecks and attacks, da Gama landed in Calicut on 20 May 1498. Unopposed access to the Indian spice routes boosted the economy of the Portuguese Empire, which was previously based along northern and coastal West Africa. The main spices at first obtained from Southeast Asia were pepper and cinnamon, but soon included other products, all new to Europe. Portugal maintained a commercial monopoly of these commodities for several decades. It was not until a century later that other European powers were able to challenge Portugal's monopoly and naval supremacy in the Cape Route.

Da Gama led two of the Portuguese India Armadas, the first and the fourth. The latter was the largest and departed for India four years after his return from the first one. For his contributions, in 1524 da Gama was appointed Governor of India, with the title of Viceroy, and was ennobled as Count of Vidigueira in 1519. He remains a leading figure in the history of exploration, and homages worldwide have celebrated his explorations and accomplishments. The Portuguese national epic poem, Os Lusíadas, was written in his honour by Luís de Camões.

Early life
Vasco da Gama was born in the town of Sines, one of the few seaports on the Alentejo coast in southwest Portugal. According to the Portuguese historian Teixeira de Aragão, he was born in a house near the church of Nossa Senhora das Salas. Some authors write that he was born in or around 1460, while others give 1469 as the year of his birth.

Vasco da Gama's paternal grandfather and namesake was born in Olivença. Vasco's father was Estêvão da Gama, who had served in the 1460s as a knight of the household of Ferdinand, Duke of Viseu. He rose in the ranks of the military Order of Santiago. Estêvão da Gama was appointed alcaide-mór (civil governor) of Sines in the 1460s, a post he held until 1478; after that he continued as a receiver of taxes and holder of the Order's commendas in the region.

Estêvão da Gama married Isabel Sodré, a daughter of João Sodré (also known as João de Resende), scion of a well-connected family of English descent. Her father and her brothers, Vicente Sodré and Brás Sodré, had links to the household of Infante Diogo, Duke of Viseu, and were prominent figures in the military Order of Christ. Vasco da Gama was the third of five sons of Estêvão da Gama and Isabel Sodré – in (probable) order of age: Paulo da Gama, João Sodré, Vasco da Gama, Pedro da Gama and Aires da Gama. Vasco also had one known sister, Teresa da Gama, who married Lopo Mendes de Vasconcelos.

Little is known of da Gama's early life. Teixeira de Aragão suggests that he studied at the inland town of Évora, which is where he may have learned mathematics and navigation. Da Gama's near-contemporary Gaspar Correia and others have claimed that he studied under Abraham Zacuto, an astrologer and astronomer, but da Gama's biographer Sanjay Subrahmanyam thinks this dubious.

Around 1480, da Gama followed his father (rather than the Sodrés) and joined the Order of Santiago. The master of Santiago was Prince John, who ascended to the throne in 1481 as King John II of Portugal. John II doted on the Order, and the da Gamas' prospects rose accordingly.

In 1492, John II dispatched da Gama on a mission to the port of Setúbal and to the Algarve to seize French ships in retaliation for peacetime depredations against Portuguese shipping – a task that da Gama rapidly and effectively performed.

Exploration before da Gama
From the earlier part of the 15th century, Portuguese expeditions organized by Prince Henry the Navigator had been reaching down the African coastline, principally in search of West African riches (notably, gold and slaves). They had greatly extended Portuguese maritime knowledge but had little profit to show for the effort. After Henry's death in 1460, the Portuguese Crown showed little interest in continuing this effort and, in 1469, licensed the neglected African enterprise to a private Lisbon merchant consortium led by Fernão Gomes. Within a few years, Gomes' captains expanded Portuguese knowledge across the Gulf of Guinea, doing business in gold dust, melegueta pepper, ivory and sub-Saharan slaves. When Gomes' charter came up for renewal in 1474, Prince John (the future John II), asked his father Afonso V of Portugal to pass the African charter to him.

Upon becoming king in 1481, John II of Portugal set out on many long reforms. To break the monarch's dependence on the feudal nobility, John II needed to build up the royal treasury; he considered royal commerce to be the key to achieving that. Under John II's watch, the gold and slave trade in West Africa was greatly expanded. He was eager to break into the highly profitable spice trade between Europe and Asia, which was conducted chiefly by land. At the time, this was virtually monopolized by the Republic of Venice, which operated overland routes via Levantine and Egyptian ports, through the Red Sea across to the spice markets of India. John II set a new objective for his captains: to find a sea route to Asia by sailing around the African continent.

By the time Vasco da Gama was in his 20s, the king's plans were coming to fruition. In 1487, John II dispatched two spies, Pero da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva, overland via Egypt to East Africa and India, to scout the details of the spice markets and trade routes. The breakthrough came soon after, when John II's captain Bartolomeu Dias returned from rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, having explored as far as the Fish River (Rio do Infante) in modern-day South Africa and having verified that the unknown coast stretched away to the northeast.

An explorer was needed who could prove the link between the findings of Dias and those of da Covilhã and de Paiva and connect these separate segments into a potentially lucrative trade route across the Indian Ocean.

First voyage

On 8 July 1497 Vasco da Gama led a fleet of four ships with a crew of 170 men from Lisbon. The distance traveled in the journey around Africa to India and back was greater than the length of the equator. The navigators included Portugal's most experienced, Pero de Alenquer, Pedro Escobar, João de Coimbra, and Afonso Gonçalves. It is not known for certain how many people were in each ship's crew but approximately 55 returned, and two ships were lost. Two of the vessels were carracks, newly built for the voyage; the others were a caravel and a supply boat.

The four ships were:
 * São Gabriel, commanded by Vasco da Gama; a carrack of 178 tons, length 27 m, width 8.5 m, draft 2.3 m, sails of 372 m2
 * São Rafael, commanded by his brother Paulo da Gama; similar dimensions to the São Gabriel
 * Berrio (nickname, officially called São Miguel), a caravel, slightly smaller than the former two, commanded by Nicolau Coelho
 * A storage ship of unknown name, commanded by Gonçalo Nunes, destined to be scuttled in Mossel Bay (São Brás) in South Africa

Journey to the Cape
The expedition set sail from Lisbon on 8 July 1497. It followed the route pioneered by earlier explorers along the coast of Africa via Tenerife and the Cape Verde Islands. After reaching the coast of present-day Sierra Leone, da Gama took a course south into the open ocean, crossing the equator and seeking the South Atlantic westerlies that Bartolomeu Dias had discovered in 1487. This course proved successful and on 4 November 1497, the expedition made landfall on the African coast. For over three months the ships had sailed more than 6000 mi of open ocean, by far the longest journey without landfall made by that time.

By 16 December, the fleet had passed the Great Fish River (Eastern Cape, South Africa) – where Dias had anchored – and sailed into waters previously unknown to Europeans. With Christmas pending, da Gama and his crew gave the coast they were passing the name Natal, which carried the connotation of "birth of Christ" in Portuguese.

Mozambique
Vasco da Gama spent 2 to 29 March 1498 in the vicinity of Mozambique Island. Arab-controlled territory on the East African coast was an integral part of the network of trade in the Indian Ocean. Fearing the local population would be hostile to Christians, da Gama impersonated a Muslim and gained audience with the Sultan of Mozambique. With the paltry trade goods he had to offer, the explorer was unable to provide a suitable gift to the ruler. Soon the local populace became suspicious of da Gama and his men. Forced by a hostile crowd to flee Mozambique, da Gama departed the harbor, firing his cannons into the city in retaliation.

Mombasa
In the vicinity of modern Kenya, the expedition resorted to piracy, looting Arab merchant ships that were generally unarmed trading vessels without heavy cannons. The Portuguese became the first known Europeans to visit the port of Mombasa from 7 to 13 April 1498, but were met with hostility and soon departed.

Malindi

Vasco da Gama continued north, arriving on 14 April 1498 at the friendlier port of Malindi, whose leaders were in conflict with those of Mombasa. There, da Gama and his crew contracted the services of a pilot who used his knowledge of the monsoon winds to guide the expedition the rest of the way to Calicut, located on the southwest coast of India. Sources differ over the identity of the pilot, calling him variously a Christian, a Muslim, or a Gujarati Hindu. One traditional story describes the pilot as the famous Arab navigator Ibn Majid, but other contemporaneous accounts place Majid elsewhere, and he could not have been near the vicinity at the time. None of the Portuguese historians of the time mentions Ibn Majid. Vasco da Gama left Malindi for India on 24 April 1498.

