A Leather Submarine?
Pepys celebrates a big anniversary in March 1662, see if you can guess what it is
A quick note before we start: I’ve got a review of Munir Hachemi’s novel Living Things up now at Minor Literature[s]. I hope you’ll check it out. It’s a very funny novel and it deserves more readers.
Pepys Show: March 1662
and while I was at dinner with my wife I was sick, and was forced to vomit up my oysters again
Samuel Pepys spends much of the first week of March 1662 fretting about his finances. He figures he’s worth about five hundred pounds, but in the last six months he’s spent at least two hundred and fifty pounds. It’s not sustainable. So he resolves to “think upon some rules and obligations upon myself to walk by.” He mentions it to his wife, Elizabeth, while they’re in bed, telling her that he wants them to be frugal for a while, but if he can build his net worth up to two thousand pounds then he can probably get a knighthood and at the least keep a coach. Later, he “set to make some strict rules for my future practice in my expenses, which I did bind myself in the presence of God by oath to observe upon penalty therein set down, and I do not doubt but hereafter to give a good account of my time and to grow rich.” He tells us that he went to a pewterer to buy a “poores’-box to put my forfeits in, upon breach of my late vows.” I guess it’s like a piggy bank, which he treats like a swear jar, taxing himself when he overspends?
Most of Pepys’ business this month involves paying off ship’s crews and seeing other ships depart, in one case for Jamaica and in another to the Madeiras with the East Indy fleet. But there’s some interesting business as well: one Colonel Appesley has to be dealt with, a counterfeiter who forged the signatures of Pepys and his colleagues. They have a constable send him to the Counter, one of two London prisons used for civil offences. There’s also a warrant put out for a “complice of his, one Blinkinsopp.” This is the second time someone’s tried forging Pepys’ signature.
In the course of his navy work, Pepys and Sir William Penn also take a meeting with the German Dr. Kuffler, “to discourse with us about his engine to blow up ships.” They know about the engine because it was used successfully in Cromwell’s time, but it’s not safe to carry onboard a ship. I’m not sure what the engine is, but it might be a submarine or torpedo, as Kuffler’s father-in-law, Cornelis Drebbel, had previously manufactured multiple “steerable submarine(s) with leather-covered wooden frame(s),” per wiki. They could stay underwater for up to three hours, and apparently King James went aboard one. Drebbel says he’ll share its secret only with the king and his heirs, and they’ll understand that it’s safe. Pepys and Penn waffle, deciding to punt the issue to the Duke of York, which is the same as killing it. It’s crazy to me that it took centuries for anyone to follow up on this idea.
On the home front, the big news of the month is that the Pepys’ beloved servant Jane, Wayneman’s sister, has returned from the countryside where she was looking after their mother. She’s a meek girl who’s been with the family since 1658, and there’s a memorable entry towards the end of the diary where Pepys’ wife Elizabeth has to step in and kill a turkey because Jane is unable to. Otherwise, their maid Sarah is down with a sickness that they fear might be ague. Wayneman and Pepys’ father out in Brampton also suffer from agues (fever?). Pepys gets sick enough to vomit twice. The first he blames on drinking small beer cold, and the second on “some boiled great oysters.”
Pepys also attends a banquet onboard the Lewes, a merchant ship. There’s a dinner where they toast their wives’ health and fire seven or nine guns for each wife, but poor Pepys gets made the butt of a joke and the “mirth of all the company.” He and Jeffreys are called brothers because they’re both fumblers, meaning men who are married but unable to have children. Pepys blames this on the kidney stones he suffered as a young man, or the excruciating surgery he had to get rid of them.
And as it happens, this month turns out to be the fourth anniversary of the operation to remove a stone, and—as per tradition—Pepys throws a party of his own to celebrate. Guests include Jane Turner and Theopila Turner, his cousins who nursed him back to health, plus “a gentleman, one Mr. Lewin of the King’s LifeGuard,” who “told us of one of his fellows killed this morning in a duel.” They hire “a man-cook to dress dinner,” and Jane marks her formal return to the household, now at a salary of three pounds per year (“she would not serve under,” Pepys says in an aside). The menu includes, “a brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens, and a jowl of salmon, hot, for the first course; a tanzy and two neats’ tongues, and cheese the second.” That seems like a good place to leave off. “In the evening they went with great pleasure away, and I with great content and my wife walked half an hour in the garden, and so home to supper and to bed.”
Theatre
March 1: Thence my wife and I by coach, first to see my little picture that is a drawing, and thence to the Opera, and there saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do, and I am resolved to go no more to see the first time of acting, for they were all of them out more or less.
March 31: Thence to the play, where coming late, and meeting with Sir W. Pen, who had got room for my wife and his daughter in the pit, he and I into one of the boxes, and there we sat and heard “The Little Thiefe,” a pretty play and well done.
One last time: I’ve got a review of Munir Hachemi’s novel Living Things up now at Minor Lit[s]. It’s about a quartet of Spanish louts who look forward to an easy post-university summer of camping and picking grapes in France, only to find out the harvest has been cancelled, leading them to find work in the much less glamorous side of the French agricultural industry. I’ve been telling people it’s almost like a Spanish Trailer Park Boys. Maybe because so much of the book is about littering at a camp site? I dunno.
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No Beatles riff anywhere in the piece?