The high price of middling fame

My friend Ibis is turning what she terms "Dirty Thirty" in a few days, and decided to have her birthday party in Acapulco, Mexico. I really don't know too much about what there is to do in Acapulco, so where did I look? You guessed it.

Acapulco has been a travel hub for more than a millennium. Somehow it managed to avoid being gobbled up by the Zapotec, Mixtec, and Aztec Empires, and was an independent city state until the Spanish conquered it, forever enriching the lives of the natives with smallpox and enforced catholicism, while simultaneously freeing them of their culture, language, and pesky left feet. There's a ton of stuff to do there, apparently, as long as what you like to do involves water sports or lying in the sun. I'm really hoping to do some snorkeling, and maybe find a gold peso or two from a Manila Galleon. Briefly, the Manila Galleon was the Spanish money ship that would sail from the Phillipines to Acapulco every year, laden down with gold. The Manila Galleon carried so much gold, that when Thomas Cavendish finally succeeded in capturing it for the English, it severely depressed the London gold market.

What I thought was most interesting, however, was the story of the man who actually discovered the Trade Winds that made the Manila Galleon possible, Andres de Urdaneta. The guy was an Augustinian priest, but was also somehow a captain in the Spanish army and became a famous explorer. All part and parcel, I guess, for a country and time where the preferred method of conversion was deception and torture. He was apparently the first one to consider that if the tradewinds in the Atlantic went clockwise, they might do so in the Pacific, as well. Despite have the perspicacity to come to this realization, he didn't think to provision properly, and most of his crew died en route back to California. Only Andres and Felipe de Salcedo, nephew of Andres' patron Legazpi, had enough strength to cast the anchors on reaching California. I'm sure this is because Andres and Felipe had amazingly robust aristocratic constitutions, and not because they ate and drank well while the crew starved to death. In any case, the lives of a few peasant bred sailors is a reasonable price for the immortality of being a footnote to history.

Seriously, though, can you imagine what the outcry would be if that many people died on a regular basis while exploring space? Because your chances of dying a horrible death of scurvy or beri-beri or gangrene were pretty high back then on transoceanic voyages.

As a side note, perhaps what Ibis really calls the celebration is "DiRRty Thirty". For those of you who might not be into pop music, "Dirrty" is a Christina Aguleira song, and apparently the video includes scenes of mud wrestling and stethnolagnia, which is defined as "sexual arousal from a display of muscles". If that's the case, I'm awfully excited about the mud wrestling, but am going to give the stethnolagnia a miss.