A century and a half later, in 1812, a Scottish historian named David Macpherson, in a dry piece of work called The History of the European Commerce with India, quoted the tea-drinking passage from Pepys’s diary. That was a very surprising thing to do, because in 1812 Pepys’s diaries were supposedly still unknown. Although they resided in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and so were available for inspection, no one had ever looked into them—so it was thought—because they were written in a private code that had yet to be deciphered. How Macpherson managed to find and translate the relevant
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