I've been working on some historical translation from (Scottish) Gaelic again, and wanted to share the results.

This is a story told in Mac-Talla, June of 1892. Mac-Talla was a Gaelic-language newspaper in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and liked to tell humorous "historical" stories on their front page. One of their favourite types features someone who seems foolish or stupid getting the upper hand.

When Rob Roy MacGregor was powerful in the Highlands, there was a landowning gentleman in Dunvegan by the name of Norman MacLeod. The MacLeods had been landowners in Dunvegan for one hundred years before that, and have descendants there to this day. Now, this Norman was as well-known as any of them, and he was a close friend of Rob Roy. We will tell of their friendship.

MacLeod needed to bring a certain sum of his money from Inverness to Dunvegan. He gave an order to one of the servants to go get it, but the servant was afraid that he would encounter Rob. He knew that Rob, at that very moment, was hiding at that moment somewhere between the Isle of Skye and Inverness. There was an idiot around Dunvegan, at that time, and the servant went to tell him of the danger he was in. The fool went immediately to MacLeod, and proposed that he go and retrieve the money instead. The master readily agreed.

The fool went on his way and, on the path to Inverness, climbing a steep slope, he met a large, handsome man, who asked where he was going. The fool told him, and the stranger inquired about his business. He replied that he was going to get the master’s money in Inverness.

“Your master must be very rich,” said the stranger.

“Oh, he is well off,” said the fool.

“Will there be a lot of money on the return?”

“There will be, perhaps a thousand pounds,” said the fool, boasting.

“You take good care of it, then,” said the stranger. “I hope we meet again.”

“I surely will,” said the other man. He did so all the way to Inverness, and got the money. On his way back, he stopped to rest near the place where he saw the stranger on the way to Inverness. He had hardly sat down when he saw the same man, riding a fine horse, coming toward him. He asked the fool if his business in town went well.

“Oh, yes, very good,” said the fool. He thought about a large, mature man like the strange with a magnificent, well-provisioned horse. “I hope,” said the man, “that the money is safe, since you have to give it to me.”

The farm-hand did not know what to do, but he responded quickly. “I cannot give up my master’s money.”

“But you must,” said the other man. “I am Rob Roy!”

“I still will not give it,” said the fool, shaking with fear.

“I’ll put a bullet in you if you don’t,” said Rob.

When the fool saw there were only two choices, give up the money or die, he took a small package from his breast pocket and, throwing it down the hillside, said, “Here it is.” Rob jumped off his horse and ran down the hill, as he chased the money. In a moment, the fool was in Rob’s saddle and left happily because there was nothing in the package but a pair of stockings, and he had the money in his pocket.

Rob was left behind, thinking he had the upper hand. When the rider approached the MacLeod’s castle, the watchman saw him, but did not know who the stately rider was, so he hastily went to ask MacLeod if he should let the approaching gentleman in. MacLeod agreed, as one man would not hurt them. When they saw who it was, they were greatly surprised.

“Where did you get that horse?” asked MacLeod. The fool told him, and the story pleased Norman greatly. But when they searched the saddle, they found more money than the fool had gotten in Inverness. MacLeod sentenced the fool to return Rob’s horse and his money to him. He was very reluctant to do that, but finally did as he was ordered. And the fool and Rob Roy and MacLeod were great friends from then on.

So recently, I've been doing some genealogical work on my family. Turns out, I have more records available for my Native ancestors than I would've thought. I recently found out that my great-great grandma attended the horrid Carlisle Indian School. I even found her enrollment card.

Now, this is interesting for two reasons. The first is that while it was believed my great grandma went to a boarding school, I didn't have any documentation. But with verifying that her mom did, there is a greater chance to say that she more than likely attended as well. The second, though, is that on her enrollment card, the ethnicity section is actually titled "Nation," which is a huge thing for Tribal Sovereignty. Many opponents of Tribal Sovereignty will argue that tribes were never viewed in the same light as other countries. Yet, as noted in several works I often cite, this was not the case. Tribal Nations were certainly viewed as any other nation prior to the late 19th Century. Yet, this card, which is from the late 18th Century (iirc), upholds the fact that in the eyes of the U.S. government, we were definitely viewed as our own sovereign nations.

Earlier this week the "antiquities dealers" in the Hobby Lobby scandal were arrested. There whole "far right evangelicals send twenty million dollars to ISIS because they want to some old tax documents in their museum" was always a pretty amusing hook, but more importantly it does show the scale of the problem.

I think the South Sulawesi AMA went fairly well, so a big thanks to everybody who contributed.

There were a bunch of questions at the bottom I couldn't get to, so I'd like to apologize for that. Here I'll take the time to briefly answer them all (well, more briefly than I normally would).

