Chapter 2 - The Unfortunate Escape of the Propagandist

Women's suffrage, besides being a cause that interested Paisley's aunt, was one of the great political movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As in many places, voting qualification in Canada was a complicated business (which is mentioned in chapter seven). Often it was the case not only that women were forbidden from voting, but also certain races, people in certain jobs, and everyone below a certain income. In Canada at this time, women could vote in some local or municipal elections if they were not married, and owned as much property as men needed in order to qualify for the vote. It took until the end of the First World War for women to begin to gain the right to vote in Dominion (federal) elections. Provinces had their own rules for their elections, and it took until 1940 for women in Quebec to get the right to vote provincially.

Red Head is (or was) the name of a hilly peninsula that Alexander Graham Bell eventually bought for his family estate, and renamed Beinn Bhreagh, meaning "beautiful mountain" in Gaelic. The Bell family still owns the house and land there.

Chapter 3 - Oysters & the Honourable Assassin

Pleasant Street, on which Elliott finds himself a couple of times, may puzzle some readers who are familiar with Halifax; the solution to this puzzle is that in the 1880s part of what is now Barrington Street was called Pleasant Street - one of many streets that have disappeared or been renamed over the years.

Sir John Sparrow David Thompson would go on to be Canada's 4th prime minister. As with Kaiser Frederick III (see below, chapter 18), one can't help speculating how history might have been improved had he lived longer. Thompson was probably the most talented, hard-working, and honest politician of his generation in the Dominion of Canada, with progressive opinions on everything from women's suffrage and copyright protection for authors, to the elimination of corruption. His sudden death at Windsor Castle in 1894, during his appointment to the Imperial Privy Council, was a great loss for both the country and the empire. The cruiser HMS Blenheim was painted black and given the duty of returning Thompson's body to Halifax for burial. His resting place, Holy Cross Cemetery, is now in need of major work to preserve it - donations are accepted by the Holy Cross Cemetery Trust. Thompson's letters received, letterbooks, and diaries are at the national archives in Ottawa.

By-elections are elections that happen when a seat in Parliament or the provincial legislature becomes vacant for some reason between general elections. For example, if a Member of Parliament resigns, or dies, or is found to have been elected illegally (there were many election irregularities, corruption, etc., in the 19th century, and many by-elections). Also, at this time anyone appointed to cabinet or some other remunerative position under the Crown had to resign and stand for re-election.

The Intercolonial Railway station on North Street in Halifax no longer exists, sadly, as it was blown up along with a lot of the rest of the city in the Halifax Explosion of 1917, but the postcards in the link above show what it used to look like. A number of other things in Halifax have changed since the 1880s, such as the location of the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, and Pleasant Street, which is now part of Barrington Street.

Clothes lines in Halifax really were controlled into living memory by municipal legislation that forbade such blasphemous crimes as hanging out laundry on Sunday. The fact that Haligonians may now dry their clothes even on the Sabbath shows vividly just how far the morals of this once-great country have declined. Why, any day now I expect to hear that the authorities have outlawed the flogging of debtors. Disgraceful!

The Ivanhoe Inn where Elliott stays is based (very loosely) on the Waverley Inn of Halifax, which existed in 1887 and still exists today. Note that both are named after novels written by Sir Walter Scott. Both are also connected with samovars. However, I don't believe that they hit argumentative guests with curtain rods at the Waverley. At least, not that I have noticed, though I have never tried to settle my bill with Russian rubles.

Cloudesley Shovell -- after whom the Admiral Shovell oyster bar is named -- beside having a ludicrous name, is remembered mainly for having sailed a fleet into the Scilly Isles, sinking several ships and killing as many as two thousand men. The Scilly Disaster (which was perhaps not as silly as it sounds), had an important historical effect, which was to motivate the improvement of navigation. As the disaster was caused by the inability to exactly determine east-west position, or longitude, a major effort was made to fill this gap in navigational technology. The problem was eventually solved by John Harrison (1693 – 1776), a watchmaker, who made the first timepiece accurate and durable enough to take to sea and use to determine the distance between the ship and the Prime Meridian in Greenwich.

