In 1985, Van Der Zee, a novelist, [0] with the literary cache to gain access to library texts that remained barred to this working class writer until 2016, with digitization opening doors that universities shut in my face, produced the book that compelled, indirectly, my own examination. Van Der Zee writes wonderfully, sees people with souls rather than nameless hands with a nation to build. From my perspective, after 15 years digging in the mine he long ago prospected, the senior author dims to naive in some cases. Yet, this after writer sitting in this old plantation house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, owes Van Der Zee the entire project. In 1992, I think, I read Michael Hoffman’s They Where White and They Where Slaves, which cited Van Der Zee as the main source. That pamphlet-sized book was the most an indie writer could manage in those pre-digital days. In 2011, researching a science-fiction novel, I re-read that book and have since been driven on a rampant quest to find and preserve the memories of those few European slaves that were named, and those armies that were not even named in their own miserable days.

Re-reading Bound Over, one sees the line of “white slavery” glowering on the basement floor of America, and then sees Van Der Zee, step short, sometimes on, but never over, that sacred line of falsified freedom. He is not permitted by his masters at Simon & Schuster to challenge the exclusive right of African Americans to ultimate oppression.

Both thematically and chronologically, Bound Over examines the progress of America from Plantation, to Colonial awakening, to Nation, in six sections: 1 Touched, 2 Bound, 3 Seized, 4 Stirred, 5 Released, 6 Transformed.

The book is introduced by another writer who falsifies the entire thing by claiming that European servants in America were voluntary actors, eager for opportunity. Claiming that only a third of American immigrants were unfree, he contradicts Van Der Zee’s repeated mention that half of all Americans were slaves. His fellow, the author, must have cringed mildly, sensing the narrative curtain dropping before his exposition of unnamed persons expiring in their suffering thousands, “in a worse than Egyptian bondage.” For In This New Isrаel, I have read Bound Over twice, and shall need assistance with the etxt in Colorado, as the eyes are troubling me again.

I will employ Van Der Zee’s work for the period quotes, dates, and in a few instances, where his literary brilliance as a social novelist shines, will quote my progenitor himself. For, in this chilling endeavor, knowing in my bones that the Postmodern American Mind, was long ago inoculated against the wicked reality of our national birth, in favor of a notional myth, I know also that John Van Der Zee is my father in this endeavor to recover what may be had from the graveyard of our grandfathers.

-JL, October 3, 2025

…

1600s America: Characters & Factors, Per Van Der Zee

“From 1609 until well after the founding of the republic, half of all colonists [2] who came to America arrived under some form of involuntary labor… This working paradise, the Big Rock Candy Mountain of its time… men staked out claims to men, stole them, lured them, fought over them and bid up their price… Indentured servitude was a structure supported by unequal contracts, resting on a foundation of punishment.”

-1633, Massachusetts Bay, servitude assigned as a penalty for thefts of food

-1656, John Hammond, captured by Maryland rebels while serving under Captain Stone, was sentenced to death, escaped and was shown mercy by captain Thomas Thoroughgood, who was “put under indictment,” for transporting Hammond back to England. In England, while composing a pamphlet promoting plantation life for laborers, he was mindful not to suggest this in person to a Londoner for fear of the cry going up, “A Spirit! A Spirit!” meaning a soul driver or kidnapper. It seems that Hammond’s Leah and Rachel was composed to buy off the warrant against him from Virginia and Maryland by promoting these two nightmare plantations as two civic sisters of plenty. Poet George Alsop did likewise a decade later. [4] Yet academics take these ransom letters by servants with literary talent equal to our modern novel and movie writers of good fame a straight travel writing, rather than the exit statement by a gulag survivor written after debriefing.

-1680s, Massachusetts assigns sentences from 6 months to 7 years for payment of debts.

-1653, John Maddison, ship’s carpenter, granted 600 acres of land in Virginia on the Mattapony River. This meant that he had the money to pay for his passage [or had worked off his own term] and the passage of 11 other persons, who would each be granted 50 acres under his control, until those persons had worked off the money Maddison fronted for their passage, which often occurred in shackles. If these persons failed to survive, under living conditions purely dictated by their master, Maddison, he would get their 50 acres. Over his life, Maddison always got their 50 acres, building a massive agricultural empire. If a servant survived his 4, 7 or 14 years of hard labor, he would be given his 50 acres, surrounded by his master’s thousands of acres, unable to compete or even eke out a living, and either falling into debt or back into bondage, or selling out to Maddison, would eventually lose his land. 40 to 50 acres, were deemed the minimal amount of American woodland, that, once cleared and cultivated, could support a man, wife and children, with nothing left over for shoes, tools, etc. On the Front Tier of the plantations, such spaces were abandoned regularly by “squatters” in their outward migration from the Planter empires.

-1670 to 1680: 5,000 servants entered Maryland, of these, at the end of their terms…

-1,300 “proved” their “freedom dues,” being tools, the clothes on their backs and 50 acres.

-3,700 either died in their toils or remained in bondage!

-900 of the 1,300 sold their acres right off, mostly to pay for passage back to England!

-241 took warrants for land, most of whom must then fall into debt and either be sold, or migrate west to the Front Tier

-139 proved their rights but took no land, meaning they sold the land rights and migrated, or stayed on as an overseer, smith, wheelwright or some other form of wage laborer or piece work artisan, whose tiny plot of land was not getting in the way of his recent Master’s eminent domain. If such a person fell into debt he might be bound again.

-4% of of servants entering Maryland finished their time and settled as freemen. 4% is the median margin for statistical error used by polling firms.

-Men shipped to the plantations as criminals, for one of the 300 plus crimes that called for death or transport, were chained to a board, by the neck, with a gang of fellows, in a hold that was 16 feet long, inhabited by rats.

Maddison’s Acreage increases:

-1657 +800 [that is land fictionally assigned to 16 servants]

-1662 +300 [6 servants]

-1664 +200 [4 servants]

-1683, Maddison passes on a patrimony including servants and Negroes gotten by renting 37 men over as many years and either working them to death, keeping them bound and unpaid, or buying them out in order to become a manorial lord of Virginia.

-1660, Virginia, freed servants could not find arable land, indicating that the promised acreage was not that which they had cleared and worked for their master, but some new acreage, which needed to be cleared, requiring a period of debt before the land produced…

-1667, Scottish servants are requested by planters of Barbados, to “… render both Commodity and Security to the planters.”

-1672, French backed negro uprisings are feared in Jamaica. Ordinance is passed stipulating that for every 10 negro slaves a planter must own a bound, and thus unpaid and forced, “Christian” servant, to serve as a soldier against any slave rising. Saint Christoper and Antigua pass similar acts, demanding unfree “Christian” men for work and to bear arms for their masters, “as experience heretofore had been had” suggesting that one Highlander had proven to be a match for ten Africans in previous uprisings. This will be echoed in the founding document of America in 1775 when the only mention of “white” men is the burden to bear arms for the republic. [3]

…

Notes

-0. Novel: Blood Brotherhood Stateline, also, Canyon: The Story of the Last Rustic Community in Metropolitan America

-1. Van Der Zee names the following secondary sources employed in his remarkable inquiry, and naively calls for properly credentialed academics to complete his study, a call answered only by a high school dropout pulp novelist:

-Colonists in Bondage, by Abbott E. Smith

-Government and Labor in Early America, by Richard B. Morris

-White Servitude in Pennsylvania, Chessman A. Herrick

-American Slavery, American Freedom, by Edmund Morgan

-2. The mandatory use of “colonist” which was not a term often used in 1600s by planters or laborers, like the term “indentured servant” which was not invented as a governmental device until about 1754 and was not used in public discourse until about 1820, are devices employed, mostly without deceptive intent. These key words mislead the reader to absorb the inquiry into early American forced labor in a subconscious manner that reinforces the notion that INVOLUNTARY labor was somehow the lot of persons who volunteered as a hallowed member of the “indentured” class seeking opportunity, when they were in fact unwilling persons referred to by all as “indented,” meaning to be acted upon according to a “contract” which they had no right to interpret, or even to question, unless they could prove themselves to have been educated in higher learning and bring their own case. See Crackerboy, 2019, JL, Yellow Negroes, about Chinese slaves in Maryland and Virginia circa 1700, as well as Job and Oglethorpe, circa 1730. I do not think Van Der Zee was naive, but that he wrote this book in submission to the editors who employed credentialed academic readers who would outrank him on any such digression I just conducted. In genius fashion, the author steers this book in the hallowed direction of 1776, which all American academia fawns over as the Holy of Holies of their collective ideal. His general conclusion is that American revolution was made possible by the simmering mistrust of Americans whose fathers were brought in chains and could not easily bend the knee once they had risen from bondage in such a ruthless school as English Ruled America.

-3. See The Greatest Lie Ever Sold, JL, 2019

-4. See Cox & Swain and Advent America for Alsop’s story.

The focus for this final preamble to the main efforts of planting English North America is Martin Frobisher and the last of the Elizabethan “sea dogs” failing to plant viable populations in their mazed lust for precious metals and pirate loot. Early voyages to New England and Virginia will be covered in the main section. This grim search for a passage through the arctic to China is presented for three reasons:

-1. To show the development of methods and ethics in long range English voyages.

-2. To demonstrate the fact that actually settling in, clearing and transforming the wilderness of North America was, entirely, an afterthought,

-3. That the lack of Asiatic empires to conquer and rule instilled a desire to recreate an ancient style of extreme class exploitation from scratch, to make a Sumer, an Egypt, an India, a China, by Planting unwanted populations in unwanted destinations. English desired of the New World trade, plunder, and a dump to plant “rubbish” people in redemptive penal situations. It is no accident that the “penitentiary” was an American invention and that America, most prosperous nation in world history, has a higher proportion of humans locked in prisons and jails, than any of the 195 less prosperous nations on the planet. We saw the French penal system in its infancy with Sable Island, a practice that continued into the 20th Century with Devil’s Island. Frobisher and his hard men, risking life and limb mining in the arctic for fools gold, are a cautionary class of pirates with aspirations to become great lords in the Medieval Style, such as did rise in America, with Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Samuel Adams, men who had their very own John Dee/Hakluyt as alchemist/advisor, Benjamin Franklin.

