Mour, Mour, Mour

A Short Note

by

Professor Dale Cull, B.A. M.A. P.H.D. R.O.T. D.D.E. University Of Plymouth

Looking out, as I do now, from my window onto the Plymouth Sound, from the Plym splitting into the Tamar and down to where it all becomes just another sneeze in the English Channel, the water looks calm and warm, the first ruined portico of global warming's infinitesimal coming. However, when Jon Praester left England in 1664, sailing through these waters as he tried to round Cornwall and plod north into the Irish Sea, the ocean was rough and cold, collaring the throat of an England shaken by change. It was September, and Charles II had been returned from his exile in Breda for five years. He had spent much of that time playing the warring king, scooping up Dutch interests in the New World (including New Amsterdam, which would become New York) and fingering the seeds he found there, seeds that would grow to become the Dutch-Anglo Wars. Even the ribaldry of the Restoration would sour within five months, as the first victims of plague keeled over in London. To look upon Praester, a Dutch immigrant and tailor, gripping the gunwales of the Zwart Herten, or Black Deer, leading his “crilling camels” across the Sound’s opening, one could be forgiven for thinking that the man was a savvy survivalist, looking to his nationality and the rumbling of things to come, and braving the main to escape the inevitable troubles of the coming decade.

But, despite all evidence to the contrary, Praester was not a man savvy of much. In fact, he was not much of anything. Of all the oceanic explorers of the seventeenth century, Praester was perhaps the only one who came to his profession by accident, patronless, and without any desire of destination. The name of his ship ¹, rendered in the language of his homeland, perhaps tells a little of his troubles. His wife was dead, but not before she had shamed him; a fellow Netherlander, Mrs. Maria Praester had committed larceny and adultery with a rival of her husband's, an Italian immigrant named Joseph Torsio, and absconded with his riches. They were both caught in Wiltshire, and without any consultation of Praester were hanged by an overzealous local bailiff before the standing stones on Avebury’s green, perhaps to set an example to city folk that they could not use the undulating hills of his county to mask their crimes. ² As if the poor man had not suffered enough, to compound his debt (at the time of his departure, he had still not accounted for “a sleuth of iron chests, eighteen hunnerd[sic] bolts of sable, furs built on loans, and six of my father's cabinets unsearched besides” ³), the death of his wife and his own cuckoldry, his reputation lay in tatters, with no pun intended whatsoever. The man was destitute.

All of this heaped misery could explain why, unlike almost every other sailor of his age, Praester turned north and east instead of south and west, seeking colder lands; the man had no mission but to escape his own quiet holocaust, in the Greek sense of the word ⁴. It is known that his own dwindled coffers were emptied for the trip, the ships, crew and provisions costing at least two hundred pounds. He set off from Portsmouth in late September amid secrecy and the abrupt cessation of his business, with debtors hounding him almost to the dock itself. Praester gave them little thought, however; in his own words, he had “commit[ed] none crime as worse as trust.” ⁵

After Cornwall, where his fleet caused mild alarm to the sleepy troop stationed at St. Ives, Praester's route has never been proven. After nearly forty weeks at sea he is recorded as crawling into the Norwegian harbour of Bodo and leaving again with only one ship and a handful of men, paid with the last of his gold. He was not heard from again. He gave the destination of his ship as “innwerd”, according to the town’s fortuitously punctilious harbour register ⁶, and no berth took the Zwarte Herten at anchor ever again. It has always been assumed by those few who take an interest in the man's life that Praester either sunk in storms, starved with his men, or was dashed to pieces by “isfjell så høye som tre menns hus” ⁷; the little caravel that he captained would not have stood up well to Norwegian sea ice.