The Kit-Cat Club existed for a few years in the 1700s, in London. It met in a pie shop kept by one Christopher Kat - hence the name, since Kit is a nick-name for Christopher. In addition to the Whigs (a British political party out of which eventually grew the Liberal Party) who frequented it, some members were also painters, and the club lent its name to the "kit cat portrait" style, which means a roughly half-length portrait from head to hands. Whigs are also the source of the name of a newspaper in Elliott's home town of Kingston, the British Whig, which later merged with The Standard to become today's Kingston Whig-Standard.

India Pale Ale is a type of ale originally made for export to India, typically using more hops than are used in other ales.

Chapter 4 - “Got ’im, Himmel!”

A Pre-Raphaelite Knight: The pre-Raphaelites were a school of 19th century painters with a fondness for historical subjects, amongst other things (in the case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his specialty was painting women with excessively large chins). They are some of the last of the primitive sort of artists - those who produced paintings that any fool could look at and say what the art was a picture of.

Burggraff, the title of Paisley's friend Adelmo, means "count of the castle or fortified town", and was a title that had largely died out in German by 1887, except as a subsidiary title of noblemen with several titles.

Chapter 5 - Would the Late Elliott Graven Please Stand Up?

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York... Elliott is reciting from Shakespeare's Richard III here, possibly out of enthusiasm for the sunshine, or possibly in a convoluted pun about Halifax being a "son of York", it being named after Lord Halifax of Halifax, Yorkshire. Or Elliott may be rambling. He's just had a few clouts on the head and several pints of India Pale Ale, after all.

The Crimean War : Fought between 1853 and 1856, and between Russia and a bunch of other countries, it was one of those wars that happen from time to time for no good reason except that it was felt peace had gone on long enough, and it was high time for a bit of war. Other examples of this type of war include the First World War, and the Second Gulf War.

There were a number of results of the Crimean War, of which I only have time to mention the two that are most important. Firstly, the idea gradually dawned on the military that it might be a good idea to look after the wounded, rather than just sticking them in some horrible barracks to die of cholera (far more soldiers died of disease than wounds in the Crimean War). Secondly, it gave rise to two major breakthroughs in sweater technology: the cardigan (named after the Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade and somehow survived), and the Raglan sleeve, named after General Raglan (who died of dysentery despite his innovative sleeves). Were it not for his sleeves, Raglan would now mainly be remembered for his annoying habit of calling the enemy "the French", even though they were Russian. One imagines that his did not endear him to his French allies.

As a minor side effect of the conflict, numerous places in Canada (and elsewhere) were named after places or people from the war. For example, Odessa in Ontario, and Alma, Inkerman, Havelock, Florenceville, Malakoff, and Williamsdale in the Maritimes. These towns were far more fortunate than Stalin Township in Ontario, where after the Second World War they were so carried away with Allied wartime propaganda about what a jolly nice fellow our dear ally 'uncle' Joe Stalin was, that they decided to name the township after him. Naturally, this caused a certain amount of embarrassment after the war, when we changed our minds and decided to notice that Stalin was actually a ruthless totalitarian tyrant rather like Hitler. Eventually, in 1986, it was renamed Hansen Township, after Rick Hansen, the athlete and activist. I'm sure he's very honoured that amongst the people of the township he is even more popular than Joseph Stalin.

A couple of Halifax soldiers of the Crimean War are named in the chapter - those on the memorial arch - but one other Nova Scotian also deserves to be mentioned: the extraordinarily unimaginatively-named General Sir William Williams. Born in Annapolis, he went on to be a hero of the war, receiving a baronetcy, the Order of the Bath, and the Légion d'honneur. He is also amongst the few Nova Scotians ever to have been made a Pasha by the Ottoman Sultan.

The Executive Council that was dining at the Halifax Club was the provincial cabinet - i.e., ministers appointed by the Lieutenant-Governor. Not to be confused with the Legislative Council, which was a sort of appointed provincial senate that many provinces had until abolished after the time of the story.

