American Weekly Mercury · 9 April 1724

CP-1724-001

Lisbon Nov. 13.

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Transcribed from the clipping

Lisbon Nov. 13. We have here a Relation of a Battle which happen’d in Galilea betwixt the Inhabitants of Mount Tabor, and those of the City of Nazareth, occasion’d by some trifling Discord.

The Arabian Mountaineers descended upon the City with all their Force, and after divers Attacks and Assaults enter,d it on both Sides; and after having plunder’d, and in a manner ruin’d it, which was not done without considerable Bloodshed on both Sides, they attack’d the Cloyster of St.

Francis de Santa Grotto, where the Ecclesiasticks, Citizens and Soldiers had retir’d, who, after holding out a Siege of 12 Days, were oblig’d to abandon that also, and fly to Sa[illegible]a Acria; but those fierce Arabs have quitted their Conquests, and return’d to their Mountains.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 5 to 18 times magnification on 25 October 2026, word by word. The long s is set throughout this page and has been transcribed as a modern s. No character the type sets as a long s has been read as an f, and no f has been read as a long s. Two words were checked against each other at 9x to prove the distinction holds on this page: “some” is set with a long s and “trifling” with a true f, three words apart on the same line. The clipping is a single complete news paragraph cropped from a column. It carries no masthead, no folio line, no running head and no page number. The only heading on it is the italic centred dateline “Lisbon Nov. 13.”, which carries no year; that dateline stands in the headline field because nothing else is printed, and nothing has been composed to fill it. Below the last line the top of a following italic dateline is visible, cut off after two letters, and is not transcribed. TRANSCRIPTION NOTES, all checked at magnification: “enter,d” is set with a comma on the baseline where an apostrophe belongs, confirmed at 10x against the raised apostrophes in happen’d, occasion’d, plunder’d and attack’d on the same clipping, and is kept as the printer set it. The siege figure was checked at 14x and is 12. In “Nazareth” the second letter is a broken sort that does not resolve as an a at this scan’s resolution; the remaining letters are clear and the reading is given, with the damage recorded here. The place after “fly to” is a five-letter word, S-a-?-?-a, whose third and fourth letters are destroyed by a crease and did not resolve at 18x with sharpening; it is marked [illegible] rather than filled in. “Santa” appears two lines above and is the obvious candidate, which is exactly why it has not been written in. “Galilea”, “Cloyster”, “Ecclesiasticks” and “St. Francis de Santa Grotto” are kept as printed. The date and the newspaper are not printed anywhere on this clipping and rest on the record of where it came from, confirmed by Maria Robles on 25 October 2026, who collected it. Nothing on the page contradicts them: the American Weekly Mercury was published in Philadelphia from 1719 to 1746, so April 1724 falls inside its run, and a Lisbon dateline of 13 November reaching an American paper the following April is an ordinary crossing time for the period. A scan showing the masthead would settle it from the page itself, and is wanted.

Context added by this archive

The page Maria flagged. “The Arabian Mountaineers” is used once, as the subject of the sentence in which the attackers come down on Nazareth, and it is not a standing label: the same men are called “those fierce Arabs” at the close, and they were introduced before that as “the Inhabitants of Mount Tabor”. Nobody of the region is named.

Nobody of the region speaks. There is not one quotation on the page.

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