* Son of Praise-God W., son of Raleigh W., son of Drake—hence, some sort of nephew to Daniel.

* In England, the Civil War that brought Cromwell to power, and on the Continent, the Thirty Years’ War.

* Counterfeits made of base metals such as copper and lead.

* The forecastledeck is the short deck that, towards the ship’s bow, is built above the upperdeck.

* Praise-God W. being the eldest son of Raleigh W., and hence Drake W.’s first grandchild; he had recently sailed to Boston at he age of sixteen to study at Harvard, become part of that City on the Hill that was America, and, if possible, return in glory at some future time to drive Archbishop Laud’s spawn from England and reform the Anglican Church once and for all.

* King Charles II of England.

* Usually the Pope, but in this context, King Louis XIV of France.

* The consensus of the best physicians in the Royal Society was that plague was not caused by bad air, but had something to do with being crowded together with many other people, especially foreigners (the first victims of the London plague had been Frenchmen fresh off the boat, who’d died in an inn about five hundred yards from Drake’s house), however, everyone breathed through scarves anyway.

* Which had been pro-Cromwell.

* Which had nothing to do with Jews; it was named partly after its location in a part of the city where Jews had lived before they had been kicked out of England in 1290 by Edward I. For Jews to exist in a Catholic or Anglican country was theoretically impossible because the entire country was divided into parishes, and every person who lived in a given parish, by definition, was a member of the parish church, which collected tithes, recorded births and deaths, and enforced regular attendance at services. This general sort of arrangement was called theEstablished Church and was why dissidents like Drake had no logical choice but to espouse the concept of theGathered Church , which drew like-minded persons from an arbitrary geographical territory. In making it legallypossible for Gathered Churches to exist, Cromwell had, in effect, re-admitted Jews to England.

* A conical glass, wide at the top and pointed on the bottom, which when filled with cold water or (preferably) snow and left outside overnight, would condense dew on its outside; the dew would run down and drip into a receptacle underneath.

* Forerunner of the Royal Society.

* He was not the first person to observe it.

* I.e., it was already 1665 everywhere except England, where the new year was held to begin on March 25th.

* Though the fields were becoming city streets, so at this point it was more like St. Martin-at-the-edge-of-a-field, and soon to be St. Martin-within-visual-rangeof-a-very-expensive-field-or-two.

* I.e., he had a sword.

* The five men King Charles II had chosen to run England: John Comstock, the Earl of Epsom, Lord Chancellor; Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Knott Bolstrood, who’d been coaxed back from Dutch self-exile to serve as His Majesty’s Secretary of State; Sir Richard Apthorp, a banker, and a founder of the East India Company; and General Hugh Lewis, the Duke of Tweed.

* Knott Bolstrood, a Barker and an old friend of Drake’s, was rabidly Protestant and anti-French—the King had made him Secretary of State because no one in his right mind could possibly accuse him of being a crypto-Catholic.

* Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company.

* None other than Knott Bolstrood, who’d been ennobled, for protocol reasons, when the King had named him Secretary of State—the King had chosen to make him Count Penistone because that way, Bolstrood the ultra-Puritan could not sign his name without writing the word “penis.”

* Pansophism was a movement among Continental savants, in which the said Comenius had been an important figure; it had influenced Wilkins, Oldenburg, and others to found the Experimental Philosophical Club and later the Royal Society.

* Philippe, duc d’Orléans, was the younger brother of King Louis XIV of France.

* Thomas Ham had been made Viscount Walbrook by the King.

* A vast, turgid, incoherent compendium of alchemical lore.

* Here, a moiety of the audience—mostly Cambridge undergraduates—stood up (if they weren’t standing to begin with) and applauded. Admittedly they would’ve come erect and shown their appreciation for almost any human female recognizable as such who appeared on the grounds of their College, but more so in this case since the role of Lydia was being played by Eleanor (Nell) Gwyn—the King’s Mistress.

* A grassy quadrangle surrounded by buildings of Trinity College.

* Pepys being a good example—but he wasn’t there.

* As King Louis XIV had guards dressed as Croats, so Charles might have Poles; any nation whose survival depended on crossing swords with Turks had a fearsome reputation nowadays.

* Which, remember, is one “storey” below the quarterdeck, where Daniel is pretty much giving up on getting any relaxation.

