Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
The remarkable correlation between geographic and genetic difference in European populations (Callaway (2008) via Bintliff):
(Okay, so this is actually Ewen Callaway reporting in New Scientiston John Novembre, et al, "Genes Mirror Geography Within Europe," Nature 456 (2008): 98--101.)
Time to say goodbye to migration in history?
This is a map that does a terrible job of showing why I have a neighbourly and proprietary interest in the settlement that gives Quatsino Sound its name. In my childhood it was linked to the rest of the world by a water taxi service from Port Alice, and we used to do weekend school trips there on the taxi to give the old day school and its aging staff of Catholic priests some purpose in their latter days, long story short. The actual Quatsino community was mostly Kwakiutl (not Kwakwaka'wakw per the band) associated by default with the Fort Rupert community in Port Hardy, and probably descended from the community that ran the Newhitty port of trade that used to compete with the old Hudson's Bay Company in the maritime fur trade.
The perhaps under-reported implications of the genetic difference studies is the collapse of migrationist explanations of the spread of the Iron Age. We're seeing something like that occur in real time on Northern Vancouver Island as the European settler populations basically give up and leave the region. This post is another exercise in reading backwards, inspired by a recent trip (my first, at the age of 60! It was a family thing) to UBC's Museum of Anthropology.
I'm sorry, Dutch people, "Watersnoosdramp" reminds me of Futurama.This is a picture of Oude Tonge, on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee, which has such a clumsy name because it is a relatively late formation, being carved out of the mainland of North Brabant and South Holland by flooding events in 1216 and 1421, per Wikipedia. Oude Tonge, first attested in 1420/1, is a village carved out of the "Old headland polder" in the manor of Grijsoord, which sounds like an exposed location, and proved to be so over the night of 31 January/1 February 1953 when a windstorm drove the spring high tides up over its embankments, killing 305 people in this village including 42 family members of poster-child survivor Jos de Boet.
The reclamation history of these islands in the Meuse/Maass/Escaut/Scheldt/New Rhine estuary (I vote for bringing back "the Maze" as the geographic designator) is an interesting one for the historian of the Late Middle Ages/Early Modern Period, perhaps the clearest evidence that the economy and population of northwestern Europe was expanding during the "waning of the Middle Ages" and not contracting as the grand overarching "The Black Plague Kills Everyone Except One Person To Pass On The Message" theory of European history. But I'm never going to roll that rock up that hill, so let's not talk about it. Let's talk about even older coastal defences, instead.
It's been more than two years since I've done a "Gathering the Bones" post, and I can report some progress. I've finished reading Fenimore Cooper's Wyandotte: Or, the Hutted Knoll. It's a really good book, Fenimore Cooper continues to be a fascinating person, and the novel is a lot like Wept of Wish-ton-Wish in that it uses distance from the Leatherstocking Cycle to comment on some of the same themes as Deerslayer while being a bit more willing to admit the crime. (The Wyandotte Patent is assigned to the infant product of a private marriage and baptism and so remains the property of a British general while avoiding confiscation during the Revolution by appearing to belong to a local Dutch New York Patriot family.) On the other hand, the question of mixed marriages is handled even more obliquely than in previous novels, much less being explicitly admitted, as in Wish. The heroine, Maud Meredith (Willoughby) is born to her mother in a British army frontier post in 1758, and so her mother is neither British nor a member of American society, in that she is neither home in the United Kingdom nor in Albany. On the other hand, she has money. So Maud Yeardley comes out of some kind of irregular circumstances that I'm not going to probe any further here, although obviously she is much better born than Judith Hutter of Deerslayer, and what about all that deerslaying?
St. Nicholas, Washington Irving tells us, was first seen by a Dutch scouting party checking out Manhattan. Shipwrecked on its shores, they had a vision in which good St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children." St. Nicholas becomes the founding father of New York, which is why he is the patron of he New-York Historical Society, founded in 1804, and to which Washington Irving belonged when, in 1809, he published this in an extended parody of Samuel L. Mitchell's Picture of New-York, the publishing sensastion that was Irving's History of New-York. The history of Santa Claus being a crowded field, especially at this time of the year, I'll leave the rest to silence except for the confusion of dates for St. Nicholas' advent, whether on the 6th of December, the 24th, 25th, or New Year's Eve, and the indigenous North American parallel that seems relevant here, Le canoe volant, or, as the Wikipedia entry more primly has it, La Chasse-galerie, which in the story carries voyageurs home to their loved ones on New Years Eve. And, as always, I should acknowledge the brilliant connection that Lauren Golf makes between the legend of the flying canoe and the Sullivan Expedition, or boats floating above the flooded countryside in general.
