ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: Why do pirates say “R” so much? Don’t they know any other letters?—Sincerely, A New England Schoolmarm.
Dear Madam: The letter R is indeed highly favored among pirates, but certainly not for reasons of illiteracy. On the whole, pirates (who are greatly misrepresented in popular entertainment) are a remarkably literate lot. The long intervals of inactivity between plunderings—intervals that, in fact, make up most of a pirate’s career—are conducive to reflection and literary pursuits, and pirates while away the time in reading small-press literary magazines and composing sonnets in the Italian style after the manner of Petrarch.
Precisely because of their pronounced literary bent, pirates are zealous guardians of their own traditions. The chant of “R” began as a protest against the trial of Captain Jack Rackham, commonly known as Calico Jack on account of the large number of stray cats he had adopted. When Calico Jack was imprisoned in Kingston in 1720 (1573 old style), a large crowd of fellow pirates gathered around the governor’s mansion shouting “Rackham! Rackham!” The governor, however, hearing the chant through his closed bedroom window, mistook it for a crowd of townspeople shouting “Rack him! Rack him!” and accordingly sent Calico Jack to the rack. In order to avoid similar embarrassments at his trial, the pirates who protested shortened their chant to the unambiguous initial “R.”
Their protest was to no avail. Calico Jack was hanged after a brief trial, and a collection had to be taken up to provide for the stray cats. But pirates everywhere still honor his memory, and the initial they shouted outside the courthouse has evolved into a pirate’s favorite oath. When a pirate says “Arrr,” what he means is “By the bones of the lamented Captain Jack Rackham, may God rest his soul.”
ANNOUNCEMENT.
IT’S PIRATE WEEK at Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine, a festival of everything piratey. So hoist yer flapjacks, mateys, and burnish yer ribbentrops! We be settin’ sail into uncharted waters!
DOCTRINES OF THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS.
No. 3.—Antithesis of Syracuse.
LITTLE HAS SURVIVED of the works of most of the important Sicilian philosophers of pre-Alexandrian times. Like most of his countrymen, Antithesis is known mostly from isolated notices and quotations in the works of better-known philosophers. The most important of these fragments are reproduced here, showing that Antithesis seems to have been especially interested in the philosophy of mathematics.
For Antithesis saith that the one is not the many, and the many is not the one. And of this he claims to have the strongest proof, although he does not produce it.
Antithesis in his book of Divisions says that the many may in fact be the few and the few the many, but the one cannot be the few, nor can the few be the one, without contradiction.
But against this Antithesis saith that the one beareth no resemblance to the few at all; for the idea (eidos) of fewness is subsumed in the idea of multiplicity.
Mesohippus, on seeing his rival Antithesis in the marketplace discoursing with a disciple, said that the students of Antithesis were one and not many, upon which Antithesis hit him with [the rest is missing].
And as an authority we may cite Antithesis of Syracuse, who commonly said that the universe was one and not many, but one day, having drunk a quantity of the best Falernian, proclaimed to his disciples, “Alas, now I see with my own eyes that the universe is many and not one.”
ADMIRAL HORNSWOGGLE’S NAUTICAL ADVENTURES.
No. 3.―Across the Piso Mojado by Balloon.
IT HAPPENED ONCE when I was a young commander aboard the Conundrum, a frigate of the third class, that we received orders to take the city of Taquito from the Spanish garrison there. The orders had come from the very highest levels of the Admiralty. Vain it was to protest that Taquito was far in the interior of the colony and thus out of reach of the Conundrum; the thing had to be done by some means or other.
Since the captain appeared to be in a quandary, I volunteered to lead an expedition into the interior, across the treacherous Piso Mojado, which (as a glance at any comprehensive atlas will tell you) separates Taquito from the coastal plain. The captain warned me that it was a suicide mission at best, but I was full of youthful bravado, and filled with a confidence that was probably unjustified by my experience. I was given a small number of handpicked men; two, in fact, one of them the ship’s cook’s assistant and the other a stowaway who had been kept in the brig. With this force I was ordered to expel the Spanish garrison, which our best sources estimated to consist of roughly two thousand men.
After a trifling incident in which I was mistaken for an incarnation of the demon-god Picante, who is invariably represented with a prominent mustache similar to the one I have always worn, we received a friendly reception at the port of Basso Profundo;―for the rebellion had entirely succeeded in banishing the Spanish from the coast. The native Mayor, or Mayor as they say in the local dialect, welcomed us heartily, and insisted on opening his own house to me. There his good wife regaled us with a hearty dinner of pise con cuidado, the well-known local delicacy, and in the course of our conversation I learned something singularly to our advantage.
