A number of mishaps were reported at Malacca without reference to bad weather or fire. The Protests discussed here concern collisions, overturning, loss of anchors and cables, and leaks.

The Protests (thirteen cases)

Collisions

Collisions were most likely to occur in port, either during a storm or while participating in manoeuvres. Paul Van Dyke describes such occurrences in Whampoa. Arthur Bowes Smyth recorded in his journal the shambles that characterised the departure of the New South Wales First Fleet from Botany Bay to Port Jackson on 26 January 1788:

the Prince of Wales and Friendship who cd not keep in stays came foul of each other and the Friendship carried her jib-boom. The Prince of Wales had her New Main sail & her Main top mast Stay Sail rent in pieces. The Charlotte also came foul of the Friendship afterward & carried away some of the carv’d work from her stern, & it was with the greatest difficulty the Lady Penrhyn escaped the same fate.

The collisions reported at Malacca, however, all took place on the open sea, though they were related to travelling in convoy.

William Colvel, Commander of ‘het particuliere Engelsche schip Saijgon’ on a voyage from Madras collided with a royal naval vessel. He presented a part of the ship's journal (not retained in the archives) to the Malaccan authorities on 26 August 1801 to convey what happened.

The metaphorical associations of Beethoven’ s high registers in the late works discussed in relation to the late sonatas derive from and apply to a nexus of works in different genres, including the late string quartets, the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, the premiere of which, in May 1824, immediately preceded the composition of the Bagatelles Op. 126, Beethoven's final serious work for the piano. Published in 1825, the Op. 126 Bagatelles were more than mere Kleinigkeiten or ‘trifles’, the term used by Beethoven in a letter to the publisher Schott in November 1824. Rather, as Beethoven wrote, the six bagatelles were ‘more fully worked out and probably the best of this kind which I have composed’. Whilst we have found striking uses of registral structure in some of the earlier bagatelles, including the Op. 119 set, and the much earlier Op. 33 Bagatelles (see chapter 5), Op. 126 offers a fascinating crucible to examine Beethoven's use of registral structure in the realm of the short form in the ‘late’ style. The following chapters explore the unique ways in which sonic space is employed in these short pieces, whether they convey metaphorical symbolism in a similar way to the late works already discussed, and whether cyclic elements emerge in relation to the registral parameter. Whilst distinct from the collections of character pieces which pervade the Romantic era, the cycle reflects, in its compressed and short forms, some of the lofty ideas expressed in the more monumental and large-scale works. I begin with a discussion of Op. 126 as a complete cycle, and proceed to look at each bagatelle, nos 1–3 below, and nos 4–6 in the following chapter.

INTRODUCTION

Sometime in the second half of the 1580s, Edmund Spenser took up residence at Kilcolman Castle. Around the same time, news reached Munster of the premature death of Tadhg Mac Carthaigh, baron of Valentia, in France. Tadhg was the son and heir of Domhnall Mac Carthaigh Mór, earl of Clancare (†1596), and of Honora, the daughter of James Fitzgerald, the fourteenth earl of Desmond. His death brought great uncertainty as to the future of his father's extensive landholdings in Munster; under English law, and under the conditions of the earlship, it had been agreed that Mac Carthaigh Mór's lands would revert to Crown possession should he die without an heir. This would bring about the division and distribution of his vast estate. This potential was not lost on Spenser; later, in a View of the Present State of Ireland, Irenius would suggest planting ‘a good towne’ on lands ‘forcibly kept’ from Elizabeth I ‘by a rough tayle kerne that proclaimes him selfe the bastarde sonne of the Erle of Clancar, beinge called Donnell Mac Chartie’.

Two bardic elegies were composed on the death of Mac Carthaigh Mór's heir. As few sources document this event (in either English or Irish), these poems are of particular historical interest. They capture the contempo¬rary significance and magnitude of the death of Tadhg Mac Carthaigh in a way that the English-language sources do not. While diplomatic editions of the poems on the baron's death are available in A Bardic Miscellany (henceforth ABM), they have not hitherto been translated or fully edited. By providing full editions of the texts, this paper offers further insights into Spenser's immediate surroundings and into a world to which he had only limited access.

This appendix aims to provide brief descriptions of significant manuscripts mentioned in this book, being more than an index of manuscripts, with a specific focus on those manuscripts which exist in digital facsimile. Manuscripts primarily transmitting Herbal material are not generally included unless their contents have been specifically discussed in Chapter 1. Where the language of a manuscript is explicit in its shelf mark, no further remarks are necessary, but it will be noted where this information is not explicit.

Belgium

*Louvain-la-Neuve, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Centre General de Documentation, Fragmenta H. Omont 3. s. ix, Old English This single leaf of medical cures was discovered only in the late twentieth century. It dates to the ninth century and is written in an Anglian dialect, most likely Mercian, according to Cameron and Schauman, who published a transcription and translation of the recipes. The relationship of this text to other Old English medical texts has been discussed by Meaney.

Czech Republic

Prague

Narodni knihovna Česke republiky, MS XIV. A. 12 s. xv, Latin

This medieval Bohemian manuscript was produced in Prague in the second half of the fifteenth century. It contains of Pliny's Historia naturalis followed by the Physica Plinii Florentino-Pragensis in three books from folio 324v, with several other texts wrongly attributed to Pliny. Excepting the epistles of Pliny the Younger (item 10), the remaining contents are strictly medical and unusually old for a medieval Bohemian manuscript.