The Halifax Club was founded in 1862, and was actually visited by A.G. Bell shortly before the events of the story. It still exists today, and you can read more about it at the club's website.

Alexander Graham Bell's visit to the graveyard (mentioned in this chapter) is another thing that is documented to have occurred. Many of Bell's activities in the book are drawn from his letters to his wife, written in the spring of 1887 - even the weird things, such as his house on stilts, his 'spectral' visitation, the mysterious lights in his house, his picnicking habits, and his interest in eugenics.

Mrs. Anna Leonowens was a real Halifax character of the day who seems to have had trouble getting her story straight from the moment of her birth. Baptized "Ann Harriet" she was known as "Anna Harriette". Born in India, daughter of a sapper sergeant named Edwards, she would later claim to have been born in Wales, daughter of an East India Company captain named Crawford. Married to a clerk named "Thomas Leon Owens", she promoted him to the more grand rank and surname of "Major Leonowens" of the commissariat. (To know what exactly is meant by "commissariat", ask a Modern Major General). Given her penchant for what we would now call "padding the resume" - or what was then known as "lying" - it's perhaps only fitting that Elliott (however unfairly) should have failed to believe her claim to have served at the court of the king of Siam. Unfair, because she really did serve there as a tutor or a governess (which was a more impressive title in the 19th century). Leonowens' was one of those interestingly mixed personalities that had the energy and imagination to do worthwhile things, but couldn't seem to do them without irritating everyone around her; she established the Victoria School of Art and Design (later the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) in Halifax, and played a great role in the advancement of women's involvement in politics and public life in Canada, but was also remembered in Halifax as "a regular Tartar". No wonder, then, that despite all of her achievements, she decided to move to Montreal, and no wonder too that Paisley's aunt was glad to see the back of her despite her organizational ability. She is probably most associated now with the fanciful musical The King and I, which was loosely based on the novel Anna and the King of Siam, which was loosely based on Leonowens' memoirs... which were loosely based on reality. Shortly after the events of Knights of the Sea, Mrs. Leonowens' great nephew, Boris Karloff (also an assumed name), was born. Karloff was destined, after a somewhat unsucessful travelling stage-actor career in Canada, to achieve immortality in movie and television roles such as Frankenstein's monster, and Dr. Seuss' Grinch.

Chapter 6 - Knights of the Electric Fish

Submarine (boats). It might seem redundant today to speak of submarine boats, or ships, but in 1887 "submarine" was still just an adjective, not having yet been promoted to noun. So, if you had said "I'm going for a ride in my submarine," your average Victorian would have waited politely for you to finish before asking, "Your submarine what?" Rather as you would if someone today said, "a voyage in my undersea." Submarines were being experimented with in the 1880s, one of the most advanced being the French Gymnote, launched in 1888. Like the Paradoxo, it was named after an electric fish.

The Peabody's Patented Parasol that Paisley's aunt owns is a little tribute to Elizabeth Peters' Egyptologist character Amelia Peabody, who is known for her ability to swing a parasol decisively in a crisis. If you're looking for an excellent mystery or adventure story set in the period from the 1880s to the 1920s, you need look no further: start with Crocodile on the Sandbank, if you like to work through series chronologically.

Sleswick-Holsatia is what English-speakers used to call Schleswig-Holstein. For some reason, we use the German name now, though we keep calling Deutschland "Germany". One could easily write a whole book just to explain the complicated history of this region, but suffice to say that it was sort of part of Denmark until Bismarck decided that he wanted it. And when Bismarck wanted something, he generally got it.

Karl Benz's Motorwagon, patented 1886, was probably the first gasoline-powered automobile. Karl's wife, Bertha, took their sons Eugen and Richard on the first road-trip on the Model 3 motorwagon on August 5 1888, 105 kilometres from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back. There were no filling stations at which to buy gasoline, of course, so she bought a kind of flammable cleaning solution at drug stores along the way (it was a petroleum distillate a little more volatile than kerosene, which is why Paisley mistakes it for lamp oil). This picture gives you an idea of what the first long-distance auto trip looked like. The route is now an historical attraction.