Despite his presumed death, Mour, Mour, Mour survives as three fragments of a longer poem cataloguing Praester's journey, reputedly penned by the man himself. It is an unusually personal piece, one which countenances a real sea journey with an allegorical journey into “Loss”. That a lowly immigrant tailor would write a narrative epic in a language not his own is not as unusual as it first seems; it has been proven from his other, greater writings that Praester was a minor man of letters, and polymathy was a far simpler exercise in an age with less appreciable “knowledge” to accrue, and far fewer strictures and institutions by which to govern illumination. Praester had always loved words but, considering his choice to live in London, had little love lost for the Dutch tongue.

That the poem should survive the journey upon which its writer was lost, and of which it is a record, is less easily explained. No original manuscript is extant; the earliest record that can be found of the poem is in 1671, nearly eight years after Praester’s disappearance, when an Italian Habsburg general, Giacomo Marisalva, records the “ultima mappa di un uomo olandese di nome praester, rilegato in pelle di leone” ⁸ in his will. Tragically, there exists no record of where and when Marisalva purchased the manuscript. That Marisalva came upon Praester’s poem at all is a miracle, not least because the general was a man who had also lost much in his lifetime; his wife and children were killed in an eruption of Mount Etna two years before he wrote his will. What is more, the general was a polymath much like Praester, and his “diario di una smarrimento” ⁹ was the only record of this eruption that still exists.

The manuscript passed into the care of Marisalva's niece upon his death, who reportedly had the poem translated into Italian and reprinted in Milan as a vanity project to titillate her dinner guests, before apparently, unbelievably, tossing the original onto the fire to see if it burnt with a strange colour. Luckily this Milanese translation hooked the cheek of the notoriously fickle world of early publishing, and we can more easily chart its journey of roughly one reprinting every century, up to this edition that you are reading today, the first of Praester's works to be reproduced digitally. This edition bypasses the problem of its reproduction separate from its admittedly dubious heritage; its length. At just over fifty lines, the three fragments hardly compare to more vainglorious works of the time, and the subject matter is obscure and confusing. That we would lose the original manuscript is cataclysm enough, but in the early 1800s an estimated ninety percent of the poem, translated from English, to Italian and then back again, was irretrievably degraded in an astounding error of judgement by an apprentice at an unnamed printers in London. The lad apparently used most of the master transcript to wrap a joint of ham that was staining his trousers and needed to be taken home to his mother. Such a tale is surely apocryphal but, like the poem itself, speaks of the extraordinary chance that such a insight affords. Assuming it is true, we may have lost the whole thing, if that apprentice had felt flush that day, and bought a flitch of bacon as well.

Despite the doubts as to its provenance, the injustices it has suffered, and its rambling, problematic verse, Mour, Mour, Mour presents a fascinating challenge precisely because of these problems and limitations. It stands alone as an intensely personal work of literature in an age dominated by very global, impersonal events. In this digital edition, you will find endnotes accompanying the work, serving to ground it in contemporary culture and provide some commentary and analysis on Praester's obtuse verse. I hope that this short note, also, has proved useful in your understanding of the troubled man to whom I owe my living, and the journey he undertook to escape and sing, as he calls it, “the song of Loss[sic]”.

Title Page: the seal of Praester, kindly reproduced with permission from the Worshipful Company of Merchant Tailors in London. The motif of the fish, most likely a herring on account of the protruding jaw and scale pattern, is an artefact of Praester's ancestry amongst the merchants of Amsterdam. The mite or louse's provenance is unknown; it is, as far as can be determined, unique in seal architecture, and may be one of the oldest representations of this microscopic creature remaining. It has been posited that this may have been a joke on Praester's part, as the admission of the existence of lice, an unavoidable feature of pre-modern clothing, would constitute professional suicide for a tailor of his stature.