Last English Phase of Pre Planting

-1546, Richard Hakluyt graduates from Trinity College as a polymath and will curate the reports of explorers. Along with Polymath John Dee, who also brought navigational science to England from Europe. Dee and Hakluyt would shape the ideals of Westward Navigation and Plantation.

-1548, Duke of Northumberland convinced Sebastian Cabot to switch allegiance from Spain to England under the boy King Edward VI.

-1551, Cabot Cartel trading with Morocco, which must have involved selling European slaves.

-1553, Cabot Cartel sends a fleet to the Grain Coast being the future Liberia in Africa, where all but 40 men and one ship are lost. Teen age Martin Frobisher, toughest and smartest of the North Atlantic explorers, is among the survivors.

-1553, Cabot elected governor [CEO] of The Merchant Adventurers of England, also called The Muscovy Company for short, the prototype plantation corporation, originally intended to find a passage north of Russia, to get to China!

-1553, Hugh Willoughby sailed north of Norway to winter in Lapland. Both ships and all men were found frozen stiff by Russian fishermen in the spring.

-1554, Richard Chancellor sailed the White Sea to Archangel and went overland to Moscow and obtained trading rights with Czar Ivan.

-1555, John Lok, with 16 year old “officer” Frobisher return from Africa with 100 pounds of pure gold.

-1558, Ascension of Queen Elizabeth sparks rush for African gold and slaves.

-1556, Chancellor wrecked off Scotland, a third expedition under Borroughs contacts Samoyeds.

-1557, Jenkinson sails to the arctic and goes overland to Persia, opening trade relations, which are squashed by a Turkish invasion.

-1560, Henry Cole begins making navigational instruments “second to none” in England, most mariners were still crossing the Ocean “by guess and by God,” and Cole’s artisan efforts aided repeated voyages.

-1561, Martin Frobisher returns from fighting Irish in Ireland, where he met patron Gilbert.

-1562, Hawkins successfully trading slaves from African Kingdoms to Spanish Hispaniola. One of his slave ships, Jesus, abducted “blackamoors” with “love.” Flying the royal flag and sailing naval ships, Hawkins was known by the device of “a demiMoor [mixed race woman] proper bound with a chord.” Frobisher jailed by Portuguese in Africa.

-1560s, Frobisher is a young pirate captain, preying on shipping with letters of marque from Dutch and French and finally did jail time in London for raiding London wine merchant ships.

-1569, The fraudulent Zeno map of Venice is still misleading mariners in Mercator’s most recent map, which Frobisher is destined to correct.

-1574, Bourne’s Regiment of the Sea published

-1567-9, Hawkins, sailing with Drake, is bested by a Spanish fleet off Vera Cruz, and is forces to maroon 100 sailors, including David Ingram, the future tavern bard. The three men who returned to England stated that they were well treated by all the tribes and that most of the men elected to stay. A hundred marooned sailors could explain a lot of Cherokee DNA.

-1576, Grim pirate Captain Martin Frobisher is selected as the leader of an expedition to find the Northwest Passage to China. Lucky for the Chinese that ice breaking ship technology was over 300 years in the future. John Dee instructs the shrewd captain in the use of the most recent instruments.

-Frobisher sails June 7.

-July 11, Sighting Greenland, Frobisher is deserted by one ship, the Michael, that turns home in fear.

-July 20, Baffin Island region charted, Eskimos named after Abnaki term for “eaters of raw meat,”

-August, trading and wrestling with the Eskimos, five of the men go off to trade with the Eskimos and are never seen again. Frobisher abducts one Eskimo by “plucking” him, kayak and all out of the sea.

-September 1, Master of the Michael in London claims Frobisher was “cast away,” or lost.

-Late August, Down to 13 men and boys, Frobisher returned home in his tiny ship, to London on October 9th, with “a peace of blacke stone,” sparking two more brutal treasure hunting voyages.

-1577, Frobisher’s Second voyage, included 6 criminals to be set ashore as miners in Greenland to “civilize” the Eskimos who had made off with 5 sailors the year before! What? Artist/Adventurer John White, who was destined to be the governor of the marooned Roanoke Plantation, was an officer on the voyage and made beautiful paintings for this thuggish voyage of discovery. They abducted two women. One was so ugly they stripped her to see if she had cloven feet and let her go. The pretty one with the baby was kept. A man was taken, who was hurt in wrestling. The three would later die back in England, and were said to have behaved with dignity. The woman’s baby rode in her hood and the man had a heavy mustache.

-1577, portrait of Martin Frobisher with armor, sword and pistol, looking grim. This man would make his best efforts charting the arctic regions of what became Canada, and participated in the wars against Spain as well as a captain under Francis Drake in early planting expeditions.

-1578, Frobisher’s Third Voyage. After Frobisher left, the Eskimo released the five English hostages, who built a boat of wood left at is docks, sailed off, and died in a storm. This story, with all details accurate to Frobisher’s written account from 1578, was told by an old Eskimo woman in 1862, to explorer Charles F. Hall demonstrating the reliability of oral tradition. The last mission, landing to mine for gold ore, was separated according to class, between “Gentlemen and “the inferiour sorte.” The superior sort did work alongside their lesser men in the brutal arctic conditions.

-1578, George Best, writing in True Discourse, states that the involvement of university educated merchant princes, and learned men like Dee, were the only reason why England sailed westward. For even to get Englishmen to fish the Grand Banks rather than buy fish from Normans and Flemmish, had required laws, and that the noble mind was not curious.

-1583, Prince Lasky of Poland invites Dee to lecture and advise.

-1582, Many ships lost at sea in tough winter into 83.

-1583, Gilbert granted a charter for Maine, sails with a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia, beats his cabin boy in a rage, heroically sails in his lesser, leaking ship, and, off the Azores, is seen by the other ship to be swallowed, ship crew and all, whole by the sea.

-1584, Walter Raghly, who is awarded a deed for Virginia, pens a discourse on planting, see below.

-1585, Frobisher Vice Admiral

-1588, Frobisher distinguished in action against Spanish Armada

-1594, November, Frobisher, age 55, mortally wounded in defeating a French garrison at Brest, buried at Cripplegate London

-1675, John Seller’s Atlas Martitimus places the northwest passage explored by Frobisher in 1578 as “not yet discovered.” This passage was not possible during The Little Ice Age, where rivers froze solid from November to March as far south as Maryland.

To finish laying the extensive context for Planting America, we should consider the 7 missions assigned by Walter Raghly in his Discourse Concerning Westerne Planting, in this reader’s paraphrase:

-“To extend the Reformed Religion”

-To improve “beggarly or dangerous” English trades made hazardous by the Spanish

-Resource extraction, “to supply England’s wants”

-To use “numbers of idle men,” in an effort to relieve urban crowding

-Military bases against Spain

-To increase the Navy and enrich the Queen

-And still, to discover the Northwest Passage

The most significant voyages of the 1500s were those of the French, which actually struck deep into the Canadian river system.

Jacques Cartier was born a subject of France, an early indigenous navigator, the hold of Italian interests now fading as national interests waxed. He was a Breton, meaning a Gaelic person with as much in common with Cornish and Devonshire seafaring men across the channel than with most of the ethnic group of France. Cartier seems to have been the best navigator of the 1500s, by far.

-1527, Basque whaling off Newfoundland

-1534, April 20, Cartier sails from Saint Malo, financed from the King’s naval treasury, charged with finding China by way of a northwest passage

-May 10, midnight landfall in Newfoundland, where Cartier had sailed before, as had many of his crew

-May 21, ice bergs, had to be dealt with to get to Canada, in spring, from the Atlantic. These Little Ice Age seas from 1290 to 1816 were much tougher to deal with than they had been in the Viking Age.

-May 24, Cartier’s crew kills swimming polar bear

-May 27, rounding Newfoundland into Gulf of Saint Lawrence

-June, explores Labrador, rescues a French fishing boat lost in this “undiscovered region” as fishermen followed the fish in a more passive type of exploration and were not eager to give away their fishing shoals. Natives from further south, who “paint themselves in tan colors,” either Beothuk or Iroquois, were seal hunting in birch bark canoes. My bet is Iroquois.

-Sunday, June 14, mass in harbor, the entrance to Canada was being mapped, such as Brion, Magdalen and Prince Edward Islands…

-July 6, Micmacs in two fleets of 50 canoes, brandish furs to be sold, indicating that Europeans had already been trading in these waters extensively. So many tribesmen appeared that the French initially panicked.

-Mid July, trading with Hurons

-July 24, Cross is raised, Chief Donnaconna objects, gives his two sons as ambassadors to France

-August 1, Cartier calls a counsel of officers, a rare departure from tyrannical captaincy of the time

-August 5, Cartier finds Montagnais tribesmen fishing as contractors for a certain Captain Theinnot, who had a private fleet nearby. It is obvious that private ventures made most of the North American discoveries long before official government navigators placed flags and crosses in the name of a king.

-September 5, Cartier returns, his crew eager to sign on for another voyage.

-1535, May, Cartier’s second voyage mans a small fleet of three ships with 112 men, with powers to punish granted by the king. Fishing and trading merchants prevented sailors for signing on to the naval ships, crew members listed by name, except for the much abused ships boys. This is not a voyage of discovery, but an attempt by government to catch up to the private sector.