Calicut, India

The fleet arrived in Kappadu near Calicut on the Malabar Coast (present-day Kerala state of India) on 20 May 1498. The King of Calicut, the Samudiri (Zamorin), who was at that time staying in his second capital at Ponnani, returned to Calicut on hearing the news of the foreign fleet's arrival. The navigator was received with traditional hospitality, including a grand procession of at least 3,000 armed Nairs, but an interview with the Zamorin failed to produce any concrete results. When local authorities asked da Gama's fleet, "What brought you hither?", they replied that they had come "in search of Christians and spices." The presents that da Gama sent to the Zamorin as gifts from Dom Manuel – four cloaks of scarlet cloth, six hats, four branches of corals, twelve almasares, a box with seven brass vessels, a chest of sugar, two barrels of oil and a cask of honey – were trivial, and failed to impress. While the Zamorin's officials wondered at why there was no gold or silver, the Muslim merchants who considered da Gama their rival suggested that the latter was only an ordinary pirate and not a royal ambassador. Vasco da Gama's request for permission to leave a factor behind him in charge of the merchandise he could not sell was turned down by the King, who insisted that da Gama pay customs duty – preferably in gold – like any other trader, which strained the relation between the two. Annoyed by this, da Gama carried a few Nairs and sixteen fishermen (mukkuva) off with him by force.

Return
Vasco da Gama left Calicut on 29 August 1498. Eager to set sail for home, he ignored the local knowledge of monsoon wind patterns that were still blowing onshore. The fleet initially inched north along the Indian coast, and then anchored in at Anjediva island for a spell. They finally struck out for their Indian Ocean crossing on 3 October 1498. But with the winter monsoon yet to set in, it was a harrowing journey. On the outgoing journey, sailing with the summer monsoon wind, da Gama's fleet crossed the Indian Ocean in only 23 days; now, on the return trip, sailing against the wind, it took 132 days.

Da Gama saw land again only on 2 January 1499, passing before the coastal Somali city of Mogadishu, then under the influence of the Ajuran Empire in the Horn of Africa. The fleet did not make a stop, but passing before Mogadishu, the anonymous diarist of the expedition noted that it was a large city with houses of four or five storeys high and big palaces in its center and many mosques with cylindrical minarets.

Da Gama's fleet finally arrived in Malindi on 7 January 1499, in a terrible state – approximately half of the crew had died during the crossing, and many of the rest were afflicted with scurvy. Not having enough crewmen left standing to manage three ships, da Gama ordered the São Rafael scuttled off the East African coast, and the crew re-distributed to the remaining two ships, the São Gabriel and the Berrio. While there he was also granted permission by the Sultan to set up a padrão (a stone pillar). The Vasco da Gama Pillar, as it is still known locally, seems to be the only one of the many padrãos set up by da Gama to survive to the present day.

After leaving Malindi, the sailing was smoother. By early March, the fleet had arrived in Mossel Bay, and crossed the Cape of Good Hope in the opposite direction on 20 March, reaching the western coast of Africa by 25 April.

The diary record of the expedition ends abruptly here. Reconstructing from other sources, it seems they continued to Cape Verde, where Nicolau Coelho's Berrio separated from Vasco da Gama's São Gabriel and sailed on by itself. The Berrio arrived in Lisbon on 10 July 1499 and Nicolau Coelho personally delivered the news to King Manuel I and the royal court, then assembled in Sintra. In the meantime, back in Cape Verde, da Gama's brother, Paulo da Gama, had fallen grievously ill. Da Gama elected to stay by his side on Santiago island and handed the São Gabriel over to his clerk, João de Sá, to take home. The São Gabriel under Sá arrived in Lisbon sometime in late July or early August. Da Gama and his sickly brother eventually hitched a ride with a Guinea caravel returning to Portugal, but Paulo da Gama died en route. Da Gama disembarked at the Azores to bury his brother at the monastery of São Francisco in Angra do Heroismo, and lingered there for a little while in mourning. He eventually took passage on an Azorean caravel and finally arrived in Lisbon on 29 August 1499 (according to Barros), or early September (8th or 18th, according to other sources). Despite his melancholic mood, da Gama was given a hero's welcome and showered with honors, including a triumphal procession and public festivities. King Manuel wrote two letters in which he described da Gama's first voyage, in July and August 1499, soon after the return of the ships. Girolamo Sernigi also wrote three letters describing da Gama's first voyage soon after the return of the expedition.

The expedition had exacted a large cost – two ships and over half the men had been lost. It had also failed in its principal mission of securing a commercial treaty with Calicut. Nonetheless, the small quantities of spices and other trade goods brought back on the remaining two ships demonstrated the potential of great profit for future trade. Vasco da Gama was justly celebrated for opening a direct sea route to Asia. His path would be followed up thereafter by yearly Portuguese India Armadas.

The spice trade would prove to be a major asset to the Portuguese royal treasury, and other consequences soon followed. For example, da Gama's voyage had made it clear that the east coast of Africa, the Contra Costa, was essential to Portuguese interests; its ports provided fresh water, provisions, timber, and harbors for repairs, and served as a refuge where ships could wait out unfavorable weather. One significant result was the colonization of Mozambique by the Portuguese Crown.

Rewards

In December 1499, King Manuel I of Portugal rewarded Vasco da Gama with the town of Sines as a hereditary fief (the town his father, Estêvão, had once held as a comenda). This turned out to be a complicated affair, for Sines still belonged to the Order of Santiago. The master of the Order, Jorge de Lencastre, might have endorsed the reward – after all, da Gama was a Santiago knight, one of their own, and a close associate of Lencastre himself. But the fact that Sines was awarded by the king provoked Lencastre to refuse out of principle, lest it encourage the king to make other donations of the Order's properties. Da Gama would spend the next few years attempting to take hold of Sines, an effort that would estrange him from Lencastre and eventually prompt da Gama to abandon his beloved Order of Santiago, switching over to the rival Order of Christ in 1507.

In the meantime, da Gama made do with a substantial hereditary royal pension of 300,000 reis. He was awarded the noble title of Dom (lord) in perpetuity for himself, his siblings and their descendants. On 30 January 1502, da Gama was awarded the title of Almirante dos mares de Arabia, Persia, India e de todo o Oriente ("Admiral of the Seas of Arabia, Persia, India and all the Orient") – an overwrought title reminiscent of the ornate Castilian title borne by Christopher Columbus. Another royal letter, dated October 1501, gave da Gama the personal right to intervene and exercise a determining role on any future India-bound fleet.

Around 1501, Vasco da Gama married Catarina de Ataíde, daughter of Álvaro de Ataíde, the alcaide-mór of Alvor (Algarve), and a prominent nobleman connected by kinship with the powerful Almeida family (Catarina was a first cousin of Dom Francisco de Almeida).

Second voyage

The follow-up expedition, the Second India Armada, launched in 1500 under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral with the mission of making a treaty with the Zamorin of Calicut and setting up a Portuguese factory in the city. However, Pedro Cabral entered into a conflict with the local Arab merchant guilds, with the result that the Portuguese factory was overrun in a riot and up to 70 Portuguese were killed. Cabral blamed the Zamorin for the incident and bombarded the city. Thus war broke out between Portugal and Calicut.

Vasco da Gama invoked his royal letter to take command of the Fourth India Armada, scheduled to set out in 1502, with the explicit aim of taking revenge upon the Zamorin and force him to submit to Portuguese terms. The heavily armed fleet of fifteen ships and eight hundred men left Lisbon on 12 February 1502. It was followed in April by another squadron of five ships led by his cousin, Estêvão da Gama (the son of Aires da Gama), which caught up to them in the Indian Ocean. The Fourth Armada was a veritable da Gama family affair. Two of his maternal uncles, Vicente Sodré and Brás Sodré, were pre-designated to command an Indian Ocean naval patrol, while brothers-in-law Álvaro de Ataíde (brother of Vasco's wife Catarina) and Lopo Mendes de Vasconcelos (betrothed to Teresa da Gama, Vasco's sister) captained ships in the main fleet.

On the outgoing voyage, da Gama's fleet opened contact with the East African gold trading port of Sofala and reduced the sultanate of Kilwa to tribute, extracting a substantial sum of gold.

Pilgrim ship incident
On reaching India in October 1502, da Gama's fleet intercepted Mirim, a ship of Muslim pilgrims at Madayi travelling from Calicut to Mecca. Described in detail by eyewitness Thomé Lopes and chronicler Gaspar Correia, da Gama looted the ship with over 400 pilgrims on board including 50 women, locked in the passengers, the owner and an ambassador from Egypt and burned them to death. They offered their wealth, which "could ransom all the Christian slaves in the Kingdom of Fez and much more" but were not spared. Da Gama looked on through the porthole and saw the women bringing up their gold and jewels and holding up their babies to beg for mercy. The lives of twenty children were spared against a forced conversion to Christianity.

Calicut

After stopping at Cannanore, Gama drove his fleet before Calicut, demanding redress for the treatment of Cabral. Having known of the fate of the pilgrims' ship, the Zamorin adopted a conciliatory attitude towards the Portuguese and expressed willingness to sign a new treaty, but da Gama made a call to the Hindu king to expel all Muslims from Calicut before beginning negotiations, which was turned down. At the same time however, the Zamorin sent a message to his rebellious vassal, the Raja of Cochin, urging cooperation and obedience to counter the Portuguese threat; the ruler of Cochin forwarded this message to Gama, which reinforced his opinion of the Indians as duplicitous. After da Gama's demand for the expulsion of Muslims from Calicut, the Zamorin sent the high priest Talappana Namboothiri (the very same person who conducted da Gama to the Zamorin's chamber during his much celebrated first visit to Calicut in May 1498) for talks. Da Gama called him a spy, ordered the priest's lips and ears to be cut off and after sewing a pair of dog's ears to his head, sent him away. The Portuguese fleet then bombarded the unfortified city for nearly two days from the sea, severely damaging it. He also captured several rice vessels and cut off the crew's hands, ears and noses, dispatching them with a note to the Zamorin, in which Gama declared that he would be open to friendly relations once the Zamorin had paid for the items plundered from the feitoria as well as the gunpowder and cannonballs.

