stuff 'n other stuff

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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Over on my other blog, I’ve been writing about how postal services, or more accurately, the letter handling service, is in terminal decline.

The universal letter service was one of the great nineteenth century inventions, and in the case of Britain (and Ireland) played a major role in keeping families in contact before email and skype.

It was the same service that allowed Wallace to write to Darwin about evolution, and for people to send home letters about the strange sights and sounds that they had seen. In short it was part of the social glue of the Victorian and Edwardian British Empire.

The postal service enabled a whole range of activities for example it allowed people to order books by mail, play chess by correspondence with people half a world away, and even get their favourite newspaper from home, even if it was two months late.

It was one of the key components, along with the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph that turned the world from something very eighteenth century to something that was recognisably modern.

And of course what we are talking about is increased and increasingly reliable communication.

In the days of the sailing ship, people effectively dropped off the face of the earth. Ships took as long as they did to get somewhere, and sending letters home was equally erratic, the services were simply not predictable.

Come the steamship and the railway, suddenly it was predictable – the predictability being what allowed Cook’s to operate, by making it simple to organise travel – train to Dover, packet boat to Boulogne, train to Marseille, ship to Alexandria, train to Port Said, etc.

And with that predictability the world changed. Punctuality became a virtue. People started using pocket watches, and scheduling meetings. All because we could now say where we would be next Tuesday with a degree of certainty …

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I’ve previously written about coins as evidence of contact. The ABC today has an interesting report on the use of beads by Maccassar fishermen to buy access to trepang beds of the coast of Arnhem land from the local population.

The interesting thing about these beads is that they are not South East Asian in origin and were either of Dutch, Czech or Venetian manufacture and have been found in eighteenth century sediment deposits.

Which of course is interesting as while Janszoon attempted to land in Australia as early as 1606, there was no sustained attempt at European settlement until 1788. In other words we can say fairly confidently that they have come as a result of trade, and that the Macassar fishermen must have acquired them from Dutch or Portugese spice traders and then traded them on …

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I went to Sydney yesterday – it was a work thing – a meeting about the state of play about data citation.

It was valuable, not in the least because of the opportunity to network – one problem about being based in Canberra is that the university data management community is passing small and there’s no real forum to calibrate where you are against your peers.

The formal trip report is available online as a pdf, but what I’m intending in this post is the value add stuff.

Getting there

The meeting was at the old locomotive works in Redfern. This is a set of old railway workshops converted to a conference centre and offices. When I last went there the place still smelled like a workshop and there were people still taking apart machinery in part of the building. Now that’s gone and the building is purely an office cum conference centre, although it, or smething similar, would also make a really good performance space.

A nice feature is that they have left some of the old panel presses as features and a reminder of the building’s industrial past.

However I’m getting ahead of myself. To get there I flew Virgin, which I havn’t done for a few years as Qantas has had a near monopoly of the Canberra Sysdeny route – while there were Virgin flights there were only a few and at inconvenient times. Now they have more flights in the morning and evening and competitive prices. Service is the usual happy-smiley Virgin service, but they are trying really hard – on the way down they handed out coffee that tasted of something and breakfast muffins to thos that wanted them, and on the way back it was distinctly adult fare – zaa’tar and salsa with wine or beer available if you wanted them. The White wine was a reasonable no name sauvingnon blanc in a plastic airline bottle, but no worse than the house wine in the airport bar.

Once in Sydney, it was onto the train. The advantage of the Locomotive Works as a venue is that it is right next to Redfern station. The trains in Sydney are under new management and they were noticably cleaner and shinier than previously, and equally efficient. I did manage to get lost in Central Station – the last time I did this the Eedfern T4 train came in on one of the surface lines, but unbeknownst to me they’d moved the T4 platform to a new platform, #25 in an underground section underneath the station – once I worked that out it was simple and easy to find.

My confusion came about because there is a mismatch between the signage and the travel information on Sydney trains website and is probably just a glitch due to the change of management, with the website referring to the T4 line and the signage referring to the Eastern Suburbs line. If you lived in Sydney you’d know they were the same thing, but I don’t so I didn’t.

Technology

I took my seven inch tablet as a note taker, which worked really well until the battery started running low half way through the meeting. While I had my power supply with me, there was a shortage of handy power points so I resorted to the alternative technology – a decent notebook and pen.

Sydney airport has free wifi, albeit with a failrly tedious signin procedure which involves having to click past various ads to get a connection. On the way down I had half an hour to spare so I used it to check my email and suchlike.

On the way back I discovered that Virgin provide stand up desks with power points at the gates so I used one of these to transcribe my notes while waiting for the flight back while recharging my tablet, and then used the airports free wifi to save my notes to google drive as a markdown file for further editing and cleanup.

There was no wifi available at the meeting, or more accurately there was but they weren’t handing out logins. Initially I thought this was a bit mean but as the day wore on I warmed to the idea. No distractions, no urge to check email or twitter, and just concentraing on the discussion. As there was no wi-fi I turned it into an opportunity and turned it off to save my battery.

The meeting

I’d describe it as quietly gratifying. As far as calibrating where we were I’d say we are up with the best of them if not quite so formally structured.

The networking and social chat was useful as it showed that I wasn’t off on a tangent – a lot of people were thinking about similar things as regards integrated search, researcher identification and data citation (and impact) as we were. It also gave let me explain our use of bagit as an archival format, and out work using fido and tika to extract and save the technical metadata.

Clearly there’s a push around altmetrics and data and I clearly have some more reading to do …

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