-September, Donnaconna speaks with sons, finds they were well treated, and makes alliance with Cartier. The Huron princes then stall in their duty as pilots, not wanting to lead Cartier to their enemies up river. Cartier is given a slave girl and two slave boys as gifts, one a son of the chief. The slave girl of 10 or 12 ran away from French rapist sailors. Recaptured, she was joined by another sex slave, a girl of 8 or 9, with the Christian captain and the heathen chief, both parties to this crime.

-October finds Cartier up the Saint Lawrence River to Hochelaga “a wooden citadel,” and King Agouhana. The Hurons thought the French were deities and sought healing, while the French, in very European fashion, sought a mythic city of gold at Lake Superior, where copper was abundant. The passage could not be made until a French outpost could be established generations later.

-Winter in Canada is a disaster, with cold and scurvy killing French and Indians. French were allowed to use the virgin girls, no doubt leaving some genetic traces. French fleet frozen in ice from middle of November to middle of April; a great scene for a horror novel if I wasn’t busy unearthing this neglected past…

-May 3, Cartier violently kidnaps Donnaconna, carrying to France: him, his 3 sons, 1 boy, 2 girls and three others, none to return, despite Cartier’s “promise” to return the chief.

-1537, Cartier accused of piracy by Spain and of assisting in Lord Gerald Fitzgerald’s attempt to become King of Ireland.

-1538, Cartier’s Third Voyage, shared with fanatic Protestant politician Roberval, counts 6 ships, 274 persons, including miners and sawyers and noble “supercargo” tourists. The labor positions could not be filled, so 50 men were “recruited” from prisons, provided they had not been condemned for religious heresy, speaking against the king or counterfeiting coins. Murderers were good to go. The same year 24 fishing ships sailed from the same port.

Morison notes, “It is difficult for Americans, north or south, to accept the fact that for a century after Columbus’s discovery, the ordinary sort of European had to be bribed, drugged or beaten to go to this land of promise, unless to fish.”

-With land lubber Roberval promoted to co command with Cartier, we witness the beginning of French Plantation economics, identical to later English practices. Roberval bought a chained gang of thieves of both sexes, ranging from age 18 to 45, to be settled in a land that froze solid from November to April. These included an engaged couple. Cartier would even torture Spanish fishermen for information. The entire expedition was like a brutal science fiction novel.

-Left behind in France, Dannonconna told that Cartier’s men used Huron’s for sword practice and robbed anybody they could. His sons died in criminal violence after they got involved in gang rackets. Roberval marooned a young woman and her maid for the noble lady having an affair with a gent. The lady survived, was rescued after a year in the arctic that claimed the life of her maid, lover, who heroically swam to shore, and infant. She became a school teacher, the friend of the queen, and the subject of the queen’s novel, about “the Valiant Demoiselle.” Indians resisted the French pirate rapists.

-Roberval built a fort named FranceRoy, had men and women beaten regularly, failed to trade with the Indians, just as Cartier failed to find the fabled Saguenay kingdom. Men were lost men to scurvy and barely survived the winter

-1539, (Hernan de Soto invades Florida with 600 men.)

-1542, Harleian Desceliers Dauphin Map with alleged portrait of Cartier, a lean faced man with a forked beard in cloak, set against a later sketch of a portrait in which he has a short beard and practical head rag.

-1542, English law passed discouraging fish merchants from buying from Flemish and French, and encouraging English to fish.

-1543, (Soto dies in Arkansas, after wiping out a few civilizations.)

-1545, Cartier publishes a Brief recit

-1561, Roberval finally killed in political street violence in Paris

-1564, French protestants settle in Florida at Saint John’s River

-1565, Spanish wipe out French in Florida

-1567, October, David Ingram and 100 other sailors are marooned by Drake at Mouth of Rio Grand and begin walking to Maine.

-1568, French pirate wipes out Spanish garrison in Florida, killing all prisoners.

-1569, Ingram and two surviving mates hail a ship at Cape Breton and are brought back to England. He supports his drinking habit and finds shelter by traveling from Inn to Inn telling tales of lost kingdoms!

-1578, Newfoundland, Parkhurst reports on fishing fleet: 50 English, 150 French/Breton, 100 Spanish

-1578 French fleet settling convicts on Sable Island captured by English, with no news as to the fate of the crooks

-1579, Sir Humphry Gilbert outfits an expedition to find David Ingram’s fanciful kingdom.

-1580, Trinity Harbor, Newfoundland, Beothuk will not trade with Captain Richard Whitbourne, English learn to hunt.

-1583, Etienne Bellinger explores Maine coast, looking for Ingram’s pubcrawl kingdom.

-1583, Gilbert claims Newfoundland for England

-1584, French convict ship bound for Sable Island wrecked!

-1586, Newfoundland, 300 fishing ships, including Dutch

-1588, Year of the Spanish Armada

-1593, English Captain George Drake finds Labrador Islands occupied by Breton and Basque whalers

-1598, October, Norman/French captain Thomas Chefdhostel, empties prisons and maroons 60 men and women on Sable Island.

-1603, Chefdhostel finds 11 men alive on sable island, robbed them of their peltry and took them to France. King Henry IV wished to see the men, who appeared like “ancient river gods,” with four year beards, in skins, and demanded that the fiendish Chefdhostel return their thieved property. Throughout the Plantation Era, the working class are treated with extreme cruelty by merchants and nobility and rarely find any kindness, except in the persons of Kings, military governors and magistrates. [1]

-1604, Camplain resumes French mission to colonize Canada

…

Notes

-1. So Her Master May Have Her Again, the story of Mary Glass in Spanish Louisiana and Of A Panted Land, the stories of Jemmy Annelsey and of Isrаel Potter

In November and January, T—B Wright interviewed me a total, of, I think, 62 times. I was sick both times, my eye seizing up and these little lungs clogging. Thanks to Russian antibiotics, i expect to be out of the woods soon. T—B has an ambitions publishing schedule of one print book a month beginning soon. He has written a lot more fiction and non-fiction than he realized until we sat down one snowy day and did an inventory. Below is a link I found in the Eskimo email box this morning.

Thanks to Montius, Paul Bing Ham, Tyler and the Vanilla Gorillla for shuffling this cipher around Kansas, Missouri and Illinois this icy January. Oh, note that Breck and Leanna interviewed me many times on Substack and that they are depicted in two chapters of Can from Casting Darts Publishing.

Howdy James!

Hope ya dig the vids. Breck and Leanna convo on writing is a special sort of oyster. You make cameo references throughout—it's only fitting...

Tyler

Concerning the outset of French North Atlantic operations. Like the Spanish and English, early efforts by France were heavily influenced by Northern Italian banking interests who transferred operations to France, Holland and England along with navigational know how, such as Cabot. Much of the activity from 1492 thru 1588 is so intensely technological in competitive scope, that I liken it to the Space Race and Atomic armament during the Cold War.

-1453, Western France devastated from 100 Years War, King requires mariners to sign charters not to attack friendly shipping, largely ignored.

-1483, Pierre Garcie, publishes Routier, a sailing and navigational guide

-1489, French wine cargoes insured by banks

-1493, Marie Johan is rigged in a manner a hundred years ahead of the time. (The French did exceed the English in sailing ship design up until 1815.)

-1504, Normans fishing on Grand banks off Newfoundland

-1507, seven “sauvages” brought from Newfoundland to Rouen

-1508, two Norman ships exploring Newfoundland, Verrazzano possibly among the “supercargo”.

-1509, a third Norman ship imports seven Indian slaves, probably Beothuk, in Rouen, from “Terra Nova”

-1510, King of Portugal complains to French King that he has lost 300 sail to French pirates since 1500!

-1511, Scotland launches the Great Michael, able to carry 1,000 men.

-1515, bill of sale for small ocean going French ship, likely for the fishery, 17,500 pounds of salted cod brought back to Rouen in one ship

-1517, Le Havre harbor improved for deep water vessels, 500 ton L’Hermine built, Varrazzano sails to the Levant

-1519, SaintMalo set aside shoreline for curing fish hauls from Newfoundland, La Dauphine, the ship destined to carry Varrazzano built, capable of twice the range and crew of Cabot’s flagship Matthew

-1520, Norman ship building expands dramatically, to handle transAtlantic commerce. Jean Ango of Rouen begins exploration and piracy, capturing hundreds of vessels with a private fleet, flying a Turkish crescent flag, even claiming unexplored Canada as a personal fief.

-1521 thru 27, the five masted 1500 ton French ship built and failed to launch, being scrapped

-1521, Gordillo, sailing from Santo Domingo, raids Carolina coast for 70 slaves, which were liberated by the governor Ayllon

-1522, September, after a three year voyage round the world, the Vittoria under Cano, with 18 crew, who were jailed, just because they were sailors, returned from the 5 ships and 239 men who set out with Magellan, sparking a search for a quicker route to China, north of Florida

-1523, Florentine Italian bankers in Lyons France, form a syndicate to promote a French backed voyage by Verrazzano, whose house coat of arms was a six pointed star, to be made in 4 ships, reduced to 2 by a storm. Giovanni, or Jean Varranzzano, does not mention a single member of his two crews by name in his log, rather, in a letter to his French backers, despises them as “the maritime mob.”

-1523, French corsair, Jean Fluery of Dieppe, plunders Spanish treasure fleet. Three French vessels fishing off Newfoundland, 5 departures from La Rocelle to Grand Banks. The French proved no better neighbors than the piratical English in the New World, addicted to plunder and slave raiding.