Seabattle
The violent treatment meted out by da Gama quickly brought trade along the Malabar Coast of India, upon which Calicut depended, to a standstill. The Zamorin ventured to dispatch a fleet of strong warships to challenge da Gama's armada, but which Gama managed to defeat in a naval battle before Calicut harbor.

Cochin
Da Gama loaded up with spices at Cochin and Cannanore, small nearby kingdoms at war with the Zamorin, whose alliances had been secured by prior Portuguese fleets. The 4th armada left India in early 1503. Da Gama left behind a small squadron of caravels under the command of his uncle, Vicente Sodré, to patrol the Indian coast, to continue harassing Calicut shipping, and to protect the Portuguese factories at Cochin and Cannanore from the Zamorin's inevitable reprisals.

Vasco da Gama arrived back in Portugal in September 1503, effectively having failed in his mission to bring the Zamorin to submission. This failure, and the subsequent more galling failure of his uncle Vicente Sodré to protect the Portuguese factory in Cochin, probably counted against any further rewards. When the Portuguese king Manuel I decided to appoint the first governor and viceroy of Portuguese India in 1505, da Gama was conspicuously overlooked, and the post given to Francisco de Almeida.

Interlude
For the next two decades, Vasco da Gama lived out a quiet life, unwelcome in the royal court and sidelined from Indian affairs. His attempts to return to the favor of Manuel I, including switching over to the Order of Christ in 1507, yielded little. Almeida, the larger-than-life Afonso de Albuquerque and, later on, Albergaria and Sequeira, were the king's preferred point men for India.

After Ferdinand Magellan defected to the Crown of Castile in 1518, Vasco da Gama threatened to do the same, prompting the king to undertake steps to retain him in Portugal and avoid the embarrassment of losing his own "Admiral of the Indies" to Spain. In 1519, after years of ignoring his petitions, King Manuel I finally hurried to give Vasco da Gama a feudal title, appointing him the first Count of Vidigueira, a title created by a royal decree issued in Évora on 29 December, after a complicated agreement with Dom Jaime, Duke of Braganza, who ceded him on payment the towns of Vidigueira and Vila dos Frades. The decree granted Vasco da Gama and his heirs all the revenues and privileges related, thus promoting da Gama from a petty noble to one of the relatively few titled nobles in Portugal.

Third voyage and death

After the death of King Manuel I in late 1521, his son and successor, King John III of Portugal set about reviewing the Portuguese government overseas. Turning away from the old Albuquerque clique (now represented by Diogo Lopes de Sequeira), John III looked for a fresh start. Vasco da Gama re-emerged from his political wilderness as an important adviser to the new king's appointments and strategy. Seeing the new Spanish threat to the Maluku Islands as the priority, Vasco da Gama advised against the obsession with Arabia that had pervaded much of the Manueline period, and continued to be the dominant concern of Duarte de Menezes, then-governor of Portuguese India. Menezes also turned out to be incompetent and corrupt, subject to numerous complaints. As a result, John III decided to appoint Vasco da Gama himself to replace Menezes, confident that the magic of his name and memory of his deeds might better impress his authority on Portuguese India, and manage the transition to a new government and new strategy.

By his appointment letter of February 1524, John III granted Vasco da Gama the privileged title of "Viceroy", being only the second Portuguese governor to enjoy that title (the first was Francisco de Almeida in 1505). His second son, Estêvão da Gama was simultaneously appointed Capitão-mor do Mar da Índia ('Captain-major of the Indian Sea', commander of the Indian Ocean naval patrol fleet), to replace Duarte's brother, Luís de Menezes. As a final condition, Gama secured from John III of Portugal the commitment to appoint all his sons successively as Portuguese captains of Malacca.

Setting out in April 1524, with a fleet of fourteen ships, Vasco da Gama took as his flagship the famous large carrack Santa Catarina do Monte Sinai on her last journey to India, along with two of his sons, Estêvão and Paulo.

The underwater quake
After a troubled journey in which four or five of the ships were lost en route, he arrived in India in September.

Early on the morning of September 8, as the ships laid becalmed near Dabul the sea began to boil and the vessels pitched and rocked violently for about an hour as the result of an submarine earthquake. The Portuguese crews were frightened, and one death occurred as a sailor jumped overboard in panic and drowned. Gama capitalized on the situation and so as to reassure his men cried out:

"Friends, rejoice and be happy, for even sea trembles before us!"

Death
Vasco da Gama immediately invoked his high viceregal powers to impose a new order in Portuguese India, replacing all the old officials with his own appointments. But da Gama contracted malaria not long after arriving and died in the city of Cochin on Christmas Eve in 1524, three months after his arrival. As per royal instructions, da Gama was succeeded as governor of India by one of the captains who had come with him, Henrique de Menezes (no relation to Duarte). Da Gama's sons Estêvão and Paulo immediately lost their posts and joined the returning fleet of early 1525 (along with the dismissed Duarte de Menezes and Luís de Menezes).

Vasco da Gama's body was first buried at St. Francis Church, at Fort Kochi in the city of Kochi, but his remains were returned to Portugal in 1539. The body of Vasco da Gama was re-interred in Vidigueira in a casket decorated with gold and jewels.

The Monastery of the Hieronymites, in Belém, which later became the necropolis of the Portuguese royal dynasty of Aviz, was erected in the early 1500s near the launch point of Vasco da Gama's first journey; its construction funded by a tax on the profits of the yearly Portuguese India Armadas. In 1880, what were believed to be da Gama's remains and those of the poet Luís de Camões (who celebrated da Gama's first voyage in his 1572 epic poem, Os Lusíadas), were moved to new carved tombs in the nave of the monastery's church, only a few meters away from the tombs of the kings Manuel I and John III, whom da Gama had served.

However, by 1884, Teixeira de Aragão, one of the advocates for the transfer of da Gama's remains to the monastery, discovered documents suggesting that the wrong remains had been exhumed from Vidigueira. Apparently, da Gama's gravestone had been exchanged with that of his great-grandson Francisco da Gama, whose tomb lay opposite his, likely during restoration works in 1841. Additionally, it was found that the casket moved in 1880 contained the bones of more than one person, whereas the other tomb contained only one skeleton. It was not until May 1898, during the celebrations of the fourth centenary of da Gama's arrival in Calicut, that the remains from the other tomb in the chapel of Vidigueira were moved to the Hieronymite monastery. In 1994, a member of the family that now owns the estate where da Gama's remains were until the 1880s claimed that the real bones of Vasco da Gama were located in an unmarked spot on the estate, purportedly having been hidden there by the estate's owner in the 19th century, the Visconde de Ribeira Brava.

Marriage and descendants

Vasco da Gama and his wife, Catarina de Ataíde, had six sons and one daughter:

His male-line issue became extinct in 1735, when the 7th Count of Vidigueira, Dom Vasco Baltasar José Luís Gama died, leaving only one daughter from his marriage, Dona Maria José da Gama, who inherited the Vidigueira estate. The title thus continued through this female-line.
 * 1) Dom Francisco da Gama, who inherited his father's titles as 2nd Count of Vidigueira and the 2nd "Admiral of the Seas of India, Arabia and Persia." He remained in Portugal.
 * 2) Dom Estevão da Gama, after his abortive 1524 term as Indian patrol captain, he was appointed for a three-year term as captain of Malacca, serving from 1534 to 1539 (includes the last two years of his younger brother Paulo's term). He was subsequently appointed as the 11th governor of India from 1540 to 1542.
 * 3) Dom Paulo da Gama (having the same name as his uncle Paulo), captain of Malacca from 1533 to 1534, killed in a naval action off Malacca.
 * 4) Dom Cristovão da Gama, captain of Malacca from 1538 to 1540; nominated to succeed in Malacca, but executed by Ahmad ibn Ibrahim during the Ethiopian-Adal war in 1542.
 * 5) Dom Pedro da Silva da Gama, appointed captain of Malacca from 1548 to 1552.
 * 6) Dom Álvaro de Ataíde da Gama, appointed captain of Malacca fleet in the 1540s, captain of Malacca itself from 1552 to 1554.
 * 7) Dona Isabel de Ataíde da Gama, only daughter, married Dom Ignacio de Noronha, son of the first Count of Linhares.

Later generations

 * Dom Vasco da Gama, 3rd Count of Vidigueira, the nobility and military personnel, son of Francisco (2nd Count) and grandson of Vasco da Gama.
 * Dom Francisco da Gama, 4th Count of Vidigueira, the viceroy (1597–1600) and governor (1622–1628) of India, son of Vasco (3rd Count) and great-grandson of Vasco da Gama.

