COVE

Character Commentary: 

Frank Jermyn 

“Thank goodness!! I had been essentially useless for the past week ever since I lost my woodcut making tools in the river. Seems to be everything, according to the inventory sheet I had salvaged from my last kit prior to the incident. I thought I was just going to be stuck here, considering the mail has not come for weeks around here. The food rations are running low too. The soldiers, what’s left of them, have resorted to shooting any animal they see. However, ammunition is running low as well, so we are soon to be out of option. Some of the men have made nice with the locals and are trying to find out what they eat. I wonder what I should make first. I think I will do a cut of the army crossing the river where I lost my tools. That was a beautiful sight to behold. It also beats all of the carnage I have been witness too here recently. I don’t think we can continue on like this for very much longer. We need supplies. The fighting has been constant as well. Everywhere we turn if not the enemy it’s the locals. Our men have been thinned out severely over the course of the past month. We are soon to be at risk of capture, if the tides do not turn soon. Oh, how I wish I could see Lucy. Just to hear her voice would make all the worry in the world go away. Mr. Steele has perished from illness, so now I do not socialize as much. Hey, at least I have my tools. Now I can do what I was sent to do. Make pictures...” 

Editorial Commentary: 

Cody Taylor 

Complete and total British domination was not always the case in colonial times. Some of the efforts were futile, exemplified in the entry from Frank, and nothing more than a tragic loss of life on all accounts. An example of this, according to the South African Historical Society, can be seen in the South African Boer war where the British and the Dutch were fighting each other over a land that wasn’t theirs to begin with. Lives were lost on all sides, including the natives, to no real short term advantageable gain. The British civilians could also find themselves caught up in the fighting, sometimes with it erupting in the areas of the newly made dwellings they’ve established for themselves. The organization furthers by stating “Reports of starvation and horrible living condition come out of the concentration camps that were established by the Brits, which at one time were meant to be refugee centers.” A change in war tactics saw thousands of native civilians perish over the course of the occupation in the early parts of it in South Africa. Diseases ran rampant through them, as thousands were also killed by Typhoid, the Measels, and dysentery caused by tainted water, according to Dr. Hellen Tilley of the AMA Journal of Ethics. This is another travesty that could have been easily avoided, has the world not fought over Africa. Even Africa of itself is just a small example of the millions of lives colonialism has disrupted and destroyed. It has even been done so in a way that it is that much harder to establish a life, once the carnage and turmoil is gone.  

Works Cited

Levy, Amy. The Romance of a Shop. Publisher Not Identified, 2011. 

Tilley, Helen. “Medicine, Empires, and Ethics in Colonial Africa.” Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association, American Medical Association, 1 July 2016, journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/medicine-empires-and-ethics-colonial-africa/2016-07.  

“Second Anglo-Boer War - 1899 - 1902.” South African History Online, www.sahistory.org.za/article/second-anglo-boer-war-1899-1902. 

Woodcut Printmaking Tools. www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FWood....