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merchant ship had or could carry cannon. A rag-tag fleet sailed to intercept, taking with them a
number of very old ships. The Spanish fleet dropped anchor for the night at Calais – bad mistake! The
very old ships had been packed with barrels of tar. The ships were set alight and sailed into the
Spanish fleet, causing some to set on fire and the rest to scatter.
They attempted to re-group further north but the Dutch then drove
them off the coast and, fortuitously, a major storm further scattered
them. They sailed north, around the top of Scotland and west of
Ireland to try to get home. Some were sunk by the English navy,
quite a number ran aground (there are dark haired people in
Ireland today who trace their ancestry to these sailors) and less
than 80 got back to Spain.

The Hudson Bay Company is still a big company but in it’s heyday
it was huge. Wikipedia says: After incorporation by English royal
charter in 1670, the company functioned as the de facto
government in parts of North America for nearly 200 years until the
HBC sold the land it owned (known as Rupert's Land) to Canada in
1869. During its peak, the company controlled the fur trade
throughout much of the English and later British-controlled North
America. By the mid-19th century, the company evolved into a
mercantile business selling a wide variety of products from furs to
fine homeware in a small number of sales shops (as opposed to trading posts) across Canada. These
shops were the first step towards the department stores the company owns today. Most people
thought of this as a Canadian company but is wasn’t until 1970, the 300th anniversary of the founding,
that it transferred to Canada. Nonsuch a ketch, sailed into Hudson Bay in 1668-1669, the first trading
voyage for what was to become the Hudson's Bay Company.

The rum trade was extremely
important in centuries past. Most
rum was not bottled where the
sugar cane was grown, the big
bottling areas being New England,
Canada, London and France. This
has of course changed considerably
in this century and the latter half of
the last.

Ron Bucanero is from Costa Rica,
Mainstay from South Africa, Carioca

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