-1523, March, Gomez contracted by King of Spain to find Northwest Passage, Cristobol de Haro, Dutch merchant and outfitter ordered to build ship

-1524, 17th January, at the end of the year, which began on March 1 until 1756 [check date], Varrazzano set sail for The New World. On March 1 Cape Fear is made, the natives are described as “the color of russet.” A sailor was made to swim to shore to parley with the natives, was marooned and saved by the natives who sent him back after marveling at “the whiteness of his skin.” It does seem here and elsewhere that the idea of “whiteness” or “white” people in North America and western Europe, seems to have come from the heavy influx of Italian bankers and merchants recently cut out of the “white” slave trade in North Africa and the Middle East by the ongoing collapse of Constantinople, which had been reduced to an isolated city in the 1400s. The young unnamed sailor observed that the natives of Virginia had skin “inclining towards black.”

-1524, April, Varrazzano and his men find a woman with a baby, and she is so beautiful they try and abduct her, but take only the baby, back as a prize to France, for she was tall and limber. How one wonders was a suckling babe kept alive? [1] The native skin is lightening as the French and Italian mob sails north.

-Next a man of “olive” skin tone parleys with the ruthless invaders, shaking in fear. He was left alone, assuring us that the rapist baby thieves were heterosexual.

-April 17, Staten and Manhattan Islands are reached, where the native skin tone continues to lighten as the folk are described by Jean as “the people are almost like unto ours and clad in feathers…”

-April, late, contact with Wompanoags of Mass and Rhode Island, who are described as big, strong, moral people with black hair and their skin tone like variations of “brasse.” The Crew were unable to rape the well guarded women, indicating that these tribes had experience with European mariners.

-May, early, the “Land of Bad People,” which became Maine was so named because the Abnaki men fought off the invaders and even bared their butts at them, with no women seen, indicating that these people had a lot of experience with slave hunting, rapist explorers.

-July 8, Giovanni returns to Dieppe, with no indication if the baby survived.

-1524, September, Gomez sails from Corunna

-1525, February, Gomez makes Cape Breton, does not stay where the Portuguese had been driven out by the Abnaki, and sails south to explore Maine down to Newport R.I. abducts a load of friendly Indians, many of whom die on the return to Corunna, where the people, expecting a load of cloves, are so disgusted with Gomez for slave raiding, that these Indians are freed, hopefully to be adopted into families and not reduced to starvation and beggary like Europe’s indigenous poor.

-1525 Jean Jolivet’s map of Normandy illustrates state of the art ships.

-1525, Ayllon sails with a fleet, 500 men, women, children and black slaves to about Wilmington Carolina, which he names Chicora, Indians are still pissed over slave raids, and his settlers misbehave.

-1526, October 18, Allyon dies of fever and only 150 survivors return. Did all of the others die? If not, they may have been absorbed by the tribes, possibly including the first African North Americans.

-1527, Giovanni Verrazzano sailed again, tricked the mutinous crews of two of his ships, cut wood in Brazil and returned.

-1528, Giovanni sails to the West Indies and is eaten alive by Caribs, raw, in front of his brother who was rowing off in their boat with members of his “maritime mob.”

-1529, French Newfoundland fish being re exported to England, Ribero World map illustrates astrolabe and quadrant, but not the cross staff, indicating that navigation was still fraught with guesswork.

-1530, the Bailly Globe shows a Sea of Verrazzano

-1534, explorers Cartier finds a fishing vessel from La Rochelle ahead of him

-1541, Roberval sails from La Rochelle

-1542, Norman map makers improve cartography based on navigational reports. In a single day 60 fishing ships and boats sailed from Rouen to Newfoundland… That the Beothuk survived this level of contact for over a hundred years and resisted planting and military expeditions until 1800, without adopting European technology, is amazing, or is it causal?

-1547, banks begin insuring English cargo

-1555, beautiful, oceangoing French ships depicted in Guillaume le Testu album

-1559, departures from La Rochelle, a single port, for Newfoundland number 49 ships

-1571, Protestant uprisings in France fuel migration to the New World.

-1573, (the Vagabond Act codifies and encourages slave raiding in England, or the rounding up of the poor to be put into unpaid service, to be “employed” or “used.”)

-1587, John Davis sails a leaky clinker built pinnace into the Arctic and back.

-1628, French protestants crushed in France.

-1637, Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, writes “at Aquednetick, now called by us Rhod Island.”

-1644, March 13, assembly votes to rename Aquednetick “Isle of Rhods” reflecting, but possibly not following, Verrazzano’s description from 1524 “about the bigness of the Islande of the Rhods.”

…

Notes

-0. This is a correction of this reader’s earlier impression that racial notions of “white” and “black” were absorbed in the west through Spain. For there are zero ancient Arуan uses of the term white as a racial noun. The desire for domestic slaves that could be shielded from the sun and rendered pale as ivory and used in North Africa and the Near East for pleasure, would continue and increase until 1804 when the U.S. sent warships to subdue Tripoli.

-1. In my novel Ire and Ice the baby’s survival is credited to a female dog’s milk, a fancy more humane that the probable fate of the child.

This section addresses the means by which extreme Northeast America was approached by European merchant interests of Italy, Portugal, England, and of the coming into common knowledge that heavily wooded shores teaming with fish, large game and wild people lie directly west from the British Isles. This chronology does extend beyond the 1600s subject line in order to honor the first folk contacted by English and French in North America.

-1245, Bristol begins development as a major sea port

-1436, Libel of English Policie establishes the sea as the “wall” of England in popular thought

-1440, Robert Stormy of Bristol lost two ships and crew to Italian pirates and Turks, while seeking spice trade in Syria

-1445, Bristol “masters and mariners” guild established a fund for a priest and 12 poor old sailors to pray for their brethren when out to sea

-1453, Constantinople falls to the Turks, who begin to squeeze Italians out of middle eastern trade.

-1470, Bristol trade enables rebuilding of St. Stephen’s Church where sailors prayed

-1474, tomb of William Canynges names him a “merchant prince,”

-1476, John Cabot confirmed as citizen of Venice

-1480, John Jay sailed in search of the mythical island of Hy Brasil, Master Lloyd sailed for Hy Brasil and could not find it, Bristol is a major wine importer, Bristol sailors feuding with German sailors over Icelandic trade, Bristol sailors, pushed out of Icelandic fishing, are seeking a new fishing ground

-1481, two Bristol ships search for Hy Brasil

-1490, John Cabot planning maritime ventures in Spain

-1491, from this date on Bristol was sending 2 to 4 ships a year in search of Hy Brasil

-1493, Cabot’s project falls through and he meets Columbus, a fellow Italian

-1495, John Cabot seeking royal support in England

-1496, John Cabot granted “letters patent” by Henry VII for westward discovery

-1497, June 24, John Cabot makes landfall on Newfoundland, the day before he had felt “the loom of the land,” including the odor of fir trees and other plants. This becomes a common experience when nearing land masses in North America

-1498, in May, John Cabot with five ships sailed, one returning in distress, Cabot and the other four ships vanished, and are assumed lost at sea

-1499, Fernandes & Barcelos granted patents from Portugal to discover new lands.

-1500, Fernandes & Barcelos sight Greenland, Corte Real voyages at his own expense

-1501, Anglo Azorean Syndicate seek letters patent from England.

-1501, Gasper Corte Real granted Portugal letters, offended, Fernandes does to England and is granted letters and seems to have been lost at sea. Gasper abducts 57 Beothuks of Newfoundland and finds a broken Italian sword, thought to have been Cabot’s. The Beothuk women are declared to be fair, small breasted and pleasing to the eye. Corte Real continues exploring in his flagship and is lost at sea. Corte Real observed that the Beothuk were “of the same color as us,” and “live like the ancient fauns and satyrs.” thye were noted for painting themselves with red ochre.

- 1502, D. Manuel Corte Real is granted his brother’s patent to Newfoundland from Portugal. He, his ship and all hands were lost at sea, the sister ship returning.

-1502, Anglo Azorean captains bring King Henry VII of England a bird, a mountain lion and three Beothuks from Newfoundland.

-1503, King of Portugal stops grating patents for Newfoundland due to heavy losses of men and ships.

-1504, Fabyan, a writer, meets the three Beothuk men at Westminster Palace dressed as gentlemen, but still not speaking English. There is another Anglo Azorean voyage to Newfoundland.

-1505, last Anglo Azorean voyage to Newfoundland, Sebastian Cabot paid as navigational consultant to England.

-1506, Portuguese fishermen active in Newfoundland

-1508, the Ruysch Map demonstrates European assumption that Newfoundland and Greenland were promontories of Asia. A possible, disputed voyage by Sebastian Cabot, son of John is not credited as likely by Morison.

-1509, England stops monarchical interest in exploration. Fishing continues.

-1518, Sebastian Cabot “pilot mayor of Spain,” again a consultant.

-1519, published play an Interlude of the Four Elements, composed in England speaks of the Ocean being too great for man to conquer but that “westwarde be founde new landes”

-1520, Fagundes exploring Newfoundland at own expense

-1521, Fagundes granted patent by Portugal and explores Newfoundland and smaller islands, including Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Sable Island, Penguin Island and mapped Bay of Fundy.

At some point Portuguese mariners, perhaps Fagundes, stock Sable Island with a cattle herd.

-1526, attempts to settle Cape Breton by Portugal fail due to Micmac slaughtering the invaders

-1525 to 28, Sebastian Cabot commands a small fleet to sail around the world, which fails in South America.

-1527, John Rut sails from London with two ships to “seke strange regions,” sighting Labrador, coasting Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New England, encountering 13 fishing vessels in Saint John’s Harbor, and sailing down into the Spanish Indies, where towns had already been moved inland against mostly French pirate raids

-1536, Richard Hore chartered two ships as tourist vehicles to cruise Newfoundland for adventure. One ship lost at sea, and the gentlemen too lazy to fish for food, the gentleman adventurers misbehaved, turned pirate and cannibal as well, eating their own. On their return, the English king compensated the French merchant that was looted at sea.

