The Wreck of the Convict Ship ‘George III’
In 1835, the British convict ship George III struck an unmapped rock off Tasmania and sank. 134 people died, most of them prisoners being transported to Tasmania to serve their sentences at hard labor. The story has some interesting wrinkles that make this a very gameable template for a sea voyage at your table, and […]
The Pirate King of Iceland
In 1809, a British merchant ship carrying the former Danish pirate Jørgen Jørgensen arrived in Iceland, a Danish dependency. The pirate overthrew the Danish governor without bloodshed and proclaimed himself king of an independent Iceland. Two months later, a British warship arrived, arrested Jørgensen, and restored the Danish governor – even though Denmark and Britain […]
Earnest Pleas in Early Muslim Poetry
Khalifa ibn Khayyat was an Arab historian and religious scholar active in the 800s A.D. His history of the Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphates is one of the oldest to have survived. It records a lot more poetry than you see in Western histories. Most of these poems are put in the mouths of people […]
Madame Chouteau’s Clever Frontier Inheritance
Marie-Thérèse Chouteau was one of the founders of the city of St. Louis, Missouri. She was a powerful and unusual woman, existing both inside the Franco-Spanish colonial system and outside it, depending on what suited her needs. The way she obtained her inheritance from her not-husband screams to be turned into an adventure, and she […]
High Society NPCs from Aubrey’s Lives
Last month we looked at eleven bizarre scholarly NPCs from 1600s Britain, taken from a wonderful historical source: Aubrey’s Brief Lives. This week we return to the Lives for fourteen high-society NPCs, and – as before – we’re less interested in the real biographies of these people than in the gossip Aubrey reports about them. One […]
The Great Onion Scheme
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The Capitalist Cannibal Butthole Bird
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Theobald Meyrick, Urban Villain
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Shen Fu’s Complicated Family
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More NPC Foibles from Suetonius
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The Scheming Landlord of Magomero
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Tall Tales of the West African Gold Trade
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The Wreck of the Ma’adin Ijafen
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The Missouri Leviathan
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The Catiline Conspiracy
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