/u/JustinJSrisuk:

Great post. My question is: what was the relationship between the Indonesian kingdoms in Sulawesi and the Siamese kingdoms of Sukhothai and Ayutthaya or the Khmer kingdoms? Were there trading missions or diplomatic relations and envoys between Indonesia and the mainland Indochina?

There were direct shipping and generally pretty good commercial relationships between Thailand and Gowa, South Sulawesi's 17th-century hegemon. Cambodia also appears in local histories as a very normal, if a little far-off, destination for merchants and is clearly marked as Kembuja in Bugis sea charts. I don't know of any official diplomatic contact between mainland Southeast Asia and South Sulawesi, though.

When Gowa was conquered by the Dutch in the 1660s thousands of people--including some of the highest-ranked nobles--fled to the remaining independent kingdoms, biding the day they could return and oust the Dutch. Some of them settled in the Thai capital of Ayuttaya, where they forged a powerful alliance with other Sunni Muslims in the city. This Sunni community was devastated when they rebelled against the king of Thailand in 1686, though, and afterwards there was no visible and permanent community of South Sulawesi people in Thailand.

If you read French, Pelras's 1998 article "La conspiration des Makassar à Ayuthia en 1686: ses dessous, son échec, son leader malchanceux. Témoignages européens et asiatiques" (freely available here) is a good place to start.

If you want a particularly interesting primary source of the revolt in 1686, try The Ship of Sulaiman translated by O'Kane John. It's an account of Thailand from a Persian envoy who witnessed the revolt.

/u/correcthorse45

What was the linguistic situation like during your time period? Did it change much? What languages did the local people speak, and what were the three literary languages you spoke of?

The linguistic situation did not change much, and almost certainly looked very similar to this map of modern language distribution in the province. The main thing that has changed recently is that Bugis is spreading a lot outside its historical borders. A lot of the "1"s you see in that map towards the upper-right corner, outside the actual peninsula, are modern developments.

We know this because first, the border between areas of Bugis manuscripts and those of Makassar ones match the current border between Bugis and Makassar languages, and second, the boundaries of the major Bugis dialects line up with the borders of the major Bugis kingdoms in the old days.

The three languages used for writing was Bugis (#1 on that map), Makassar (#7), and Mandar (#10). But Mandar isn't very common because the royal dynasties of Mandar thought they were descended from Bugis and often used Bugis as the prestige language of writing.

/u/boyohboyoboy

Did South Sulawesi send tribute missions to China? What were its official and unofficial relations with China like?

By the time South Sulawesi states were sufficiently developed to send tribute to anybody outside their immediate surroundings, the Chinese tribute system was not really being acknowledged by anyone south of Thailand.

The Qing, who succeeded the Ming, didn't care about the tribute trade nearly as much as the Ming. The end result was that a grand total of one country from Island Southeast Asia sent tribute to China throughout the Qing's tenure of two hundred years.

So no, no tribute. Still, China was South Sulawesi's biggest trade partner by the mid-18th century.

What were South Sulawesi's interactions with the Portuguese and Spanish like?

The Portuguese showed up in the 1540s, managed to get a few kings baptized, then left. They didn't matter much until the 17th century, especially after the Dutch conquered their main base in Southeast Asia in 1641.

Fleeing Dutch depredations, many Portuguese people fled to Makassar, the main port of Gowa. (It helped that the Muslim kings of Gowa were famous for being great patrons of Catholicism.) They represented an important commercial community there--some Portuguese even entering the highest echelons of the court and becoming friends of the king--until the Dutch forced Gowa to expel them in a treaty in 1660.

As to the Spaniards, remember that Portugal and Spain were ruled by one king until 1640. There couldn't be any competition between the two, so the Spaniards generally left South Sulawesi to the Portuguese. There was a thriving trade between the Spanish Philippines and South Sulawesi though.

Did the South Sulawesi either engage in or were victims of piracy and coastal raids? To what extent?

Both. People from South Sulawesi were infamous as pirates and slave raiders, but they could just as well be victims. Even today some people in coastal villages have recollections of how black people with fuzzy hair suddenly showed up and kidnapped their friends and family (probably slave raiders from islands around New Guinea).