* That is, ahead of them and off to the side from which the wind is blowing—at about ten o’clock.

* At about five o’clock if he were facing toward the bow.

* Mary Beatrice d’Este of Modena; for Anne Hyde had been winched into a double-wide grave two years previously.

* There are thirty-two points on the compass rose.

* Jack could not read but could infer as much from the types of letters used.

* The reason the pikemen didn’t protectively surround the musketeers, instead of being surrounded by them, was that even if the musketeers aimed between them, or over their heads, they would get mowed down by errant balls; because if, as frequently happened, a musket ball was a bit too small for its barrel, it would take to bouncing from one side of the barrel to the other as it was propelled out, and might emerge at a sharp, startling sideways angle.

* It turned out that if you did the mathematicks on a typical war, the cost of powder was more important than just about anything else—Herr Geidel insisted that the gunpowder in the arsenal of Venice, for example, was worth more than the annual revenue of the entire city. This explained a lot of oddness Jack had witnessed in various campaigns and forced him to reconsider (briefly) his opinion that all officers were mad.

* Which Jack could tell by interpreting the coats of arms carved on the gateposts and embroidered on the flags.

* As the trading-houses were called, because important men called factors inhabited and ran them.

* E.g., “Hey, Doc, how many goats were shaved to make that wig?”

* Just guessing, here.

* Which they knew because it bore the trademark of none other than Herr Geidel.

*Faulbaum , the Germans said, meaning “lazy and rotten tree.” They were alders.

* The Doctor: “Actually, it is a helix, not a spiral.”

* Various pieces of evidence suggested to Jack that he’d been sleeping.

* It being one of the many peculiar features of Jack’s upbringing that (1) he had a perpetual sparring partner (Bob)—perpetual in the sense that they slept in the same bed at night and, as brothers do, fought all day—against whom he was evenly matched, and (2) at the age when every boy engages in mock sword-fight, he and Bob happened to suddenly find themselves living in a military barracks, where their duels served as free entertainment for large numbers of men who actually did know a few things about fighting with swords, and who found the entertainment lacking if it was not well played, both in a technical sense (blows had to be delivered and parried in some way that was realistic to their discerning eyes) and in a dramatic sense (extra points scored, and extra food thrown in their direction, for enhancements such as hanging by the knees from joists and fighting upside-down, swinging like apes from ropes, etc.). The result being that from a young age the Shaftoe boys had sword-fighting abilities considerably above their station in life (most people like them never came into contact with a sword at all, unless it was with the edge of the blade in the last instant of their life), but limited to the type of sword called the spadroon—a cut-andthrust weapon—which, they’d been warned, might not be very effective against Gentlemen armed with long slender poky rapiers and trained to insert them deftly through narrow gaps in one’s defenses. The Janissary-blade was a rough Mahometan equivalent of a spadroon, therefore, ideally matched to Jack’s style, or Bob’s for that matter. He waved it around dramatically.

* And of her husband, Duke Ernst August.

* Louis XIV of France.

* William of Orange.

* William of Orange.

* King Louis XIV of France—not really Monmouth’s uncle, but the brother of the widower of the sister of his illegitimate father, as well as the son of the brother of his grandmother, and many other connexions besides.

* A quartering of elements old (fleurs-de-lis, denoting their ancient connections to the royal family) and new (Negro-heads in iron neck-collars).

* It dropped from 572 to 250 when word of Monmouth’s rebellion spread.

* E.g., Nassau, Katsenellenbogen, Dietz, Vianden, Meurs.

* The flying jib downhaul.

* The Duke of Northumbria was the bastard son of Charles II by his mistress Barbara Palmer, nee Villiers, Duchess of Castlemaine.

* The Duke of Richmond was the bastard son of Charles II by his mistress Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth.

* The Duke of St. Alban’s was the bastard son of Charles II by his mistress Nell Gwyn, the nubile comedienne and apple-woman.

*
The name of Hexagram 3 of the I Ching, or 010001, that being the encryption key for the subliminal message embedded in the script of this letter.

*
Darkening of the Light: Hexagram 36 of the I Ching, or 000101.

*
Increase: Hexagram 42 of the I Ching, or 110001.

*
Family: Hexagram 37 of the I Ching, or 110101.

*
Break-through: Hexagram 43 of the I Ching, or 011111.