1624 Needing sugar to make their gin, the Dutch seize the sugar
plantations of Salvador da Bahia. A year later, the Spanish eject
the Dutch. Two years later, the Dutch return the favor, and so
on until 1654, when the Luso-Brazilians finally reclaim Bahia
as their own. While the importance of all this was that it gave
the Dutch the desire to establish slave-and-sugar plantations in
the Caribbean, some Brazilian historians have seen in these bat-
tles the roots of capoeira,which was supposedly developed to
help slaves who escaped during the confusion to better resist
recapture. Yet this causality seems improbable, mainly because
the Maroons of Haiti, Jamaica, and Reunion all greeted the
bounty hunters with firearms, spears, and pungisticks, not mu-
sical bows and twirling shin kicks. Therefore capoeira probably
dates to the development of sizable mixed-race populations
during the eighteenth century rather than the unrest and war-
fare of the seventeenth century.
1624 The English coin the word gunman. The idea was to distin-
guish the matchlock-armed Woodland Indians of the Carolinas
from the European settlers (who were described as “firemen,”
after their snaphaunce and wheel-lock weapons).
1625 The Thirty Years’ War causes the development of new codes of
warfare in Europe. The Dutch jurist Huigh de Groot describes
these changes, the main purpose of which was to put legitimate
use of force into the hands of a central state rather than re-
gional chieftains, in a legal text called On the Law of War and
Peace.On the other side of the world, Japanese warlords were
formulating an equally flexible code of bureaucratic militarism
known as bushidô(the Way of the Warrior).
About 1630 French and German duelists begin scoring points using the
points instead of the edges of their rapiers. To reduce injuries
during training, fencing masters first develop the fleuret,or
flower-like leather sword-tip, and then a special lightweight
sword known as the épée.
About 1640 Catholic Irish butchers are reported hamstringing or kneecap-
ping their Protestant rivals, who retaliate by hanging the
Catholics from meat hooks.
1643 The phrase second-stringstarts referring to the substitute dur-
ing a football scrimmage rather than the spare bowstrings that
British archers carried in case their first string broke or
got wet.
1646 The English word fire-armis coined to describe wheel-lock car-
bines and other weapons that discharge projectiles using the
hot gases released by burning gunpowder.
About 1648 A Dutch geographer named Olifert Dapper (who bases his
comments on an account written by a Dutch mercenary named
Fuller) reports that the armies of the Angolan queen Nzinga
Mbande trained for war using leaping dances. This Angolan
dancing has been claimed as a root of the modern Brazilian
game called capoeira.
About 1653 Rather than shaking hands before a match, school-trained
French fencers are reported as raising their swords to their hats.
1659 Outside Pratapgarh Fort, 80 miles southeast of Bombay, the810 Chronological History of the Martial Arts