Bugis ships were also victims of piracy too. The 18th-century Chinese writer Wang Dahai has a funny anecdote about this:

I had once a [Bugis] slave-girl, called Chang-choo, who accompanied me to Banjarmasin; on the way we fell in with pirates, when I was very much alarmed, and lost command of myself. The crew of the vessel also said, "Few against many, what can we do?" The slave-girl said, "Since it has come to this point, we must exert our strength." However I did not know what to do; when the girl cried out, "Never fear"; and grasping a spear she went forth, and mounted guard at the companion, without moving. When the thieves came on board, they rushed aft, but the maid brandishing her spear wounded several of them. The pirates fell back, and said to each other, How it is that she has got the Bugguese [sic] mode of brandishing the spear. On which the slave-girl bawled, "I also am a Bugguese, come and let us have another round." The thieves were however alarmed, and retreated in confusion.

As my slow writing of the book continues apace, I've been working this week on a short side article about Canadian humourist/economist Stephen Leacock's 1916 pamphlet, National Organization for War. First published as a supplement in the Montreal Star in a run of 2,000 (at Leacock's own expense), the pamphlet would subsequently be distributed by the Canadian government to the tune of 250,000 copies.

The document is well worth a read for any number of reasons, but one of them is that it sees this usually most genial of authors let loose with some absolutely scathing invective against his fellow countrymen and -women. Leacock maintains that Canadians had become lazy, fat, and self-satisfied, treating the ongoing Great War as some distant business that should not really concern them beyond some rationing and the payment of a special tax. He argues instead that this kind of thinking was a betrayal of the fighting man at the front, and that the current situation was a stain on the national character:

But people either do not, or will not, know this. They still want their industry and its inflated gains, and War Prosperity with the flush on its hectic face and War Pleasure with its strident laugh, dancing away the midnight hours. In and through it all moves smug hypocrisy, suggesting the little words and phrases that are to salve the soul; teaching the manufacturer to call himself a patriot as he pockets his private gains, and to shout for trade, more trade, that he may cram his pockets the fuller; teaching the farmer that his own fat, easy industry is war itself, and that he may count his fatted cattle in the light of his stable lantern and go to bed a patriot; teaching all the drones and parasites, the lawyers, the professors, the chefs and the piano players, the actors and the buffoons that in going on with their business they are aiding in the conduct of war. “Business as usual,” shouted some especial idiot at the outset of the war. The cry was like to ruin us.

"Every man, to-day, who consumes any article or employs any service not absolutely necessary," he concludes, "aims a blow at his country."

Leacock's solution to these problems is aggressive governmental control of industry, more or less forcing manufacturers to shift away from civilian production to a more purely military output. He also argues for a campaign of national and personal austerity, insisting that every Canadian dig deep and use both their wages and their savings wisely. Taking a cue from the fighting front, he characterizes some of the challenges this might entail:

Our present taxes are, for war-time, ridiculously low as far as all people of comfortable, or even of decent, means are concerned. And they are made with one eye on the supposed benefit to industry. We need a blast of taxation—real taxation, income tax and all, that should strike us like a wave of German gas. As things are, we should go down before it. Armed with the new gas helmet of national thrift we could breathe it easily enough and laugh behind our goggles.

It goes on in this way for several pages, and does not exactly end on a hopeful note. For an author most famous (now, at least) for short, light-hearted comic sketches, this is something of an anomaly indeed. It nevertheless remains an important moment in his much-neglected career as a public intellectual and writer of serious works, which, if not now remembered with any great fondness, were at least significant to Leacock himself.

I've been listening to the podcast Sawbones (as well as AH's own lovely podcast), and I feel like the medical historians out there have much more exciting careers than the rest of us.

Or maybe I've just been spending too much time in the fifteenth century?

I also wonderfully received a copy of "Highland Songs of the Forty-Five" recently (only people here could understand just exactly how excited this makes me. I haven't gotten very far, but did get distracted by the utterly terrible translation at the beginning. It's an excerpt from a poem by Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair (Alexander MacDonald in English), who is considered among the greatest Gaelic poets ever, if not the single greatest. I don't have the title of this poem yet, because it wasn't cited in the excerpt and I'm still in the introduction.

Cha tearma thigeadh ceart oirnn

'Prasgan nan Garbh-chrìoch'

Ach cruithneachd nan gaisgeach

Chuir ceartas am fear-ghnìomh,

Fìor-eitean nan curaidh

An am curaidse dhearbhadh,

Luchd-bhualaidh nam buillean

Ann an cumasg nan dearg-chneadh.

Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair was a fluent bilingual, served as an officer in Prince Charles' army, and was the Prince's own Gaelic tutor. He writes here in the aftermath of Culloden, when the Jacobite cause lay in ruin. He speaks of the English and lowland view of the Gaelic Jacobites, before counterarguing it from his own perspective. The original has a lovely simple meter to it, but I am no poet and would not attempt to name the style (I believe it to be iambic, though), and the bilingual poet makes some interesting choices to preserve meter. One of these is the word "curaidse", which is actually not a Gaelic word at all, but merely a Gaelic spelling of "courage". It's interesting as well that he felt comfortable using the word, that it would have been widely enough understood by his audience not to hinder understanding--which I think speaks to a general bilingualism, at least passively, among many Gaels of this period.