-1537, Richard Hore chartered a ship named Valentine to take on salt, wine and passengers in Portugal. He abducted and held the passengers for ransom, causing another scandal, even being sued by his crew, who were presumably unpaid!

-1550, Harbor Grace a thriving fishing settlement of many races elected a rotation of “admirals” to act as a peace chief. These fisherman would save numerous expeditions, eventually feed New England planters in distress and gave much aid to each other, demonstrating a kind of democratic anarchy rarely achieved among men. The Basques stood outside of this circle of cooperation and were feared by all.

-(Beothuks of Newfoundland were described as light skinned like Europeans, went about painted in ochre, lived by hunting and fishing, avoided Europeans from 1501, being their second recorded mass abduction, to their final extermination and are estimated to have numbered from 500 to 1000 folk and to have occupied the island for about 1500 years.)

-1556, Sebastian Cabot done in portrait by Stephen Borough, master of the pinnace Serchthrift, the pinnace was a terrifyingly small ship necessary for coastal exploration.

-1568, Diogo Homem’s map of Cape Breton uses Micmac names

-1583, (Harbor Grace is recognized and claimed by England)

-1601, (Lescarbot and Poutrincourt visit Newfoundland)

-1608, (John Guy and the Society for Merchant Adventurers decide to settle Newfoundland)

-1610, (Cupper’s Cove settlement in Newfoundland, John Guy Governor of Newfoundland, John Mason assigned to take New Hebrides from Gaelic clan chiefs)

-1610, (Pirate Peter Easton builds a fort above Harbor Grace)

-1611, (Easton and the fishermen of Harbor Grace survive a French attack.)

-1612, (John Guy’s Party in Newfoundland, Beothuk have moved into the interior, never adopt firearms, and maintain a band structure or sub tribal organization, unique among first contact North Americans.)

-1615, (John Guy succeeded by John Mason as governor.)

-1700, circa, (French bounties paid to Micmac’s to kill Beothuk along with incursions by Inuit. These are now regarded as myths and debunked out of hand, with all killing of Beothuk’s blamed on European trappers and settlers. However, in all other regions of North America, it was trappers who allied with and married into tribes.)

-1768, (George Cartwright contacts Beothuk survivors)

-1812, (David Buchan contacts Beothuk and leaves two marines, who are murdered)

-1829, (Beothuk Shanawdithit, last woman of the people, dies, after her people survived 315 years of hunting and slave raiding by English, Italians, Basques, Portuguese, French, Micmac and Inuit enemies. They fared better than most tribes and empires. Current myth making blames disease and Europeans, suggesting that natives of North America never engaged in warfare until Europeans arrived, despite the evidence of excellence in warfare on first contact.)

Dates that fall outside the chronology, as reflecting backward, such as maps and narratives, composed after the facts of exploration, are in [brackets.] Documents that are letters of intent, contracts to conduct a voyage, the orders of a monarch, etc., are listed as events rather than documents, not bracketed. Events not cited by Morison are in (parentheses.)

Morison asserts that Cogs of the 1200s could handle heavy seas better than modern yachts, but that contrary winds and lack of navigational instruments and pre-charted locations made two-way trips across the North Atlantic very unlikely. The Cog would develop into various forms of ships recognizable to the modern eye. A caulk called oakum, made of shredded hemp fibers, was necessary to keep these ships water tight. Heavy seas or neglect could cause such ships to “spew” this caulk and sink, as if drunk by the sea. Morison describes an ever-filling graveyard of wooden ships up to 1600 when deadly experience had taught her 200 year lesson to the explorers. Pavesses, or decorative shields, were mounted “viking” style at the waist of the ship, representing “supercargo” or noble adventurer passengers, often sailing in support of the captain against the crews, who were prone to mutiny. Crews had in their number, especially in voyages of royal discovery, convicts from prison, the prequel to planting “trash” or “rubbish men,” in new lands, to relieve prison overcrowding and urban unemployment. The crews were also likely to include fishermen, who had been forced or “convinced” or “pressed” by captains and merchants, who all, it does seem, doubled as pirates, in action and intent. Morison, offhandedly, does note that the origins of American restive politics, of a deep distrust of government, were pre-existing on board ship long before any viable settlement had been established by government decree. Sailors were influenced by ancient pagan beliefs, such as that “unbaptized infants” buried at the foot of a tree, made a ship built from that timber fortunate.

This general chronology is not comprehensive as to discoveries of and conditions in what became English North America by 1763. Rather, we are establishing the inspirations for and methods of the passage to the plantations, which managed to transport whole, the volcanic social conditions of Europe to America. These voyages were financed and captained by merchants and aristocratic adventurers whose fortunes were lost as often as the lives of their disposable rope workers, who mostly preferred fishing and hunting to hazarding exploration, just as their masters preferred piracy in known waters to the discovery of new harbors. This, and the three following chronologies, will overlap, as these are studies of specific efforts to bypass North America, use it as a base for trade with tribes and piracy against nations, and finally to plant it with already discontent populations tasked with building an overseas economy and at the same time propagate a religion compatible with imperial economics. [1]

North Atlantic Chronology

-The Canary Islands known since Antiquity, were the watering and west wind catching station for Southern and Central America, then northeast up the east coast of North America. [2]

-1152 to 1180, The Laws of Oleron, of the sea, stipulate that a master may strike a sailor, but only once. If he continues to beat the fellow, the sailor might defend himself. Boys, youths, often abducted orphans, may be beaten more often. At least 1 cat is to be taken against rats.

-1325, Dulcert Chart located Hy Brasil near Ireland, a mythic realm perhaps based on Nordic lore or notions out of Antiquity.

-1367, Pizzigani Chart propagates Atlantic with fictional islands, perhaps based on reports of Madeira or Azores by storm tossed mariners returning from the Canaries who did not accurately chart these locations

-1400, single masted ships are the rule, and have great difficulty navigating east and west across the Atlantic

-1419, Madeira Islands discovered

-1420, Center for Exploration and hydrography established in Portugal by royal decree

-1424, [Antilia, Isle of the Seven Cities, appears on hopeful Pizzi Nautical Chart in rough position of Azores, it and the other mythical islands on it number the same, but with more land area, than actual Azores. The chart was based on a Venetian chart.]

-1431, Cabral seeks Azores or Hawk Islands

-1432, First Azore found

-1434, Gil Eanes rounds Cape Bojador, Africa

-1439, four more Azores discovered

-1441, Antao Concalves brings slaves and gold back from Africa

-1443, Azores established as Portuguese territory and settled

-1447, [1563 account] claims a Portuguese discovery of Visagothic people settled on an island, being descendants of an A.D. 743 exodus by 7 bishops

-1452, Flores and Corvo, Azores 6 and 7, discovered by Valesco

-1453, Flores and Corvo granted as fiefs

“The Ocean had loosed her chains as Seneca prophesied…” -Morison

-1462, a fantastical island granted as a charter to Fernando, based on a mistaken sighting by a certain Fernandes

-1471, (Columbus shipwrecked on Iceland, probably learning of North America from fishermen)

-1474, islands to be discovered granted to Teles

-1475, Teles granted a deed to a fantastical Island of Seven Cities, beginning the storied hunt for El Dorado

-1474, Paul Toscanelli’s letter to Columbus convinces him of his westward purpose. Many of the actual Atlantic discoveries were based on hopeful fancies

-1480, Hastings Manuscript illustrates ocean capable sailing ships.

-1480, wages for sailors are the norm, superseding “share” systems except among fishermen, pirates and privateers.

-1481, King Afonso continues the Portuguese monarchy’s maritime support

-1484, letter of donation for islands to be discovered by a captain of Madeira

-1486, Afonso issues letter to “find and rule” Isle of the Seven Cities

-The terrible westerly sailing conditions in the north Atlantic frustrates Portuguese exploration

-1492, September 25, Columbus fails to find Antilia as expected, he too having been lured west by Venetian geographical fiction

-1492, hammocks discovered by Columbus. (This technology had been lost with Antiquity, as Alexander’s men carried hammocks.)

-1493, Columbus in the tiny Nina, sailed home before a cyclonic storm that would have sunk many a modern yacht, losing all but one of his sails.

-1497, Newfoundland charted by John Cabot, navigation standards established

-1500, three masted ships are now the rule and enable return, yet still largely “blind,” voyages across the Atlantic.

-1517, Basque fishermen working off Newfoundland

-1525, Cartier’s Grande Hermine outfitted for exploration

-1527, Spanish report of an English ship having a bread oven

-1529, Ribaldo World Map, illustrates advanced “long course” sailing designs

-1541, earliest ships with gunport hatches

-1542, Grand Routier navigation guide by Garcie

-1544, Morison marks as the beginning of a general adoption of “long course” sail arrangement, from study of map illustrations. This was used for piracy, the hunt for premade Chinese commodities, and finally exploration for resources and settlement as a final desperate priority.

-1548, the Complaynt of Scotlande, a chantey poem describes the brutal life of a sailor and how he wished for “many prizes,” “for God fair,” to send, in other words, that his captain would turn pirate so that he and his mates might divvy the “spoyle.”

-1550s, a whipstaff for navigation comes into use in British navy

-1552, the bark, a new class of ship, lighter than merchants, was now being adopted for exploration

-1553, Sebastion Cabot, publishes Ordinances for northern voyages, a gallon of beer per man, per day, becoming standard, noting that the ballast in the bowels of the ship are not to be used as a latrine, a rule commonly ignored, as hanging one’s butt over the rail of the pitching ship was the method of relief for the sailor, while the captain had chamber a pot that the cabin “boy” emptied.