Chapter 7 - Another Dinner with Interruptions

Passenger pigeons (which Elliott thinks about when trying to understand what Lady Beauchamp means by “transmigration”) were once the most numerous bird in existence, with flocks moving about eastern North America in such numbers (in the hundreds of millions) that they could darken the sky for hours or days. They were slaughtered so recklessly that by 1914 the passenger pigeon was extinct.

Fabians vs Fenians. This mix-up of terms which both Paisley and Elliott are guilty of (probably in order to be irritating), can be cleared up as follows. Fabians were a British society in favour of gradual social change. Fenians, by contrast, were a revolutionary & terrorist organization created to free Ireland from British rule.

The Fabians split off from the somewhat more woolly-minded “Fellowship of the New Life”. But whereas the latter organization fizzled out soon after, the Fabian Society is still around today. Some of the more famous members include H.G. Wells, Edith Nesbit, Beatrice Webb, and Ramsay MacDonald. They were interested in such reforms as the introduction of a minimum wage, universal adult suffrage, and health care.

One of the schemes of the Fenians was to invade the colonies of British North America (or after 1867, Canada), and trade them for Irish independence. They staged raids across the border from the USA, the first at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, and later into Ontario, Québec, and Manitoba. The Canadians, taking exception to being repeatedly attacked by these wild bands of Irish-American revolutionaries, became more inclined towards favouring Confederation as a means of collective protection from invasion. Meanwhile, in England, Fenians were planting bombs at Clerkenwell prison, Scotland Yard, Nelson's column, London Bridge, the Tower of London, and Parliament, which likewise did not so much effect Irish independence as turn public opinion against the Irish, since they mostly tended to kill innocent bystanders.

Chapter 8 - A Wolf in no Clothing

Sir Walter Scott was probably the most popular writer of his time, and started the historical novel genre. His works were popular not only in the English speaking world (and Scotland), but were to be found in the original or in translation in many other countries too. During the Greek Revolution, there was even a warlord who kept a set of Scott novels in his cave for the convenience of British visitors. As far as I know, there is no evidence of a real Scott novel called The Beastmen of Glen Glammoch, but it would be best to consult the DeLoup / Graven archives at the Spohrville Library before coming to any conclusions.

The Cutty Sark song that Mungo sings, and which bothers Paisley, is part of Robert Burns’ poem Tam O' Shanter:

Her cutty sark, o' Paisley harn,
That while a lassie she had worn,
In longitude tho' sorely scanty,
It was her best, and she was vauntie.

Which is about Tam happening upon some dancing witches, one of whom is wearing a Paisley linen shirt (sark) that is too short (cutty).


Chapter 9

Haven't noticed anything noteworthy yet.


Chapter 10 - A Breakfast with Interruptions

Paisley's adaptation is of the first two lines of Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib", which starts

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Given what interrupts breakfast, it's perhaps appropriate that the real poem later goes on with

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

Chapter 11 - Young Lochinvar is Out to Lunch

An inquest - which Elliott suggests will be held regarding the body – is an official investigation into deaths not resulting from natural causes. The purpose of an inquest is to decide what the cause of death was (for example, murder, or accident). It is administered by a coroner (an office dating back about a thousand years), who today typically has medical or legal expertise. The coroner may (or in some circumstances, must) summon a jury to assist in the inquest. Strictly speaking, Elliott and Paisley were guilty of an offence in concealing the true circumstances of the death that occurred (though the under the circumstances, a verdict of “lawful killing” probably would have been found absolving anyone of a criminal act in connexion with the death). However, it would have been awkward to explain to the coroner and jury the involvement of a werewolf in the incident. And incidentally, “connexion” is an old spelling of “connection”, which is why it appears in the story that way.

The Plica Semilunaris (another of those Big Words that Elliott isn't supposed to know…) is a little fold of tissue in the corner of the eye. It is a vestige of the nictitating membrane, or “third eyelid” that is found in cats, dogs, and many other animals (but not in primates such as humans). Paisley’s is larger than usual because of her lycanthropy.