Legacy

Vasco da Gama is one of the most famous and celebrated explorers from the Age of Discovery. As much as anyone after Henry the Navigator, he was responsible for Portugal's success as an early colonizing power. Beside the fact of the first voyage itself, it was his astute mix of politics and war on the other side of the world that placed Portugal in a prominent position in Indian Ocean trade. Following da Gama's initial voyage, the Portuguese crown realized that securing outposts on the eastern coast of Africa would prove vital to maintaining national trade routes to the Far East.

However, his fame is tempered by such incidents and attitudes as displayed in the notorious Pilgrim Ship Incident previously discussed.

The Portuguese national epic, the Lusíadas of Luís Vaz de Camões, largely concerns Vasco da Gama's voyages.

The 1865 grand opera L'Africaine, composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer from a libretto by Eugène Scribe, prominently includes the character of Vasco da Gama. The events depicted, however, are fictitious. Meyerbeer's working title for the opera was Vasco da Gama. A 1989 production of the opera by the San Francisco Opera featured noted tenor Plácido Domingo in the role of da Gama. The 19th-century composer Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray composed an eponymous 1872 opera based on da Gama's life and exploits at sea.

The port city of Vasco da Gama in Goa is named after him, as is the crater Vasco da Gama on the Moon. There are three football clubs in Brazil (including Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama) and Vasco Sports Club in Goa that were also named after him. There exists a church in Kochi, Kerala called Vasco da Gama Church, and a private residence on the island of Saint Helena. The suburb of Vasco in Cape Town also honours him. A garden in Macau is also named after him.

A few places in Lisbon's Parque das Nações are named after the explorer, such as the Vasco da Gama Bridge, Vasco da Gama Tower and the Centro Comercial Vasco da Gama shopping centre. The Oceanário in the Parque das Nações has a mascot of a cartoon diver with the name of "Vasco", who is named after the explorer.

Vasco da Gama was the only explorer on the final pool of Os Grandes Portugueses. Although the final shortlist featured other Age of Discovery-related people, they were not actually explorers nor navigators for any matter.

The Portuguese Navy has a class of frigates named after him. There are three Vasco da Gama class frigates in total, of which the first one also bears his name.

The Portuguese government erected two navigational beacons, Dias Cross and da Gama Cross, to commemorate da Gama and Bartolomeu Dias, who were the first modern European explorers to reach the Cape of Good Hope. When lined up, these crosses point to Whittle Rock, a large, permanently submerged shipping hazard in False Bay.

South African musician Hugh Masekela recorded an anti-colonialist song entitled "Colonial Man", which contains the lyrics "Vasco da Gama was no friend of mine", and another song entitled "Vasco da Gama (The Sailor Man)". Both songs were included in his 1976 album Colonial Man.

Vasco da Gama appears as an antagonist in the Indian film Urumi. The film, directed by Santosh Sivan, depicts atrocities and progression to establish the Portuguese empire by da Gama in India.

In March 2016, archaeologists working off the coast of Oman identified a shipwreck believed to be that of the Esmeralda from da Gama's 1502–1503 fleet. The wreck was initially discovered in 1998. Later underwater excavations took place between 2013 and 2015 through a partnership between the Oman Ministry of Heritage and Culture and Blue Water Recoveries Ltd., a shipwreck recovery company. The vessel was identified through such artifacts as a "Portuguese coin minted for trade with India (one of only two coins of this type known to exist) and stone cannonballs engraved with what appear to be the initials of Vincente Sodré, da Gama's maternal uncle and the commander of the Esmeralda."

title: Vasco da Gama


text:
The Puppet Masters

The Puppet Masters is a 1951 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, in which American secret agents battle parasitic invaders from outer space. It was originally serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction (September, October, and November 1951).

The novel evokes a sense of paranoia and Heinlein repeatedly makes explicit the analogy between the mind-controlling parasites and the Communist Russians, echoing the prevailing Second Red Scare in the United States. George Stubbins noted "Two particularly disturbing scenes in The Puppet Masters—the one in which members of the President's privately created Security Service hold at gunpoint the entire membership of both Houses of Congress and proceed to search out the traitors among them, and that in which armed vigilantes roam the streets in search of traitors and shoot to death with impunity anyone they suspect of being such. Both scenes make sense in the context of the book's Science Fictional setting, and both are highly scary if applied to real American life."

The book takes up the then common theme of sightings of flying saucers, the plot assuming that the "saucers" seen in the 1950s were part of a preliminary reconnaissance of Earth, carried out by the extraterrestrials in preparation for a full-fledged invasion sixty years later.

Background
The novel starts in 2007. Following a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the Western Bloc, which left both sides battered but unbroken, both sides return to a state of Cold War. Washington, D.C., and other US cities devastated in nuclear strikes had been completely rebuilt. The Soviet Union and China remain a single bloc dominated by Moscow, and the sharp Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s never happened.

Social customs have changed somewhat, in a way typical for Heinlein's fiction (i.e. having become more liberal, such as marriage contracts being possible with fixed terms, etc.) and ray guns and personal flying cars are commonplace. "Slug throwing guns" remain in possession of some private citizens, but are considered obsolete by professionals. Space stations exist and colonies have been established on the planet Venus (depicted, as common in science fiction of the time, as a tropical planet habitable by humans).

Space technology is far more advanced than in the actual first decade of the 21st century. For example, in the last scene, a space warship is sent on a twelve-year trip to Titan, with not only life-support for a large crew, but also enough armaments—presumably nuclear—to confront an entire world on its own.

However, communications satellites have not been thought of, and television broadcasts are still limited to line-of-sight, as they were at the time of writing. This is of critical importance to the plot. The territory of the United States is divided into numerous transmission blocks, which receive television broadcasts from their neighbors and relay them onwards. When the invaders seize one of these blocks, they effectively control all communications within it and can isolate its inhabitants from the outside world, deny the central government any access to them, and consolidate control at their leisure.

The current president—on his second term—had established directly upon being first elected a new intelligence agency, known as the Section. Its creation was never authorized by Congress and its existence is kept secret, being funded by sums diverted from innocuous sounding items in the budget. It has a disguised underground headquarters in Washington, D.C., and a network of similarly disguised branch offices around the US. Unlike the clearly demarked spheres of the FBI and CIA, the Section carries out extensive espionage in Soviet territory, but also conducts operations inside the United States. If ordered to, its agents are ready to shoot and kill American citizens on US soil. The Section's Director, who had been the president's campaign manager, is universally called "The Old Man". Only gradually does the reader learn that he is the protagonist's actual father.

Plot

In the summer of 2007, Earth is under attack. Slug-like creatures, arriving in flying saucers, are attaching themselves to people's backs, taking control of their victims' nervous systems, and manipulating those people as puppets. The Old Man, the head of a clandestine national security agency called the Section, goes to Des Moines, Iowa, with Sam and Mary, two of his best agents, to investigate a flying saucer report, but much more seriously the ominous disappearance of the six agents sent previously. They discover that "the slugs" are steadily taking over Des Moines, but they cannot convince the US president to declare an emergency.

Sam takes two other agents and returns to Des Moines to get more evidence of the invasion. They fail and are forced to flee quickly, but in the confusion, a slug gains control of one of the agents. Back in Washington the team discovers the slug and captures it, but later it escapes and attaches itself to Sam, using Sam's skills and knowledge to make a clean escape.

While under control, Sam uses the Constitution Club—whose membership includes many important members of the city's political elite—to gain more hosts for the slugs. The Old Man captures him, takes him to Section's new headquarters, and later coerces Sam into allowing himself to be possessed by the slug again. Under drug-induced hypnosis, Sam reveals that the slugs come from Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn. Later the Section exposes several possessed congressmen at the Congress session, finally persuading the Congress that the United States is under attack. The law is passed requiring people to have bare backs to demonstrate that they are not carrying slugs.

The Army prepares a counterattack in the most heavily infested areas, planning to take over most broadcast centers and reveal the truth to the local residents. Sam drives alone to Kansas City and discovers that the slugs now possess almost all residents. He returns to Washington too late to stop the operation, which fails; the invading soldiers are either killed or captured by the slugs.

Sam and Mary take a short leave, get married and have a happy honeymoon that is interrupted by a slug that seems to have been targeting Sam for repossession. They return to work and discover that people are now required to be practically naked as the slugs learned to attach themselves to other body parts. Together with the Old Man, they go to Pass Christian, Mississippi, to inspect a flying saucer that had made a bad landing. Inside the alien ship, Mary is overwhelmed by repressed memories from the time she was a child on Venus and had been possessed by a slug. The slug had died from Nine-day Fever, a deadly disease native to Venus, showing that the disease kills slugs faster than their human hosts.

Adopting biological warfare, the authorities release infected monkeys into enemy-held territory. Slugs possess the monkeys and then quickly transmit the disease to each other. Several carefully timed days later, thousands of volunteers are parachuted to administer the cure to those people whose slugs have died. Sam and the Old Man join the effort in Jefferson City, Missouri.

The Old Man gets possessed by the last healthy slug in the city, captures Sam and escapes in an air-car heading to the Yucatán, where the slug intends to restart its effort to conquer humanity. Sam manages to kill the slug and crash the air-car.

