Bryn Stole writes for the NY Times (archived) about a treasure trove of old mail:
In a love letter from 1745 decorated with a doodle of a heart shot through with arrows, María Clara de Aialde wrote to her husband, Sebastian, a Spanish sailor working in the colonial trade with Venezuela, that she could “no longer wait” to be with him.
Later that same year, an amorous French seaman who signed his name M. Lefevre wrote from a French warship to a certain Marie-Anne Hoteé back in Brest: “Like a gunner sets fire to his cannon, I want to set fire to your powder.”
Fifty years later, a missionary in Suriname named Lene Wied, in a lonely letter back to Germany, complained that war on the high seas had choked off any news from home: “Two ships which have been taken by the French probably carried letters addressed to me.”
None of those lines ever reached their intended recipients. British warships instead snatched those letters, and scores more, from aboard merchant ships during wars from the 1650s to the early 19th century.
While the ships’ cargoes — sugar from the Caribbean, tobacco from Virginia, ivory from Guinea, enslaved people bound for the Americas — became war plunder, the papers were bundled off to so called “prize courts” in London as potential legal proof that the seizures were legitimate spoils of war. […]
Poorly sorted and only vaguely cataloged, the Prize Papers, as they became known, have now begun revealing lost treasures. Archivists at Britain’s National Archives and a research team at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany are working on a joint project to sort, catalog and digitize the collection, which gives a nuanced portrait of private lives, international commerce and state power in an age of rising empires.
The project, expected to last two decades, aims to make the collection of more than 160,000 letters and hundreds of thousands of other documents, written in at least 19 languages, freely available and easily searchable online. […]
“You find so many individual voices by men, women — children, even — who speak, not as a colonial administrator, but as a person abroad,” said Dagmar Freist, a historian at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg who directs the Prize Papers Project. “They would describe their social interactions with other religious groups, with enslaved people, with rituals and traditions,” she added. “It allows you insights into everyday life.”
The paperwork of colonial commerce makes up much of collection: invoices for goods, contracts, bills of lading. Reports from the managers of colonial slave plantations, dispatched to owners and investors in Europe, also turn up frequently.
But some are poignant and personal. A German sailor on a merchant ship captured in the 18th century copied out a poem for his daughter’s baptism. One letter mailed back to Europe requesting a new pair of shoes includes the traced outline of the writer’s foot to match the size. […]
Archivists and a team of volunteers have begun sorting the documents — some still coated in soot and grease, and smelling of the filthy 1800s London air — in some cases matching paper creases or other marks to bring together scattered pages.
Conservators at the National Archives clean and preserve the collection, while two photographers, hired by the project through the German Historical Institute London, meticulously document the intricate work. “This is like a wild archive,” said Amanda Bevan, who leads the National Archives team. “All the work I’ve done the rest of my career has been on documents which were already in good order, identified, numbered.”
Prying the lid off an archival box recently, Bevan pulled out a mailbag from the Zenobia, a merchant ship captured while sailing from France to New York during the War of 1812. Inside were dozens of letters — still sealed with wax — bearing addresses all across the East Coast: Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, New York, Philadelphia. […]
“The immense number of letters include those written by ordinary working men and women for whom we have virtually no letters surviving,” said Julie Hardwick, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. Hardwick said she was “astonished” that a collection — scantly used by previous historians because of the “disarray” in which the Prize Papers long sat — contained such “incredible richness in terms of variety as well as sheer scale.” […]
Unlike many letters stored in archives, which have been pressed flat or bound into books for safe storage, many of the documents in the Prize Papers collection remain folded into envelopes or bundled together by British notaries and court officials centuries ago.
“What amazed me was how much the letters — even the ones which have been opened at some point, but they’re still folded up — retain a ‘paper memory,’” Bevan said. “They’re folded in quite intricate patterns.”
