Sunday, April 22, 2012
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Doctor Lemuel's Diary: Port Royal
A few observations on a sink of depravity
and outlaws.
I
should Relate some Notes on Port Royal,
that Famous Pirate town in Jamaica, but I most prudently stayed aboard while in
port, except for one night when in the safe company of the Captain and his Quatermaster. It is enough to say that if you were to build
about a Blue Bay a Town of the Ramshackle ends of other Towns, populate it with
the poxiest Whores and Procurers and close-fisted Moneychangers, fill the
remaining spaces with casks of Beer and Rum, and let loose each Night in its
environs Twenty-score Buccaneers with soon to be emptied pockets full of
silver, you would have Port Royal. You
may add, while imagining, the Midnight Voices of those Buccaneers in Song
coming across the water, sometimes melding a dozen songs into a strange,
direful, Dirge. And each Dawn, five hundred yards off shore on shipboard you
could Smell the Reek of vomit, stale spirits, and piss.
In our three days
there, while Balthizar disposed of the Dutch ship, I tended nearly as many
Cutlass and Knife Wounds as I did after a battle. And in Treating subsequent cases of the Pox I
nearly ran out of my entire supply of Tincture of Mercury.
It
was in Port Royal that Captain Baltizar, who had several shore-side Spies and
informants on his payroll, heard rumors of a Spanish Treasure Ship, and we soon
set sail South along the Main, hoping to make a Fortune, but leading us to the
Death and Strange Fortune that form the most Bizarre Aspect of this Narrative.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
The First Dinosaur Novel
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
by James De Mille
"It looked like one of those fabled dragons such as may be seen in
pictures, but without wings. It was nearly a hundred feet in length,
with a stout body and a long tail, covered all over with impenetrable
scales. It hind-legs were rather longer than its fore-legs, and it
moved its huge body with ease and rapidity. Its feet were armed with
formidable claws. But its head was most terrific. It was a vast mass
of bone, with enormous eyes that glared like fire; its jaws opened to
the width of six or eight feet, and were furnished with rows of sharp
teeth, while at the extremity of its nose there was a tusk several
feet long, like the horn of a rhinoceros, curving backward. All this
I took in at the first glance, and the next instant the whole band
of hunters, with their usual recklessness, flung themselves upon the
monster."
The ebook on Gutenberg Project.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
An Introduction to the Text
The collection of the Royal Society contains many strange and curious artifacts, and you now hold in your hands the first printing of one of the most eccentric texts. The author presented his narrative to the Society’s President and Council in 1671, with the stipulation that the work be only available to Society Council members and then only those researching the more bizarre aspects of natural history. The work was not to be released to the public for three centuries and thirty years, a request as strange as this narrative.
In the eighteenth century zoology, taxonomy, and the classification of species, would find their beginnings with the works of Linnaeus; comparative anatomy, and its offspring paleontology was later to be born of the works of Cuvier. When Dr. Christopher Lemuel, a naturalist as well as physician, set sail from Portsmouth in 1665 on the British privateer Worcester, he may have known that large fossilized bones had been found in Britain and on the Continent, but was unlikely to have had an inkling as to what sort of creatures they belonged to. This ignorance, strangely enough, has added an element of verisimilitude to his story, as you shall see.
We have taken the liberty of modernizing some of Dr. Lemuel’s spelling and period literary quirks – he had the tendency of the times of Capitalization For Emphasis, as well as the haphazard period spelling; for example the word pistol is spelled variously as “pistoll” and “pistolle” throughout the original.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Who Wrote the First Dinosaur Novel?
the rest at the Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracking.
"Who wrote the first dinosaur novel? For a long time, I thought the answer was Arthur Conan Doyle. His 1912 adventure yarn The Lost World set the standard for dinosaur-inhabited literature—at least until Jurassic Park
came along—and Doyle’s story has lived on in at least six film
adaptations that run the gamut from landmark film to cinema trash. But
contrary to what I had previously believed, Doyle wasn’t the first
author to prominently feature dinosaurs in a novel."
the rest at the Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracking.
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