The First Fragment

NAME TO NAME, SYND THE GRYTING ¹⁰
YE MISERABL PRAESTE JON
TELLITH OF MAERVILLES ¹¹
MOUR, MOUR, MOUR ¹²
EACH MOUR TERRIFIC THAN LAST
A RAESON TO TRAVAIL
BY THE GRAECE OF GOD
AND KING ¹³
I WAS SAENT BY GRAEFE TO LANDS UNFURROW'D BY PLOW
OF ASPECT DULL'D ¹⁴
BY LONG ABSAENCE FROM OUR

england ¹⁵

That tyme which I steel from sleep and meet,
Is filled with airs rare and swift,
That cross seas maugre ¹⁶ and full of heat
To humour I with icy drift ¹⁷
And set god to pudding, er I lift ¹⁸
My arms to clasp the wood that roars
I would rub honey ¹⁹ on the oars.

Myne otium ²⁰ then, goes to the work
Of nursing aching lymbs in peace
Such pains make of me a shirk
But lord of lice, I lay down feasts
Plot their journey to the east ²¹
Where burgages ²² are smaller, mean and spare
As ice will cover fields from whence they drew ware.

On Barber’s Day ²³, we passed the Dancing Norse ²⁴
Such spits ²⁵ of death we found upon our course ²⁶
We passed three skeps ²⁷ upon a rock, black bees lived there
But the wind smoked the very ²⁸God from the air

The tail flicked above us in irritation of our buzzings. ²⁹

The Second Fragment

We took to shore for game ³⁰, no fields we saw ³¹
No bristleking ³² to guard against our venery
Moss hung, blist’ring ³³ like hemlock ³⁴ raw
Right blemmyes ³⁵ were made myne men, in memory
We burnt their troughs ³⁶ in charity
And sang our boy ³⁷ the song of Loss ³⁸
Where in ending are all men gross.

Past the point of Robert’s ³⁹ beach
We took our crilling camels ⁴⁰ clumsy
Into the stables of Kirkoe’s ⁴¹ reach
Where my captains spoke of whimsy
And a stew to flow myne dropsy ⁴²
But hundreds stood out in the surf
And so we made for godlier turf ⁴³

On Hermit’s Eve ⁴⁴ we found a moon gibbous
Euclid's ⁴⁵ rose quick to three points ludicrous
The Clayfolk ⁴⁶ were baked in England’s last earth
Salted by Robert, Bruce of death.

The Greek struggles with the snake,

and so slakes the hydra weak,

and so sleek best the hunter takes,

and Alfirk rakes me undermeek. ⁴⁷

The Third Fragment ⁴⁸

In ⁴⁹ amongst the pox and hollerwind of the east,
I froze the last of my honeyed horses ⁵⁰ for meat ⁵¹
The Lord's mercy on my hands, all counting ⁵² may cease
And no more to run, my tenants are fed with feet.
I am the Lord of Loss ⁵³, and mour these feasts
My God, My God I am mended of my need. ⁵⁴
No mour shall I whirl about and seek
As with the wind, Loss did follow me. ⁵⁵

For when I did lift my arms in that first moon
A patch of sin did burrow from without ⁵⁶
And as with burrowers and burrows, soon
Will spill from me a curious mouth
Which says “No mour, no mour, let us turn south”
“And seek the brighter gates of wives to come”
“This world is round, and full of happiness handsome.”

My whirling broke as the crab’s claws clean
Each other on the whet of night serene
I follow my new wife ⁵⁷, of Greek caves, south home ⁵⁸
And leave my Loss here and alone.

The sun was fixed, and I learnt to sail.
And she said “set aside your pails ⁵⁹
I am a god, I must make man
Such is my nature, as yours is to wane.
Allow the wood to rot about
The herring and the mite to meet ⁶⁰
For in the realms of balain ⁶¹ and trout
Lie true valleys where you will find your feet. ⁶²

About The Author

Jon Praester (1625-?, also known as Praeste Jon) was a Dutch tailor of Amsterdam who settled in London in 1653 with his wife Maria to continue his practice and write his diaries, of which several survive. In 1664 a succession of misfortunes left Jon Praester without his business, his wife or his reputation, and so, bequeathing his possessions to his servant Tartarus (a pseudonym the still-unknown individual adopted to anonymously publish Praester's diaries), he set off on his famous last voyage, from which he never returned, and of which this poem is the only relic.

