"The Green Thumb."
Pete has been taught multiordinal evaluation which means looking at everything twice, thinking it through for yourself and not taking anyone else's word.
I once supervised a school history lesson. The pupils were given extracts from four documents about a naval engagement won by the Spanish against the English. The exercise was to read and evaluate all four extracts before answering questions, starting with "Why did the Spanish win?" In the first extract, a Spanish admiral boasted of superior seamanship. The remaining extracts made clear that the English fleet was scandalously ill-equipped and under-prepared. One boy read only the first document, then insisted that superior Spanish seamanship was the answer and therefore that he did not have to read any of the remaining extracts! He had so spectacularly missed the entire point of the exercise. I asked him whether, if there was a fight between pupils of his school and those of another, he would uncritically accept an account of the fight from the other side. Of course not.
Pete has to assess whether the alien, Joe, is a threat to humanity. As an Andersonian hero, he is a problem-solver and does not just accept Joe's account of himself.
5 comments:
Also, in that time-frame Spanish warships generally only beat English ones if they had very substantial advantages in numbers and weight of metal.
English ships were technically superior (usually), and they had more advanced canon and canon techniques -- they invented the broadside in that period.
A lot of the ship's guns recovered from Armada wrecks have terrible standards of construction -- bores out of true, for example.
In fact, the best guns in the Armada were bought (usually at second- or third-hand) from English foundries!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It was not entirely one sided! During the War of Jenkins' Ear in 1741, Lt. Gen. de Blas, commander of Spanish naval forces at Cartagena (now in Colombia), inflicted a crushingly ignominious defeat on the British, when his forces were vastly inferior.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I was referring to the Elizabethan period. Yeah, overconfidence can getcha. OTOH, by 1741, the English had much more reason to be overconfident...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The point I'm trying to make was that Spain was not a pushover. Not only were the British humiliated at Cartagena Spain also wrested back the Balearic Islands from the UK in the same war.
Ad astra! Sean
My understanding is that the technology of making high quality cannons was crucial for the later making of cylinders & pistons for steam engines. So it's an interesting point that the English/British were ahead of other countries in that so early.
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