Some years later, Sam and Mary board a spaceship headed for Saturn to take the offensive. Sam expresses the hope that a way would be found to save the small elf-like hosts whom the slugs enslaved.

Characters

 * Sam, born Elihu Nivens, is the classic Heinlein hero, multi-talented, independent, fiercely loyal to friends and an implacable enemy to foes. He is thirtyish, but has changed appearance so many times even he has doubts as to how he originally looked.
 * Mary, born Allucquere in a religious commune in Antarctica before growing up on Venus, is Heinlein's classic heroine. She is beautiful, red-headed, hard-nosed and brilliant. Sam describes her as having the "real redheaded saurian bony structure to her skull". Her professional exterior conceals psychological scars from her encounter with the slugs as a child. Only the Old Man knows the truth about her, thanks to the deep hypnotic analysis that all agents have to undergo.
 * The Old Man, born Andrew Nivens, is the head of a top secret government agency that he wishes did not have to exist, doing his job reluctantly because nobody else would do it properly. He represents the third of Heinlein's favorite types of character, the "wise, grumpy old man". He is the first in the line that includes Jubal Harshaw, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, "Kettle Belly" Baldwin, and the later life of Lazarus Long. (Lazarus Long's grandfather, who has a major role in the later part of Time Enough for Love, is particularly similar in character to "The Old Man".)

Alternative version
Heinlein's original version of the novel was 96,000 words, and was cut to 72,000 words for both the 1951 book version and the serialization in Galaxy Science Fiction. For the Galaxy version, editor H. L. Gold also did extensive rewriting, to which Heinlein strenuously objected.

In 1990, two years after Heinlein's death, an expanded version was published with the consent of his widow, Virginia Heinlein. This edition contained material that had been cut from the original published version, because the book was deemed to be too long and controversial for the market in 1951. The uncut version seemed more risqué in 1951 than it did decades later. For example, in the uncut version the book begins with Sam waking up in bed with a blonde whom he had casually picked up the evening before, without even bothering to learn her name; the older version omitted all mention of her. The 1951 version does mention that men possessed by the invaders lost all sexual feeling—an essential element in the early parts of the plot; the original publisher completely cut out a reference to the "puppet masters" later discovering human sexuality and embarking upon wild orgies, broadcast live on television in the areas under their control. Also all references to the Soviet Union were eliminated.

Reception
Boucher and McComas characterized The Puppet Masters as "a thunderously exciting melodrama of intrigue", noting that Heinlein displayed "not only his usual virtues of clear logic, rigorous detail-work, and mastery of indirect exposition", but also unexpected virtues like "a startling facility in suspense devices [and] a powerful ingenuity in plotting". P. Schuyler Miller, noting that the novel's "climactic situations seem to be telegraphed", suggested that Heinlein presented his background situations so effectively that readers solve the story's mysteries more quickly than Heinlein allowed his characters to. In his "Books" column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Damon Knight selected the novel as one of the 10 best SF books of the 1950s.

The book was also reviewed in the 15 June 1951 issue of Kirkus Reviews. The reviewer wrote

"The recurrent enigma of the flying saucer is finally solved when an aerial pieplate is caught with its exhaust down by the F.B.I. of 2007. Hero Sam penetrates the contaminated area, brings a 'master' back—a gelatinous gray mass which attaches itself to a soldier's body and controls his thought processes. Sam and his girl spot further landings, plan a counter campaign and eventually are able to rid the solar system of its parasites.  Exciting, even if it exacts a strong stomach."

Adaptations
The Brain Eaters, a 1958 science fiction film directed by Bruno VeSota, bore a number of similarities to Heinlein's novel. Heinlein sued the film's producers, including Executive Producer Roger Corman, for plagiarism, asking $150,000 in damages. The case was settled out of court for $5,000, which included Heinlein's stipulation that his name not be used on screen or in any way with the production. The case halted actor John Payne's intention of producing a film based on Heinlein's novel.

The theme of the novel is echoed in "The Invisibles", an episode of The Outer Limits aired in 1964, and also in "Operation -- Annihilate!", the last episode of the first season of Star Trek in 1967. Similarly, in the story line begun in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Coming of Age" and completed in "Conspiracy", aliens from a faraway sector invade the bodies of high-ranking Starfleet admirals in an attempt to compromise the command structure and spearhead an invasion of Earth.

The novel was adapted, with some plot and character changes, into the 1994 film of the same name.

Influence
The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (1954) takes up a similar premise of extraterrestrials taking over the bodies of humans. Also in the plot of the 1956 What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown—as in that of Puppet Masters—police and vigilantes ruthlessly shoot down anyone suspected of being controlled by the book's invaders from space.

Kenneth Von Gunden's novel Star Spawn takes up the basic premise of The Puppet Masters and transfers it to a Medieval setting. Extraterrestrial parasites able to take over the bodies of humans and control them invade Medieval England and embark on conquering it, castle by castle—and are eventually foiled by the highly resourceful Friar Gregory and his friend Sir Morrough the Knight.

N. K. Jemisin's short story "Walking Awake," included in her short story collection How Long 'til Black Future Month?, is a response to Heinlein's novel. The story follows Sadie, a caregiver who is complicit in a system that raises human hosts for alien parasitic beings (beings we later learn are not aliens, but were created by humanity in the distant past).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: The Puppet Masters


text:
Cad (disambiguation)

CAD is a commonly used acronym for computer-aided design.

CAD or Cad may also refer to:

Biology and medicine

 * CAD (gene), an enzyme-encoding gene
 * Caspase-activated DNase, a protein encoded by the DFFB gene in humans
 * Coronary artery disease, a group of cardiovascular diseases
 * Cold agglutinin disease, an autoimmune disease that makes the suffering predisposed to autoimmune hemolytic anemia
 * Computer-aided diagnosis, software for assisting physicians in the interpretation of medical images

Chemistry

 * Charged aerosol detector, used to measure the amount of chemicals in a sample
 * Collisionally activated dissociation, a technique in mass spectrometry

Economics

 * Canadian dollar, by currency code CAD
 * Capital Adequacy Directives CAD1 and CAD2, EU directives on capital requirements

Science and technology

 * Cold-air damming, a meteorological phenomenon
 * Computer-aided dispatch, software used to dispatch and track vehicles or personnel
 * Control-alt-delete

Transportation

 * CAD (TransMilenio), a mass-transit station in Bogotá, Colombia
 * Center axle disconnect, a type of automotive drivetrain
 * Civil Aviation Department (Hong Kong), also called CAD
 * CAD, the IATA code for Wexford County Airport in Michigan, United States
 * CAD, the station code for Cadoxton railway station in Wales

Other uses

 * Cad (character), a man who is aware of gentlemanly codes, but does not live up to them
 * Cad Coles (1886–1942), American baseball player
 * Cad (river), a river in Romania
 * Cad Bane, a character in the Star Wars franchise
 * Cad Brook, a tributary of the River Isle in Britain
 * Central Ammunition Depot (disambiguation), several depots nicknamed "CAD"
 * Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a project to compile a dictionary of the Akkadian language
 * Cylindrical algebraic decomposition, a notion and an algorithm in computer algebra and real algebraic geometry
 * cad, the ISO 639 code for the Caddo language of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma
 * CAD, abbreviation for the American Ctrl+Alt+Del (webcomic)
 * Civil Affairs Division, of the US Army
 * cad., caddesi in Turkish

title: Cad (disambiguation)


text:
Talk:Sixth Column

POV
This article needs NPOV revision - at the moment, there is a strong element of defending the book against charges of racism The Anome

From the article:

 * However, any hatred directed at the invaders seems to be a response to their activities rather than their race. For example, they crushed an abortive rebellion by killing 150,000 American civilians as punishment. Also, in the end, Major Ardmore permits the invaders all to return to their home overseas without retribution -- hardly the act of a racist. It's more likely that the Pan-Asians are the racists, based on their justification of enslaving subject nations of their empire.

This is an argument defending characters in a book against racism - not sure how this plays in the NPOV stakes.

I (clarka) pulled this paragraph because it's untrue. Heinlein did his homework on Asiatic cultures and pulled together strong common themes.

 * Although the Panasian invaders are specified in the novel as not being Japanese, some of their characteristics are bound to provoke just such an association, particularly to readers in the World War II era. The book emphasizes the idea of "face" among the colonial forces and their resort to "honorable suicide" after losing face; the use of brush writing; the elimination of the written native language in the occupied territory, as Japan did when it colonized Korea from 1910-1945; and so on.

Date of publication
The Robert A. Heinlein article claims the publication date of this novel is 1949, however this article says 1948. Obviously these two references need to be consistified by someone who knows. -- Ellmist

 * My paperback copy says: "Copyright © 1949 by Robert A. Heinlein. Reprinted from Astounding Science Fiction, © 1941 by Street and Smith Publications Inc." --Brion 06:06 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

 * I think it was originally published as a serial and then later collected into a novel and have added this info to the page. —Lowellian (talk) 11:40, Jan 10, 2005 (UTC)

 * There is no way this could have been written in 1941 if it began serialization in January 1941. I have changed "written" to "serialized" in the "Portrayal of racism" section. 173.61.139.203 (talk) 05:22, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Fifth Column
Is the title an allusion to Fifth Column (disambiguation)?