But "the first Christmas" in North America was at the second permanent European colony in North America, Port Royal, Nova Scotia. It was celebrated by Samuel de Champlain, Membertou, the sachem of the Micmacs, and Champlain's Order of Good Cheer, more than two centuries before in 1605.
So here is, I think, a pretty basic question suited for a footnote as I gallop through the way that the politics of Sixteenth Century Europe led to the Pilgrims' exit from Leiden and the world of Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage, which, to my shame, I still know from the cod summaries of others and not from a direct reading in spite of it being on my list since I first encountered Fenimore Cooper's Nineteenth-Century-novelist-style sly hints about the role of marriage, church and deception in American ethnogenesis. Ahem, digressive sentence over, direct question: What was it like to sail from Devon and Newfoundland. I mean, people did it, by the millions! Canada's most important contribution to the world's inventory of dirty drinking songs is about the "North Atlantic squadron."
I've posted this Youtube-guaranteed bowdlerised version from Stompin' Tom before, but it's not hurting anyone to do it again.
So, yeah, not finding it, although I'm pretty sure it's out there and I've just not landed on it. But what I did find is some fine scholarship posted to the web here, here, and here, and a historiographic recommendation to Jeffrey Bolster's Mortal Sea, which turns out to be a book which I've bounced off before, so now I've got two copies counting a Kindle edition. Oops. (It seems I wanted Peter Pope's Fish Into Wine, at $57 for a paperback delivered next month. Fuck!) Anyway, I am presented with a thesis which, after reading about early Scottish lawsuits and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York, 2140AD, of all things, I now have something to say.
Oops! Turns out that the Statute of Labourers was passed in the twenty-fourth year of Edward III. Although I was looking for a fashion-plate sort of image, and everyone knows that gay men are fabulous, right? Gaveston's gloves, at least, look like fine Moroccan leather.
(The Canaries have a great deal of volcanic tuft that makes it relatively easy to dig out a cave sanctuary or necropolis, something that old time Canarians loved to do.)
The Omicron Variant isn't just a rejected Michael Crichton manuscript. It's also eaten my weekend! But I did want to post something today, and given the rate of typos in just the paragraph I've already written, it sure better be low effort. Fortunately, there's an interesting question that has been weighing on me. It's even tangentially related to an epidemic of swabbed rapid tests! Have we caught up with the ancestral genetics of the island Atlantic now that everyone is asking 23andMe to do their genealogy homework for them? We haven't.
There's something a little unfair about remembering a great actor and a great guy like Ricardo Montalban for a tagline from a commercial, but, come on, "Fine Corinthian leather." It's hilarious, and it reminds us of a distant day when Mediterranean leather products had a cachet of quality that industrial leather from more northerly climates just could not match.
The product that comes immediately to mind when I think about this is chamois leather, which turns out to be a southwestern French product, but close on its heels in my free-associating mind is "Moroccan kid leather," an advertising tag rather than a specific industrial product. This turns out to be a specific product of exactly a national industry, "Morocco leather." Per Wikipedia, it was a goatskin product, usually dyed, especially associated with the port city of Safi, imported into Europe since long before the late Sixteenth Century, when it became the bindery leather of choice for expensive book editions. Not surprisingly given that it is sourced to an entrepot city, the Wikipedia article goes on to indicate that much Moroccan leather was not from Morocco at all, and singles out northern Nigeria as a source.
Which, sure, why not. But today I want to talk about the Canary Islands.
This may or may not be on me, but it turns out that I don't have Sunday off. I suspect that after wasting far too much time trying to make iOS and Onedrive get along, I was not going to get a postblogging post up tomorrow anyway, but it sure isn't happening now.
I don't, however, want to leave the blog silent, and it occurs to me that I haven't written about the Columbus problem, either as it is traditionally understood, or as historiography seems finally prepared to confront it.
So after eighteen apocalyptic months, UBC Library is open this week, and while I did not visit my precious old journals, because of pure laziness, it turns out that I wouldn't have been able to see most of them due to the usual robot uprising.
Damn. Should have gone with that instead of copping to being lazy. Anyway, going to lean on the door marked "seals" and see where it takes us!
