stuff 'n other stuff

In January we had the nine days wonder of something that looked to be a drawing of a kangaroo turn up in a pre 1600 liturgical manuscript from Portugal and now we’ve had the minor drama of an Edward VI shilling being pulled from the mud of Victoria bay in British Columbia.

None of this is really remarkable.

During the sixteenth century European expansion sailors went everywhere, and sometimes they weren’t even very sure where they went. And quite often when they did know, they kept it secret for reasons of possible commercial advantage.

It would be quite reasonable to expect that a ship sailing up the west coast of the Americas would pitch up in the islands and bays between where Vancouver and Seattle are now looking for shelter from a storm.

It’s also not impossible that some unlucky sailor dropped a shilling – a day’s pay for a tradesman, a soldier or an actor in the mud.

Of course it doesn’t mean that the unlucky sailor was one of Francis Drake’s men as has been claimed. Coins were basically lumps of silver of known weight and hence value, meaning that they were readily exchangeable on the basis of the amount of silver in them.

This probably meant that in ports, especially where there was shortage of coined money, such as during the early days of the Spanish colonisation of Mexico, the pool of circulating coins could well be a mix of common coins from half a dozen different seafaring countries.

Now there’s some suggestions that some other English coins of the same period have turned up in roughly the same area, so perhaps it was an English ship, but a single coin does not prove anything – all it means is that by the 1550’s European ships were already penetrating that far north …

Following on from looking at the Linux distros developed in Argentina and Venezuela, I thought I’d broaden my scope a little and see what information I could track down on the use of Linux in other Latin American countries.

Now when searching for information like this you sometimes end up going down strange rabbit holes for reasons that you don’t quite understand but seem promising at the time. And that’s how I ended up looking at the TVPeru website.

I didn’t find what I was looking for but I couldn’t help noticing that one of the news anchors was called Josefina Townsend – which seemed a little odd given that Townsend is such an impeccably English name.

On second thoughts not so strange. My rereading of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia had reminded me of just how many English Welsh and Scottish people migrated to Latin America in the nineteenth century.

Some made good, some lost everything and some made good and then lost it – in one of his letters Chatwin recounts a story of a successful British family living in Iquique making a good living from guano – that was until chemical fertilisers came along.

Overnight, they were ruined, or if not exactly ruined, had lost the source of their prosperity. The daughters of the family lived on among the tattered remains of their former grandeur stuck between two worlds. Always the emigrants curse – not quite belonging where you are, and no longer belonging to where you came from.

Chatwin wrote that the history of Argentina could be seen in the Buenos Aires phone book – he meant that there were so many surnames from recognisably different heritages that you could see the history of migration in a country …

Following on from rereading Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia I’ve moved on to reading Under the Sun and anthology of his letters and correspondence.

As Chatwin was not given to voluminous letters, in fact he seems to have preferred short scribbled notes on postcards, this makes the book an ideal one to read in small gobbets over lunchtime to make a break away from my desk.

Almost unconciously, a picture emerges of his world, which was rooted in class and privilege, in a way one hopes might not be the case today but probably is. While his parents were not rich, they were well connected and through these connections effected the introductions that enabled Chatwin’s ever so slightly gilded life.

This is not to decry his obvious talents, and his correspondence certainly contains a lot of interesting and amusing material. I’m only partway through and I’ll leave a full review until I’ve finished the book.

One thing however has struck me – we can only have this book because people kept his letters and his postcards, in part because the postcards were themselves intrinsically interesting. In other words much of his correspondence has survived by happenstance.

That wouldn’t be possible today – or at least not in the same way. A twenty-teens reincarnation of Chatwin would undoubedly use email, might well have a facebook page to communicate with his immediate circle, and perhaps a blog and flickr account.

Now we know that what happens to your content after you die is a moot point. However sooner or later it will go, but there might well be a mechanism to archive it. People worry about this and because they worry about this there will sooner or later be and answer.

There’s only one problem with this – people don’t keep the same email account for ever, and perhaps don’t keep the same services forever. And services disappear – for example there once was blogging service called Journalspace – it disappeared a few years ago, and while there was another similar service of the same name it’s not the same thing. My content only survives because I had the presence of mind to archive a copy on my Dropbox account.

Basically, services die. And when they die, content is lost.

The same is true of email. In my time I’ve had email provided by:

• four employers – only one of which is still valid
• Compuserve
• Freeserve
• Rocketmail
• The Irish Times
• Yahoo
• Hotmail
• Gmail

as well as a two or three ISP’s and a couple of specialist hosting services. During that time I’ve kept the same email address because I’ve used an email forwarding service and used fetchmail and various other email aggregators to consolidate my email.

