During the Black Death, Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani wrote, “The priest who confessed the sick and those who nursed them so generally caught the infection that the victims were abandoned and deprived confession, sacrament, medicine, and nursing … And many lands and cities were made desolate. And this plague lasted till ________.”
He left the blank so that he could record the date of the plague’s end, but then he himself succumbed, dying in 1348.
Another and still more amusing instance of self-revelation may be found in a manuscript familiar to many who have visited the Bodleian Library at Oxford. There, among other precious treasures, is a collection of notes scribbled by Charles II. to Clarendon, and by Clarendon to Charles II., to beguile the tedium of Council. They look, for all the world, like the notes which school-girls are wont to scribble to one another, to beguile the tedium of study. On one page, Charles in a little careless hand, not unlike a school-girl’s, writes that he wants to go to Tunbridge, to see his sister. Clarendon in larger, firmer characters writes back that there is no reason why he should not, if he can return in a few days, and adds tentatively, ‘I suppose you will go with a light train.’ Charles, as though glowing with conscious rectitude, responds, ‘I intend to take nothing but my night-bag.’ Clarendon, who knows his master’s luxurious habits, is startled out of all propriety. ‘Gods!’ he writes: ‘you will not go without forty or fifty horse.’ Then Charles, who seems to have been waiting for this point in the dialogue, tranquilly replies in one straggling line at the bottom of the page. ‘I count that part of my night-bag.’
— Agnes Repplier, Essays in Idleness, 1893
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon of 1851 contains a sobering entry:
ραφανιδοω: to thrust a radish up the fundament, a punishment of adulterers in Athens
In recalling this to friends at Christmas in 1972, historian John Julius Norwich wrote, “I’m sure it must once have been familiar to every schoolboy, and now that the classics are less popular than they used to be I should hate it to be forgotten.”
Freezing in the Canadian arctic in 1821, John Franklin noted some telling effects of fatigue in his companions:
I observed, that in proportion as our strength decayed, our minds exhibited symptoms of weakness, evinced by a kind of unreasonable pettishness with each other. Each of us thought the other weaker in intellect than himself, and more in need of advice and assistance. So trifling a circumstance as a change of place, recommended by one as being warmer and more comfortable, and refused by the other from a dread of motion, frequently called forth fretful expressions, which were no sooner uttered than atoned for, to be repeated, perhaps, in the course of a few minutes. The same thing often occurred when we endeavoured to assist each other in carrying wood to the fire; none of us were willing to receive assistance, although the task was disproportioned to our strength.
From Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, 1823.
One of the most beautiful and moving of the bird-songs heard throughout the country which [French merchant Nicolas] Denys governed [in 17th-century Acadia], is that of the Veery, or Wilson’s Thrush. The Maliseet Indians of the Saint John River, as Mr. Tappan Adney has recently told us, say this bird is calling Ta-né-li-ain′, Ni-kó-la Dĕn′-i Dĕn′-i?, that is, ‘Where are you going, Nicolas Denys?’ and Mr. Adney thinks this an actual echo from the days of our author.
— From William Francis Ganong’s 1908 introduction to Denys’ Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America, 1672
“To read History is to run the risk of asking, ‘Which is more honorable? To rule over people, or to be hanged?'” — J.G. Seume
Perhaps the most touching story is told by a Canadian, Flight-Commander R. Leckie, D.S.O., in a letter home, published in an American paper. After an engagement with hostile aircraft over the North Sea he came down, his seaplane riddled with shrapnel, over fifty miles from land, and then had to act as rescuer and host to the crew of an aeroplane, wrecked by engine failure. Six men were then adrift in a doomed machine, with no food and little water. The Commander had four pigeons; one was released at once, a second on the next day, a third on the third day. All failed to reach home, perishing over the waste of waters. The fourth, set free in a fog, hungry and thirsty, struggled over the fifty miles of sea without a landmark and without a rest. He could not reach his loft, but fluttered down in a coastguard station, and there fell dead from exhaustion. But his message was delivered, and six men were saved.
— Bird Notes and News, Winter 1918
In November 1795, Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a volume of Apuleius from the Bristol Library.
In the borrowers’ register, in place of the date, he wrote, “9 Dutch ships taken, with 3000 troops Bravo.”
The Greek architect Dinocrates proposed carving Mount Athos into a colossal man who held a city in one hand and with the other poured a river into the sea.
Alexander the Great rejected the proposal because (among other things!) it would have required importing grain by ship rather than growing it near the city.
In his 2007 history The Slave Ship, Marcus Rediker reports that sharks would sometimes follow slave ships entirely across the Atlantic, “that they might devour the bodies of the dead when thrown overboard,” in the words of veteran captain Hugh Crow. Observer Alexander Falconbridge wrote that sharks swarmed “in almost incredible numbers about the slave ships, devouring with great dispatch the dead bodies of the negroes.”
A notice published in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1785 reads, “The many Guineamen lately arrived here have introduced such a number of overgrown sharks, (The constant attendants on the vessels from the coasts) that bathing in the river is become extremely dangerous, even above town.”
In a natural history of sharks published in 1774, Oliver Goldsmith tells of a “rage for suicide” aboard one ship, whose captain made an example of one woman by lowering her into the water:
“When the poor creature was thus plunged in, and about half way down, she was heard to give a terrible shriek, which at first was ascribed to her fears of drowning; but soon after, the water appearing red all around her, she was drawn up, and it was found that a shark, which had followed the ship, had bit her off from the middle.”