Sao Tome and Principe is an island state off the equatorial coast of Africa with an area of 1000 square kilometers, a population of 211,000, a GDP per capita of $1668USD and not much else to say about themselves. They were allegedly uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived around 1470, and in 1499, Felipe Fernandez Arnesto reports, the captain, Pedro Alvarez, wrote to complain about a shipment of new arrivals, Jewish orphans deported from Lisbon during the expulsion. There were, the Captain reported, only 50 colonists on the islands, mostly exiled criminals themselves, working a marginal sugar plantation, without a mill to support exports. They had no truck to trade for ivory and pepper on the mainland, little food, and had great difficulties securing wives. The rest of the islands' five century history isn't that much more interesting, although the implied mixed-race community (thoroughly dominated by first-generation Portuguese) did emerge during the next century.
As a Canadian and a UofT man, I associate the "development of underdevelopment" with Harold Innis' "staples theory," phrased in these parts as asking why British Columbia has forests, logs and mills, but not IKEA. The question of how the long-term development of "the West and the rest" became, of course, ever more pressing in the decades after Innis' death. By the time that Joan Robinson addressed the question in 1978, the state of Africa was frequently presented in apocalyptic terms --that was certainly my high school experience-- and although the worst has not happened there, we have the current state of Haiti to remind us that the Third World is still with us.
Robert E. Howard was born on 22 January 1906, the son of an itinerant doctor, which doesn't sound like a real job, but, then, we're talking about Texas. In the postwar boom, Dr. Howard's finances improved enough that he was able to settle his family in Cross Plains, Texas, where his son died seventeen years later by his own hand on 11 June 1936, predeceased by his mother.
Kull wasn't only a literary precursor to Conan. Howard made an explicit family connection in an unpublished essay, "The Hyborian Age," which lays out his prehistoric imaginarium in some detail, further hinting at a connection with some of his other characters, notably Cormac Mac Art, a "Gaelic pirate" of the time of King Arthur, and not the quasi-historical High King of Ireland. The comic panel opposite makes Cormac the descendant of Kull's sidekick, Brule the Spear Slayer, but close enough, because Brule is the reason for this digression.
"The Hyborean Age" presents us with a prehistory of the Earth that is catastrophism on steroids. Kull lives about 20,000BC, and is brought up on the barbaric island continent of Atlantis, to the east of the Pictish Isles. Further east is a blobby continent in place of Eurasia, where (Western) humans fight evil serpent-men. Some time later, but after Atlanteans and Picts have colonised the northwest bit of the blobby continent, catastrophe reshapes geography and causes the collapse of civilisation, such as it is. The Picts and Atlanteans became barbaric, the Atlanteans becoming Cimmerians, Conan's people. Another catastrophe brings an end to the age of Conan adventures, and reshapes the geography of Eurasia one more time, so that the Picts and Cimmerians are isolated on what becomes the British Isles, now as Celts, and, well, Picts.
In Howard's writing, although not in the published fan fiction he has inspired, the later Picts are notably more barbaric than the Cimmerians, almost to the point of being subhuman. In defence --somewhat-- of Howard, this is the Picts of popular history at the time that he was writing. Speakers of a non-Indo-European language, of "Asiatic" phenotype, possessed of an unusual, matrilineal legal system, and in some writing, so "degenerate" as to live in holes in the ground, the Picts had become an object of racist fantasy. Of particular interest to this blog is the implication of a connection with North American First Nations, who notably also practiced matrilineal succession and are of Asiatic phenotype.
Well, no. This blog post is inspired by Siân Grønlie's introduction to his 2006 translation of the Kristni saga, the story of the conversion of Iceland. Grønlie's introduction discusses both the saga and its precursor, Ari the Wise's account of the conversion of Iceland in the Islendimgabok, assuring the reader that the lacunae in the two accounts are as important as what is actually said, because these accounts are intended to create an Icelandic nationality, and one of the key features of a national identity is a "collective amnesia" about alternative accounts of national origins.
In this week of nationalism run amok, I have finally found an excuse to talk about Robert E. Howard and the Picts that is actually related to the topic at hand. "Collective amnesia" is a powerful concept, and the Picts may be its most spectacular victim.
So speaking of odd threads dangling out of the whole story of Greenland, how about the "Sinclairs of Greenland and Rattar"?
This is one of those tangles that doesn't really have a starting point as such, so I'm going to begin with a Sixteenth Century Venetian historian, Niccolo Zeno, who in 1558 published a series of letters between one of his ancestors, and his brothers. They described various exciting adventures in vaguely located Atlantic islands, back at the turn of the Fifteenth Century. (The best known of the brothers was a Venetian naval hero active in 1400.) This was an exciting era on the triple borderland between Christianity and Islam, the known world and unknown. It was full of Christian adventurers in Muslim lands, Muslim adventurers in Christian; Of converts both ways, both paladins and saints; and of little taifa states trailing down the coast of what the kings of Morocco declined to allow to be Morocco out of their commitment to the inland caravan trails.
