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Ghosts and Pirates

Things about the history of India, I know very little about. Read this in The Making of Asian America

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Manila became a center of transpacific slave trading. Facilitated by the Manila galleon trade, Asians constituted another pool of slave labor in New Spain, albeit much smaller than the African population. Colonial merchants, priests, and military and civil officials involved in the trade all profited handsomely. In 1604, Father Pedro Chirino observed that slaves from India, Malacca, and Maluco fetched the highest prices, because “the men are industrious and obliging, and many are good musicians; the women excellent seamstresses, cooks, and preparers of conserves, and are neat and clean in service.”34 An estimated 6,000 entered the colony each decade during the seventeenth century.

Remembered my grandmother telling me stories about pirates in the Bay of Bengal in the same vein as ghost stories. The idea was to entertain the child and instill some fear about not obeying elders who knew better - wandering away, talking to strangers and such always ended with some bad actors getting in the mix and the kid ending up in a pot of boiling water or much worse. She also told stories about my uncles when they were growing up - both were a lot of trouble and their escapades were no less exciting to me than those involving pirates or ghosts. My childhood memories are a blur of these stories making it hard to separate fact from fiction. That some of these stories could be historically accurate would have never crossed my mind.  


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