Yes, it is such an allusion. The idea is of these characters as a response to them, I think.

 * I haven't read the book for many years, but if my memory's right, there's a passage early in the book explaining that a fifth column consists of enemy agents working against the invaded nation while this is an organization of patriots working to overthrow the invaders, making them a sixth column not a fifth. JDZeff (talk) 18:10, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

I know of an off-site review of this page at http://srehn.com/books/rh_sixthcolumn.html but I feel it would be dishonest for me to link to it because it's on my site.

If anybody else feels it's appropriate to put that link there, do so, but I won't.

 * Self-published reviews like that generally aren't linked from Wikipedia. If you ever get it published somewhere besides your own web site, feel free to bring it up again. IPSOS (talk) 04:09, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Racist Text Edits?
I don't have access to my copies of the book, but I've been discussing it with friends, and I suspect that some of the most racist text may have been removed from later editions (just as later editions of The Story of Doctor Dolittle are universally expurgated).

Specifically, after Japanese-American Frank Mitsui is coagulated to death while saving the heroes from the mad Calhoun, one of them says as a tribute: "He may have been a yellow man, but he was white inside".

That line is apparently missing from later editions. I realize that this is original research, and therefore shouldn't be added to the main article, but it's a point that I thought deserves some future examination.

It also has always struck me as an (unintentionally?) macabre line, since the coagulated Mitsui was (in my recollection) compared to a hard-boiled egg - which is, of course, white inside (albeit with a yellow center). PMaranci 14:54, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

 * But any future examination will need references, so someone would need to find an original edition. — Val42 04:09, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

 * Actually, wouldn't looking it up in the original edition be considered original research? To discuss a work of art, wouldn't we need to reference secondary sources instead of the work itself? Applejuicefool (talk) 20:31, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

 * Seeing if the line is in the original but not in subsequent editions would be something that anyone could do. I don't think that this would be original research. — Val42 (talk) 05:53, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I have a paperback copy from 1949 that does not include that line. 184.250.17.216 (talk) 01:24, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

 * Cuts if any would have been made to the original Astounding serial (1941). Usually though the book version is an expansion of the serial, and/or restoration of text cut for length in the magazine. In a country invaded by Asians, to not have common racial epithets would be absurd, despite how they appear now. 202.81.249.14 (talk) 08:20, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Watchmen link?
There is a scene in the Watchmen movie (and quite possibly the graphic novel, I haven't read that yet so perhaps someone else could comment) which reminds me strongly of a scene in this novel.

The scene that made me wonder is the one wherein a giant-sized Doctor Manhattan is walking through rice paddies in Vietnam exploding bad guys with the power of his mind. In the book, suppression of the surface tension in the cells of bad guys' bodies makes the cells' internal pressure cause them to explode. This is used in conjunction with holograms of a giant, heroic figure to strike terror into the hearts of the enemy... who are Pan-Asian.

The similarities are striking enough to make me wonder. Is this just my imagination?

Racism re-edit
I took out everything dealing with suppositions of racism or not hinging on book references; that is OR. Having just read the book, the later "race-base" comes from adjusting to resonating frequencies of hemoglobin (because every race has its own), but there was no claim made as to minorities, etc., initially - the Ledbetter effect also spared the mice and rats because it was oscillating across the "human" spectrum. Mitsui's wife, by the way, could very well have been Mexican (it being California), because the book says "brown children", not "black" as the article here states. There's very little in the way of race explicitly stated other than that the PanAsians are basically within their racial stereotypes, but are not Chinese or Japanese.

My point here is not whether something differs in relation to a particular edition, or what the text says, but more the fact that this is a story, and that presuming author intention through a work of fiction when the author has not indicated that intent (New Criticism, anyone?) is very definitely OR and not appropriate for an encyclopedic article (synthesis, speculation, and primary source are all involved - pick one). Thus, I have removed everything cited from the book in the racism section and any points depending on it. MSJapan (talk) 21:01, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Jack London connection?
Maybe the original inspiration for the ethnic bio-weapon came from the 1910 Jack London short story The Unparalleled Invasion The_Unparalleled_Invasion where the Western Powers eradicate China with biological weapons.

Leridan (talk) 09:33, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

 * Unlikely.
 * http://books.google.com/books?id=IxafmqhrjMEC&lpg=PA98&dq=sixth%20column%201940%20heinlein&pg=PA98#v=onepage&q=sixth%20column%201940%20heinlein&f=false
 * 173.61.139.203 (talk) 05:29, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
 * 173.61.139.203 (talk) 05:29, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Elephant in the room?
In all the discussion concerning racism, there is one topic conspicuous by its absence - from both the book and the discussion. Where is the "black" or African-American element of the American population? The book seems to have two ethnic elements - White and Asian (Panasian or Asian American - Mitsui & family). The entire scientific basis of weaponry as per the book is based on differentiating between whites and Asians. The history as used for background refers to actual realpolitik between China, the Soviets and India leading to war with the United States. Realpolitik would also need to account for any change in the makeup of the United States - specifically why the United States is now all white with some Asians who are being eliminated by the Panasians. In the final war episodes, the troops are told to shoot anything that moves - they can't hurt a white man, but it is death to all Asians. That being the case, it is odd that there is no mention anywhere in the book of the African-American population of the United States - it is as if they do not exist. And that, to my mind, is the real issue of racism in the book - the elephant in the room no-one mentions. Ptilinopus (talk) 23:25, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

"unpublishable"
The word "unpublishable" was used twice in the article. I changed the first instance to "unpublished" but left the second -- BUT would ask: WHO says it was "unpublishable"? Seems to me that this is a POV word -- shouldn't it be sourced? If it was Heinlein, himself, say, writing about it in one of his commentaries somewhere, shouldn't that be noted? Hayford Peirce (talk) 18:16, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Second meaning (political)
Aleksandr Dugin describes or better said defines the general political meaning of the 6th column: "the fifth column which just pretends to be something different" (29 April 2014). See: Aleksandr_Dugin So, shouldn't there be another article about this or an additional chapter in this article? Mirriam shares this definition: 6th Column  Manorainjan  08:06, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Sixth Column


text:
Henry V (play)

Henry V is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written near 1599. It tells the story of King Henry V of England, focusing on events immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years' War. In the First Quarto text, it was titled The Cronicle History of Henry the fift, and The Life of Henry the Fifth in the First Folio text.

The play is the final part of a tetralogy, preceded by Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2. The original audiences would thus have already been familiar with the title character, who was depicted in the Henry IV plays as a wild, undisciplined young man. In Henry V, the young prince has matured. He embarks on an expedition to France and, his army greatly outnumbered, defeats the French at Agincourt.

Characters

 * Chorus
 * The English
 * King Henry V
 * Duke of Gloucester – Henry's brother
 * Duke of Bedford – Henry's brother
 * Duke of Clarence – Henry's brother
 * Duke of Exeter – Henry's uncle
 * Duke of York – Henry's cousin
 * Earl of Salisbury
 * Earl of Westmorland
 * Earl of Warwick
 * Sir Thomas Erpingham
 * Capt. Gower – an Englishman
 * Capt. Fluellen – a Welshman
 * Capt. Macmorris – an Irishman
 * Capt. Jamy – a Scot
 * John Bates, Alexander Court and Michael Williams – soldiers
 * Herald
 * Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph – soldiers, former followers of Sir John Falstaff
 * Boy – formerly Sir John Falstaff's page
 * Mistress Quickly – hostess of the Boar's Head tavern, and Pistol's wife
 * Archbishop of Canterbury
 * Bishop of Ely
 * The traitors
 * Earl of Cambridge – Henry's cousin
 * Lord Scrope
 * Sir Thomas Grey

 * The French
 * King of France
 * Queen Isabel
 * Louis, Duke of Guyenne, the dauphin – their son and the Dauphin of France
 * Katharine – their daughter
 * Alice – Katharine's lady-in-waiting
 * Constable of France
 * Duke of Bourbon / Duke of Brittany (depending on the edition of the play)
 * Duke of Orléans
 * Duke of Berry
 * Duke of Burgundy
 * Lord Rambures
 * Lord Grandpré
 * Monsieur le Fer – French soldier
 * Montjoy – French herald
 * Governor of Harfleur
 * French Ambassadors
 * Soldiers, servants, attendants, and lords

Synopsis
The play begins with a Prologue, in which the Chorus (a lone speaker addressing the audience) apologizes for the limitations of the theatre, wishing for "a Muse of fire", with real princes and a kingdom for a stage, to do justice to King Henry's story. Then, says the Chorus, King Henry would "[a]ssume the port [bearing] of Mars". The Chorus encourages the audience to use their "imaginary forces" to overcome the limitations of the stage: "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts ... turning the accomplishment of many years / Into an hour-glass".

