I own both the black Crusader cup and the standard "silver" Crusader cup. Lotta folks may wonder what the difference is.
The black cup is for those who are primarily interested in appearances. It's for folks who are mostly interested in what "looks cool". They want their mug to match their black water bottle and look all tactical and whatnot.
The black Crusader mug is the exact same cup as the "silver" cup, except that it is painted with a sort of teflon-type black paint that peels and falls out of the interior in little specks and flakes the more you use it, and those specks and flakes get into your food which you eventually ingest. You'll have a harder time finding and purchasing this mug, and you'll pay more for the privilege of ingesting those little specks and flakes.
What's more, the regular "silver" Crusader cup - which you'll have an easier time finding and that'll cost you slightly less - gets black on its own after just a few uses on the campfire, anyway.
In short, there is absolutely no practical reason whatsoever to insist on the black Crusader mug. It was the first one I bought - way back in the day when I was much younger, and much more concerned about appearances and being "cool" - but it is inferior to the regular "silver" Crusader mug because of the negative issues the black paint creates.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
