Vineyard Enigma Read Online Free PDF

desolations of the great archives of Alexandria, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlán fill me with despair and anger whenever I am reminded of them. Not many people are more loathsome in my eyes than book burners.
    No such people worked in the Edgartown library, only book lovers, one of whom smiled at me from behind her desk.
    “What brings you here on a fine afternoon like this one, J.W.? I’d have guessed you’d be off somewhere fishing.”
    “I did my fishing this morning. Now I’m in search of other game. Cecil Rhodes, to be precise.”
    “Cecil Rhodes, is it? Well, go right over there to the computer and you should be able to track him down.”
    When I was a lad, you tracked library subjects down in the card files, but nowadays card files are only a memory, so I went to the computer and found Cecil there. If the electricity failed, I thought grumpily, nobody would be able to find anything in modern libraries; not that it would make much difference, since the whole world would probably stop spinning.
    I spent an hour reading about Cecil, about the origins of Rhodesia, and about the later transformation of Rhodesia into Zambia and Zimbabwe.
    Cecil, founder of the Rhodes scholarships and dreamer of the Cape-to-Cairo railway that had never been built, hadn’t lived to see fifty, but nevertheless had managed to change the face of southern Africa for a hundred years. His success as an owner of diamond mines made all the difference.
    He had been one of those sincere racists who was convinced that Anglo-Saxons were the peak of evolution and the fulfillment of a divine master plan, and he considered it his duty to make sure of the plan’s success by extending the British Empire around the world. Part of this grand design, I noted with interest, was a scheme to recover the United States for the Crown, including, presumably, Martha’s Vineyard.
    He entered the Cape parliament; manipulated boundary commissions; bargained with local African chiefs; persuaded London to oppose German, Belgian, and Boer interests and support his own; negotiated, quarreled, amalgamated with opponents; annexed territory; fomented a revolution; conspired, schemed, survived censure; and otherwise did his best to establish “British dominion from the Cape to Cairo.”
    His success was considerable, but native revolutionary sentiments, never far beneath the surface of European colonial rule, emerged strongly throughout Africa after World War II, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century, governments organized and run by whites were, one by one, replaced by governments dominated by black Africans. Northern Rhodesia became Zambia and Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, home of Abraham Mahsimba, seeker of the Zimbabwe eagles.
    Unfortunately for Africa, its new black leaders were as corrupt and power hungry as the whites they had replaced, and newer revolutionary groups were now seeking to overthrow them in their turn.
    Everything changes, nothing changes. Rhodesia had been born out of intrigues, ambitions, schemes, double dealings, and passion, and a hundred years later Zimbabwe was being governed the same way.
    I thought about Africa’s diamond mines, gold mines, silver mines, and lead mines, about its millions of acres of rich farmland, and about the fortunes made in tourism, industry, communications, and transportation. I thought about the convolutions of African history, and about its politics, which, like the stock market, were driven in such large part by the fear and greed and ancient hatreds so well understood by Machiavelli.
    Chinatown.
    I found some material on Great Zimbabwe and read that. Like much of Africa, it had been raided, raped, and misunderstood by the unstoppable white migrations that had come north from the Cape in much the same fashion as white Europeans had poured west across America, sweeping all before them. On both continents, Stone Age and Iron Age people had no chance against gunpowder.
    I left my reading materials on a