About The Editor

Professor Dale Cull (1966 - ) is Professor of English at Plymouth University, and has previously been Course Supervisor at UCL (1999-2000), Course Assistant at Loughborough (2000) and Facilitator of Restoration Studies at Aberystwyth University (2000-2001). He lives in Plymouth with his cousin Julie. He wishes to thank Julie for all her patience, and the archivists at the British Library, and express his gratitude that not all archivists are like that printer's boy in London, all those years ago. You can email him with any queries regarding his work, future publications, and public speaking opportunities.

Reproduced, With Some Permissions, By The Widsith Institute

Endnotes

1. Some fanciful retellings of Praester's story have given his ship black sails, or had him sailing to Jayakarta (modern-day Jakarta) in his grief and discovering the rubber plant. ↩

2. Oddly, John Aubrey, nearly ten years before in his accounts of his travels on the Salisbury Plain, related the local tale of the “Lope And Lap”, a folkway that boasted not only considerable venerability, but also near-identical resemblance in character and circumstance to Mrs. Praester's unfortunate tale. ↩

3. Robert Toll, Registers Of The English Houses, 1611-1630; Chambers Harrap, Edinburgh, 1923 ↩

4. Iceland was a well-used port at this time, but if Praester was truly making for Norway, the route east around Dover and across the North Sea was less treacherous and far shorter. However, it must be considered that the Anglo-Dutch War was in full imbroglio at this point, and though Praester was under no suspicion as a Dutch spy, it is likely that he worried for his little flotilla, in the mouth of both side's cannon. Braving the “Little Ice Age” would have been no easy decision, but given the political climate, he had little choice. ↩

5. Jon Praester, Hear The Larva: The Revealed Writings Of Jon Praester; ed. Joanna Van Domelen, Berkeley Press, California, 1978 ↩

6. Recorded in misspelt English; the poeticism of the remark was most likely lost on the monolingual Bodoians. ↩

7. “icebergs as tall as three men[s] house”, from Bodo's charming tourist guidebook, self-published. ↩

8. “the last map of the Dutchman named Praester, bound in lion skin”. The lion skin, here, is most likely that of a seal, misattributed by the Venetian-born Marisalva. ↩

9. “diary of a misplacement”. This fascinating document is no longer in print, and was originally published in pamphlet form by a firm named Myrging; I have yet to find a copy other than my own. ↩

10. The antiquated spelling conventions here would not likely have been present in the original; these anachronisms were likely added in the first English reproduction of the Italian translation, in order to assuage readers of its authenticity as an “antiquity”. However, without certainty of such, the spellings have been maintained as a faithful reproduction of the translation. They seem to lessen in intensity as the work proceeds, however. ↩

11. Read as “marvels”. ↩

12. This was apparently bolded in the original, and so has been taken as the title of the work since the first translation. ↩

13. A calculated inclusion, perhaps to restore his reputation if the work was ever found. It is still a compelling mystery as to how Praester's manuscript made its way from the hoary seas of Norway to Nicolosi and Marisalva's desk; if it is not a forgery, which at this point scholars are unwilling to contemplate, then there is certainly a story to tell there, if only it could be uncovered. ↩

14. This frontispiece, or prelude, marks this fragment as the opening of the poem. It was most likely included by Praester as a means of gathering his thoughts, to set out exactly what he wished to communicate in his poem. The form would have been démodé even in Praester's time, and is either an affectation or a deliberate joke on Praester's part. From what we know of the man, it is more likely the latter. ↩

15. It is odd that “england”, here, is not capitalised, a quirk that has been reproduced since the first translation, and which most likely is due to a printing error being taken as canon, over again. ↩