I’m also probably pretty unusual in this aspect. However I don’t have anything like a full archive, as inevitably I’ve deleted stuff that no longer seems relevant.

Some of my professional email to mailing lists is preserved but most of it is not. I’ve probably got the last five or six years of my private email correspondence, plus a few random archived emails.

Some of my email possibly lives on in other people’s archives, but anyone foolish enough to try and trace my correspondence would come to a dead end.

Now, you might argue that I’m no Bruce Chatwin, and I’d certainly agree with you about that, but Bruce Chatwin was once only a bit-player in the social comedy of life, but we have some of his letters and postcards from then, just as we have the letters and notes of other people. And in the main they’ve survived because people see some intrinsic value, be it an interesting picture, a pretty stamp or a witty comment – for years I used to keep a big pinboard in the kitchen with interesting postcards and things stuck to it – a sort of correspondence installation.

Technology has changed the world and in the process has made things more ephemeral and as a consequence the nature of literary scholarship will be changed forever

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This morning’s Fairfax Papers ( The Age, The SMH and so on) had quite a nice piece about a marginal drawing of a kangaroo in a pre 1600 Portuguese liturgical manuscript.

The dating to before 1600 is significant, previously the first recorded European landing on Australia was by Janszoon in 1606 on a VoC expedition.

However it’s not that surprising, the Portugese and later the Spaniards were all over the Indonesian and Phillipine archipeleagos in the 1500’s on the back of the spice trade and their interactions with the Japanese who were also beginning a short lived expansion into the area.

Just as odd as the tale of Shakespeare being performed off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607 is the tale of Christopher and Cosmas, two Japanese sailors on a Spanish galleon captured by Thomas Cavendish off the coast of Baja California in 1587, and who seem to have spent time in England – the evidence is circumstantial, but they are mentioned on the roster on Cavendish’s ship when it left Plymouth on a later expedition suggesting that they must at least have reached Plymouth.

However, back to the main piece. We can be fairly certain that the Macassan trepang trade with the Yolngu in Arnhem land predates the arrival of Europeans in the area. The recent discovery of European glass beads in pre-1788 deposits suggesting that the Macassans were acquiring them from European traders and passing them on.

It would be quite possible that the Portuguese had heard of the trepang trade and had gone to investigate.

It could also be the case that the drawing of the kangaroo dates from Jorge de Menezes expedition than landed on Weigo Island in Papua in 1526. As Weigo is on the Australasian side of the Wallace line its possible that he might have seen tree kangaroos despite never venturing to Australia. And of course, it wasn’t just de Menezes. Inigo Ortiz de Retes explored (and named) the northern coast of New Guinea in 1545. Either voyage could easily have brought news and drawings of strange unknown animals

Interestingly, in recordings of the oral history of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Wessel island there’s apparently as story of ‘Men wearing mirrors’ landing on the islands.

And, I suppose, that could just be an oral history recollection of the appearance of mid sixteenth century Portugese sailors and soldiers landing on the islands as part of one of the Portugese voyages of exploration in the area …

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I’ve just finished rereading Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. I first read it in 1978 or 79, I forget which, and still have my original Picador paperback copy.

I remember being impressed by the mystic otherworldliness of Chatwin’s luminous text – a journey to the end of the world in search of the skin of an extinct creature – a sort of Anglophone Borges.

Thirty plus years on I find myself still impressed by the quality of his writing and his technique of gluing little stories and events together in a narrative. Today, rather than a mystical journey I would view it more as a journey into a vanished society of English farm managers, Scottish Welsh and German migrants, more as social history than anything else.

When Chatwin travelled there, there were still people who remembered hearing stories of the early days of settlement and who remembered some of the events of the time. Now all these people would be long dead, and Patagonia, is doubtless a very different place – more Argentinian than perhaps it once was.

That said I still enjoyed the writing and the turns of phrase and the near fantastical parts of his story telling, and came away with the feeling that the world is now a more prosaic place than it once may have been

On 5 September 1607 Hamlet was played on the deck of the English ship Dragon somewhere off the coast of Sierra Leone.

The audience included a number of local African notables who were provided with a running commentary in Portugese the lingua franca of the Guinea coast. Hamlet was also performed a second time, as well as one performance of Richard ii.

The Dragon was an East India company ship commanded by William Keeling. This was the third voyage of the Dragon. The intention was that the ship would sail for Indai but the ship failed to reach Aden.

Keeling later went on to the Moluccas.

This could be interpreted as evidence, if any more was needed, of Shakespeare’s superstar status as a playwright in the early Jacobean. Actually, the story is a little more prosaic. The Dragon had put in for repairs having become separated from the other East India company ships in the fleet.

