51. Magnus’s Opera Omnia was published in Lyon in a twenty-one-volume edition in 1651 edited by Father Peter Jammy, O.P. Albertus Magnus (ca. 1193–1280), also known as Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne, was a German Dominican friar and a bishop who achieved secular fame for his comprehensive knowledge of science. In 1931 he was made a saint by Pope Pius XI; ten years later, Pope Pius XII recognized him as the patron saint of the natural sciences.
52. Ramon Llull (ca. 1232–ca. 1315) (Anglicized Raymond Lully, Raymond Lull, in Latin Raimundus or Raymundus Lullus or Lullius) was a Majorcan writer, philosopher, and logician. His Ars Generalis Ultima, or Ars Magna (The Ultimate General Art), published in 1305, was a book on analytic thinking—essentially, an early computational tool—that influenced such thinkers as Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). Curwen owned a one-volume Latin edition of several of Lully’s works, published by Lazarus Zetzner in Strasbourg in 1598. The Zetzner edition includes related works by the Italian friar, philosopher, and occultist Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and the German magician-alchemist and philosopher Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535; see note 119, below) on modes of thought.
53. Some scholars attribute the book to Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1294). For example, the Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845) listed, among Bacon’s writing, “Thesaurus chemicus, Franckfort [sic], 1603 and 1620, 8v (?) contains the Specula mathematica, the Speculum alchymice, and some other tracts, which Tanner puts down altogether as Scripta sanioris medecince in arte chemicc.” Similar credit is given in the Dictionary of National Biography. However, although Bacon was a prolific, indeed encylopedic, writer, other scholars doubt whether Bacon in fact wrote this work (see, for example, Dorothea Waley Singer, “Alchemical Writings Attributed to Roger Bacon,” Speculum 7, no. 1 [January 1932]). Bacon’s high profile as an alchemist of the day led to many alchemical tracts of the period being attributed to him, some plainly authored by others.
54. Robert Fludd, or Robertus de Fluctibus, a physician of Welsh descent (1574–1637), studied astrology and alchemy and employed so-called sympathetic cures (for example, the idea that a blade could draw the infection from a wound caused by that blade). He adopted the idea that diseases were an invasion of the body by the spirits of demons, set forth in his Pathologia daemoniaca. The work for which he is best known is Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris Scilicet et Minoris, Metaphysica, Physica, Atque Technica Historia, a “technical history of the two worlds, the greater and the lesser” (1617–1619), but he wrote numerous minor works, some of which remain unpublished, including Clavis Philosophiæ et Alchimiæ Fluddanæ (Frankfurt, 1633). He is best known, however, as an ardent English supporter of the Rosicrucian movement, though he is said not to have been a member.
55. Johannes Trimethius (1462–1516) was a German abbot, cryptographer, historian, and occultist who wrote several banned works on religion and cryptography, or steganography; his best-known work is Steganographia, which spent a full three hundred years on the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the ban was finally lifted in 1900). Nevertheless, he wrote nothing about the philosopher’s stone, and this is more likely to be a work by Isaac Hollandus and Johan Isaac Hollandus, Mineralia Opera Sue de Lapide Philosophico. These Dutch adepts probably lived around 1600, but virtually nothing is known of their lives or even their family name (Hollandus merely designates their nationality). Isaaci et J. I. Hollandi Opera Universalia et Vegetabilia, Sive de Lapide Philosophorum (The Universal and Vegetable Works of Isaac and J. I. Hollandus; or, On the Philosopher’s Stone) was printed in Arnhem in 1617.
56. Many of these works, complete with inaccuracies (such as Mesnard instead of Ménard), are listed in the 1902 (10th edition) of the Encylopædia Britannica.
