The Anathemata
The Lady of the Pool (continued)
Had made fast
a hove hawser for the first of the fathering tars of old mother Troas to tie-up at the Downgate.1
Had conned their ship
for them as put Jonah by the board and were the man at the steer-tree2 in the Saving Barque that Noë was master of.
And not content with ships of glass, voyaging islands and like old fablings
must aver
recent instances of islands that be males and females:e what a carry on!
But, to put the cap on all:
that his Maddoxes, Owenses, Griffins and Company was a type of sea-king and very lords of admorality as had held to a course west by south till a new-found stony land were on their starboard and south-south-westing in the offing of a wooded shore fetched up in a vinevard,4 with a whole cog-load of mountain squires such as may be dabsters with a coracle in a’ estuary and as can handle the bulleda oar of
coasting currach,
David Jones notes
1 Called also the Dowgate, situated where the Walbrook fell into the Thames (Cannon Street Station stands on the site), the earliest of all the ports and quays of London, and in Roman times the principal if not the only one. Troas used as the female personification of the Trojan thing, cf. Britannia, etc.
2 Cf. The Towneley PIay of Noah
’. . . tent the stere-tre and I shall asay the depnes of the see . . .’
3 A phenomenon reported by Marco Polo.
4 Cf. the eleventh-century Norse voyages to Stoneland, Woodland (Markland) and Wineland (perhaps Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New England respectively) and cf. the legend of a Welsh twelfth-century transatlantic voyage. Though this story of Madoc may be regarded as a legend given currency in English in 1583, nevertheless it may reflect something of the Welsh contacts of four hundred years previously with the Irish-Norse of Dublin and with the Norse settlements in Wales itself, contacts which were particularly close between 1000 and 1500. Idea and myth no less than techniques of war and material barter would be involved in these interchanges.
additional notes
DJ note 3: see Book 3, Chapter 31.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
a bulled: rounded, like a paddle.
comments
The boatswain speaks ‘as though’ he had sailed with the Argives to Troy, taken part in Caesar’s invasion of Britain, had accompanied Brutus sail up the Thames to establish Troy-Novant, had been shipmates with Jonah. He now claims familiarity with a number of Welsh legendary voyages. Elen is sceptical of the boatswain’s claims.
The voyage(s) mentioned here may be a mixture of Madoc, son of the twelfth century Welsh king Owain Glynnedd, who was said to have sailed to the Americas (though there is no evidence for this claim) and the Norse voyages to north America; see note 4. (At the time he wrote The Anathemata, DJ would not have heard of the so-called ‘Vinland map’, for it would not by then have been discovered.)