Of course, it was also an age of entertaining fictions about the same, and as far as we can tell, that's what the Zeno letters were. That is not, however, what Johann Reinhard Foerster, Calvinist divine and former naturalist on James Cook's first Pacific voyage thought when he encountered the letters, mainly because he fastened on a supporting character in the colourful story, one Prince Zichmni, which Foerster decided was a Venetian attempt to render "Sinclair." This would be an odd error on a late medieval Venetian's part, inasmuch as "Sinclair is just a Scottish form of "Saint Clare," and Santa Clara of Assisi, founder of the Poor Claires, is perfectly well rendered into Italian as Santa Clara.
Foerster's error, if error it was, isn't actually that hard to understand --now that we have Google. The Sinclairs of Greenland and Rattar are an extremely obscure branch of a Scottish noble house that became extinct in 1784. Short of pouring through old genealogies no Nineteenth or Twentieth Century reader is likely to have heard of them before the rise of Google's awesome powers of aggregation. On the other hand, the extinction of the house, which involved its last heir committing suicide in London at the age of 33 two years after being "wounded in the groin" while reconnoitering the works at Yorktown in the company of Lord Cornwallis is not a story that anyone, or, at least, any man, who was alive at the time was likely to be forget!
So Foerster probably had "John Sinclair,Seventh and Last Lord of Greenland and Rattar" on his mind when he encountered "Prince Zichmni." Foerster had no trouble finding a candidate "Prince Zichmni" in the Sinclair family line, albeit one two centuries before a branch of the family named itself for a farm estate in Caithness that, coincidentally, bore the same name as Greenland's icy mountains. Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney and Lord of Roslyn (c. 1345--c. 1405) was a Scottish/Norwegian nobleman from the strange era of Sottish/Norwegian condominium in the vaguely defined "Northern Islands" that, I guess, a particularly expansive mind might take to include Greenland and Vinland along with the Orkneys. Henry owed fealty to Scotland for minor properties in Lothan, and to Norway for the Orkneys. In respect to Norwegian affairs, he is recorded as a supporter of King Erik. As far as Good King Robert of Scotland was concerned, he was mainly known as a pest about his Lothian properties, and we might speculate, over the reversion of his wife's lands, which originally included the entire suppressed earldom of Strathearn. Then he was "cruelly killed" by invaders of the Orkneys who might have been English seafarers avenging an attack on an English fleet at Aberdeen by ravaging the Orkneys. The rest is pseudo-history, culminating in "Prince Henry" sailing all the way to Nova Scotia to build some matching New World structures to a classic puzzle-structure in the Old, Rosslyn Chapel, south of Edinburgh. It has to do with Knights Templars and the Holy Grail, you see.
This isn't actually where I started down the rabbit hole. That would be the claim that a Sinclair crest has been found on a tiny bit of jewelry recovered at a dig in Greenland. I don't know. I've been having trouble locating the story online, and if it's in Kirsten Seaver's Frozen Echo, I can't find that, either. (Not to worry, it'll show up on one of my shelves the moment I hit "Post.") It's all pretty irrelevant considering that the old Sinclair crest was a simple saltire cross, so it would be ridiculous to think that a signet ring (or whatever) with a saltire cross on it was a "Sinclair" piece and proof of the doings of Prince Zichnmi.
The issue is that I carried that factoid into my investigation of Arthur St. Clair, himself a fascinating figure in the primordial days of the plantation of North America, as he was the Governor of the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan) in the earliest, pre-Constitution days of the American Republic, and yet is a surprisingly shadowy figure. I mean, there's almost four times as many people in Ohio as there are in British Columbia, and I cannot even begin to imagine how many graduate students at BC history departments would be on the trail of Sir James Douglas if there were half as many loose ends in that fascinating man's back story as there are in that of Arthur St. Clair!
From January through October of this year, and most especially through the Canadian lockdown, I helped operate a "corner store" concept for my company --4000 sq feet of grocery attached to a pharmacy in the Oakridge shopping mall. An unwelcome legacy of the old Oakridge store was a queue of items that had gone out of stock just before the old store shut off automatic replenishment. Unless we manually removed them from outgoing orders, we got a very eclectic set of items, again and again.
