'Most Pot-valiant Drawcansirs, Run a Muck'

Many times I interviewed Charles Gehring, director of the New Netherland Research Center at the New York State Museum in Albany (Fort Orange, as the Dutch knew it). For almost half a century, Gehring has transcribed and translated documents and records from seventeenth-century Dutch, the language of New Netherland.

 

Once, in conversation, he digressed on the subject of anti-Dutch sentiment among the English who usurped their colonies in North America. As evidence, he rattled off some of the expressions we owe to this four-hundred-year-old antagonism: “Dutch uncle,” “going Dutch,” “Dutch treat,” “double Dutch” and one that was new to me: “Dutch courage.” In the pithy words of the OED: “bravery induced by drinking.”  The Dictionary cites Walter Scott’s Woodstock, or The Cavalier. A Tale of the Year Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-one (1826): “Laying in a store of what is called Dutch courage.” The implication was that the Dutch were cowards unless drunk.

 

I thought of Dutch courage again while reading some of Coleridge’s letters, where I came upon this, written to his friend Samuel Purkis, a tanner from Bristol, on Feb. 1, 1803: “There is a preparation of the Indian Hemp, called Bhang, or Bang, or Banghee—the same Drug, which the Malays take, & under it's [sic] influence become most pot-valiant Drawcansirs, run a muck, &c.”

 

Pot-valiant is a dead ringer for Dutch courage, minus the ethnic slur. Dr. Johnson defined it as “heated with courage by strong drink.” Drawcansirs is the name of a character in George Villiers’ anti-Dryden burlesque The Rehearsal (1672). In the play’s final scene, Drawcansirs enters a battle and kills all the combatants on both sides. The OED defines the word derived from his name as “a blustering, bragging person,” a character type Coleridge would certainly recognize.