The Way Of Cain | from Stolen From God | Reg Meuross

When Drake wasn’t circling the globe he focussed his attention on gaining naval dominance over the Spanish & Portugese in the highly lucrative sugar and slave trades. And In 1588 he sealed his place in posterity - and our school books - among great and glorious Englishmen by leading the defeat of The Spanish Armada. The school books didn’t mention the slave-trader bit…
Ships from Topsham, Plymouth, Lyme Regis, Bideford, Bridgwater and of course Bristol laden with goods produced or supplied by so many honest west country sheep farmers, cloth makers, shoe makers and gunsmiths, were the same ships of sorrow that brought separation and despair to colonies thousands of miles away by stealing their honest working men, women and children.
All these virtuous and good christian men needed some way to justify the wealth they were gaining by the enslavement and degradation of their fellow man, and in their minds they needed to look no further than The Bible. Admirals undecorated in their private quarters, politicians in their lofty halls, landowners in their colonial mansions, sailor-adventurers and privateers on raging seas in howling storms, they all called on the same master and commander, God!
Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist, writer and orator who visited Bridgwater in the mid 19th century on a lecture tour had this to say of the white churches: “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference-so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessityto reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked....I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle- plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
Reg Meuross: Vocal / Guitar / Organ
Jali Fily Cissokho : Kora
Tom Jobling: Bass / Percussion
Roy Dodds: Perc
Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne: Concertina
Reg / Cohen / Jaz Gayle / Katie Whitehouse: BVox
Recorded at Mill Farm Music, Dorset
Produced by Reg Meuross and Tom Jobling
regmeuross.com

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Folk music at its finest.