Full fathom five

I've been dipping into An Elizabethan in 1582, the wonderful diary of Richard Madox, Fellow of All Souls and chaplain aboard the Edward Bonaventure, headed for the Spice Islands and for China, though her voyage failed. As shipboard politics grew tense—he did not approve of swerving from their mission to engage in privateering—Madox began to write in cipher, then in Latin and in Greek in cipher, giving the masters and sailors around him names out of Greek and Roman comedy, which made his narrative fall into playlike shapes. An Aethopian legate "brought our general an elephant's tooth and a long-tailed monkey, which pleased him inordinately as a result of that sympathy which I believe exists between them. But after he had twice fouled his guardian with urine and aroused enmity between his master and others ... he was finally given to Pyrgopollinices, a matter which marvelously vexed Colax." Everything intrigued him: a wizard-king of Guinea, the taste of crocodile. He cast the journey's horoscope; he sketched a tattooed woman "finely pinked"; he drew flying fish. And he died of a bloody flux off the coast of Brazil and was committed to the deep.

Nine