Sometimes, cascading inserts and enclosures fold out from inside a single stuffed envelope, with additional letters meant to be passed on to other relatives or friends. Those packages unfold like matryoshka dolls, with letters for elderly parents wrapped around letters for siblings and spouses, enclosing short notes for children, or hiding small gifts like rings, or, in one instance, a single coffee bean.
So far, the team has gone through documents seized during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) in close detail but have taken only cursory looks at files from other wars.
The materials are astonishing to think about, and the images at the link give you a good idea of what they’re like. Thanks, Bonnie!
I hope they make some of the transcription and translation a public project. What a gold mine!
Still while the historian-linguist-genealogist side of me dreams of data locked away, I can hardly begin to imagine the sadness that these unreceived letters also represent.
Yes indeed, on both counts.
While the ship’s papers were being captured, I presume those on board would generally be taken prisoner rather than, say, shot or left to drown? When your loved one was away for three years instead of three months it was sad, but sadder things happened.
A corpus of 1000 Dutch letters (out of a total of 40000) from British archives (perhaps from different sources than the Prize Papers) was made available and searchable online in the Letters as Loot project in 2013.
Intricate letter folding was also used for letterlocking, a practice in which letters were folded and sealed in such a way that no one could open the letter undamaged.
Unlocking history through automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography
Piracy is one thing, but I can’t imagine the sociopathy necessary to just not deliver a letter. How long did they have to be kept to function as prize papers!?!
While the ship’s papers were being captured, I presume those on board would generally be taken prisoner rather than, say, shot or left to drown?
When practicable, certainly. Even pirates would generally rather try to assimilate the crew rather than simply executing them. The hard case is when a larger crew had surrendered to what turned out to be a smaller one: the captors might well fear that the tables would be turned, but even then marooning was generally preferred to outright slaughter.
I can’t imagine the sociopathy necessary to just not deliver a letter.
I imagine the trouble was that the letters were mixed in with the other stuff, and were most likely being carried by private inviduals, not by national postal services, which hardly existed then.
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But anyway, what the devil does Stole [insert nominative-deterministic snicker here] mean by “so called ‘prize courts'”? Those were regular courts of admiralty law, which was partly international in nature, in at least the UK, the U.S., and the Netherlands; courts tended to be created ad hoc in France and Spain, but still followed a regular procedure with judges sworn to do impartial justice as between captor and captured. It was far from unheard-of for the ship’s captains and/or owners to prove the ship’s or the goods’ neutrality, at which time the ship or goods would be released and compensation paid.
As recently as 1916, words were exchanged between the UK and the U.S. because the former claimed the right to unilaterally change the acceptability of evidence other than ship’s papers, which the U.S. claimed was contrary to international law. The British argument was that if it had ever been possible to rely solely on the ship’s papers, because if they were incorrect the consignments could not be correctly dealt with at journey’s end and therefore there was no incentive to lie, that day had passed; the U.S. agreed in principle but said the unilateral change contravened existing treaty arrangements. I don’t know how the matter was resolved.
Since 1956, prize jurisdiction in the U.S. has rested with the Federal District Court (sitting in admiralty) of the port to which the ship is brought, though there have been no prize cases tried since then.
John Cowan – Perhaps he simply means it in the sense ‘that’s what they were called’ rather than implying that there was anything unofficial about them.
That’s how I read it.
When refereeing papers, I frequently advise nonnative English speakers to avoid using “so-called,” since it is likely to be misunderstood as pejorative—implying that the thing being referenced is not really worthy of the name.
“advise nonnative English speakers to avoid using “so-called,” since it is likely to be misunderstood as pejorative”
Their mistake stems from the fact that the equivalents of “so-called” in other languages are not pejorative, such as German sogenannt ~ so genannt and Polish tak zwany.
Offer them non-pejorative equivalents they can use instead, such as “known as” and “as it is called.”