Yes, they included an item identified as kippered herring, although as far as I can tell it's not quite the same preparation as the kippered herring that comes in cans. These particular kippered herrings had to be stored frozen and cooked before eating. I bought a couple and they were . . okay. Products of the Scottish herring fishery, they are Relevant to events of today, as fishing rights come up under Brexit. Foreigners fish some fishing grounds in British waters, and it is perhaps a matter of urgency that they be made to stop. Because of conservation. Or jobs. The fact that the British are great fishers but terrible seafood enthusiasts is a very interesting subtext to the discussion, and perhaps a historical question of some significance.
Getting back to the fish I ate (not a normal part of my diet, either), Alison Mary Locker explains that these short-life preservation techniques came into vogue in Nineteenth Century London because the fish would last long enough to be distributed by costermonger, but didn't ask too much in the way of cooking equipment and time. She's probably not the only historian to explain such things, but, in comparison with agrarian history, there's a bit of shortage of fishing/salt industry historians. In spite of that, there's been some movement in the field in the last few decades, perhaps not entirely synthesised yet. (I keep finding references to Kurlansky's Salt in academic monographs. Surely if there was something less popular, it would be cited instead?)
(By some kind of miracle I actually found one of the songs that CBC Radio wakes me up with)
Arnarstarpi on Snaefellsnes By The original uploader was Reykholt at English Wikipedia. - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2860812
I assume that the village of Arnarstapi has the best view of the spectacular cone of Snaefellsjokul, at the tip of the Snaeffellsnes peninsula,. At least. this photograph is far more impressive than the one that illustrates the article for Helgafell,the place where Guðrún ÓsvÃfursdóttir is said to have been buried, and, where, more importantly, the medieval monastery of Helgafell was located. It seems at least likely that both the Flateyjarbok and the Skaholtsbok were produced at Helgafell; although even if not they were both produced in the diocese of Skalholt a generation before. This makes the Helgafell scriptorium the only source for one of the two Vinland Sagas (The Greenlanders' Saga), and probably one of only two sources for theSaga of Erik the Red along with the Hauksbokof approximately a century before.
The issue here is that the Vinland Sagas are often treated as transparent historical sources, even when the skeptical conclusion is that they are useless sources. Yet we owe the foundations of the modern historical method to these same scriptoria and in this same era, as they checked and tested the production of rival scriptoria for the key ecclesiastical purpose of settling real estate disputes. This study of diplomatics seems to have skipped right over the Vinland Sagas, which seems a little odd, all things considered. Fortunately it turns out that "seems" is doing a great deal of work, and in a light blogging week before I get on with postblogging technology for May of 1950 it is worth exploring these studies.
This is very much a problem-oriented inquiry. The heroine Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir appears in a prominent role in both sagas, albeit more so in the Greenlanders' Saga. She is the mother of Snorri Thorfinnson, and ended her life as the wife of a very prominent chieftain, giving her the means to make a pilgrimage to Rome and to endow, it seems, a convent. While the Greenlandic characters in the two sagas are somewhat obscure, Gudrid is a well known figure who appears in the genealogy of the editor/patron of the Hauksbok, Hauk Elendsson.* She is the grandmother and great-grandmother of a number of early Icelandic bishops, not surprisingly considering her son's leading role in the Christianisation of the island. Given all of this, it seems reasonable that the convent that claimed Gudrid as a patroness would promote her history and seek her beatification by producing a hagiography; and, given that, one's attention is drawn to the Vinland Sagas, and especially the Geenlanders' Saga, as a possible outcome of that effort.
Moreover, the genealogical descent of the legendary founder of Greenland, Erik the Red, is for the most part extremely obscure. This is all the odder considering that Gudrid has a tangential connection with the family, having been briefly married to Erik's second on. Surely over four centuries some other descendants followed the path back to Iceland, and are worthy of mention somewhere in the Saga of Erik the Red? And yet the closest we come to it is Freydis Eriksdottir, who appears in the Greenlanders' Saga as a foil to Gudrid, making her own voyages to Vinland, where she is involved in dark and bloody work. The saga predicts through the mouth of Leif Erikson, that "her descendants will not get on in the world." In the post-predictive world of the literary prophecy, that has to mean that there are traditions about Freydis' descendants. Making an enormous leap, I've sometimes wondered if those descendants are figurative, and that we might be seeing hints of a rivalry between religious institutions. There were, after all, several convents and monasteries in Greenland, of which we know precisely nothing.
So that's the problem: Whether the production of the sagas might tell us something about long-dissolved religious communities that might have claimed ownership of the Vinland story in the late 1300s. I'm not sure how far current saga diplomatics gets me down this quixotic path, but it is certainly time to explore the state of the art!
