Author’s Note
208 Words
Author’s NoteDoves have always been connected with religion and mythology in one way or another.
The Athenians had a Temple of Aphrodite Pandemos (‘of all the people’) whose Temple was purified by the sacrifice of a dove.
When I was in Haiti, I saw a Voodoo ceremony and there a sacrifice was made by the Mother Priestess of two white doves.
The dove also stands, of course, for purity, for love and in this book for prayer.
Kidnapping, a word originally coined about 1680, described the then prevalent practice of stealing children and sending them to servitude on British plantations in America and the Caribbean.
In European countries one of the most prevalent forms of kidnapping was the impressment of soldiers or sailors into Military Service. Kidnapping or shanghaiing, as it is sometimes known, of Merchant seamen, flourished in Port towns throughout the world where owners of waterfront boarding houses, brothels and taverns victimised their own clientele.
It was actually in the late 1920s and 30s that it became commonplace in the United States of America for wealthy persons or their children to be ‘snatched’ in the argot of the underworld and held for heavy ransoms, but there were many cases of it happening at the end of the previous century.
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