Well, I dunno there, Smokey. You might want to check your sources on that. The flauto plastico was indeed first developed in the 15th century by the sixth Earl of Clacton (whose name, by the way, happened to be Earl Earl, which tended to make for a certain aura of redundancy about him). He was walking one day in his formal garden, admiring his roses, when he happened to notice a pool of black goo oozing out of the ground over by his begonias. His gardener was off somewhere, but the resident alchemist happened to be wandering by.

"What is that stuff?" asked the Earl (Earl Earl). Since the Earl tended to mumble, the alchemist didn't quite hear the question, so he asked, "Earl?'

But the alchemist was from one of the Channel Isles, the Isle of Joisey to be precise, and of course he had a Joisey accent, and it came out, "Oil?"

And that black, oozy goo has been called that ever since.

Well, anyway. . . .

The alchemist took some samples of the stuff and played with it for awhile. He knew nothing about polymers or long chain molecules or any of that esoteric stuff, but be found that by mixing it with other types of goo he had laying around and with the proper spells and incantations, he found that it had a certain plastic quality. He could mold it into various shapes and it would harden into that shape.

The Earl (Earl Earl), being an eccentric, used to combine both exercise and meditation by treading water in the castle moat while playing an Azerbaijani nose-flute (snouto flauto), which had come into the family when it was brought back by one of his ancestors who had gone on the Crusades, but had gotten horribly lost.

The Earl (Earl Earl) had long been interested in finding a different instrument. He wasn't all that happy playing the snouto flauto because he was plagued with sinusitus, and after a long session of treading water and meditating, the snouto flauto was a real bitch to clean. So he and the alchemist designed a sort of whistle with finger-holes made of the plastico material, which had shown signs of being pretty impervious to water.

This heralded in the era of plastico flauto. The plastico flauto became highly valued, not because of its tone quality (God knows!), but because of its durability. You could stomp on them repeatedly and more often than not, they could still be played. However, since the goo from which they were made was not readily available until relatively modern times when they found they could drill for the stuff, plastico instruments were exceedingly expensive, hence, rare. Many composers and musicians, not to mention audiences, regarded this as something of a blessing.

The Earl (Earl Earl) did, indeed, have a Japanese relative, but the actual nature of that relationship has never been clarified. Legend has it that the Japanese relative possessed an instrument very like a modern transverse flute made of bamboo.

This instrument had a beautiful tone, and many musicians wanted to buy it from him, offering him huge amounts of money for it. Seeing an opportunity here (he was a capitalist immigrant), he got the Earl's alchemist to make up a batch of plastico copies, which he tricked up and tried to sell as the original bamboo flute, but the sham was spotted right away, and the epithet, "cheap Japanese shite" came into existence. He tried to claim that because the plastico copy was developed in England, it should be regarded as an "Engrish frute."

By the way, trying to pass plastic off as genuine bamboo was the origin of the term "bamboozle."

Glad to help clarify these matters.

Don Firth