Whenever I am down with a stomach bug, as is rarely the case in general, but often the case after I travel (have I traveled? I have traveled -- 3,400 miles of finest North America, la Republica del Norte), I reflect on those poor unfortunate young men, like me of the County of Plymouth, in Massachusetts, in Newe-England, who sailed with doom'd Admiral Vernon in his expedition against Cartagena of the Indies, only to die before its walls in festering lowland fever-pits, amid morasses of dysentery, and clouds of flies.... What strangeness and folly, to think a northern people could survive in such places!..... And yet, did not northern men, twenty-two years later, capture Havana, and sound the death-knell of Spanish hegemony among its oldest colonies -- expose the very rot and weakness that infested the Most Catholic Monarchy in its empire over the seas? History is strange; folly sometimes works.
But not most of the time.