In Henry V, the first act deals largely with the king and his decision to invade France, persuaded that through ancestry, he is the rightful heir to the French throne. The French Dauphin, son of King Charles VI, answers Henry's claims with a condescending and insulting gift of tennis balls, "as matching to his youth and vanity".

The Chorus reappears at the beginning of each act to advance the story. At the beginning of Act II, he describes the country's dedication to the war effort: "Now all the youth of England are on fire... They sell the pasture now to buy the horse, / Following the mirror of all Christian kings ...." Act II includes a plot by the Earl of Cambridge and two comrades to assassinate Henry at Southampton. Henry's clever uncovering of the plot and his ruthless treatment of the conspirators show that he has changed from the earlier plays in which he appeared.

In Act III Henry and his troops besiege the French port of Harfleur after crossing the English Channel. The Chorus appears again: "Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy/And leave your England, as dead midnight still". The French king, says the Chorus, "doth offer him / Katharine his daughter, and with her, to dowry, / Some petty and unprofitable dukedoms." Henry is not satisfied.

At the siege of Harfleur, the English are beaten back at first, but Henry urges them on with one of Shakespeare's best-known speeches. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; / Or close the wall up with our English dead...." After a bloody siege, the English take Harfleur, but Henry's forces are so depleted that he decides not to go on to Paris. Instead, he decides to move up the coast to Calais. The French assemble a powerful army and pursue him.

They surround him near the small town of Agincourt, and in Act IV, the night before the battle, knowing he is outnumbered, Henry wanders around the English camp in disguise, trying to comfort his soldiers and determine what they really think of him. He agonizes about the moral burden of being king, asking God to "steel my soldiers' hearts". Daylight comes, and Henry rallies his nobles with the famous St Crispin's Day Speech (Act IV Scene iii 18–67): "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers". The French herald Montjoy returns to ask if Henry will surrender and avoid certain defeat, and ransom his men's survival; Henry bids him "bear my former answer back", saying the French will get no ransom from him "but these my joints".

Shakespeare does not describe the battle in the play. Though the French in one scene complain that "Tout est perdu", the outcome is not clear to Henry, until Montjoy tells him the "day is yours'". The battle turns out to be a lop-sided victory: the French suffer 10,000 casualties; the English lose a Duke, an Earl, a knight, a squire, and "of all other, but five and twenty." In Laurence Olivier's film of the play, Henry V (1944), this line is "of all other men, but five and twenty score" (historians believe the English toll was approximately 600). "O God, thy arm was here," says Henry.

Act V comes several years later, as the English and French negotiate the Treaty of Troyes, and Henry tries to woo the French princess, Katharine. Neither speaks the other's language well, but the humour of their mistakes actually helps achieve his aim. The scene ends with the French king adopting Henry as heir to the French throne, and the prayer of the French queen "that English may as French, French Englishmen, receive each other, God speak this Amen."

The play concludes with a final appearance of the Chorus who foreshadows the tumultuous reign of Henry's son Henry VI of England, "whose state so many had the managing, that they lost France, and made his England bleed, which oft our stage hath shown". Shakespeare had previously brought this tale to the stage in a trilogy of plays: Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, and Henry VI Part 3.

As in many of Shakespeare's history and tragedy plays, a number of minor comic characters appear, contrasting with and sometimes commenting on the main plot. In this case, they are mostly common soldiers in Henry's army, and they include Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph from the Henry IV plays. In a grim note, Bardolph is executed for looting. The army also includes a Scot, an Irishman, and an Englishman, and Fluellen, a comically stereotyped Welsh soldier. The play also deals briefly with the death of Sir John Falstaff, Henry's estranged friend from the Henry IV plays, whom Henry had rejected at the end of Henry IV, Part 2.

Date and text
On the basis of an apparent allusion to the Earl of Essex's mission to quell Tyrone's Rebellion, the play is thought to date from early 1599. The Chronicle History of Henry the fifth was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 14 August 1600 by the bookseller Thomas Pavier; the first quarto was published before the end of the year—though by Thomas Millington and John Busby rather than Pavier. Thomas Creede did the printing.

Q1 of Henry V is a "bad quarto", a shortened version of the play that might be an infringing copy or reported text. A second quarto, a reprint of Q1, was published in 1602 by Pavier; another reprint was issued as Q3 in 1619, with a false date of 1608—part of William Jaggard's False Folio. The superior text was first printed in the First Folio in 1623.

Views on warfare

Readers and audiences have interpreted the play's attitude to warfare in several different ways. On the one hand, it seems to celebrate Henry's invasion of France and military prowess. Alternatively, it can be read as a commentary on the moral and personal cost of war. Gathered, Shakespeare presents warfare in all its complexity.

The American critic Norman Rabkin described the play as a picture with two simultaneous meanings. Rabkin argues that the play never settles on one viewpoint towards warfare, Henry himself switching his style of speech constantly, talking of "rape and pillage" during Harfleur, but of patriotic glory in his St Crispin's Day Speech.

Some scholars have connected the nationalistic glorification of warfare with contemporary military ventures in Spain and Ireland. The Chorus directly refers to the looked-for military triumphs of the Earl of Essex, in the fifth act. Henry V himself is sometimes seen as an ambivalent representation of the stage machiavel, combining apparent sincerity with a willingness to use deceit and force to attain his ends.

Other commentators see the play as looking critically at the reason for Henry's violent cause. The noble words of the Chorus and Henry are consistently undermined by the actions of Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym. Pistol talks in a bombastic blank verse that seems to parody Henry's own style of speech. Pistol and his friends, thus, show up the actions of their rulers. Indeed, the presence of the Eastcheap characters from Henry IV has been said to emphasise the element of adventurer in Henry's character as monarch.

The play's ambiguity has led to diverse interpretations in performance. Laurence Olivier's 1944 film, made during the Second World War, emphasises the patriotic side, ignoring the fact that the enemy of the play, the French, were in fact allies in that conflict, while Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film stresses the horrors of war. A 2003 Royal National Theatre production featured Henry as a modern war general, ridiculing the Iraq invasion.

In recent years, there has been scholarly debate about whether or not Henry V can be labeled a war criminal. Some denounce the question as anachronistic, arguing that contemporary legal terminology cannot be applied to historical events or figures like those depicted in the play. However, other scholars have supported the proposed viewpoint. For instance, Christopher N. Warren looks to Alberico Gentili's De armis Romanis, along with Henry V itself, to show how early modern thinkers (including Shakespeare) were themselves using juridical approaches to engage with the past. As a result, Warren argues, the question of whether Henry V was a war criminal is not only legitimate, but also "historically appropriate".

In a rhetorical display intended to intimidate the Governor of Harfleur into surrendering the city to the English, Henry denies personal responsibility for his soldiers' actions if battle is resumed – "What rein can hold licentious wickedness / When down the hill he holds his fierce career?" – and describes in graphic detail the violence they will do to the townsfolk if his demands are not met:

The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,

And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,

In liberty of bloody hand shall range

With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass

Your fresh, fair virgins and your flowering infants.

 * —Act III, Scene iii.

On the other hand, Henry is portrayed as a great leader, as he keeps his temper when insulted: "we are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us". He also admits to his past mistakes: "did give ourselves to barbarous licence" and is shown to have great confidence: "I will rise there with so full a glory that I will dazzle all the eyes of France".

A mock trial of for the crimes associated with the legality of the invasion and the slaughter of prisoners was held in Washington, DC in March 2010, drawing from both historical record and Shakespeare's play. Titled The Supreme Court of the Amalgamated Kingdom of England and France, participating judges were Justices Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The outcome was originally to be determined by an audience vote, but due to a draw, it came down to a judges' decision. The court was divided on Henry's justification for war, but unanimously found him guilty on the killing of the prisoners after applying "the evolving standards of the maturing society". Previously, the fictional Global War Crimes Tribunal ruled that Henry's war was legal, no noncombatant was killed unlawfully, and Henry bore no criminal responsibility for the death of the POWs. The fictional French Civil Liberties Union, who had instigated the tribunal, then attempted to sue in civil court. The judge concluded that he was bound by the GWCT's conclusions of law and also ruled in favour of the English. The Court of Appeals affirmed without opinion, thus leaving the matter for the Supreme Court's determination.

French language
Very brief snippets of Henry V are written originally in the French language; Act 5, Scene 2 is an example.

Performance history

The Chorus refers to Essex's 1599 campaign in Ireland without any sense that it would end in disaster. The campaign began in late March and was scuttled by late June, strongly suggesting that the play was first performed during that three-month period.

A tradition, impossible to verify, holds that Henry V was the first play performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599—the Globe would have been the "wooden O" mentioned in the Prologue—but Shapiro argues that the Chamberlain's Men were still at The Curtain when the work was first performed, and that Shakespeare himself probably acted the Chorus. In 1600, the first printed text states that the play had been played "sundry times". The earliest performance for which an exact date is known, however, occurred on 7 January 1605, at Court at Whitehall Palace.

Samuel Pepys saw a Henry V in 1664, but it was written by Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, not by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's play returned to the stage in 1723, in an adaptation by Aaron Hill.