16. Read as “meagre”, or few. ↩

17. Praester would not have seen ice on the open sea before, and so the mention of “icy drift” confirms that he went as far north as Scotland's western highlands. 1664, by the estimate of many scholars, was close to the decline of the “Little Ice Age”, as it was called, and so Praester may have inadvertently witnessed some of the last great freezes that Northern Europe, and particularly the Scottish Isles, were likely to encounter. If he did not divert from his course he would have rounded Scotland in late November, just as Iceland's harbours were closing and more of her inhabitants were starving to death. It is therefore unlikely that he continued north from Scotland, but rather turned east, towards his next certain port at Bodo. ↩

18. A phrase concurrent with the modern saying, “when Hell freezes over.” ↩

19. This is a reference to the Roman practice of coating the oars of their galleys with honey as a promised reward to slaves who rowed with vigour and without complaint; however, by the time they had reached their destination, the sea had washed the honey away, and so the slaves had nothing. ↩

20. “Otium” is a Latin term meaning contemplation or retirement from public life. Praester is directly parodying the epics of Roman mythopoeic tradition by comparing his voyage, a serious undertaking in those days, to an afternoon of relaxing and reading. This self-deprecation is consistent across his writings, and is even evident in his recordings of the bills of his own tailoring. ↩

21. It was originally thought that Praester had travelled north into the ice as an elaborate suicide, though analysis of the poem leads others to think that he meant to travel east along the Siberian coastline, where freedom from his responsibilities ultimately lay. However, the mystery as to why Praester would have chosen to sail into the wasteland that was the Arctic Sea rather than escaping to the sunnier climes on the continent blunts this argument somewhat. Given the “Little Ice Age” which extended over northern Europe in his time, and the extent of the sea ice southwards, it is unlikely that he would ever have completed his journey. ↩

22. A medieval landowner's term, meaning a long narrow plot on which a house was built. ↩

23. “Barber's Day” is ambiguous, here; there was no patron saint of barbers, or surgeons (the two roles were often conflated in the same man) at the time that Praester was writing. St. Martin de Porres, who died in 1639, was a barber, and would be canonised in 1962. We may assume that it is early November, by which time Praester would have been near the coast of Northern Island, and the Isle of Man. ↩

24. There is still some scholarly debate as to what this line refers. It could represent any of the isles in the Irish Sea, as they had historically been the domain of Norsemen or monks; that landmark in question has likely since disappeared into the vernacular and the sea. ↩

25. This has been interpreted variously, in the scant past criticism of this work, as spittle from an animal or human, a spit of rock, or the lash of the sea. The latter two would certainly mean death for an unwary crew. ↩

26. The rhyme scheme changes here, to a sort of coda in rhyming couplets, recalling the sonnet form. Praester may have been using the construction as a droll address to his late wife, a love letter sent from aboard ship to either forgive her or mock her. ↩

27. A skep is an open-ended basket used for keeping bees. It is assumed that bees are used as a metaphor for a tight-knit and insular community. These islands were used for thousands of years by Irish monks, though they were long gone by the 1600s. ↩

28. It is interesting that “God” is majuscule here, as was the convention of the time, but not in the instance earlier in the fragment. ↩

29. This is an extremely unusual structure for the time period, especially in a gallant form such as that “Mour, Mour Mour” imitates; this internal half rhyme on the “zz” fricatives of “above us” and “buzzings” recalls both thematically and phonetically the “bees” of the previous stanza. It is unknown to what Praester is referring, however. ↩

30. Based on what Praester would have taken aboard three caravels, and the number of crew for whom he had to cater, we can assume that food supplies would have run out around two months into the voyage. Also assuming that Praester did not put ashore after Cornwall (which, given the political situation, would have been inadvisable) places him past Isle of Skye, and into the Arctic Ocean. If he was coast-hopping, a common practice for the fragile craft of the day, he may in fact have been much further south. ↩

31. This represents both a symbolic departure from the world for Praester aboard his ship in open water, and for society at large in the 17th century, as worldly concerns such as agriculture and subsistence gave way to the “Mental Revolution” of scientific advancement and urban migration in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. “No fields” means no farmers, and no distractions from the musings of the educated man, especially one with so much on his mind. ↩