The performance was organised by the master, who must have been some sort of Shakespeare nut to have the scripts of Hamlet and Richard II to hand, to distract the crew and stop them engaging in other less salubrious acts.

Under the circumstances, he could just as well have chosen the work of another less well known Jacobean playwright. And of course it wasn’t about culture, it was to keep the crew busy.

What it does speak of is the degree to which theatre had entered popular consciousness – the fact that Keeling could get his crew to perform a play shows a degree of buy-in on their part. It also shows how horizons had expanded over the previous fifty years.

When Henry VIII died England was still a very provincial place where people lived in houses of wood and daub, and where there was no real engagement with the outside world other than the Flemish wool trade. The Spanish and Portugese voyages of discovery had made little or no impact. In fact it could be argued that Renaissance court of James IV of Scotland fifty years earlier was much more in the spirit of the Renaissance than Henry’s court.

Fast forward fifty years and one sees a massive expansion of horizons with the East India company sailing to Surat, black people living in London, and the beginnings of global trade …

[update 01 January 2017]

Shakespeare (and other English dramatists) were a little more widespread than I realised – on the back of trading links companies of players  traveled to the various Hanseatic ports of northern Europe to play and perform, sometimes in English, sometimes in German prose translations, something that has given us the Gdansk Shakespeare theatre of today.

I guess the parallel would more have been with these small student companies that sometimes pitch up in unlikely places than a more formal tour …

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Yesterday the Guardian published an article on the use of social media in Saudi Arabia.

I’m not surprised. One thing that was very obvious when we were staying at a resort hotel in Habarana earlier this year was the number of families from the Gulf holidaying there, just as in Nuwara Eliya despite the cold and the rain.

And the thing that really struck me was just how many of the women had an iPhone or iPad in their hands and was using them.

At the time, I speculated about how iPads might be a tool for female empowerment in these countries.

It seems I was wrong – they’re a tool for empowerment – male and female …

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Hot on the heels of news of discoveries that suggest that Macassar traders were sourcing beads from Dutch and other European spice traders to trade with the Yolngu of Arnhem Land for sea cucumbers, comes news of the discovery of a 250 year old cannon on a NT beach.

While it was originally thought that the cannon might have come from a Portugese vessel, there is now speculation that it had come from a Macassar vessel blown off course.

If it was of non-European origin this has some implications for the Kilwa coins problem.

We know that before the European arrival in Indonesia in the sixteenth century, there was no circulating coinage as such, and instead people used Chinese coins, as they still do in religious ceremonies.

It’s quite possible that the Kilwa coins some how ended up in the pool of circulating currency, just as VoC (Dutch East India company) duits did in the early days of the Dutch presence in Indonesia. And we can wave our hands once more and say that they ended up on the Wessell islands in a single shipwreck of a Maccassar or VoC ship.

If we had a mix of Chinese coins of the sort in circulation in Indonesia and the Kilwa coins I’d plump for a Macassar shipwreck, but the presence of VoC duits points to a ship with greater involvement with the European presence (I’m choosing my words carefully here, as if it’s true that Macassars acquired glass beads from the Dutch and traded them on, its quite conceivable that there could have been duits on a Macassar boat – it doesn’t mean that it was a VoC boat).

And where does this leave the Kilwa coins?

I’m tempted to say that they were simply there by accident, perhaps as someone’s lucky coins, or as special coins intended for an offering. They probably entered the pool of currency through the spice trade. I can believe that Kilwa coins could have got to Sri Lanka or South India, and ended up in a spice traders bag of mixed coins, and from there made their way to Indonesia …

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Some time ago I started a thread about Vikings and cats.

I’ve just come across an interestinf student thesis on the role of cats in viking beliefs.

I’ll be the first to admit that I havn’t yet read the thesis in detail but the story seems to go something like this:

• Cats were of great ritual significance to Viking peoples
• Vikings were familiar with wild cats and lynx
• there is no significant evidence of a larges scale presence ofdomestic cats in Sweden much before 1000CE
  • evidence of domestic cats has been found as early as C6CE

So, basically it was wild cats that fed the myths and the domestic mog did not get a lookin to much later. If it’s true that cats were not common in Sweden until the end of the Viking period, I’d be tempted to suggest that before the migration period the Vikings did not keep cats for rodent control on any large scale.

This of course begs the question of where the cats came from, and whether while the mice of the north of Britain may show evidence of a Scandanavian genome, the cats went the other way, adopted by Viking settlers and then introduced to Scandanavia.

Either way, a genetic analysis of teh cat populations of Iceland and the Fearoes could prove interesting …

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