Wolfville is a real place, not something I made up to have more wolves in the story. Besides being the home of Acadia University, it has also been home to people with the surname DeWolfe, and Alexander Graham Bell was genuinely researching his family tree there in 1887.

Chapter 12 - Spooks on Stilts

Codd-neck bottles (which contain no cod) are pretty much as described in the book. They’ve been mostly replaced by cans and metal bottle-tops, but in Japan there’s still a popular drink called ramune (which comes from the Japanese pronunciation of ‘lemonade’) that uses bottles sealed with a glass ball that drops into the bottle neck.

Chapter 13

Does anything in this chapter need further explanation?

Chapter 14 - Dark Waters

Plan H, as Paisley calls it, is her and Elliott's scheme to sneak liver into Lady Beauchamp’s food to save her from insanity. They were basing their plan on the general idea of liver being healthy, but actually it is an excellent source of vitamin B12 (which had yet to be discovered in 1887). B12 is only present in animal foods, so someone who –as Lady Beauchamp seems to be doing – eats only fruit and vegetables will be at risk of a deficiency of this essential vitamin. Eventually, this may result in permanent damage to the nervous system, and can cause psychosis or a wide range of other disorders.

Evans and Woodward (Mathew Evans & Henry Woodward), who provided Adelmo with the lights in his submarine, were a couple of inventors from Toronto who developed and patented an incandescent light bulb in 1874, one of their innovations being the use of an inert gas inside the bulb (which is what incandescent light bulbs still use today) instead of a vacuum, which doesn’t work as well. Being in Canada, though, they were unable to find anyone willing to invest in the invention, so they sold their patents to Thomas Edison, who claimed all credit for developing the light bulb. Of course, Evans and Woodward weren’t the sole inventors of the light bulb – countless people tried their hands at inventing one – but they were on the right track, and were frustrated mainly by a lack of money.

Johnston’s Fluid Beef, the mainstay of the modern submariner, was a real stuff. For those of you familiar with British foods, it eventually became Bovril. It was created by John Johnston (another fellow with rather unimaginative parents), who set up a company at 27 St. Peter Street, Montreal, to make this nutritious cattle goo. Production moved to Great Britain, where Bovril was considered a somewhat more appetizing name than ‘Fluid Beef’. Bovril went on to make plenty of amusing and sometimes disturbing advertisements for their liquid beef product (for example, this one).

Chapter 15 & 16

Nothing too noteworthy.

Chapter 17 - Celebrating 129 Years of Nova Scotian Democracy, or Elliott Elects to Campaign

Celebrating 129 Years of Nova Scotian Democracy, the title of this chapter, is (dare I say it) a slight poke of fun at Nova Scotia’s prominent Democracy 250 campaign a few years ago. Certainly during the 1775-1815 period, the concept of “democracy” would have been about as socially acceptable in the British Empire as Marxist-Leninism, or sleeping in on Sundays. Even 129 years after the first meeting of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, democracy in Nova Scotia was, as in the rest of Canada, still very much what we might call a work in progress. And we’re still working on it.

Patronage: The buying of votes, and trading of support for government money and jobs, were rampant in 19th century Canadian politics. Thompson complains about patronage frequently in his letters (“slime” is one of his own words for describing politics). Honest politicians like Thompson, working for the good of their country rather than to feather their nests, rarely profited much from their public service – after his death in office as Premier of Canada in 1894, a collection had to be taken up to save his family from poverty. Many of Thompson’s colleagues retired rather more comfortably, in some cases aided by the overt corruption that fuelled politics. Fortunately today such shady deals are done decently behind closed doors, allowing us to have more confidence in the honesty of our elected representatives.

Premier was a title used at this time not only for the head of a provincial government (as is generally the case today, except in French where premier ministre is used for the head of either a federal or provincial government), but also for the leader of the Dominion (i.e. Federal) government: what we would now call a prime minister, to avoid confusion with provincial leaders.

