Series 4 > Miscellany of the Scottish History Society

66
MISCELLANY X
skipper that the said Wm salbe ansuerable to John Finlasone for sik
thingis as the saidjohne may claime of him as the law will ’ Date,
court, parties and particulars chime in sufficient circumstantial har¬
mony to make it almost certain that this implied admission by Wil¬
liam Lindsay of a qualified legal liability tojohn Finlayson validates at
least one grievance in Wallwood’s story, on which, however, the
most careful exploration of the records of the Court, down to the end
of 1606, sheds no further light. A reasonable deduction from the cor¬
respondence is that sometime about November 1601, when Lindsay
‘band him before the noters of Lleisbome ... to com to Dondei’,
Lindsay dismissed Wall wood from whatever office he had held—
probably, as suggested above, as clerk of this ship; that at a date
between 10 June 1602, when Wallwood wrote from ‘St A wall’, and
29 November 1602, when he writes from Dundee, the disconsolate
and discomfited man had come back from Portugal and left the field
clear to his alleged persecutor and traducer.
By December 1602 (No. 6) Wallwood had apparently got another
ship, but his letter of that date bears no mention of destination or
other like particular. The narrative accounts, Nos. 7 and 9, are un¬
dated but may be of about the date of No. 8 (6 June 1604), written
by Wallwood from Elsinore on his way to Bergen and beyond that to
Lisbon again. There perforce we must leave this sad and angry man,
alone with his grief, for he has just heard that his ‘tua sonis’ were dead:
hard tidings that made him ‘mer sorray nor all the trobell and sketh’
he had ‘sostenit’.
★
The somewhat eccentric spelling of the documents has been retained,
but modern punctuation and capitals have been added where neces¬
sary. Following the texts, a glossary, a list of places mentioned and a
table of Portuguese money values have been provided.
My obligation to Mr R. A. Barrowman, formerly Town Clerk of
Montrose, for his unfailing courtesy and assistance while I worked on
these papers, I most gratefully acknowledge here. To Professor C. R.
Boxer, Camoens Professor of Portuguese History in the University
of London, and to Mr A. J. Aitken, Editor of the Dictionary of the
Older Scottish Tongue, for generously given expert help in solving
problems of Wallwood’s idiosyncratic vocabulary and orthography,
I am greatly obliged, w. A. MoN.