Limekiller!

A brochure printed by what was still graciously named The Visitors’ Bureau contains the lines: “British Hidalgo’s numerous and picturesque lagoons, colorful coral reefs, sand banks and beaches together with clear blue skies and tropical vegetation, combine to provide this lovely little country a scenic beauty which, together with a mild climate and the friendly welcome of its people, forms the basis of its tourist industry. ”

This is, in fact, or, at any rate, very often in fact, a True Relation: although perhaps industry is too strong a word, and despite the Hotels Encouragement Act, Conrad Hilton somehow lacked the courage. Still, it is, in so many ways, a “lovely little country,” that one can perhaps understand its being coveted by other and rather larger countries.

Not so many years ago, it is well-known, the Director of Correspondence in the Republic of Hidalgo struck yet another blow for the liberation of what he and his countrymen still (after three hundred years) call Hidalgo Occupado, or Hidalgo Ingles: letters addressed to Inglaterra, he ruled, would be no more delivered. not, at least, until the Occupied Districts, falsely called “English,” were returned to their rightful allegiance, videlicet, the Republic of Hidalgo. This was front-page news for one full day throughout Centroamerica y Darien, with the implication of an isolated England supinely treating for a pax hispanica. (The ruling is, so far as anyone knows, technically still in effect; and the few letters which actually travel between Ciudad Hidalgo and, say, Birhmagnan, Mahcesthre, Liberpiil, and Londres — these being, it is also well- known, the only inhabited places in that distant and ice-bound Island, with its odd-odd names — are required to disguise their destination under the novel sobriquet of Gran Bretannia.) — A blow! Unquestionably a blow. One which could certainly not fail of effect, and of immediate effect at that time.

And yet. somehow. somehow. British Hidalgo, for reasons inexplicable (or, anyway, inexplicable in Centroamerica y Darien), failed to become Republican, Roman Catholic, and Mestizo-Ladino; and remained, as long it had been, Autonomously Monarchial, Nominally Protestant, and Predominantly Black. And, also, possessed of a memory like a wind of long fetch: not a single schoolchild cannot tell you how, when Don Diego Bustamente y Bobadilla, Sub-Admiral of the Spanish Main, came crawling down the Crawfish Channel with his armada of three shallow-draft galleys, intent on lowering the Unionjack, establishing the Inquisition, and raising both the Spanish Ensign and the tax on nutmeg — the Royal Navy being elsewhere at the time, either fighting the French for Canada or perhaps it was the Swedes for Spitzbergen — the Baymen both Black and White hastily mounted logs on cartwheels, stained them cannon-black with tar, and vigorously rolled up barrels of, presumably, gunpowder (actually: rum); and thronged threateningly around with lighted matchrope as they sighted their pseudo-weaponry. Don Diego and his three galleys prudently crawled back.

“And him de same mon who defeat de Torks at Toronto! Ah, but de Sponiard is ah fool, mon! De Sponiard is ah fool!"

Limekiller had once earnestly urged that the site of Don Diego’s victory over the Turks must have been Lepanto -

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,

Don John of Austria is going to the war.

Stiffflags straining in the night-blasts cold,

In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold…"

— as a Canadian he could hardly do less — but found that the dates did not fit, and so gave up. Be that as it may.