Since his death in 1881, Benjamin Disraeli has been reimagined many times: as a social reformer, a democrat, an imperialist, and more recently as a Tory wet and a Jewish seer. This essay explores his earliest reinvention, before any of those better-known efforts began. This was the one engineered immediately after his death by a quartet of high-spirited Tory MPs known as the Fourth Party, and particularly by the Fourth Party's founder and least-known member, Henry Drummond Wolff. It is argued here that Wolff developed a coherent strategy for perpetuating Disraeli's politics. He had known Disraeli since he was a teenager in the 1840s. He shared his preoccupations with high society, with diplomacy and particularly with the Near and Middle East (or ‘the East’ as I shall call it here, following most Victorians). This essay interprets Wolff's political activities in the 1880s in the light of Disraeli's writings and actions. It argues that understanding Disraeli's priorities is the way to make sense of Wolff, but also that by making sense of Wolff we can understand Disraeli better.

Wolff made a number of contributions in that decade. He was Lord Randolph Churchill's right-hand man – his ‘jackal’, according to Joseph Chamberlain – in the Fourth Party, which harassed the Liberal government of William Gladstone and exposed the torpor of the official Conservative leader, Stafford Northcote. In 1883, he founded the Primrose League to commemorate Disraeli's name and provide a focus for Churchillian Conservatism. He was posted to Constantinople and Egypt between 1885 and 1887 with a plan to solve Britain's greatest foreign policy crisis since the Crimean War, its fraught military entanglement with Egypt and Sudan.

In addition to delays caused by storm damage, groundings, fire and ravages by pirates, country traders could also be impeded by imprisonment, detention, embargoes and other forms of harassment. Surprisingly, these interruptions to trade did not result solely from altercations with wartime enemies, such as the French, but arose also from the different agendas of the Malay States or from clashes with that ostensible defender of the country traders, the British Royal Navy. The following Protests have been divided into these different groupings where belligerence could result in loss of life, goods and time.

The Protests (nine cases)

Capture by the Malays

On a slightly different plane to the European notion of wartime capture there was also the possibility of capture by the Malays as an extension of their custom of maritime raiding. The murder of Captain Thomas Sadler at Mempawah in 1795 falls into this category.

The event has previously been described in some detail. In summary, however, the Protest, in English, signed by Thomas Groube, first mate, and other officers of the country trader vessel Transfer, reported the murder of their captain. It was presented to the Dutch notary on 5 August 1795 when the Transfer called at Malacca. Sadler was an experienced, highly regarded country captain who had traded around the archipelago for at least twelve years, including to Mempawah. On the particular voyage in question, the Transfer arrived at Mempawah on Sunday 12 July 1795 and Sadler spent the next few days ashore while cargo was being traded.

Song Accompaniment – A Marginalised and Gendered Profession

Collaborative piano work, and art-song accompaniment in particular, is a marginalised profession. Singers tend to have the more powerful agent and higher fees; their names sell the tickets and critics focus on them. Unlike their partners at the keyboard, singers never fear being left out of a song recital programme, standing awkwardly by themselves in green rooms after concerts, or being unlisted on a YouTube video in which they are visibly performing.

This disparity seems particularly odd given that the core art-song literature was composed by pianists, not singers. Johannes Brahms, Benjamin Britten, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, Franz Schubert, Clara and Robert Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Hugo Wolf were all keyboardists. To cite pianist Iain Burnside, in fact, ‘in Lieder, it is the pianist who leads’.

It also cannot be argued that collaborative pianists follow a shorter or less intensive educational path. They have as long a training route as piano soloists or singers, and one that is often more interdisciplinary. They must sight-read, study poetry and foreign languages, and master a great deal of repertoire, while developing essential soft skills. Pianist Anna Tilbrook attests that these pianists must develop a ‘sixth sense, knowing when singers are going to have a memory lapse, when they’re going to come in a bar early or even skip a whole verse… and [learn to] cover all that with their playing, so smoothly that no one notices’

Two powerful metaphors found in the literature of the early medieval English peoples are the weaving of peace and the weaving of death. Both metaphors have generated a long history of argument and discussion, a history which this chapter and the next necessarily address. In this chapter, I begin with an overview of critical opinion on the potential definitions to date for “peaceweaver/peaceweaving,” and then follow with the definitions considered here. Meanings considered in this work take into account all of the elements of the word “peaceweaving,” including the often under-considered second half of the metaphor: “-weaving.” Anglo-Latin evidence has also rarely been taken into account in this conversation, and I do so here, documenting previously unaddressed evidence. After assessment of this full range of evidence, the chapter will also examine potential analogical influences in the development of the early medieval English metaphor for weaving peace.

It is not comfortable to be an individual, and it is not easy being the best. This is the wisdom of Achilles in Madeline Miller's modern imagining of the greatest of all Greek warriors, who demands the following of his lover Patroclus:

Part of what makes Miller's novels (The Song of Achilles, Circe) compelling is the self-conscious quality of her characters: they are more than literate in their own mythos, and understand with sometimes painful precision the roles they are to play. Achilles knows the sort of man he is to become; myth is a living, dynamic force in this storyworld, informing the decisions he makes (and thus the shape of the plot). Achilles looks back at the great heroes of his culture, and sees that great fame goes hand in hand with pain, and that adventure is the product of difficulty and disaster. Like the superlative tragedy faced by Amis and Amiloun discussed in Chapter 1, there is a sense that such a superfluity of anything must teeter on the edge of dismay. Fame – being known of – is not the same as being known (the unspoken preoccupation of the romance characters I discussed in Chapter 2).