-1553, Willoughby Expedition

-1555, Olaus Magnus, illustrates punishments for mutiny, hand pinned with dagger to mast, keel hauling and dunking

-1566, Parliament begins establishing beacons and other markers for navigation

-1570s, the flyboat, a lighter version of the bark, requiring fewer sailors, could keep at sea with less threat of mutiny, increasing the power of the captain

-1571, mention of a “charley noble” meaning a smoke stack, for below decks oven

-1574, William Bourne’s A Regiment for the Sea

-1575, Ship’s log established at sea

-1576, Frobisher seeks Northwest Passage, his officer Christopher Hall established the altitude of the sun on June 26

-1577, Frobisher’s second voyage

-1578, Frobisher’s third voyage

-1583, Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage to Newfoundland

-1585, illustration of Grenville’s Tiger indicates gunports are common

-1588, The Mariner’s Mirror illustrates the astrolobe, half hour glass turned by a boy who may not sleep more than 29 minutes lest he be beaten with a cat o’ nine tails, and a cross staff, indicating full maturity of pre chronometer [late 1700s] navigation

-1594. John Davis writes The Seaman’s Secrets

-1596, hammocks adopted by British Navy, Martin Cortez’ Art of Navigation is translated into English

-1600, John Norden’s visual “Description” of London shows sophisticated ships capable of deep sea and coastal exploration AND with the hull capacity for planting populations

-1605, John Davis killed by Japanese pirates off Singapore

-1627, Sea Grammar by Captain John Smith

Notes

-1. No slight upon Christianity or those who brought the faith to America is intended. It will be seen that native belief systems did not support the idea of transforming mixed hunting and agriculture under dispersed tribalism, into intensive livestock management and cash crop export agriculture under concentrated civic systems. Where Christianity fits into the narrative of the Planting of America, will be covered in Mathew and The Son Of Man, the 8 part summary of Christian guidelines held by the first explorer/planters.

-2. For an excellent study Sea the Discovery of Mankind by Abfula [Editor please correct name spelling.]

It’s just under two acres, on a mountain side above Coal Canyon to the east and Boulder canyon to the North. It is a getaway cabin cut into the hillside, one level from the street but two levels from the mountainside below. The view from the street is low and plain. Within one is surrounded by notched ceder beam construction. The cabin pops in the wind, making of the house a writer’s lurking friend.

The south front door leads inward to an open floor. To the right, where the coats and hats and boots are neatly racked, is the ceder and iron rail down stairs. Ahead is a walkway between the railing and the granite topped kitchen island. The kitchen is a standard L that tracks along the west wall, giving way to a cocktail cabinet, a window and a small round dinning table. Book shelves will be found in every room, as the one by the back door. That door opens on a ceder and iron rail deck that is covered by the triple picture window that faces north over a beautiful landscape, framed by evergreens near, focused on three conical mountains and more distant fellows marching north into whiteness.

The east wall of the main room is a massive stone chimney around which the entire structure is formed. On this level the fireplace is topped by crossed sabers, an antique rifle and crossed lances above a mule deer head. On the other side of the fireplace is the master bed room lined with books. Next to that is the office, lined with books, and inward along the south wall again, to the stairwell, is the bathroom.

There is no clutter. It is clean. Every item has been placed with thought. The benches and chests that line the north wall under the storybook window are filled with quality canned goods. The cupboards and cabinets in the kitchen alone contain food enough to see one man through a winter, and to spare. The counter top has plug ins, so that this ghetto gourmet can cook for his host with two pots at once! Beans, beef and bacon are going right now.

The west window behind makes for soft morning writing light and a final chapter done by the last fading light. Across the yard are two tarp covered pallets of split wood next to a row of log rounds awaiting splitting. A shed, next to the west curve of C driveway, offers all the tools for maintaining the property. The space between the south door up a gentle sloop to the street, is shaded in pine, with stumps of cleared trees piled with rocks and yard art.

The beans smell good. The writer looks longingly at the yellow-leafed aspen beyond the wrought iron table and chairs on the deck. There, we have coffee before Matt drives far away to work. Beyond that railing is a 10 foot drop to a mountainside yard that has a flying pig and alert cat statues. Between two retaining walls a lower cut of 15 by 40 feet has a camping spot and a bench.

The writer raked and gathered combustibles for four hours yesterday and was knocked down for a 13 hour nap. So, as much as he wants to rejoin obsessive yard work, he shivers in here instead, stiff, clear-lunged and muddle headed. The well-maid, light, wooden dowel chairs, at this table, are, it seems of oak, and are so sturdy as to offer dip presses for the relief of the writer’s compressed spine. On this table is a WWII German military bowel meant for some officer’s table. In the kitchen, one reflects, are many cups and utensils of antique European military origin.

A skylight breaks the slanted ceiling above near its peak. The ceiling is of ceder planks supported by five 6” by 16” inch ceder beams, the two over this table notched into the chimney.

The writer occupies the basement. Against the south wall, to either side of the stairs, there is a food storage room with weights and a boxing dummy, a very nice bathroom stocked with a winter’s worth of water in military grade containers, as well as 5 gallon buckets of MREs, and in the southeast corner, a wash and utility room.

The central chimney is massive down there. Before it is a wood stove piped into it, next to a wall of split and seasoned wood from the property; pine and aspen, not the best, but fast burning. The main room in the basement is shag carpeted in an autumn rust. Behind the chimney on the east wall is a large storage room with enough gear to outfit a squad with packs, bed rolls, and necessities.

On the west wall, beyond the chimney and the wood stove, is a smaller picture window that looks out over the patio and under the deck above, upon the majestic mountains, the one in the foreground nearly a perfect knob cone without trees. A shallow culvert needs dug to the west, east and south of the patio to afford melt drainage from the snow, which ices the patio in winter. The writer is already obsessed with doing that small task.

It is so fortunate, as a writer, to be able to inhabit such places, a place of such solitude, where many books and good conversations are available. To be able to help with hands the younger souls who offer lodgings so serene, increases the depth and breadths of the soliloquy’s that haunt a writer to his purpose. To have the luxury to chore on a mountain so distant from the gutters where one was spawned, helps balance the writing mind.

In the basement, against the west wall, before the north door to the covered patio, is an entertainment center alcove, the TV and DVDs backed against the inner wall to the southern storage/training room. The west wall is lined with a love seat. A long couch keeps the cold from the door and picture window off the back. A long oak coffee table makes a good stand for setting up this lap top to listen to DeFoe’s Moll Flanders last night. Night lights are plugged in along the walls at ankle to knee height. Before the sun rises dawn casts a pale light into the room. When the writer is summoned by this soft lumen to rise, he is treated to a red, white, gray, blue and orange sky streaked over the distant plane visible as a fallen world to the north quarter of the east, the lower mountains like garden walls in the near distance. In seven days, he will be down there, waiting for a bus to Albuquerque.

Samuel Eliot Morison is credited with 22 solo history books, focused on navigation and education, as well as two efforts with other writers on the same. The man’s prose is pleasing, his deductions conservatively brilliant, and his experience as a sailor and navigator, having braved many of the same seas as his old time subjects, makes this read an exercise in enlightenment. I intend in four chapters to follow Morison and summarize the circumstances and means by which a terribly oppressed Europe, and a morally destitute England, approached the North Atlantic and North America from the early 1400s through 1600. I shall quote Morison directly, for only one passage in each chapter, as I am unsure of the copyright. I am extracting the dates of charters, voyages, letters, maps and events, from earliest to latest, and thank him for preserving the quotes of the Sea Dogs for our use.

Morison stood convinced that Medieval Europeans were unable to cross the Atlantic “both ways.” His command of the classics of Antiquity is excellent. His one lapse in dismissing ancient technology as the same or less then medieval is contradicted by his own observations on two accounts, that old ships of the 1500s were superior in heavy seas to modern yachts of the same length. Other volumes in this series have discussed evidence of European contact with North America in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. That was only important genetically, as Morison’s discourse will reveal, that the further north one went in America, the more European the folks looked, until encountering the Asiatic Eskimos of the arctic. Here, we are concerned with how Europe, wracked by class and religious wars, addressed America as a vent for her steam.

As an elite class man, Morison is liberal, not scorning the common sailor as much as his academic fellows. His compassion for the natives is also balanced. The conditions of the common sailing man is what I, as an inquirer into the condition of bound, pressed and convicted men “of the inferior sort,” am interested in. Let us look to Morison’s wonderful work for the methods, conditions and material means by which the Merchant Masters of Early Modern Europe exported their restive underclass and ambitious noble class to expand their realms of acquisition, extraction, production and consumption.

One will see that the various monarchs were not only puppets, but mere autopens—perhaps possessed of rage and wit, like Gloriana—but little more than vectors for the formation of companies towards the merchant dream of MONOPOLY.

Morison is vague on the Basques, who may have predated other Northwest Atlantic fishermen. He does not seem to know that the fisheries had drifted west from Ireland, beyond Iceland to Newfoundland over the first 200 years of the Little Ice Age beginning in the 1280s, when he does not an increase in deep water ships. [See Fagan, the Little Ice Age.]

…

Sailing Conditions

The sailor was a creature of the rope, which was “his road.” The sailor slept on the open deck against the gun-wall, covered by whatever blanket he might provide. He was initially a free man signing on to a crew of 5 to 30 men, for a stake in fishing or trading voyages. Most ship’s crews were also hopeful pirates, composing songs about taking a prize. These men were a political mob ripe for mutiny from the beginning, often outnumbering the captain and his mate by 10 to 1. Noble adventurers, or “super cargo” were invited on board to stack the odds for the captain, but who might also include fractious actors. Many ships were captained by a mere “master” working for the owner. It was rare for a captain to own a ship. He labored above the mob of the rope and below the stockholders monarch or officers that supplied the ship and fiance. Human cargo was limited to the ships boys, orphans, who were treated terribly and turned the hour glass every half hour. As ships became larger and piracy became a facet of every expedition, as a threat or opportunity, men would be pressed into service from merchants or fishermen.