32. The term “bristleking” has several allusions; it refers to a boar, noted for its wiry hair, seen as a king of the wood. Traditionally, woods belonged to the crown, and “venery”, or hunting, was strictly forbidden amongst the common folk. The conjunction of “bristle” and “king” is much like a kenning, a poetic device used in Old English epics such as “Beowulf”. It is unknown whether Praester would have been aware of the tradition, and the debate is further confused by the term's similarity to compound noun structure in his native Dutch. ↩

33. A beautiful visual comparison to “bristleking” in the previous line. ↩

34. Hemlock (conium maculatum) is a lacy-leafed flowering plant native to temperate watercourses in Europe and Africa, and latterly the United States. Given his location it is impossible that Praester would have found it growing wild; it is likely that he mistook a gorse or another plant for the more deadly herb. ↩

35. A medieval Ethiopian tribe that were fictionalised by early travellers into a race of men who had no heads, but whose face was in their chests. This reference reinforces and satirises Praester's role as an explorer, and perhaps gives an allusion to grisly circumstances when they set ashore. ↩

36. Remains of a 17th century caravel have been found at Loch Burifa in Aberdeenshire, and it is possible that a whole ship was dragged ashore and burnt. ↩

37. The boy's identity is unknown, but it was not uncommon for young men to be taken to sea on the strength of their singing voice. Here, Praester makes one of several references to “Loss”, always capitalised as a personal, grandiose sort of misfortune. ↩

38. This is perhaps the most famous line of the poem, and was proposed as a title by John Walker, a 18th century publisher of Praester's works, before Blake's more famous “Song of Los” took the chance from him. ↩

39. This strangely personal note is illuminated by the later stanza, mentioning the “Bruce of Death”. This is designed to evoke the legacy of Robert the Bruce, who had defeated the English and gained Scotland's independence some two hundred years before Praester's birth. We can view this line as something of an insurance policy, designed to reinforce Praester's patriotic credentials towards the English if the work was ever found. We can assume that the beach is somewhere in northern Scotland. ↩

40. Another reference designed to display Praester's well-read credentials; this is a deliberate reference to Marco Polo, and his expeditions along the Silk Road to China on the backs on camels. ↩

41. This could refer to many place names in northern Scotland and the isles that have a relation to the Icelandic and Faroese word “kirkja”, referring to a monk's cell or a church. This “reach” could have been the town of Falkirk, any coastal church, or Kirkwall, on the Orkney Islands. ↩

42. If this line is biographical, Praester seems to have succumbed to some form of fluid retention, a miserable fate for even the cheeriest of souls aboard ship. As readers are probably aware by now, Praester was not the jolliest of writers. ↩

43. These lines are some of the most puzzling of the entire poem, and to this day nobody is quite sure to what they refer. They mark a departure from easier conjecture, and the point after which we lose Praester on a map of the world. ↩

44. This is another festival for which we have no contemporaneous evidence; it could refer to festivals in mid-December before Christmas, or indeed to Christmas Eve itself, when the greatest hermit, Christ himself, was close to birth – let us imagine, for a moment, the howling gales blowing down from the Pole, the empty sky above, and those sailors, tempted with gold, freezing to death on those rocky seas! ↩

45. Again, this is a strange line in construction and subject. Euclid was instrumental in developing Classical practices of geometry, and a “rose” is another name for a compass. It may a cryptic navigational instruction, but three points on a compass is ninety degrees, which is an unusual manoeuvre for a ship at sea, unless it is heading in the wrong direction. ↩

46. An anachronism, a lost people, or a poetic allegory on Praester's part. This stanza does seem grounded in earthly matters; “clay”, “earth” and “salt” are used to represent varying degrees of virtue or sin, with Robert the Bruce, now almost a mythological figure, transforming these unknown islands into an arid wasteland, populated by remnants of England's conquests. Whatever place it was, it was lonely and grim when Praester passed by. ↩