A boat launching in the Banc d'Arguin National Park
At the risk of repeating myself, it's worth restating where this investigation has been going. First of all, I have Lameen's challenge to think of a West African Age of the Reconnaissance, which turns out to be exactly right. And, second, we have the challenge of taking Morocco as a key actor in the European Reconnaissance seriously.
It is an old truism of the earliest "Reconnaissance of the Atlantic" that the Portuguese effort that eventually led to Vasco da Gama rounding the Cape and reaching India, began as an attempt to bypass Moroccan control of the northwestern terminus of the trans-Saharan trade in sub-Saharan gold, slaves and naturalia. Going a little further, Peter Russell suggested in 1994 that this effort was, on the one hand, an extension of an attempted Portuguese continuation of the Reconquista into the southernmost portions of the old Roman Diocese of Hispania, which is to say, Morocco; and on the other, a defensive measure against Castilian efforts to secure the defection of Hispano-Lusitanian grandees with opportunities to crusade.
All of this is interesting, but would be less so if, in fact, the Portuguese had just arrived on the African shore in 1405. In reality, the city of Ceuta has traded hands between Hispanic and Moroccan regimes so often that I doubt anyone can keep track, and, by extension, Hispanic and Moroccan regimes have their hands deep in each others' pockets since at least sub-Roman times. Therefore, Prince Henry's involvement in Morocco has as its mirror image, Moroccan interest in Portugal. Or, to put it another way, that it is all one political realm, and Moroccan politics have to be considered alongside Hispanic.
It is probably also worth noting that the core period of Henry's African adventure coincided with the period in which Henry's brother was being held hostage in Fez for a Marinid restoration in Ceuta. Ferdinand surrendered himself in 1438 and died in 1443, a period spanning the first half of Afonso V's difficult minority. During this short period, a series of expeditions along the coast reached the Bay D'Arguin and as far beyond it as the mouths of the Gambia and the Senegal. Henry, withdrawn from politics to his villa at Sagres, remained an entrenched opponent to any scheme for the redemption of the Infante Ferdinand, while patronising the geographical, and, perhaps, naval architectural sciences.
Note all the little Portuguese enclaves down the coast.
So any understanding of this adventure needs to focus on the political axis between Fez and Sagres. This much, should, indeed, be obvious. There is, however, that traditional blindness, or to be more charitable, professional unwillingness to overextend, that puts Morocco in a different category from Europe, drawing the line of political history at water's edge. There is also the foreshortening effect that makes far off countries seem smaller and more homogeneous than they would seem if we took their politics more seriously. Morocco, in particular, is a very big country. The Almoravid/Almohad imperial city of Marrakesh is 500km south of the Marinid/Wattid capital of Fez, and even a Martian would, when it was put that way, expect a north-south rivalry. It is, moreover, a rivalry that one can easily visualise as producing a kaleidoscopic variety of potential alliances. From the perspective of Ferdinand's uneasy custodian, the vizier Abu Abd Allah al-Sheikh Muhammad ibn Yahya, not only Portugal, but also Castile, Aragon, Tlemcen, Marrakesh and the sub-Sahelian states all had to be taken into account.
And for anyone from the marginalised North, South, East or West of any given polity, attention will be on the marginalised, the political interest denied its legitimacy by the simple expedient of grouping it into the larger state. Morocco had just been through an extended period of government from the south, by the Almoravids and the Almohads. I'm going to link to that classically bloated Hollywood epic, El Cid, again, just so that the reader can appreciate the way that even the comparatively heedless visual politics of the 1960s biopic could read the Almohads as a threat to northern Christians and Muslims alike. (And a reminder that mask politics is not new.) It's unfortunate that it was the Almoravids who sometimes trace their origins to a ribat on the island of Tidra in the Bay d'Arguin, but given that the Portuguese did not just happen to arrive in 1405, full of wide-eyed innocence, on the North African shore in 1405, the arrival there in 1443 of Nuno Tristao, and his subsequent attack on a village on the adjacent island of Arguin, has, or ought to have, resonance. As much as Christian slavers were an ominous novelty in African affairs, small communities on islands in the Bay of Arguin were an established threat to northern regimes.
By Jerzy Strzelecki - Own work,
CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2998955
Al-Idrisi (1100--1165) tells us that the city of Safi is so-called from "Asafi," the local pronunciation, which is from Arabic "Asaf," meaning "regret." It gets this name, the illustrious geographer tells us, from the sorrows of a ship's crew of "wanderers" [mughrarin] of Lisbon in al-Andalus, who sailed in search of the ends of the Atlantic Ocean, only to end up at Safi. When told that they were two months sail from their homeland, one of the crew said that he had regrets.