Fishermen seem to have been one or two generations, 20 to 40 years, ahead of the government-backed and merchant explorers. These men gathered in multinational fleets, camped together when “dry fishing” with fish cured on nearby land, or working in tandem for wet catches salted in barrels on board. These fishermen were the rescuers of a few explorers, and organized much like pirates, electing an “admiral.” The Basques seemed not to be allied with the Irish, English, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish fishermen, who feared them, indicating they might have been the first. Fishermen would trade with merchants and explorers, but often refused to cooperate and were so notoriously independent that they were not often pressed into crew service until the late 1500s brought the Military Age of Sail.

Dried biscuits, salted meat and a gallon of beer per man per day, were standard rations. Aquavitae, some medicinal brew, was sometimes shipped on major expeditions. Hundreds of ships were lost with all hands to history in the North Atlantic. The U.S. Coast guard estimated 600 sailing ships sunken off the Carolina Outer Banks alone. Later pirate rules of incorporation developed out of the democratic fisherman tradition and the limited, constitutional, floating monarchy of the merchant vessel.

The most common affliction of all voyages was that the merchants who contracted to provide supplies for the sailors were constantly cheating and providing the worst possible food and drink. This will be a consistent complaint through to the 1750s when up to half of German servants and free immigrants would be starved to death as part of survivor debt schemes by wicked captains. [1]

Gentleman adventurers would place shields painted with their arms at the waist of the ship, where the common men slept on the deck. The waist had a protective measure in the form of a canvas tarp that might be strapped between the fore and aft decks to keep off sea spray or enemies. Three masts made a ship, the rest being something less. Until Cook’s voyages in the late 1700s, it was a matter of guesswork to determine longitude. Most of the crew would be unable to navigate, lacking the required mathematical skills. An important tool was weighted sounding lines to probe the bottom. Knowledge of what kind of bottom their was and how deep it was, used for positioning and determining how close land might be. Light houses were rare in Europe and absent in America. A pilot was required for not wrecking in many of the harbors of Europe. Pilots did not exist for America until the late 1500s, and these were quite rare.

Hatches were used to keep heavy seas from flooding the hold. Guns below decks were gradually introduced, with most ordinance being light deck guns. For hunting on shore, bows, long bows and crossbows were preferred over guns. Carpentry tools and old fashioned hand weapons were carried by all ships, and also the boats and pinnaces of less than three masts which so often sank in rough seas.

First contact with natives almost always resulted in Europeans abducting hostages as a starting point. The record shows that these were not the first people to be kidnapped and enslaved in the Age of Sail, that poor Europeans were held in bondage on every ship as sailors, although all would be promised pay as an inducement not to mutiny. No provision was made for sailors learning to swim, for they could then easily escape their floating work house. A ships boy was a boy, and in the 1500s, a boy was nothing else than a slave. The aim of this study is to place America in gradual context; to seek an understanding of how the character and conduct of the passage from Europe to America effected the resulting Plantation Society.

…

Expeditionary Characters

The Canary Islands were known since Antiquity and were conquered by Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese from the 1300s through 1600. Italians, such as Columbus, Cabot and Varranzanno, would take the lead as navigators in English and French service further north and west. This was in part due to the terrible financial conditions of the Early Modern monarchies, and the fact that Northern Italian Banking houses were busy relocating in France, England and Holland in competition with the German Hansiatic League operating in the Baltic. The only man to make a profit on Magellan’s 1521 heroic voyage was a Spanish banker who took that fortune to Flanders and relocated out of reach of the Inquisition. Magellan’s only surviving ship was lost in the Atlantic like so many other ventures. We shall see how the high risk nature of these sailing expeditions developed the military acumen of the seafarers and the ruthless axioms of corporate capitalism along the same adventurous arc.

Charts and maps in the chronological summary that follows reflect earlier discoveries, and often mistakes based on fraudulent maps. Claims of earlier discoveries of the 1400s by map makers and writers of the 1400s, 1500s and 1600s are often debunked by Morison. Based on the prevalence of scheming Italians in the North Atlantic, I suspect that there were intentionally false geographical sets promoted in order to lure competing explorers to their doom. Earlier examinations of Irish and Norse by Morison are not part of this Chronological study.

Notes

-1. The Greatest Lie Ever Sold, JL

Hope all is well.

I've been catching up with your recent interviews with InTheseGoingsDown. Really enjoyed the content. He is a great interviewer. You were talking about your idea of a good residence.

I have few ambitions left in life. But I enjoy picking land and properties for people based on my training and experience in agriculture and real estate. I have no desire to homestead or own property and the only reason we have that house is that my wife is not in good health and likes to collect pets.

Here are some of my criteria for a good writers lair that might or might not work for you.

Good source of water.

Imperative and not hard. Throughout the US, one can obtain sizeable tracts of land in rural areas that have good springs and large subterranean caves for less than a million dollars. I see them for sale all the time.

Alternative septic.

To keep the water source pure.

Not in the path of progress.

Most of the old men in my business who made good amounts of money did it by anticipating the path of immediate progress and buying land in front of it that they sold for a massive profit.

Also the plot of Leone's Once upon a time in the West.

Obviously this is not desirable for a long term haven for men and books.

Best,

PB

Paul, thanks for the solid tips. Caves? I never thought of caves! I do recall you showing me various high valleys in the Ozarks and bottom lands in Missouri, and commenting on how Americans tend to look at property based on the view from the property. That I think is a legacy the same as the lawn, the blood memory of us being ruled by a baron upon a hilltop fort whose wife gazed down her long nose at us over the pastures where her sheep grazed to make wool for her maid servant’s looms.

You also suggested, that Mexicans looked at land mostly in terms of its use, which I suggest might also be a blood memory of their own peonage.

I never thought about buying in the path of progress as a money making prospect, but rather of avoiding progress. Your notes above remind one to gather real estate information and reverse the recommendation, exactly what the Brickmouse did, buying that house in Baltimore City behind the outward wave of hoodrat assault on the adjacent suburbs. I suppose, just like in boxing, selecting the sustainable privacy retreat, is all about “getting offline,” taking an angle off the axis of power commanded by your opponent. In this case, the opponent is the Worme, the Dragon, Leviathan, the ever gobbling Grub Civilization.

To revisit the question, posited to InThesegoingsDown by a writer out of Europe, the author, I think of Lovecraft’s Cat, if I had a million or few dollars, and had the mind to settle down, what type of place, and where would this be?

I would have to pick a mountain side retreat in the California or Oregon Coastal Range, the Cascades, across that Central Valley to the east, or, in the high deserts of Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Utah or Colorado. New Mexico is a bit dry for my taste. I like four to five acres, a footman’s, not a horseman’s spread. I want to be able to see the property from my small watch tower, a little shed, with two benches, for reading, writing and sighting. I don’t want the house on the highest point, but prefer the highest points wooded, up behind the house, which I like facing the north, away from where most houses, thoughtfully built, face.

Three acres of clear pasture for goats ringed by two acres of wooded ridge lines, appeals to my myopia. A spring at the foot of the watch tower, feeding a stream, that feeds a small pond, fed also by melt off from the mountain faces of such a narrow high valley comes into mind. Places of the like I have seen, such as Pages Flats in the Ceder River Watershed, would be ideal. I want a lair set in a valley that is snowed in for three months, like some in the Bear Tooth Mountains of Wyoming/Montana. To have two married couples, a brewer/gardener and groundskeeper to take care of the goats and chickens would be ideal.

The structure, would have to be a Germanic hall, of the kind I wrote in Slave., as the feudal hold of the back tier Dast Lord. In that fiction, I sketched my dream house, a place with a long table and a great hearth for friends to gather. If I was fortunate enough to afford a lair, which I have never seriously considered as a possibility, then, after these seven years a tramp, hosted by dozens of welcoming souls, I would want a place suitable to return those many kindnesses. I sit here above Boulder Canyon and Coal Canyon, in a wonderful place, embarrassed that I drink a few too many pints last night, and recall that for 17 years, I held one ambition, to pay off and retire in that little brick duplex at 4711 Luerssen Avenue, in Gardenville, Baltimore, three blocks up the hill from where my brother Gerard is buried at Holy Redeemer Cemetery, to read and write and not have to hazard the walk to work. Yet here I am, writing under the roof of a hard-working western man near the roof of a distant land. At this point, every step along the road feels further from home.

Thank you Paul, for your hospitality, and to Matt, Erique, Dominick, Blake, Queen Ruby, Punky, Major, Mo, Nero, Cutie, Zak, Herman and Dove for your welcome ways, in this month of October. Life takes on a haze.

-JL

Your host John Correia, a cop adjacent gun guy, provides in these daily reviews of mayhem, a cop’s eye view of aggression, within a legal framework. He addresses cops and private individuals, and sends enough mixed class of defender messages to make my cynical eye twinkle. He informs us that police are “protected individuals,” and that any violent act against them, even in self defense against wrongful arrest, will be punished. Off handed, in numerous instances, all the while beating the pro-cop drums, John lets you know that the law is designed for law officers, not for us. They are the protected class, putting the lie to every “protect and serve” banner. John sticks with all of the “good guy” “bad guy” BS, with the cop always the “good guy,” but he does it with a twinkle in his eye.

I really love his reviews of the South American off duty cop shootings of thugs. The fire discipline is usually criticized, but never the courage of these government gun thugs, slaughtering violent criminals caught in the act robbing people at gunpoint!

