Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots

 

Euan Ward, "Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots, Uncovered by Amateur Code Breakers,"  New York Times, Feb. 8, 2023.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/world/europe/mary-queen-of-scots-letters.html

Deep in the archives of France’s national library, an assortment of coded letters listed as Italian texts lay untouched for more than 400 years. But when three code breakers — a German pianist, an Israeli computer scientist and a Japanese physicist — stumbled upon them, they discovered something remarkable.

They were, they found, not Italian texts at all.

Instead, they were part of the secret prison correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose tragic life and tangled role in the lethal dynastic and religious politics of 16th-century Europe have long fascinated writers and historians. One leading biographer of Mary described the discovery as the most significant in the study of her life for more than a century.

“We found treasure lying in plain sight,” said George Lasry, the Israeli computer scientist who led the yearlong project, which was released to the public on Wednesday, the 436th anniversary of Mary’s death.

COMMENT
A classic tale of finding hidden treasure, with the twist that a library cataloging error made the letters invisible. 

 

Moby Dick

Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The Whale  1851.

EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).

      It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
      So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses! 

COMMENT

Melville seems to be making fun of his own book by starting out with a librarian, a sad, unadventurous person who "belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm."  Yet the librarian is acknowledged to be good company and has helpfully compiled a bibliography of whales. He will reappear in the narrative (Chapter 32: Cetology) speaking in the first person in order to catalog actual whales.  Personally, I was so pleased by the presence of the librarian in Moby Dick, that I wrote a poem about him. [1]

Cetology 

Sometimes on days when work is slow
I take my lunchbox and I go
Down by the People’s Freeway
To the Garden of Modest Bureaucrats

Where I breathe the intoxicating patchouli
Narcissus scent of paperwhites
Planted in the Grove of Inferiority
Complex with Attitude near the statue

Inscribed, “To that sallow Sub Sub Librarian
Whom Melville mentioned in his book
Which is mostly about people chasing whales”
The Librarian, too, was hunting Leviathan

And met with notable success
Finding him swimming though Genesis, Psalms,
Job, Milton, Shakespeare’s plays;
The Marine Mammal Protection Act

Had not yet been written; Whales were prey
To Quakers and cannibals, but soon the bureaucrats
Would arrive armed with regulations; the whales
Would be saved from pagan harpooneers;

Melville, or at least his doppelganger Ishmael,
Was misguided when he wrote that chapter
Overstating the eternal, unbreachable
Future of those immensely vulnerable creatures,

Now even the oceans have become too small
To absorb the wrath of those damned whalers
Who must forever blame something
For whatever limb it was they lost at sea

While the Librarian sat calmly compiling
Folio, octavo, duodecimo, of cetology
Steadfastly refusing to be drowned
When all hands on the ship went down.


[1] Amy Brunvand,  Pink Birds and Beasts of Land and Sea, Journal of Wild Culture, 7/15/2016.