FWIW, såkaldt in Danish can be used to introduce a term with no other implication than that the writer thinks it needs introduction (koens første mave, den såkaldte vom), but it’s often used to indicate that the writer thinks the term is double talk or worse: Putins såkaldte militæroperation. (I don’t know if that’s pejorative or something else). In short, the same caveats as in English apply.
Såkalt can have pejorative implications in Norwegian too, and it’s easy to pick up those before the lexical meaning. Kids (e.g my youngest brother at about the age of five) may well use såkalt as a pejorative intensifier: Din såkalte dust “You so-called fool”.
@Trond Engen. In its pejorative use, English “so-called” means ‘falsely or improperly so named’, as in “A so-called friend deceived them.” Thus, the purpose of “so-called” here is to note that the friend was in fact NOT a friend.
By contrast, if I rightly understand your description of såkalt used pejoratively, the word implies that the speaker or the writer agrees that the person termed a ‘fool’ is indeed a fool.
By contrast, if I rightly understand your description of såkalt used pejoratively, the word implies that the speaker or the writer agrees that the person termed a ‘fool’ is indeed a fool.
You’re talking about a five-year-old. Logic and lexicography are out of place here. The speaker was using a word he did not understand to add force to an insult, as is common at that age (and, to be fair, often much later)
The German version has all the meanings you’ve accumulated here, except “pejorative intensifier”.
During WWII, C. S. Lewis reported hearing someone refer to “those so-called Germans.”
Previously at Language Hat: Lost Writings Found.
The quotes in the first three paragraphs in the story are presumably the archivists’ translations from Spanish, French, and German. But later in the story (not quoted in the post) there’s a quote in 18th-century English:
So I wondered, if those were Spanish wives and children writing to their husbands and fathers, why is that in English? A few lucky guesses found this letter on the project’s page about the Juffrouw Elizabeth Galley, a Dutch ship captured en route from Tenerife. The quote is from a transcription labeled “Translation of the letter by the Admiralty Court”, attached to a letter in Spanish; I guess it was a translation made by the British after they seized the letters? But there are also letters from the same writer and his mother in excellent English to what seems to be a charitable English couple, thanking them for “protection” of their father and husband. They dated these letters “May 18th – 1741 – N.S.”; the British were still using Old Style dates then.
I think exactly the same description works well for English “so-called”. It can be, and is, used with no pejorative implication simply to introduce a term, but also it’s often pejorative with basically the meaning of scare quotes.
For a quick empirical check on my sense of how it’s used, I tried a Google search for the phrase on nytimes.com, from the past year: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:nytimes.com+%22so-called%22&tbs=qdr:y
Results include:
“… New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five Eyes nations that broadly share intelligence.”
“… being created by designers, engineers and executives [at Google] working in so-called sprint rooms to tweak and test the latest versions.”
“… a decade of debate over so-called gain of function studies, in which pathogens are endowed with new abilities.”
” Thirteen states have so-called trigger laws, which were passed in the years since the Roe decision in 1973 and …”
In all, out of the first 10 results I think 9 of the 10 use the format of introducing a term. (The one exception: “A so-called stablecoin lost all its value in a matter of days”, referring to Tether.) Of those 9, perhaps one or two have a subtext that the term is doubletalk or worse (like “reports of abuses involving Russia’s so-called filtration camps”). The other 7 or 8 of the 10 feel like simply introducing a term.
Now, reporters have thick skins: if someone misreads a pejorative implication into their work and takes offense, they’ll blow that off as the least of their worries. Brett’s advice to scientific authors is quite sound, because a researcher is wise not to risk the person who came up with the term (who is probably someone more senior in their field!), or others who use it, reading a snarky challenge where no such thing was intended.
Surely “sogenannt” *can* be pejorative in German. The Cold War habit of many BRD politicians referring to the Soviet-vassal regime to the East as “die sogenannte DDR” was obviously intended to point out that that regime’s label as a “Demokratische Republik” was empirically false.
@JWB: I can confirm that.