I include my translation below, but the meter was impossible to maintain.

Unjustly they called us

The horde from the Rough Bounds

Yet were we the greatest of heroes

The true heart of valour

Our courage proven

In the blood-red fury

Of strong fists.

Last week, I posted a series of strange anecdotes by otherwise professional 1800s intellectuals, talking about a Native American practices of capturing elk (wapiti) calves for packs or pulling sleds. If this was nothing more than folk rumor, it seems to have reached all the way to England when they were described by journalists upon arriving at the King's Mews.

I had started looking through these in 2013 trying to find the first sources of this story (I got as far back as 1804 but that apparently still isn't the original source), but have since taken a break and I figured someone else here may have heard these before and know how they started.

A supporting curiosity of these rumors is this tidbit mentioned by the Spring 1994 issue of The Bugle, Journal of Elk and The Hunt, where it mentions some of the Eastern elk that arrived in New Zealand as being originally captured by Native Americans in Minnesota, about the same region that these anecdotes take place. I don't have access to the original article so I don't know if it cited any sources, and nor am I aware enough of Great Lakes hunting practices to know if capturing/trapping elk-sized animals (or potentially their calves) was a known or regular thing.

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone knew just what was going on here? Is it okay to page people that I think could be knowledgeable on the subject?

A limerick about work on my thesis:

There once was a man who worked on his thesis

trying to put stuff together from many little pieces

he noticed, procrastination

will not be salvation

because it has lead him to in the last week produce only faeces

By the way—as to those artificial names of unearthly places & gods & persons & entities—there are different ways of coining them. To a large extent they are designed to suggest either closely or remotely—certain names in actual history or folklore which have weird or sinister associations connected with them. Thus “Yuggoth” has a sort of Arabic or Hebraic cast, to suggest certain words passed down from antiquity in the magical formuale contained in Moorish & Jewish manuscripts. Other synthetic names like “Nug” & Yeb” suggest the dark & mysterious tone of Tartar or Thibetan Folklore.

• H. P. Lovecraft to Duane W. Rimel, 14 Feb 1934, Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, &c. 140-141

Lovecraft revealing some of his secrets. The "-th" construction appears in several of his entities and place-names, including Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Yuggoth, and Shub-Niggurath, and was inspired at least in part by Lord Dunsany's "Sheol-Nuggorath" in his story "Idle Days of the Yann" and the Egyptian god Thoth. Robert E. Howard too followed the trend with names like Bal-Sagoth, Thoth-Amon, and Shuma-Gorath. The names would go on to inspire comic book writer and artist Steve Ditko to coin terms like Hoggoth and Sligguth for the Doctor Strange comic books.

Was talking in last week's Friday thread about a visit to the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, and had an interesting short conversation which ended with /u/chikindiner quoting a bit about anthropological museums' pasts as cabinets of curiosities.

I was asking because what you described reminded me of Karen Krupperman's Indians & English: Facing Off in Early America, when she describes the cabinets of curiosities.

In 1599 a German traveler in England, Thomas Platter, visited the cabinet of curiosities created by Walter Cope and saw a collection of "queer foreign objects in every corner." He compiled a list of the fifty most interesting items, which ran from the mummified corpse of a child to to "Heathen idols," and finished with the canoe that Cope had hung from the ceiling.

Then this Friday, I've been searching up information on the Oniwaban, the shogun's private guard and intelligence corps (among other things), and I found a perfect example of this from Oniwaban member Muragaki Norimasa, one of the lead ambassadors on Japan's first modern diplomatic mission, to the United States in 1860.

He was appalled when he saw a mummy in a glass case at the Smithsonian museum at Washington. "Though [this exhibit] has come about through their investigation of all things between Heaven and Earth, it is unspeakable to display the remains of humans side by side with those of birds, animals, insects and fish . . . One must call these people barbarians (iteki)."

• pp. 7-8, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi by Albert M. Craig

Any reading suggestions for absentee planters, slavery, and British sugar plantations? Mainly interested in the period between 1800 and 1840, with special interest in Antigua and Barbados.

Having just watched Dunkirk, I was wondering if anyone could suggest any good reads, particularly available digitally (kindle), about the lead ups and fall out (would be super interested in the direct or indirect effects it had on the Battle of Britain) around the whole event. I'm sure I could google search down a few, but nothing like good recommendations :)

Could anyone tell me the oldest example of literary fiction? As in any writings from any culture that is completely made up... could be of any genre.