The Old Gaol in Baddeck (“gaol” being an old spelling of “jail”) was as described in this chapter. A few years later, in 1890, a new courthouse was built. I think it must have been round about that time that the old gaol fell out of use. The customs detective that I placed in the gaol in this chapter was inspired by one mentioned in a biography of John Thompson. The real case was of a customs detective in Baddeck who had been charged with a crime in 1886 which Thompson (the Minister of Justice) thought might have been a false charge set up by a corrupt magistrate in order to discredit the detective. The detective, thought Thompson, probably knew of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by the magistrate himself.

A Shiretown is the chief town in a county, where government institutions such as court houses and gaols were located. You can still find old courthouses around the Maritimes that have been rendered obsolete, along with the shiretowns themselves, by the mindless centralization of government services.

Weginald Wuggles Gates, a.k.a. Reginald Ruggles Gates, was a real Nova Scotian youngster of 1887, later to become a real biologist and eugenicist. He was (for a while) married to Marie Stopes, and founded the eugenicist journal Mankind Quarterly. For much of his life he was a proponent of racist pseudoscientific theories which would be considered repugnant today, such as classifying the races as virtually different species. When the Second World War exposed the worst excesses of Nazi eugenics, the field fell off somewhat in public esteem, with Gates’ reputation suffering accordingly. He's memorialized by, amongst other things, the Ruggles Gates Chair In Biology at Mount Allison University.

Chapter 18 - The French Trap

Commercial Union with the United States was one of the policies that the new Liberal Party leader, Wilfrid Laurier, advocated. It amounted to a kind of free trade, where Canada and the USA would have been a common market, with trade barriers against the rest of the world. Since Canada was part of the British Empire (which covered much of the rest of the world), this presented certain awkwardnesses. There were also those south of the border who wanted to use commercial union, and other pressures, to lead Canada towards annexation by the United States. When the matter became an election issue, Canadians soundly defeated the idea of commercial union, considering it a threat to Canada’s burgeoning independence.

Laurier was a great reader and - as Paisley muses - tended to frustrate Thompson by always getting the new books first from the Library of Parliament. Of course, some other parliamentarians may have been inconvenienced in turn by Thompson’s habit of mailing interesting library books to his wife in Halifax, so that she could read them too.

Crown Prince’s Serious Illness, a headline in the newspaper that M. Percheron gives Paisley, was a serious concern in 1887. After Frederick became the German Emperor the following year (upon the death of his father), Frederick himself had only another ninety-nine days before he too died, on 15 June 1888, as a result of the untreatable cancer that was reported in the papers in 1887. The consequences for world history of Frederick’s untimely death were, perhaps, incalculable. It’s possible that there would have been no World Wars in the 20 th century had he lived to lead Germany in a more liberal, less warlike direction.

In passing, I should add that the other news story noticed by Paisley – about half a million eels being delivered to Budapest by railway – was not a mere whimsy on the author’s part, but was something that actually happened.

Chapter 19 - Forgive Thine Enemies

Picking the sharpest spoon, as Strange does in this chapter, may seem a peculiar thing to do, spoons being a rule rather dull instruments, but before stainless steel cutlery became widespread, spoons tended to be made of softer metal, such as silver, or silver plated brass. These will wear away with time, leaving a sharper edge where the spoon rubs against a pot or bowl. Some old spoons can be sharper than modern table knives.

The Hue and Cry (or hue an' cry as Strange says it) is an old obligation in common law - if anyone sees a crime committed, they're supposed to shout to alert others so that the offender may be arrested.

A Special Constable was indeed something a man could be compelled to serve as, when local authorities decided one was necessary for the maintenance of law and order. Rather like being deputized in the Wild West. The pitiful fees paid (which Maddox complains about), such as 20¢ for delivering a writ of capias – an arrest warrant – are the actual fees, specified in the Statutes of Nova Scotia. Had Maddox refused to serve as a constable, he would have been liable to pay a fine of $8.