57. Qanoon-e-Islam; or, The Customs of the Moosulmans of India, by Ja’far Shar¯ıf, treats the culture, religious rites, ceremonies, and clothing of Indian Muslims in the nineteenth century. (Of the “Rufaee, or Goorz-mar” tribe of “Fuqeers,” for instance, Ja’far Shar¯ıf writes: “Sometimes they sear their tongues with a red-hot iron, put a living scorpion into their mouths, make a chain red-hot, and pouring oil over it they draw their hands along it, when a sudden blaze is produced. I have heard it said, that they even cut a living human being into two, and unite the parts by means of spittle. They also eat arsenic, glass, and poisons. . . .” [London, 1879], 291–92.) However, that book was written in 1832, translated by Gerhard Andreas Herklots (whom the author acknowledges in his introduction), and published in that year, so it is not possible that Mr. Merritt saw the title in 1746; this must be another, unknown volume.
58. The story is told in “The Festival” (here, above).
59. See note 2, above.
60. Best known many years later was the industrialist Nicholas Brown Jr. (1769–1841), great-grandson of Pardon Tillinghast (see note 62, below) and descended from the well-known Baptist minister Chad Brown. Brown University, cofounded by his father, bears his name.
61. The descendants of Gideon Crawford, who (according to Kimball) came to Providence in 1687 and set himself up as a merchant; with the guidance of Gideon’s widow, his sons John and William went on to own ships, warehouses, and wharves (150).
62. Captain Joseph Tillinghast (1734–1816) built a house on a site that had been claimed by his great-grandfather Pardon Tillinghast in 1645. Captain Tillinghast is remembered as the commander of one of the American boats involved in the burning of the schooner HMS Gaspée in 1772. The Gaspée was enforcing the customs laws when it ran aground in Narragansett Bay. A group of the Sons of Liberty rowed out to the ship and attacked the crew, wounding the commander, and burned the ship. The incident is celebrated as the first blood spilled in the American Revolution.
The house site was also the location of the first wharf and warehouse in Providence.
63. Sint Eustatius is part of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean; it lies northwest of Saint Kitts. It was an important supplier of munitions to the Revolutionary army in the late 1700s.
64. In 1758, the French and Indian War (also known as the Seven Years’ War) was raging on the North American continent, as British and French troops fought for control of the extensive holdings of these countries there. The troops Lovecraft makes reference to were probably part of the buildup for the Siege of Louisburg, the British attack on the key French fort of Louisburg that controlled the St. Lawrence River and kept the British forces from reaching Quebec. The siege ended in July 1758 with the capitulation of the French commander. The British moved on to Quebec, and by 1763, in the Treaty of Paris, the French ceded the whole of Canada to the British.
65. According to Kimball, Green sold “ ‘A Large and Compleat Assortment of Braziery, English Piece Goods, Rum, Flax, Indigo, and Tea’ ” (326).
66. “Sign of the Frying-Pan and Fish” adjoined the northwest corner of the Court-House lot, and according to Kimball, the proprietors, Clark and Nightingale, offered “a large Assortment of English and India Piece Goods; Likewise Stationary and Hard Ware . . .” (321).
67. Twenty-five miles south of Providence, Narragansett was still a small village then, dependent on farming and fishing out of Narragansett Bay.
68. By 1760, there were perhaps as many as seven candlemakers in Newport, all using whale products (head matter, sperm oil, and whale oil) as key ingredients. The process was new to America, having been introduced (most scholars believe) by a Sephardic Jew living in Newport named Jacob Rodrigues Rivera, who emigrated from Portugal. Others credit Benjamin Crabb, of Rehoboth, while yet another school of thought on the subject (see Patty Jo Rice’s “Beginning with Candle Making: A History of the Whaling Museum”) says most advances came about through the so-called Spermaceti Trust, established by manufacturers (twelve by 1763, according to Rice) whose price fixing—to control the escalating price of head matter—gave them a monopoly.
69. George Whitefield (1714–1770) was a Methodist open-air preacher who converted
many to Calvinsim in his campaigns throughout America. He was one of the first of the Methodist clergy to preach to the enslaved.
70. The Rev. Josiah Cotton was called in 1728 to serve in the place of worship established in 1723 by the Congregationalists (now the First Unitarian Church of Providence) at what is now the corner of College and Benefit streets in Providence.
