The JPI? Who’d have thought! Penguins in Jamaica!
During the Early Colonial Era, post-Columbian explorers search for ways around this enormous, obtrusive island we call America had happened upon a far northern island where they discovered a small community of intelligent, compassionate penguins who, with their brethren, had developed a marvelous egalitarian society. Without competition from other penguins (there were no others in the north) the Penguans, as they called themselves, were able to develop their culture and build vast cities immune to the plagues of suburban sprawl. Their peaceful society was however, to haunt them. Though far beyond the cultural achievements of the Europeans who encountered them, their military advancements were none. The wonton killings preformed by Henry Hudson’s men marked the beginning of a long tale of suffering. Though disaster was temporarily averted when the miraculous cunning of Penguan elders convinced Henry’s crew to mutiny, the remaining crew members told a rich benefactor to be of the riches of this northern society, and in secret he gave these so-called “bird hunters” a crew and two ships with which to make their voyage. The talk of Penguan riches was a lie - they were of a society who cared not for things so petty as gold, but sadly for the Penguan, the ex-mutineers had more terrible plans in mind. Having stocked the ship with steel, powder and guns, the two ship’s men mimicked the Spanish end of the Peruvian Incas. The Penguan society sundered, the men rounded up the small groups of refugee penguins and replaced with them the gunpowder that had so devastated the Penguan life. The men continued with their plan to make their fortunes in the then-Spanish colony of Jamaica. There, Spanish landowners were happy to pay well for such easily subjected workers as the Penguan. Now, nearing the four hundredth anniversary of their subjugation first by Spanish, then English, then native Jamaican landowners and townspeople, the exhausted and dogged remainder of the great Penguan have decided to fight for the freedom they were denied after England emancipated its slaves and again after the Jamaicans gained independence. Their society, the Jamaican Penguin Insurrection, or JPI, struggles to free the world’s only other intelligent life form from its continued oppression.
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