Owen Jones

One of my favorite personas, fleshed out into a full character. Decided to publicize it in case anyone else might enjoy. Owen Jones is of course a fictional character from a fictional island, but much of his biography is based on real events. It is actually true that one of the last primarily sail-powered merchant ships (the Pamir) went down only two weeks before the first man-made satellite (Sputnik 1) went up.

Born 1901 as Owain Llywelyn Jones, on a remote island off the coast of Wales. Not much to say about his early years: farming, fishing, living very simply. For him and his fellow islanders, the irregular steamboat visits were the only major intrusions by the modern world into lives otherwise little changed from those of their medieval ancestors. Automobiles, electric lighting, and radio were known to him, as he was an avid reader of any written word that happened upon his shores, but he had little real interest in seeing such things. Then, in the twilight of his boyhood, came the word of war in Europe.

From their little green island, more and more men were drawn off to muddy trenches on the continent. It seemed so strange to Owen that some monarch dying in the Balkans meant that men from Wales should be ordered off to France by an English king whose language many of them could barely speak, so that they might kill or be killed by the German subjects of a foreign king who shared a grandmother with his own foreign king.

Owen read much of philosophy in his teenage years. He read but quickly discarded the teachings of Marxism, finding it incompatible with his staunch Methodism and his sense of personal independence. He had little time for those urban atheists, but was far more sympathetic to the Irish Republicans and the hardscrabble Boers who had fought and lost against the engines of imperial industry. In time, he settled instead upon the writings of those rambunctious Americans: Lynsander Spooner, Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker. It instilled within him a sort of proto-libertarianism, and his mind continued to absorb theory even as his muscles hardened and hands calloused from intermittent toil in shops, on fields, and at sea.

World events would put his self-education on indefinite hiatus. For he was to reach conscription age before the next spring, and the war showed no sign of ending in that summer of 1918. The Ludendorff Offensive was in full swing, papers extolled a weary populace to prepare for the expenditure of whatever blood and wealth may be needed to drive the dastard Hun back from the River Marne. Owen couldn't care less that a fellow Welshman was administering the empire, he had developed no love for the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha or whatever they chose to call themselves these days, and he avowed that he would not spill his blood for them in 1919. He made his decision, and if he blundered in his strategy, it was no fault of his intellect that he could not peer into the future.

The risk to life and limb was very real when he slid off that fishing boat into the dark waters off the coast of the Netherlands. On a neutral shore, he read with consternation the fall of the Hindenburg Line, the Hundred Days Offensive, the eventual November Armistice. There would be no Spring Offensive in 1919, he would celebrate his eighteenth birthday in a world at (relative) peace! One where he was still a deserter, and where it would be death or hard labor for him to ever again set foot upon the isle of his birth.

He took up life as a stevedore on the Rotterdam docks, where he quickly realized that he had no taste for urban living. He soon worked his way to the mines, ranches and rubber plantations of Dutch Guiana, and in that fetid land he learned of all the senseless misery and cruelty he had ever sought to avoid in the fields of France. But he was not uninitiated to work or to struggle, and a harder layer of skin developed beneath which still dwelt the introspective peasant boy.

The world changed around him, and with some reluctance he changed with it. He found himself a quick study with languages, whether those of colonial overseers or the patois of the natives. He was likewise adept with all things mechanical, though he still preferred to work at the edges of the industrial world. In the years to come, he would sustain himself as a menial worker, a vagabond, a miner and prospector, a logger, a ranch-hand, a roustabout, a mechanic, a local guide, even ironically an armed guard or soldier-of-fortune on either side of the various Banana Wars and other jungle conflicts. He was never exactly a pacifist, and very willing to fight on his own terms. And with his flexible views on the laws of man, he sometimes found himself in the world of smuggling, bootlegging, even gun-running when he felt the cause was just.

He traveled up and down the Americas from Patagonia to Texas, where in one oil boom town he made the acquaintance of a certain pulp writer of very similar outlook, upon whom he left a strong impression. At sea, he developed his skill as a ship's engineer and signed up to serve aboard the Flying P-Liner windjammers. His fondness for these ships would last for the rest of his life, even as he knew that the close of the nitrate trade and improving diesel engines would one day put them out of service. But, uprooted from his native land, he found that he could never stay long in one place.

It was aboard the Pamir that Owen found himself back under His Majesty's rule. That ship was seized as a prize of war by the New Zealand government in 1941. Holding no more love for the Fuhrer than he had for the King, he agreed to stay on as engineer, his earlier shirking of duty overlooked for the nonce. This arrangement didn't bother the middle-aged salt as much as it might have bothered the feckless teenager, as the pay was good and the accommodations fair. He continued serving in the British merchant marine in the years after the war, shipping Gloster Meteor fuselages to Korea. It was at this time that he saw his home island once again from the deck of a passing Empire Class ship. The dwindling population had been evacuated years before, only birds lived there now. He would never again set foot upon it.

Fighting communists was all well and good, though Owen often feared that their tribe and his would one day blow the whole world to smithereens with their terrible new weapons. He was glad to be out of that service before he had to witness the attempt to strong-arm the Egyptians out of their canal, and he rushed back to his old love the Pamir when he heard that German investors had saved her from the breakers. She was among the last of the sail-driven freighters still in commercial service when she sank in the year of 1957. It was thus in a world of Sputnik satellites, jet airplanes, interstate highways, IBM computers, and H-bombs that the story of a Welsh peasant boy would end.