The excellent Trevor Joyce, source of so many things both poetic and bloggic, alerted me to this amazing passage from The kings tovvre and triumphant arch of London. A sermon preached at Pauls Crosse, August. 5. 1622. By Samuel Purchas, Bacheler of Diuinitie, and parson of Saint Martins Ludgate, in London:
O London, which art rich at home, and needest none other World, then Brittaine, how hast thou extended thy Trade into all parts of Europe?
Coeli & soli bonis omnibus donata, thou hast twice, with thy long Armes, embraced the whole Globe; art made delicate with Russian Furres; fed, when need is, with Corne from Danske, and Poland; whom the Germanes present with rare Artifices; Italians, with Silks, Stuffes, Veluets; the French and Spaniard, with Wines and Oyle; the Belgians, with Wares for thy Peace, and Warres for thy superfluous bloud; the Mountaynes of Norway, descend that thy houses may ascend; Narue and the Easterlings are thy Calkers and Riggers for thy Ships; Iseland, New-foundland, and the North-seas furnish thee with Fish; Turkie, with Carpets; Barbarie and the Negroes, with Gold, and Creatures for thy pleasure: the Northwest hath opened her various passages to thee, and if Nature denyed not, would giue the thorow-fare: Greenland melteth her huge Whale-monsters, to doe thee seruice: the Ilands, which Nature had almost lost in the Ocean, are found out by thy Mariners: the Red Sea hath been awed, and the Turks afraid, lest thou shouldst stop vp that mouth of Mahomet: the Mogoll’s, Persian’s, Moscouite’s, large Dominions are thy thorow-fare, thy Staples: Thou hast strewed thy Factories alongst the East euen to Iapan, and sowen and reaped Wealth and Honour in the Ocean. How doe the most remote parts send in their Commodities both for thy profit and pleasure? while, by the way, Saldania, Saint Augustines, Saint Helena, and other places yeeld refreshing to thy Merchants and Mariners; Siam, sendeth the Lignum Aloes, Beniamin, rich Stones; Socodanna, Diamonds; China, Raw Silke, Porcellane, Taffata, Veluets, Damaske, Muske, Sewing-gold, Embroydered Hangings; Macassar, and Patania, Bezars; Baly, Slaues for thy Merchants Indian vses; Timore, White-sanders and Waxe, Banda, Nutmegs and Oyle; the Molucca’s, Cloues; Iapan, Dyes, Salt-peeter, Siluer; Guinnee, dying-wood, Oyster-trees, Guinny-pepper; Zocotora, Ciuet-cats, and Aloes; Arabian Red-Sea-Moha, Indian and Arabian Commodities; Cambaya, Cloth, Carpets, Quilts, Spikenard, Turbith, Cinnamon; Surat, Indicoe’s Callicoes, Pintadoe’s, Chado[r]s, Shashes, Girdles, Cannakens, Treckanees, Senabafs, Aleias, Patolla’s, Sellas, Greene-ginger, Lignum Aloes, Suckets, Opium, Sal-armoniacke, and abundance of Drugges; Balsora, Pearles; Zeilon, Cinnamon; Iambe, great grain’d Pepper; as Priaman, Passaman, best Pepper, and Gold; the East of Africa, Gold and Amber-greese. These, with many more, conspire to make thee Great. Thou hast not, as of old, visited the New-world, but hast made (not Ireland alone, but) Bermuda’s frequent and populous; Virginia, to multiply in Townes and Hundreths; besides, New-England, New-found-land, and other thy Plantations; O magnae spes altera Brittaniae. Virginia! I will repeat of thee, which I said before of thy Royall Godmother, which named thee Virginia, O quam te memorem virgo? thy louely cheekes, alas, lately blushed with Virginian-English bloud: but how soone? and thy blush being turned to indignation, thou shalt wash, hast washed thy feet in the bloud of those natiue vnnaturall Traytors, and now becommest a pure English Virgin; a new other Brittaine, in that new other World: and let all English say and pray, GOD BLESSE VIRGINIA.
How rich a piece of writing! how many exotic names of wares: Pintadoe’s, Chadois, Shashes, Cannakens, Treckanees, Senabafs, Aleias, Patolla’s, Sellas! And Place-names both familiar (China) or easily recognizable (Iapan, Zeilon) and mysterious (what or where is Saldania? or Iambe?), and the rhetorickal Turnes (“with Wares for thy Peace, and Warres for thy superfluous bloud”), and the wondrous Participles (sowen!); truly one could spend hours luxuriating in Purchas his Prose.
Saldanha Bay is on the southwest coast of South Africa, but maybe it still referred to Table Bay for this author? The Djambi Sultanate of Sumatra was noted for the export of pepper. Short comment because I must go to sleep now.
Stunning, but the most stunning part is the name. I thought Caesar’s Belgae were dug up and zombified only in 1830 to give a name to the otherwise unprecedented country of Flemings and Walloons, but here they are, no more exotic or scholarly contrived than the Germanes.
Admittedly, some basic Latin is presupposed as not needing translation, so perhaps the sermon was actually preached to people who’d read some Caesar.
Wiktionary surprises me: “This verb started to become weak in late Middle English, but was predominantly strong.” But the comparanda it provides show everything makes sense. Proto-Germanic *sēaną regularly became Proto-Northwest-Germanic *sāan, and that made people unhappy, phonologically speaking. North Germanic, or at least Danish, smoothed *āa to *ā, resulting in så. English inserted /w/ into the cluster, resulting in OE sāwan, ME sowen. Mainland West Germanic inserted /j/ into the cluster, so it looked like a causative and became a weak verb: Dutch zaaien, German säen, säte, gesät (with the /j/ lost again after umlaut).
