English wine cask units the mediæval French and Italian "botte") or pipe was half a tun, or 1008 pints. Tradition has it that George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Edward IV of England, was drowned in a butt of malmsey on 18 February 1478. (However, Josephine Tey in "The Daughter of Time" suggests that "drowned in a butt of malmsey" means rather that George, Duke of Clarence, drank himself to death rather than literally drowning in a container of wine.) In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado", the narrator claims he has received "a pipe of what passes for Amontillado".
Isleños in Louisiana Canary Islands. With the crisis occasioned by the collapse of the trade in the Canarian "malvasia" wine (called "malmsey" in England) in the 18th century, there was an increase in poverty. Beginning in the late 1700s, prickly pear cactuses were grown in the Canary Islands to serve as hosts plants for cochineal insects from which the dye carmine was made. It became a major export of the islands in its own right, but this trade collapsed in its turn after the dye began to be produced synthetically in Europe. Most of the affected people were farmers and laborers who had