I’m not sure pejorative is the right label either, if that word still means ‘having negative connotations, tending to disparage or belittle’. Maybe it’s sarcasm? It can be used to call out the bare-faced use of a certain term as dishonest, but it impugns such users, not the word itself. (To take one of Greg’s examples, stablecoin is probably a valuable term of art in crypto trading, but the so-called is aimed at the fraudulent [or self-deluded] issuers of Tether).
@Lars Mathiesen: I would describe that sense of so-called as pejorative. (This is in the OED sense B.: “Depreciatory, contemptuous; (Linguistics) giving or acquiring a less favourable meaning or connotation.”) To me, it feels like so-called attacking the use of a term in a certain way. Any criticism of a word choice is concomitantly a criticism of whoever has opted to use the word in that way, but what precisely that implies can vary based on the context. Taking that same example, from just what Greg quoted, it is not actually clear whether the writer is merely insinuating that Tether was not worthy of being called a “stablecoin,” or whether, in addition, the whole notion of a stablecoin is incoherent. (Both are respectable viewpoints, in my opinion.)
I agree with Brett: the usage seems pejorative to me.
Deprecatory more that pejorative, I’d say; cf. the American ’90s TV show My So-Called Life.
I don’t understand the difference in this context. Surely deprecatory implies a pejorative attitude.
Just to show how context-dependent this all is, Homer Simpson’s use of “so-called” in the phrase “so-called Super-Donut” in this tv commercial does not strike me as either pejorative or deprecatory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as_oVHXKQQ4
@J.W. Brewer: Based on Homer’s next line, it seems to me that the pragmatic meaning is something like, “I’m going to call it that, even though i know some of you will mock me.”
I’d say, pejorative is insulting, deprecatory is mocking.
@Y: It’s funny that earlier this week, I had had a discussion with someone about My So-Called Life. After you mentioned it here, we discussed it again, and I said while I thought I knew what the title meant, it was not so straightforward to explain. I also remembered that it seemed, based on the first episode, as if references to Angela’s “life” were going to be a recurring motif. One of the very first voiceovers was:
However, I don’t think that really happened.
I know nothing about the show but its title, but when I first heard it, I interpreted it as meaning “this thing which other people call my life, but which to me seems like a living death.” But I may well be talking nonsense.
In Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the Mariner’s ship is becalmed and he and all his crew are slowly dying of thirst, when a sail appears on the horizon, but things rapidly go from bad to worse:
Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?
Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman’s mate?
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
At the mere approach of the ship, all the Mariner’s crew fall down dead. Death means ‘skeleton’, and the red lips are those of scurvy; free looks are immodest ones.
John C.: I know nothing about the show but its title, but when I first heard it, I interpreted it as meaning “this thing which other people call my life, but which to me seems like a living death.”
Me too.
The show was dark, but it wasn’t that dark.
It also demonstrated that teenagers of the 1990s, in spite of protestations on surveys that there weren’t enough sophisticated media that spoke to their real experiences, generally didn’t want to watch a “pimples-and-all” (as I heard My So-Called Life described* by a television critic shortly after it was cancelled, trying to explain why) depiction of teenage life.
* The phrase probably stuck with me primarily because even at the time, I had a visceral dislike for the way stage makeup is used in most shows and movies aimed at teens and tweens. The actors, especially young actors, are given the appearance of completely, artificially even complexion. It’s so overdone that it sometimes triggers an Uncanny Valley reaction in me.
… given the appearance of completely, artificially even complexion. It’s so overdone that it sometimes triggers an Uncanny Valley reaction in me.
I have the same reaction to the makeup on the ex-President. You’da thought his wife would have given him some tips, her being an ex fashion model.
AntC, you think he’d accept suggestions from her (or anyone)?
Of course – but only in the way you present. It can’t be used as a “pejorative intensifier” unconnected to its literal meaning, as in “the so-called Germans” that CS Lewis heard about.
His spray-tan is perfect. Like everything else he does, it’s perfect. Just ask him – he’s a narcissist.