The longest-running production of the play in Broadway history was the staging starring Richard Mansfield in 1900 which ran for 54 performances. Other notable stage performances of Henry V include Charles Kean (1859), Charles Alexander Calvert (1872), and Walter Hampden (1928).

Major revivals in London during the 20th and 21st centuries include:

 * 1900 Lyceum Theatre, Lewis Waller as Henry
 * 1914 Shaftesbury Theatre, F. R. Benson as Henry
 * 1916 His Majesty's Theatre, Martin Harvey as Henry
 * 1920 Strand Theatre, Murray Carrington as Henry
 * 1926 Old Vic Theatre, Baliol Holloway as Henry
 * 1928 Lyric, Hammersmith, Lewis Casson as Henry (Old Vic Company)
 * 1931 Old Vic Theatre, Ralph Richardson as Henry
 * 1934 Alhambra Theatre, Godfrey Tearle as Henry
 * 1936 Ring, Blackfriars, Hubert Gregg as Henry
 * 1937 Old Vic Theatre, Laurence Olivier as Henry
 * 1938 Drury Lane Theatre, Ivor Novello as Henry
 * 1951 Old Vic Theatre, Alec Clunes as Henry
 * 1955 Old Vic Theatre, Richard Burton as Henry
 * 1956 Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Christopher Plummer as Henry, with William Shatner as his understudy who substituted for him in one performance
 * 1960 Mermaid Theatre, William Peacock as Henry
 * 1960 Old Vic Theatre, Donald Houston as Henry
 * 1965 Aldwych Theatre, Ian Holm as Henry (Royal Shakespeare Company)
 * 1972 Aldwych Theatre, Timothy Dalton as Henry (Prospect Theatre Company), also in 1974 in Roundhouse Theatre
 * 1976 Aldwych Theatre, Alan Howard as Henry (Royal Shakespeare Company)
 * 1985 Barbican Theatre, Kenneth Branagh as Henry (Royal Shakespeare Company)
 * 2003 Royal National Theatre, Adrian Lester as Henry
 * 2013 Noël Coward Theatre, Jude Law as Henry (Michael Grandage Company)
 * 2015 RSC and The Barbican, Alex Hassell as Henry
 * 2022 Donmar Warehouse, Kit Harington as Henry

In the Shakespeare's Globe's 2012 Globe to Globe festival, Henry V was the UK entry, one of 37 and the only one performed in spoken English. Jamie Parker performed the role of Henry.

On British television, the play has been performed as: In 2017, the Pop-up Globe, the world's first temporary replica of the second Globe Theatre, based in Auckland, New Zealand, performed 34 Henry V shows. London-trained Australian actor Chris Huntly-Turner took on the role of Henry, Irish actor Michael Mahony as Chorus, and UK–New Zealand actor Edward Newborn as Pistol/King of France.
 * 1951 Clement McCallin as Henry, Marius Goring as Chorus, Willoughby Gray as Pistol
 * 1953 Colin George as Henry, Toby Robertson as Chorus, Frank Windsor as Pistol
 * 1957 John Neville as Henry, Bernard Hepton as Chorus, Geoffrey Bayldon as Pistol
 * 1960 Robert Hardy as Henry, William Squire as Chorus, George A. Cooper as Pistol
 * 1979 David Gwillim as Henry, Alec McCowen as Chorus, Bryan Pringle as Pistol, part of the BBC Television Shakespeare series
 * 2012 Tom Hiddleston as Henry, John Hurt as Chorus, Paul Ritter as Pistol, part of The Hollow Crown TV series.

Film
Three major film adaptations have been made. The first, Henry V (1944), directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, is a colourful and highly stylised version which begins in the Globe Theatre and then gradually shifts to a realistic evocation of the Battle of Agincourt. Olivier's film was made during the Second World War and was intended as a patriotic rallying cry at the time of the invasion of Normandy.

The second major film, Henry V (1989), directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, attempts to give a more realistic evocation of the period, and lays more emphasis on the horrors of war. It features a mud-spattered and gruesome Battle of Agincourt.

The third major film, The King (2019), starring Timothée Chalamet as Henry V, was adapted from Shakespeare's plays Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, and Henry V.

Television
In 2012, the BBC commissioned a television adaptation of the play as part of The Hollow Crown series. It was part of a tetralogy that televised the entirety of Shakespeare's Henriad. Produced by Sam Mendes and directed by Thea Sharrock, it starred Tom Hiddleston as Henry V, who had played Prince Hal in The Hollow Crown's adaptations of Henry IV, Part I and Henry IV, Part II. The BBC scheduled the screening of Shakespeare's history plays as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, a celebration of British culture coinciding with the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Dance
In 2004, post-modern choreographer David Gordon created a dance-theatre version of the play called Dancing Henry Five, which mixed William Walton's music written for the Olivier film, recorded speeches from the film itself and by Christopher Plummer, and commentary written by Gordon. The piece premiered at Danspace Project in New York, where it was compared favorably to a production of Henry IV (parts 1 and 2) at Lincoln Center. It has been revived three times—in 2005, 2007, and 2011—playing cities across the United States, and received a National Endowment for the Arts American Masterpieces in Dance Award.

Music
Suite from Henry V is a 1963 orchestral arrangement of music that composer William Walton wrote for the 1944 Olivier film. The arrangement is by Muir Mathieson, and is in five movements.

Henry V – A Shakespeare Scenario is a 50-minute work for narrator, SATB chorus, boys' choir (optional), and full orchestra. The musical content is taken from Walton's score for the Olivier film, edited by David Lloyd-Jones and arranged by Christopher Palmer. It was first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London, in May 1990. Performers for this premiere were Christopher Plummer (narrator), the Academy Chorus, Choristers of Westminster Cathedral, and Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The conductor was Sir Neville Marriner. A CD of the work with these performers was released by Chandos in 1990.

O For a Muse of Fire is a symphonic overture for full orchestra and vocal soloist, written by Darryl Kubian. The work is 12 minutes long, and was premiered by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in March 2015. The work is scored for full orchestra, with vocal soloist. The vocal part incorporates selected lines from the text, and the vocal range is adaptable to different voice types. The soloist for the premiere performances with the New Jersey Symphony was former October Project lead singer (and former Sony Classical artist) Mary Fahl.

title: Henry V (play)


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Esperanto library

The following Esperanto libraries and collections of works in the Esperanto language are worthy of note:
 * The Montagu Butler Library of Esperanto materials, maintained by the Esperanto Association of Britain. This holds some 12,500 books as well as a documentary archive, a photo archive, audio-visual materials and various artefacts. An online catalogue is under construction.
 * The Austrian National Library in Vienna, holds the world's largest collection of research materials on Esperanto and planned languages. It includes an International Esperanto Museum with 35,000 volumes, 3,000 museum objects, 5,000 autographs and manuscripts, 22,000 photos, 1,200 posters and 40,000 flyers. In 1995, a project was started to put the catalog online. The database, known as Trovanto, can be searched from the website of the Austrian National Library.
 * The Universala Esperanto-Asocio, which maintains the Hector Hodler Library in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The Hodler collection contains around 20,000 books and a vast collection of periodicals.
 * The Center for Documentation and Exploration of the International Language, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, founded in 1967. It is part of the City Library and contains more than 20,000 bibliographical units.
 * The International Museum of Peace and Solidarity in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, founded in 1986 and handled by the International Friendship Club. The museum's goal is to advance peace and world consciousness.  The museum exhibits around 20,000 books, pieces of art, and memorabilia from 100 countries.
 * The Spanish Esperanto Museum, in San Pablo de Ordal, Spain, which began in 1963 when Mr. L. M. Hernandez Yzal began systematically collecting Esperanto publications. It grew into a museum which opened in 1968.  In 1993, the computer catalog listed 8400 books and 12,315 yearly bound books of 2485 periodicals.
 * The German Esperanto Library, in Aalen, Germany, which has a collection of more than 11,000 pieces.
 * The Cesar Vanbiervliet Foundation, a section of the City Public Library of Kortrijk, Belgium. The Foundation has a legally preserved collection of 10,000 books and periodicals.
 * The Fajszi Esperanto Collection in Budapest, Hungary, another collection that began with the work of one person, Károly Fajszi, who started collecting in the 1970s. In 1991, a catalog of the collection was published which was 542 pages.
 * The National Esperanto Library and Archive in Massa, Italy, founded in 1972 as the library of the Italian Esperanto Federation. In 1994, the 7250 volume collection was made part of the National Archive of Massa and opened to the public.
 * The National Esperanto Museum in Gray, France. The museum is a public archive with a permanent Esperanto exhibition.
 * The George Alan Connor Esperanto Collection at the University of Oregon includes many titles, catalogued in its bibliographic guide, Catalog of the George Alan Connor Esperanto Collection (1978).
 * The University of South Florida-Tampa Special Collections Department also houses a large collection of early Esperantist publications, including the first Esperanto edition of Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (1926) and early publications of the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (SAT).
 * The Allan C. Boschen Esperanto Collection, established in 2015 at the W.E.B. Du Bois Special Collections and University Archives, at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, began with 18 linear feet of books and publications and is actively soliciting contributions.

title: Esperanto library