The Congregationalist Church, now the First Unitarian Church, 301 Benefit Street, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
71. William Read Staples’s Annals of the Town of Providence records, “During the time that Josiah Cotton had the pastoral charge of the First Congregational Society, a part of his church and congregation seceded from his watch and care. The seceders deemed his preaching destitute of sound evangelical principles. They accused their pastor of preaching ‘damnable good works’” (449). In 1743, Deacon Joseph Snow and a group of adherents left and established a new church in a private house.
72. There is no record of Dutee Tillinghast in the records of the Tillinghast family, which was of some prominence (see note 62, above).
73. Probably now Hope Street—most of Power’s Lane was subsumed under this name.
324 Hope Street, Hope High School in 1990 (across the street from the site of the school that HPL attended), possible site of Powers Lane Hill. Photograph courtesy of Will Hart
74. The schoolhouse between 1747 and 1758 was indeed across the street from the parade of the old Colony House, according to Kimball. It was on the west side of North Main Street. The town ceased to conduct a public school in 1754, but the building was leased to Stephen Jackson, who probably occupied it until 1763. Elijah Tillinghast, a likely relation, was on the Providence school committee in 1754. See Welcome Greene’s Providence Plantations.
75. Unfortunately, the extensive catalogue of the RIHS fails to list this item; neither did it appear in Betty Ring’s Let Virtue Be a Guide to Thee, catalogue of the comprehensive sampler show mounted at the RIHS in 1983.
76. Nothing is known of the Enterprise, other than its existence.
77. Samuel Winsor III (1722–1803), whose father was also a pastor at the First Baptist Church, must be the clergyman in question. In 1770 and 1771, a controversy within the church caused him to form a new Baptist church in Johnston, Rhode Island.
78. The Providence Gazette and Country Journal was first published in 1762. Coincidentally, Joseph Tillinghast, the great-great-grandson of Pardon Tillinghast (not the sea captain), was the publisher of the Gazette in 1809; later, he became a U.S. representative.
79. There are no records of this individual.
80. The American Revolution caused much dissension in New England churches, as many pastors refused to omit prayers for the king and the royal family. The Rev. John Graves, rector of King’s Church in Providence from 1755 to 1781, was among that group, and his church was closed. Feeling against him remained so strong that he was unable to resume his parish duties after the Revolution. Graves’s presence in Providence is recorded in Kimball, who reports that a broadside announced a sermon for December 10, 1772, by Dr. Graves at King’s Church.
81. King’s Church was funded by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the missionary arm of the Anglican Church.
82. Cosmo Alexander (ca. 1724–1772) was a Scottish painter descended from several other well-known Scottish artists, including his father, John Alexander. A firm Jacobite, he fled Scotland after the 1745 uprising and went to Rome, where he painted many exiled Catholic leaders. From there, he moved to London and then the Netherlands, sailing for America in 1766. According to William Dunlap’s 1834 History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, in 1769, when Alexander was visiting Newport, Rhode Island, he met Gilbert Stuart, one of whose later portrait subjects was, famously, George Washington. The portrait, begun in 1796 and never completed, formed the basis for the image on the U.S. dollar bill. One of Alexander’s patrons, Dr. William Hunter, apparently facilitated the introduction to Stuart, then a teenager. Alexander gave the younger artist lessons and employed him as an assistant. In 1770, Stuart accompanied Alexander on a painting tour that included stops in Philadelphia, Delaware, and Virginia before their voyage to Edinburgh. Alexander died unexpectedly on August 25, 1772, leaving the seventeen-year-old Stuart stranded in Edinburgh. He went on to do portraits of the five men who succeeded Washington in the presidency, as well as of some one thousand other subjects. (I, 167, 197–98)
83. Nine times the governor of Rhode Island, Hopkins was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence and instrumental in the founding of Brown University.
Home of Stephen Hopkins, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
84. One of the four Brown brothers; they included John, Nicholas Jr., and Moses. Joseph (1733–1785) was active in the brothers’ commercial enterprises as well as in an important political role, serving as a state representative and state senator for Providence.