What I don’t know if there’s any known pattern to these insertions (or the Danish contraction).
From the OED’s entry for Belgium (2015):
First citation for Belgian in English from 1571, for Belgium from 1586, although “The less common form Belgia is found slightly earlier”.
As participles go, unreduced “sowen” instead of “sown” may be archaic, but I’m not sure I would call it wondrous. Perfectly standard for the time – Deut 11:37 in the KJV *without* silently-modernized orthography is “And if any part of their carkasse fall vpon any sowing seed which is to be sowen, it shalbe cleane.”
To be sure, Shakespeare preferred a weaker approach, e.g. “what wilt thou be / When time hath sow’d a grizzle on thy case?”
But speaking of strong/weak variation, note that Purchas has “hast strewed” rather than “hast strewn.”
Virginia, to multiply in Townes and Hundreths;
The Powhatan attack, which killed one quarter of the Virginian colonists and drove the survivors to abandon every settlement other than Jamestown, happened in March 1622. I assume that event was known in London by August.
Apparently it didn’t diminish the English enthusiasm for continuing their colonization efforts, as subsequent events also demonstrated I suppose.
Part of the reason for that, at least among Puritans, seems to have been Edward Winslow’s account of the first year of the Plymouth settlement entitled Mourt’s Relation, from which we have our story of the first Thanksgiving. The book was published in London in 1622, presumably before this sermon, and was an effective bit of marketing. I was surprised to see a reference to a „New England plantation” in a sermon that early, but maybe the book was already making waves.
I recently listened to Miles Franklin’s “My Brilliant Career” read by Megan E Rees (“began her acting career in Perth, Western Australia in 1980”), who regularly pronounced all of shown, grown, known, thrown as disyllables. I don’t know if this is Rees’ own accent or her impression of the accent of narrator Sybylla Melvyn (b. 1879 rural NSW). Franklin’s text uses standard spellings.
Zocotora, Ciuet-cats, and Aloes
Is that Socotra? But it has no native mammals (except a bat). Civets can be raised in captivity, but it seems an odd place to raise them.
Chadois looks like an OCR error for chadors.
The title led me to expect a demonstration of the existence of Santa Claus. I am disappointed.
Chadois looks like an OCR error for chadors.
A little googling convinces me you must be right, and I’ve made the [bracketed] correction. It surprises me, though, because the text looked like it had been proofread to a fare-thee-well.
I just want to say how much I love “the Ilands, which Nature had almost lost in the Ocean”.
@Y: The civet Viverricula indica arrived in Socotra centuries ago, according to UNESCO. Introduced for the perfume business?
“Chadois” may be a typo, but it’s not an OCR error.
Definitely a typo; compare Purchase’s Pilgrimage, vol 1 p 530:
Thanks!
Where does the second g in Goga come from? Did the author believe it had a twin city Magoga?
I think Goga is not Goa but rather Ghogha in Gujerat.
@me: “Purchase’s Pilgrimage” — recte “Purchas his Pilgrimes”; the pilgrim quoted above being Captain Walter Peyton, not to be confused with Running Back Walter Payton. The step twixt Peyton and Purchas affords opportunity for many a typo.
Further to mollymooly: the Michigander Gerald Ford pronounced “known” (and I think similar words, but “known” is the only one I remember clearly) as two syllables.
Pintados, Chints and Chadors
It’s interesting to see English singular chintz get its start here as an English plural of Hindustani छींट چِھینٹ chī̃ṭ ‘splash, drop, stain, spot; chintz’.
As it has actually stuck in English I would say that “chintz” is a mass noun, and some non-trivial number of mass nouns are etymologically plural. (Like a lot of mass nouns X, “chintz” can also be a count noun meaning “type or instance of X.”)
Megan E Rees (“began her acting career in Perth, Western Australia in 1980”), who regularly pronounced all of shown, grown, known, thrown as disyllables.
This is standard Aus and NZ pronunciation. Comes from Irish English, I believe.
@AntC
I don’t know if there is an epenthetic vowel but the diphthong in some words with ō in Std. E is “prolonged”, i.e., the partner of me elfla is me owwwl wan or owwwl'(w)an.
Iambe?
Must be Jambi, which according to Captain Walter Peyton “is on the East-side of Sumatra. It yeeldeth like great-grained Pepper as Priaman, but is not subiect to the King of Achen …”
@AntC
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4GlbHOEJy8k
There is a version by the Pogues, but this one is more “authentic”, as far as the vowel is concerned…
Strikingly Polish [l] in that one (in (wi)ll).
“Purchase’s Pilgrimage” — recte “Purchas his Pilgrimes”
Actually Purchas his Pilgrimes and Purchas his Pilgrimage are two different works. He also wrote a Purchas his Pilgrim. It drives bibliographers crazy.
You can disambiguate them by the subtitles! E.g. volume 2 (“his Pilgrim”) is “or Microcosmus, or the Historie of Man. Relating the Wonders of his Generation, Vanities in his Degeneration, Necessities of his Regenerations.”
Peter Gabriel released four albums in a row each nominally titled only _Peter Gabriel_, but conventions emerged as to how to refer to them to avoid confusion. Maybe the Purchas fanbase isn’t as well-organized?
They should have annual (at a minimum) meetings here to hash out these things and develop standards.
There’s a Portuguese restaurant I quite like in West Harrison, N.Y., right next to Purchase, that I commend to meeting attendees. Purchas could probably have gotten quite an extravagant sermon out of the menu.
https://aquario-restaurant.restaurants-world.net/
It drives bibliographers crazy.
Wikipedia: “The fourth edition of the Pilgrimage (published in 1626) is usually catalogued as the fifth volume of the Pilgrimes, but the two works are essentially distinct.”