Liner Notes for To Whom It May Concern
Liner Notes 8
Everyone is having bad luck along the Jungle coast it seems. Firstly Robin Button was marooned, then Will Fanshawe lost the leader of the expedition he was supporting. Now Lizzie O’Leary has been shipwrecked off it.
So be it; there are notorious places for people to get shipwrecked in the real world, yet people kept sailing through them. Why? Well, it was the route they knew, and so safer than one they didn’t. Also quicker and shorter in many cases. And sometimes there was no alternative.
The Great Eastern Trading Company is the East India Company transplanted from our world to this one. They’re midway into their expansion into the power vacuum following the decline of the empire dominating Rajahland, and flexing their muscles all over the Rajic Ocean. Having not entirely intentionally mashed together the Seven Years War and the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars in the first few stories I actually don’t have a good model for the situation on the subcontinent. The Company is in contention with a handful of larger powers, allying with smaller princely states, bringing them under their protection. This will inevitably lead to war and empire – unless events take a different turn in this world than in ours.
As the description Age of Sail Fantasy might indicate I’m more interested in the shipping side of the things. The Company’s original power came from their monopoly; they were the only ones allowed to bring back certain goods from certain Rajahland states to Whitland. (This was not just in their favour; it meant they were responsible for maintaining a suitable supply of their goods, and were responsible if they failed. Having said that, it was still a great way to make vast profits as the only legitimate supplier.) The value of the goods, and a route that went past various unsettled and loosely governed lands made the ships vulnerable to piracy. In addition the compounds – known as factories, though that word has come to take on a different meaning – in the trading ports were packed with valuable supplies, and even cash.
All this needed to be protected, and hence the Company gained an army and a navy. And once you have an army and a navy, and someone interferes with your trade and profits, or asks for your help for preferential trading treatment, inevitably you become a military and political power.
I say inevitably, probably not, but that’s what happened with the Great Eastern Trading Company.
These monopolies were enforced in different ways at different times. Certainly arresting the ship (yes, arresting a ship is a real thing that happens, ships are allowed to move freely unless you formally arrest them, look it up if you like) before it sets sail is a very curious way of dealing with the situation. The embargo of Antipodea seems to be very formal, very intense. Someone is keen that no unauthorised expeditions travel there. I wonder why. I wonder what is there and what they don’t want revealed.
The Evening Star Islands and The Royal Society of Natural and Unnatural Society came out of two items I saw on the internet on the same day. The first one noted that fictional scientific papers were all “I have something curious to draw to your attention,” and not “We proved you wrong Professor Jones, suck it!” Hence this; an “I’ve proved you wrong Professor Groby, suck it,” letter.
Meanwhile there was also a video of a swimming camel. A swimming camel out at sea, following a boat. Anyway, I wanted some sea nomads in the series at some point and this seemed as good a place as any to introduce the idea. I rather think that Lizzie exaggerates the distance – out of sight seems a bit of a long distance to swim – but herding animals with strong swimming skills across rivers and bays is a real life event that takes place when there is no near ford or bridge.
Anyway, as to money. A guinea is twenty one shillings, or a pound and a shilling (£1.1.0 or £1 1s). A rupee is two shillings, making ten rupees to the pound. A rupee is divided in various ways; there were sixteen annas to the rupee, making an anna worth the same as one and a half pennies.
I hope this clarifies the situation. I’d apologise for this but I went to some effort to research the actual historical prices of many of the objects in this story so the least I can do is ask that you stick with the oddities of real old British and Anglo-Indian currency.
Now the names. Every name, of ship, people and place, that had not already been created in an earlier story in the series, is the name of a village in Leicestershire. Why? You may ask, or perhaps WHY? In fact I keep lists like this for when I need to come up with lots of names in a hurry. One or two at a time I can come up with distinctive, suitable names for characters, but if half a dozen people turn up at once they run a chance of being John Williams, Will Johnson, Jane Wilson, Billie Jonathan etc. English village names sound like English names (because in many cases they are English surnames) yet they don’t sound like generic placeholder names, ones out the top ten most common surnames. In this story I liked what I came up with and just decided to stick with this one list.
It’s probably distracting if you’re familiar with Leicestershire. I can only apologise, or possibly offer an alternative version of the story that uses a list of villages in Hampshire.
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