It seemed that there was a young man in the town who not only was an accomplished aeronaut, but also possessed his own balloon, in which he frequently took honeymoon couples for an aerial view of the municipal wire works. He was a strange fellow, the Mayor told us, and a bit of an occultist, but of a friendly and pliant disposition. With this balloon, and its owner as our guide, we might effect a crossing of the Piso Mojado with no need for the climbing gear, salad tongs, Phillips-head screwdrivers, and phenakistoscopes normally required by travelers in that inhospitable region.
We wasted no time: the next morning we contracted with the aeronaut to carry the three of us across the Piso Mojado. Even after we had established to his satisfaction that I was not the demon-god Picante, his deficient knowledge of our language, and our equal ignorance of his barbarous dialect, made it a little difficult for us to communicate our intentions; but eventually we came to an understanding, the aeronaut being under the impression that we were a honeymoon couple and their manservant. I am to this day not entirely sure which one of us he thought was the bride.
Our flight went well at first, and I allowed myself some premature satisfaction at the apparent success of my plan. Just as we had almost reached Taquito, however, we suddenly heard shots from below; and you can imagine our consternation when we looked down and beheld on the ground a number of swift horsemen pursuing our balloon. It seems that the local tribal elders, or Jussars, had also mistaken me for the demon-god Picante, against whom they had an ancient grudge, and who was frequently represented as flying across the sky suspended from a giant beetle. Even as our aeronaut guide was conveying this information by means of the most animated gestures, one of the shots penetrated our balloon. It was not enough to bring us down, but two or three more like it would be enough.
I could think of only one thing to do. Communicating my meaning by elaborate hand signals, accompanied by such scraps of Wagner as I could recall, I persuaded our guide to make use of his occult knowledge. Once he grasped my meaning, the aeronaut set to work with a will, and in short order had a circle drawn on the floor of the balloon. He then chanted some barbarous phrases in a low monotone, and in only a few moments we were rewarded with an apparition of the real demon-god Picante in all his terrifying malevolence. The fiery face of the angry deity filled half the sky, and the Jussars, his natural enemies and the ones against whom he directed his wrath, turned and fled immediately, pursued over hill and valley by the awful supernatural manifestation.
When we arrived in Taquito, we discovered that the Spanish garrison, terrified at the sight of the angry demon, had fled in confusion into the jungle, where I understand that the demon-god Picante turned them all into okapis, an animal until then unknown in those parts. The natives, who were more accustomed to the occasional manifestations of the demon, had simply covered their ears until the noise was over; and so we were welcomed as heroes who had liberated them from the Spanish yoke. It was on the strength of this victory that I was given the rank of captain, and some of you may already have read the story of my first command, in which I ended the Spanish War once and for all. In this case, however, I must say that, although honesty forbids me to discount my part in the affair altogether, I owed some of my success to the demonic powers: a thing that has always prevented me from feeling that entire satisfaction that ought to come from a job well done.
ERRATA.
In the recipe for caramel apple sturgeon on page 149, “stir vaingloriously” should read “stir vigorously.” You may wish to mark the correction on that page in order to avoid embarrassment.
In the recipe for boiled water on page 212, the last paragraph was inadvertently omitted. It should read as follows: “Now pour the water into a kettle or pot, place it on the stove, and turn the burner on ‘high,’ leaving the water on the stove until it boils.”
Several readers have written on the subject of the Swedish Pickled Asparagus Tarts on page 283 to remind us that “Sweden” is not a real country. We apologize for the error.
It has been found more helpful to state the quantity of flour on page 320 as “one cup” rather than as “1/1,258 wheelbarrow.”
The caption under figure 1 for celery and onion stew on page 551 misidentifies the onions. The onions are in fact the roundish objects in the picture.
In the recipe for Potemkin salad on page 1,375, substitute Romaine lettuce for radicchio. Further research indicates that there is no such plant as “radicchio.”
The “index” beginning on page 2,591 is actually the index to a book on mechanical improvements to the unicycle, which the author was preparing at the same time as the present work.
In the first erratum above, “caramel apple sturgeon” should read “Nova Scotia herring blintz cake.”