85. West (1730–1813) moved to Providence at age twenty-three, where he began as a bookseller. In 1770, he received an honorary Degree of Letters from Brown University. He published an almanac from 1765 to 1793. In 1769, West erected a temporary observatory in Providence, just off Benefit Street, and, along with Joseph Brown and Governor Stephen Hopkins, spent the day of June 3 observing the transit of Venus across the sun. West subsequently published An Account of the Observation of Venus upon the Sun, the Third Day of June, 1769, at Providence, in New-England: With some Account of the Use of Those Observations. West’s telescope is on display at the John Hay Library. In 1781, West became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
86. According to Edward Field’s State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century (vol. 2, 640, n. 1), this was the first bookseller in Providence. Daniel Jenckes was the Chief Justice of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas for Providence County. Judge Jenckes was also the father of Rhoda Jenckes, who was the first wife of Nicholas Brown Jr.
87. Samuel Ward (1725–1776), who entered politics on the side of hard currency, opposing the faction of Stephen Hopkins, who favored paper money. Hard currency in colonial America, also known as specie, represented a promise to pay whatever was understood to be used as exchange—which could mean, variously, silver, tobacco, sugar, and other commodities. Of course, British hard currency was gold or silver, and the value of the currency approximated the value of the metal. Paper currency meant actual pieces of paper used as tokens of money or exchange; it had no intrinsic value, only that assigned by the colony. Ward and Hopkins alternated as governors of Rhode Island, and Ward was another of the founders of Brown University.
88. Hackers Hall was destroyed by fire in 1801 and rebuilt.
89. Edward, known as the Black Prince, Prince of Wales (1330–1376), one of the heroic figures of the Hundred Years’ War, whose reputation was sullied only by his siege of Limoges in 1370, in which the town’s 3,000 inhabitants (men, women, and children) were slaughtered.
90. The upside-down pentagram, a sign of black magic, representing the goat of lust (with its cloven hooves) attacking the heavens.
91. The Haute-Vienne is the department (the French equivalent of a county) in which Limoges is located. However, the prisoner must have been confused by Curwen’s question, for the département Haute-Vienne was not created until after the French Revolution. It certainly did not exist in 1370. While the upper Vienne (“haute Vienne”) flows through the district around Limoges, the prisoner probably would have recognized only the names Limoges or Limousin, the traditional name for the region. See Anthony Pearsall’s The Lovecraft Lexicon.
92. The spectacle was described in the Gazette in March 1864 as “an Entertainment for the Curious”—further explained, somewhat ambiguously, as “a work of seven years, done at Germantown, in Pennsylvania” (reported by Kimball [310] and quoted in the October 1916 issue of Providence Magazine).
93. In 1769, t
he British armed sloop Liberty had seized a brig and accused its captain and crew of evading the customs laws. When the men of the Liberty came ashore to explain their actions, a group of locals seized the sloop and dismantled and scuttled her onshore. Although a substantial reward was offered by the Crown for arrest and conviction of those responsible, no arrests were ever made. A few days later, the ship floated to nearby Goat Island, where a violent thunderstorm destroyed it.
94. This is probably a reference to Sir James Wallace (1731–1803), who was twice posted to the North American station in his career, in 1763 and again in 1774, though he was but a captain at this time.
95. A fictitious ship; the real HMS Cygnet was an eighteen-gun sloop captured from the French by the British in 1758 and sold in 1768.
96. John Robinson, a customs collector employed by His Majesty’s government. In this immediately pre-Revolutionary period, the Sugar Act and, shortly afterward, the Stamp Act caused wealthy local merchants to align with common criminals to evade the royal customs officials. Robinson, while attempting to bring in to justice an illegal importer of molasses, was himself arrested for theft of the cargo by a sheriff sympathetic to the revolutionaries.
97. In popular opinion, mummies were an excellent source of many remedies, including tinctures, treacles, elixirs, and balsams. Paracelsus and many others published recipes for these that drew on sources from as far back as the ninth century CE, which themselves purported to repeat formulae developed by the Egyptians who performed the mummification. Of course, mummies were only one source of such remedies; many other components of human remains—brains, bones (skulls in particular), blood, hair, and urine all formed part of the ancient pharmacopoeia.
98. A “smack” is a small boat, usually equipped with a well in which to keep the captured fish alive.
99. Nothing is known of Captain Mathewson beyond the information recorded in this tale.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 49