47. This stanza has been visually presented in this manner in every edition of the work and, if original, represents a significant departure from contemporary convention. What notes accompanied it, and what it refers to, is lost along with the skin-bound original. ↩

48. The previous two fragments are, in truth, collections of fragments themselves; the ABABBCC rhyme structure, followed by the internal rhyme of the concluding line at the end, is an academic construction based on knowledge of poetic convention of the time, and put together in a seemingly coherent narrative. This fragment, the final one chronologically (or so we believe), reveals the inadequacies of this approach; the final stanzas are a mess of half-rhymes, imputations, and translucency. As archivists, we must be fully aware that we are handling material that has been edited, reworked, and agendaed by many who came before us; like the bicycle that has had all of its parts interchanged, the spirit of the thing may be all that remains. ↩

49. This section lacks structure and restraint, and in places takes on the appearance of free verse. This disassociation with the past either means that this fragment comes much later chronologically than the earlier pieces, or that Praester experienced some sort of sea change in his circumstances which is obscurely related in his verse. ↩

50. Some rather overexcited scholars have taken this reference to be confirmation of cannibalism aboard the Zwart Herten, but with so little evidence, this will forever remain in the realm of macabre fancy. ↩

51. What follows is a common mistake made by the dying and desperate; a lack of resources is mistaken for a sudden wellspring of virtue. ↩

52. This, however, is less ambiguous. Whether Praester lost his hands to frostbite, piracy, or some other misfortune, his “Loss” is at this point a little more corporeal. The clumsiness of his prose seems to echo his deepening decrepitude, though we can imagine that this was unintentional. ↩

53. What we see here is a culmination of the word “Loss” as a device, though ironically most of the examples of it have been lost with the original manuscript. As “Lord of Loss”, Praester could mean that he has experienced the most ruin that it is possible for a man to endure, or instead that he has risen past it, and sits above in dominion. ↩

54. This is often seen as violent catharsis for Praester in the form of “ruling” or “owning” his Loss. ↩

55. Given the mysterious nature of the text, and Praester's inexperience as a sailor, there are some scholars who believe that Praester did not actually go to sea at all, but instead disappeared into the Scottish Highlands and died a lonely, mad death, much in the manner of his Bruce. There are many references to travelling by land which support this view, as well as overly poetic references to the sea which do not resemble the account of one actually travelling upon it, but this scholar believes that the maritime evidence is too compelling to be ignored. ↩

56. This is interpreted as a reference to the buboes caused by Yersinia Pestis, known commonly as plague, which was to nearly annihilate London the following year. Praester was already well-versed in the disease as a relic of the past; his grandfather fled the Netherlands in 1599, along with his family and treasured bolts of cloth, in the wake of an outbreak in Amsterdam, before settling in St.-Giles-In-The-Fields in London. ↩

57. If we hypothesise that Praester died on his voyage, this “new wife” may be as allegorical, catharsis in the guise of a Hellenic goddess, Athena or Persephone or another catabatical deity. ↩

58. If this is chronologically late in the poem, it is an exciting admission; Praester would have been far along the Siberian coast at this point, with no passage south. All rivers would have been frozen, and the nearest ocean was thousands of miles east in the Bering Strait. What he found out there has been postulated over and over again, but nobody can find a clear solution to “The Anyder Problem”. ↩

59. This may refer to pails used on ships to bail out rising water, which lends this last stanza an inexorable, yet dignified, tone. ↩

60. A lovely harkening to his seal, and the situation in which he finds himself. ↩

61. “Balain” is an old French term for “whale”, used extensively in medieval bestiaries. ↩

62. And so the poem ends in mystical tones, speaking of death, drowning, loneliness, quite possibly madness, but a healthy degree of perspective and ascension. Whether he was a liar, an early plague victim, a consummate captain, a cannibal or merely a great poet, Praester has left us with his own peculiar cope and a wonderful story, a “whirl[ing]” inwards, to the very pit of himself. ↩