Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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847

Frank Foley

A mild-mannered clerk in the British Embassy’s passport office in Berlin, just before the outbreak of war in 1939, was not all he seemed to be.

By 1938, Germany had stopped forcing Jews to leave the country and was interning them in camps, yet thousands still escaped into British-run Palestine. An angry Arab backlash prompted the Foreign Office in London to dam the flood, but one man had both the will and the means to introduce more than a few leaks.

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Picture: From PikiWiki Israel collection, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

848

Olaf Tryggvason and the Pigsty

Olaf hears that the ruler of Norway has lost the support of his noblemen, and sails away from England to claim his crown.

Hakon Sigurdarson, Norway’s de facto ruler, has gone to ground after upsetting his noblemen. His rival, Olaf Tryggvason, recently returned from England, guesses that Hakon will seek out Thora of Rimol; but Thora has hidden Earl Hakon and his servant Karker beneath the floor of a pigsty.

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Picture: © Lucas Migliorelli, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA UK 3.0.. Source.

849

The Cat, the Mouse and the Banyan Tree

A mouse’s delight at seeing his old enemy caught in a trap proves short-lived.

Yaugandharayana, minister of Udayana, King of Vatsa (roughly Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh), has made a casual assertion that even animals go to each other for protection. Yogeshvara challenges him to provide an example, so the wise minister tells him about a mouse that once lived at the bottom of a banyan tree.

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Picture: © Dr Raju Kasambe, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

850

The Baptism of Olaf Tryggvason

Viking raider Olaf Tryggvason, taking a break on the Isles of Scilly, cannot resist the temptation to hear his fortune told.

In 988, Norwegian prince Olaf Tryggvason took a break from raiding the coastal populations of the British Isles, and stayed for some time in the Isles of Scilly. Despite several years of service at Novgorod to Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, Olaf was still a Norse pagan; yet rumours of a Christian hermit who could tell one’s fortune were too intriguing to ignore.

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Picture: © Tom Corser, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA UK 2.0.. Source.

851

The Oath of Olaf Tryggvason

Viking raider Olaf Tryggvason, newly converted to Christianity, threw his weight behind a Danish invasion of England.

After converting to Christianity, Olaf Tryggvason renounced his career as a self-employed pagan pirate. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that six years later he felt free to ally himself with King Sweyn of Denmark, a Christian, and challenge Ethelred the Unready for the English crown.

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Picture: From the British Library, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

852

The Character of Captain James Cook

Captain Cook’s friend and ship’s surgeon David Samwell gives us his impressions of the great explorer.

Welsh poet and doctor David Samwell was Captain James Cook’s surgeon on his third voyage, aboard HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery. Samwell accompanied him from Plymouth in 1776 to Hawaii, where he saw the impulsive Cook killed in an altercation over stolen stores on February 14th, 1779.

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Picture: By Nathaniel Dance-Holland (1735-1811), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.