At some point, when I was writing Thriving in Bad Places on the SingleTravelDude website, John had a good word to say about something I had written. I look so forward to staying with Matt for many reasons. But the guilty pleasure associated with this mountaintop location, is watching skinny legged twerps with guns doing home invasions, robberies, carjackings, motor cycle robberies and the like and then seeing them get gunned down and taking “the asphalt temperature challenge!” Sometimes, it is the apartment floor temperature challenge, or side walk, or tile floor.

I mostly enjoy the violence. But, the advice, including unarmed self-defense advice, avoidance and awareness, down to particulars of handgun usage in violent encounters, is very useful. I’m not a gun guy. But this is information I can use to write gun-using characters more realistically. In some 50 videos, I have not heard him advise actions or methods in my area of experience that were poorly thought out or inaccurate. Since his main thing, as a former uniformed, gun-carrying “protected individual,” is hand gun usage, I assume that his advice there is accurate, especialy if he can get everything right in my department.

For entertainment or preparedness information, I recommend this version of Pig TV. It is always good for we who have the boot heel of The State upon our necks to view things from the perspective of those “Good Guys,” wearing those boots, dedicated to curtailing our freedoms and punishing our attempts to defend ourselves in the hunting ground cultivated by their evil masters, to cull and control us “bad guys,” who don’t have a badge.

John, thank you for the hours of laughs and the practical food for thought.

My faithful Mohawk scout, Paul Bing Ham, has sent me this interview with T—B Wright, who has recently done some 60 video interviews with this old crumb.

Paul owns the coolest wife around, who did not bat an eye when we boxed for 30 minutes in her kitchen and then sparred with aluminum bats and wooden knives for 20. However, the white dog, Kenny, noting that my colored chattel was gaining the upper hand in the fray, interceded between the trashcan and the sink, and saved me from the RISING. Thank you Kenny, for that show of pale solidarity.

Paul and I also recorded a podcast with Richard Barrett.

interview with Tyler

I am honored, that in a single week, three new fiction readers have written in concerning some aspect of that work. At this point, I have crossed the furthest finish line I had ever been able to imagine in this life. With 70-odd books still not in print I have been giving those away to young folks for publishing as proofs. It is just the writers ego speaking at this point, wanting to push off that message in the bottle before the cannibals gather round…

Good evening Mr. LaFond,

I have processed the weight of your message and I'm truly honored to be afforded an opportunity to curate the Sunset Saga. I hope to stay true to your vision and get it in front of new readers with all its blood-curdled grit and wild cosmic strangeness!

I am honored to contribute to your ongoing web soliloquy, however I hope that it is simply one of several grumbles not quite from the grave, out of my own selfish want to learn more from the Supreme Hobo of Letters. I've spent many years writing academically and professionally, a military stint, raising a family, and yet not quite finding the inertia to return to fiction writing and worldbuilding. I'm approaching 40 now and feeling the weight of having let life go by without a single book publication! When I learned that you spent the greater part of your life reading voraciously and working and only released your first book some 25 years back (source: Danica Lorincz's preface to Writing Unchained: Prolific Writing by Design), well...

All I can say is that was the very datum that I needed to see that all is not lost! Like a good alien anthropologist, I've observed and lived in the world and now it's time to share the decades of findings.

Was it Hunter S. Thompson that advanced the idea of two types of authors: the author who lives life first and then writes, as opposed to the author who writes while living life? I forget who it was that said it, but it's apparent that we're in category alpha. Neither are wrong approaches, by the way.

I would definitely like to find some time to chat more personally with you about all matters Sunset Saga, particularly where you would like to see it go and that fabled final book WhiteSkyCanoe. Would you be open to allowing another versed in your work to pen that final novel? What immediately comes to mind is some arrangement similar in scope to the posthumous Spider Robinson and Robert A. Heinlein novel Variable Star, where the former author utilized an RAH outline to complete the novel. Do you see some such opportunity to realize that final novel, or would you prefer to leave it as, ending with Seven Moons Deep? Forgive me if I'm being too bold in my excitement here, but I figure now is as good a time as any to inquire.

As for my juvenile science fiction manuscript, I must say that in all these years of wrestling with it, you've got me now considering an angle that I had yet to consider. My original plan was to edit out the corny pre-military me naivete, but now you're suggesting that I retain it but add a curmudgeon's voice to dial it down and balance it out. This could very well serve as the vehicle by which the young author and the more mature author wrestle with ideas. Thank you for presenting that option.

Finally, I want you to know that I purchased a good 25 additional physical books off of Amazon of which Sunset Saga is included. I meant it when I said I'm going to collect a small LaFond library for my end of the world bunker ha!

Respectfully,

—

Tyler Wright

…

Tyler,

The honor is mine, really—I spent 5 years posting fiction that had less than 5 reads. I even gave people money to buy the Sunset Saga online so that the webmaster would not feel as though he was wasting time—and half of them pocketed it.

I had no real vision for Of the Sunset World other than to base the character interaction on my relationship with a nerd named Charlie. The first couple of chapters, with Jay and Charlie in school, that was autobiographical. But, Jay is physically based on Dante, a boxer I coached, so instead of doing 117 dips like I did, he could do 150. It was going to be an excuse to write historical time travel with the subtext the looming realization that the time travelers journeying back to Khronos’ dim lair, were engaged in a sort of bio-piracy.

Of the Sunset World, about 1300 pages, which was split into Big Water Blood Song and Ghosts of the Sunset World, so it could be printed, began as a means of keeping my mind. I was working long hours as a manager for a corrupt pair of sisters trying to keep their business afloat. When I declined to have sex with the older sister she became vindictive, on top of hating me for being a high school dropout and yet having the inventory and people skills to get the business above water that the combined masters degrees she and her sister owned had taken it under. So the tension between the bad faith science/management team based in the future, operating out of the present, to pillage the past, and the good faith Time Jumpers actually taking the risks and doing the deeds, is based largely on that horrible time. I was not mentally designed to manage, and it was toxic. I had a dream every night during my short sleeps, in which I had already cut off her head, but could not find a proper course of action… The extreme brutal violence came from those dreams. It was then forged in the Harm City experience, the fact that hoodrats and cops hunted me at night as I left that job and went to work for $10 per hour. I had the first 15 chapters done when I quit that job, written over a year from 2009 to July 5, 2010 when I threw the tie in the trash.

I finished Ghosts of the Sunset World on Christmas Eve 2010, after rewriting the three-volume Broken Dance. I went back to writing non fiction mostly as no readers bothered with the fiction, writing When You’re Food and Winter of a Fighting Life in early winter 2011. The bug hit me again, as I worked only 24 hours a week, just enough to eat and rent the room for 100 a week. In August 2011[might have been 2012, but I don’t think so] I wrote Thunder-Boy, at 96,000 words on a myopic whim. That was my best word count ever, amybe the best novel in the series.

The Randy Bracken character, initially a supporting character, began gaining a life of his own, largely because he was based on two men I knew and motivated by my worst sentiments.

Writing Unchained is a book close to my heart, which I do not have a copy of, as it is the property of that fine lady who saw me as literary puzzle.

I am excited that you are going to settle into the art. I could not write when I was a young man and used gaming rules and world building as a means to learn. Reading Grumble from the Grave, Heinlien’s letters really helped me approach writing. You probably have grammar skills I cannot comprehend. It would be nice to do WhiteSkyCanoe as a collaboration, with you taking some characters on their threads and editing the thing.

My teacher was Stewart Weick of White Wolf Magazine, who coached me with a red pen. I did write Tribes, a setting for role playing games, in 1992 when my overtime was cut. It exists in two manuscripts I gave away, one with my blood all over it from a seizure. I have used the setting, in my mind, for Supplicant Song and Confessor. I had no choice but to be the late kind of writer. I could not read until I was 10 I think, end of 4th grade.

WhiteSkyCanoe, has been written in my mind since 2009. The final battle is stuck in my head. I have two different endings I have toyed with in manner of an epilogue: But the fate of Jay Bracken and Three-Rivers I sketched in my mind many times and it is there. There are many characters I would leave loose. It is really something I could write in a few weeks if that’s all I did and would come in at about 80,000 to 100K words. Jay bracken is up to a world bending caper at the end of Seven Moons Deep. The Three-Rivers timeline makes it until 1865, with no USG, but an intact British Empire, in which Sir Richard Francis Burton from our timeline and the Three-Rivers timeline will be on both sides, the one that gets snatched in the World Is Our Widow advising the tribal confederacy, and the one that is a few years younger, instead of being stuck in Brazil as a Crown agent, is working as a reporter/anthropologist for the Royal Geographic Society, but also as a secret agent for John Company, which did not suffer the Sepoy Rebellion in this time line, and still had its American possessions.

One of the epilogues is a total buzzkill, and I might do both, why not, with splintering Time on the table. Other letters have been written about this on the site, including a spoiler. I don’t know where they are. Charles did set up a search function—one is a note on the spoiler epilogue. The important thing to me is to have savage tribesmen battling British troops in the Appalachians in 1865, at Three-Rivers, Pittsburgh and trying a Khartoum at Baltimore in a timeline where USG never came to be. Alexander the Great and Archimedes would be the ancient recovery mission for WhiteSkyCanoe. If you had a few time jumpers left, and your tribal confederacy was at war with Britania, well, you would want the best general, Time could provide on the eve of their demise. Archimedes is short and fun. Randy goes back to get him. The future, base time line, would be the minor thread in volume and be addressed in a prologue, 3 chapters and an epilogue.

Tyler, I’d like to meet in person to discuss these things. Thank you so much for buying those books, that should cover the 7 pints of stout I unwisely drank at the Canyon Tavern the other night. Congratulations on the return to writing. I hope to be of help.

My service in this part of the Rockies is almost nothing. My number is 443 686 0598.

Send me a text and when I get good service, I’ll call.

I have retained your whole name here, because you should start building some name recognition and, well, we are just discussing science-fiction, a fantasy about what might have crazily been.

-JL