It's generally not a good idea to take a twelfth century geographer's word on etymology, even if he was the official geographer to Roger II of Sicily, a man of a certain reputation even setting aside his assumption of the title of (Norman) King of Africa and a 1926 opera.
(Never let it be said that I wouldn't go the extra mile and do a Youtube search for you!)
"Asafi,' we're told, is the Berber word for river estuary. And while I'm tolerably certain that there's no such language as "Berber," I have the complete confidence of an ignoramus that "fey/sfi/sfey" is the common root for the verb "to flood" in the Afro-Asiatic languages of Morocco.
So what I can salvage from all of this is that the name of this town on the central Moroccan coast is linked by a distinguished medieval scholar with one of many stories anticipating Columbus. You cannot sail directly from al-Andalus to the end of the Atlantic, but I can certainly see you ending up in the mouth of the Chaabi River if you try. Rounding out the Wikipedia-reading, Safi is historically a centre of the Moroccan weaving industry and sardine fishery. (The Chaabi isn't mentioned in the skeletal Wiki. I add value!)
Given that Marrakesh itself was only founded about this time, it is unlikely that the city settlement of Safi is much older than the mention in al-Idrisi, so it is unfortunate that the enthusiasm for plumbing the depths of the Atlantic in southerly latitudes apparently lapsed at the mouth of the Chaaba. Had Asafi been founded on the Draa, instead, we would have been getting somewhere.
Sunniva was the sister of St. Alban, the British protomarty, executed sometime between 209AD and 305AD for being a Christian pain in the ass. The Romans made sure that he would be the best "protomartyr" he could possibly be, by beheading him at the site of one of the sacred wells on a main road out of London, which I will never now be able to think about without connecting them with Harrison Hot Springs. That local colour being dispensed with, I have to notice that it seems like we don't believe in a Celtic "headhunting cult" any more, so we should place less emphasis on the beheading thing.
Sunniva, traumatised by her brother's death, migrated to Ireland, where she happened to be the heir of a kingdom. As happened in those days, a heathen king invaded the kingdom, looking to marry Sunniva and inherit the throne. Sunniva would have none of that, which, actually, I blame on the heathen king, since this kind of thing happened all the time. Anyway, Sunniva did the obvious thing, which was to take two companions and her brother (who was alive again) and migrated to the unoccupied islands of Selja and Kinn, off the coast of Norway.
Unfortunately, they scared the sheep, and by this time it was 962--995, and an evil, pagan Earl of Lade was in charge of Norway. Consequently, when a posse of Norwegians landed on the island, the four saints cast Destruction on the cave they were sheltering in, causing them to all die in the cave in. I'm not sure that I'd handle things this way if I could cast seventh-level clerical spells, but then, I'm not a saint. Some time later, the bodies were recovered. Being incorrupt, everyone was reminded that they were saints, and the bodies were placed in a timber shrine, which was replaced sometime around 1100 by a Benedictine Abbey dedicated to St. Alban, and also about 1070 by a bishopric and cathedral devoted to St. Michael. By 1405, the Abbey was in ruins, except for the shrine to St. Sunniva, which remains an important Norwegian pilgrimage site, and the Bishop of Bergen took over its benefices.
As the story of St. Sunniva has some slightly implausible elements, such as her age of approximately 800 at time of death, it is worth at least briefly exploring the details. According to the official history of the Diocese of Bergen, King Olaf Tryggvason (995--1000), was inspired to found a church at Selje by the discovery of Sunniva's relics. This runs into the problem that the church seems to have been dedicated to St. Alban at first, with Sunniva's cult later and secondary, and also Olaf Tryggvason is only slightly less legendary than his supposed grandfather, Harald Fairhair.
