Читать книгу Independence - Alasdair Gray - Страница 10

2: The Naming of Britain

In three hundred and thirty BC

when ships always tried to sail within sight of land

at the west exit from Earth’s middle sea

don’t go through was carved. That small strait led

to the Atlantic that keeps moving its bed,

drowning beaches twice between noon and noon

and twice uncovering them, pulled by the moon.

It was hard to sail by Atlantic coasts

without splitting keel on reef or running aground

but possible, as traders from Carthage found

who sailed out with bolts of cloth, returned with tin,

carved don’t go through to keep competitors in

and stationed warships to make their command obeyed.

The galley of Pytheas slipped through that blockade.

He was a Greek when Greece had markets

on every Mediterranean shore,

and learned from neighbour-nations more techniques

than discussed in one language before.

Greeks thought all knowledge theirs to explore,

enlarge and record for their extrovert civilization,

a thought that drove Pytheas to Atlantic navigation.

His boat, moved by oars and one square sail

like those in which Vikings cruised to America,

found an archipelago. From a tribe there he took

a name for it used in a Greek geography book,

a name that Romans spelled Britannia,

but during and after the Roman occupation

Britain was never the name of a single nation.

Only Wales could claim the old British name

when Angles, Saxons, Danes and Norman French

conquered south Britain, fighting until they became

one kingdom, England, which they fought to subjugate

every adjacent state. Ireland was the first colony

of her empire over sea. She conquered Wales.

France and Scotland won free.

Scotland was free till King Jamie the Sixth got news

that he could inherit England’s crown too

if he lived there, an offer he did not refuse.

Like many Scots he went down to London town where,

Britain’s chief landlord now, he signed parliamentary acts

to make these islands one kingdom

despite contradictory facts.

England and Scotland’s clergy held

different kinds of Protestant creed –

hating Papists was the one point on which they agreed,

while Catholic Ireland constantly rebelled

against English landlords who bloodily quelled

their attempts to reject the South British yoke.

How could a Scottish king unite such folk?

King James, with the force of English arms,

evicted Catholic owners of Ulster farms,

gave their land to Protestant Scots whose immigration

diluted the Catholic Irish population.

No more (thought James) could they trouble his nation.

Such oversea meddling brought again and again

more and worse centuries of political pain.

To gain an empire whose sun never set

the English explored, traded, fought and won

mastery of seas and vast sub-continents,

helped by Scots and Irish whose parliaments

were both in the past, but left such outsiders a say

in the British Empire, though the USA,

hating taxation by London, soon broke away.

To make folk think the British Isles were one

Britain’s Postmaster General called Scotland N.B. –

North Britain – and Ireland W.B.,

until West British rebels on an Easter day

seized Dublin’s main Post Office, raised a Tricolour flag,

so that England’s first colony followed the USA

when all but six Irish counties broke away.

National empires end. Britain’s did –

Russia’s too. Commercial empires remain

promoting war with drug and weapon sales

while parliaments in Ulster, Scotland and Wales

cannot stop the London government

sending their troops to fight in distant lands

when America’s chief war-businessman commands.

Ulster Protestants may be last to gladly claim

the old British name.

Britain is still the irregular archipelago

to which Pytheas came.