(The entirety of our contemporary record of Olaf Tryggvason: A.D. 994. This year died Archbishop Siric: and Elfric, Bishop of Wiltshire, was chosen on Easter-day, at Amesbury, by King Ethelred and all his council. This year came Anlaf and Sweyne to London, on the Nativity of St. Mary, with four and ninety-ships. And they closely besieged the city, and would fain have set it on fire; but they sustained more harm and evil than they ever supposed that any citizens could inflict on them. The holy mother of God on that day in her mercy considered the citizens, and ridded them of their enemies. Thence they advanced, and wrought the greatest evil that ever any army could do, in burning and plundering and manslaughter, not only on the sea-coast in Essex, but in Kent and in Sussex and in Hampshire. Next they took horse, and rode as wide as they would, and committed unspeakable evil. Then resolved the king and his council to send to them, and offer them tribute and provision, on condition that they desisted from plunder. The terms they accepted; and the whole army came to Southampton, and there fixed their winter- quarters; where they were fed by all the subjects of the West- Saxon kingdom. And they gave them 16,000 pounds in money. Then sent the king; after King Anlaf Bishop Elfeah and Alderman Ethelwerd; (48) and, hostages being left with the ships, they led Anlaf with great pomp to the king at Andover. And King Ethelred received him at episcopal hands, and honoured him with royal presents. In return Anlaf promised, as he also performed, that he never again would come in a hostile manner to England.
Olaf Kyrre (1050--1093), who is an actual, historic figure, raised Selje to a bishopric in 1068. The associated monastery was evidently not Benedictine yet, and the diocese covered the territory of the later Bergen and Stavanger. It will be noted that at this point there is an ongoing rivalry between Norway's kings, based in the far southwest around, yes, Bergen and Stavanger, and the Earls of Lade (Trondheim), who are associated with the Archbishops of Nidaros (Trondheim.) A man of his age, Olaf Kyrre may have promoted the cult of St. Olaf by planting his shrine at Trondheim. Or it might have been the otherwise mysterious English missionary bishop, Grimkell, who assisted Olaf's conversion efforts. Or the cult of St. Olaf only emerged a century later.
What we know, more-or-less-securely, is that point, Selje was a bishopric in the King of Norway's domains at a time when the Earls of Lade were often in the ascendant, and patronised by Canute the Great.Once the kings finally and definitely defeated the Earls of Lade, Nidaros (Trondheim) became the Norwegian archbishop's seat, and the cult of St. Olaf eclipsed other Norwegian cults. It will also be noted that the cathedral erected to house the remains of St. Sunniva was dedicated to St. Michael, and that the (claimed) first bishop of Selje-as-St. Michael's was St. Bernard the Saxon, was a suffragen of Hamburg-Bremen. This brings him to the attention of Adam of Bremen. As always, we have the problem that Adam's agenda means that he might not accurately report earlier bishops at Selje.
Adam, who wants to take all the credit for the conversion of the north for the Diocese of Hamburg-Bremen, is certainly early evidence that Olaf Tryggvason existed, and of his cult, but because he needs to take Olaf down a notch, he presents him as a pagan magician, bandalso by portraying him as working with English bishops active in Scandinavia. All thiskill-stealing by English bishops is a pretty important issue for Adam, which is why he tells us about it, which, Thank God, because otherwise we wouldn't know about it at all. And, as far as the early history of the plantation of the Atlantic goes, that's actually kind of important.
Well, here I am, back at the epitomiser's desk, substituting for Ronnie because she has to do real work, and I am now just a full-time Navy flyboy, trying out the gadgets on the P2V, including a dust trap that we're hoping to scoop the Air Force with, when Ivan drops his bomb this summer. (At least, we assume that it'll be this summer. It's cold for bomb dropping in Russia in the winter!)
I have been told not to drop any bombs of my own in this letter. I hope that I have been obedient to my instructions, but my blood is boiling over Taft-Hartley repeal. It doesn't help that the business press has been doing a victory lap over it! I've tried telling Ronnie that this is what we get for electing Truman over Wallace, but she has been quite cool to that and perhaps I am pushing my luck. It's hard to believe that business is riding so high in the saddle, and even more so that it is being supported by the Southern bloc. It used to be that you could count on the Klan to at least have no time for Big Business! But now, it turns out that if you're going to fight civil rights, and you have to jettison the Popular Cause to do it, it is okay, because there is a better and higher Popular Cause called, "Keeping the Negro Down." Only they don't say "Negro."
Well, perhaps I should keep myself to myself for as long as I wear Air Force blue, says Ronnie. Given the career I've lined up for myself, it's thirty years out a captain, unless Navy air goes land-based.
Uncle George says that this is fine, because, as much money as the family has made on land already, there will be new vistas in the 1970s. San Francisco will need commuter suburbs on a new scale by then, and why not the West Side? Our alfalfa lands, covered with houses filled with industrious white-collar workers commuting over the mountains by high speed trains? What a vision!
My own vision, meanwhile, consists of the Navy accepting that aircraft carriers are dangerous and impractical contraptions that don't accomplish anything that patrol aviation can't do better. Which is why, perhaps with the optimisim of youth, I am not ruling out a flag in my future.