The comment by Thompson about Lord Salisbury's life being "very stupid and worthless" was (like a number of Thompson's other utterances), something he actually said. They are just used here in different situations. In reality, the "latest act" by Lord Salisbury that Thompson complained about was not a submarine scheme but Salisbury's acceptance of the Bering Sea Arbitration (a fishing dispute).

Chapter 22 - The Paper Chase

Trusts, or monopolies, were a serious problem in 19th century United States. Eventually, the so-called "anti-trust" laws were enacted to prevent such abuses of monopoly. In Canada there is a Competition Act which similarly governs anti-competitive activities.

Duelling-scars were popular souvenirs of university life in Germany up until the 1930s. The object of the exercise, rather than killing the opponent, was generally to inflict or receive a superficial wound that would be cool-looking. Fortunately, we have advanced beyond such primitive displays, and have replaced them with the more civilized institutions of tattooing and body-piercing.

The ironically-named “Congo Free State” was one of the most abominable and barbarous colonial enterprises ever undertaken. It was operated as a private commercial fiefdom of the king of Belgium, without any oversight by the Belgian government. Like the Wellborn Trust’s schemes, the Congo Free State began as a supposedly philanthropic organization – the Association Internationale Africaine – which was eventually transformed into a nightmarish rubber monopoly that was infamous for its cruelty. Amid worldwide outcry, generated in part by writers such as Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle, the Belgian Parliament took control of the Congo.

Chapter 23 – Knights of the Tea

Cod tongues, which Elliott counts among the peculiar regional delicacies, are mostly eaten in Newfoundland, and as the name suggests are the tongues of codfish. Goose tongues, on the other hand, are a seaside plant (Plantago maritima) commonly eaten in coastal areas of the Maritimes. Having only ever associated with polite geese, I have of course never seen one stick out its tongue, so I can only assume that the two types of goose tongue must be somewhat alike in shape.

Madame Tussauds’ museum was, and is, a collection of wax figures begun by the eponymous Madame Tussauds, who launched her career sculpturing famous decapitated heads in the Terror during the French Revolution. When the French ran out of aristocrats, she took her show on the road, finally ending up in London. Her display of slaughtered dukes and duchesses, spiced up with waxworks of a few notorious criminals and maniacs, was a great success. Eventually, she even modelled authors, such as Sir Walter Scott. Another author, P.G. Wodehouse (of Jeeves & Wooster fame), said in 1975 that after getting both a knighthood and a waxwork of himself in Madame Tussauds’ he no longer had any ambitions. And true to his word, he then promptly died.

Mrs Maddox, who used to fire rockets at drowning sailors on Sable Island, is the narrator of a short story about her first encounter with Dr Maddox: “A Visit from Prospero”, which is included in the short story collection Ether Frolics. Rockets were used on Sable Island at that time for firing rescue lines into the surf when a ship had been wrecked near the island.

Morse's Tea, which in Paisley & Elliott's day was the product of a Halifax company, is still made today, only in Sussex, New Brunswick, by Barbour's Foods. For many years, the Morse’s Tea building in Halifax was occupied by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, descendent of the Victoria School of Art established by Mrs Leonowens (see above). Sadly, a nitwit recently painted over the venerable old Morse's Tea name for no conceivable reason other than sheer idiocy. To the right is an example of a samovar similar to the one Elliott owns (if less beetle-like).

Canute, whom Elliott thinks about when trying to shift some smoke out of the room, was an English king who demonstrated the limitations of political power by going to the seashore and ordering the tide to go back. It was fortunate for him, and for subsequent English history, that he attempted this feat on the sea in England, rather than on the shore of the Bay of Fundy near Spohrville, where the tide can change by as much as sixteen metres.

Chapter 24 – Sub Divo, Sub Finem

The title of this chapter sounds rather like it has to do with the sub diving and being finished, but the Latin actually means "Under the Sky, Towards the End." The Latin word "Divo" is also related to the concept of a god, as in "divine".

"Comfy", you might be surprised to learn, was a word in use for at least a couple of generations before Alison uses it in the time of Knights of the Sea.

Jumbo the elephant was a famous Barnum & Bailey Circus circus animal who was struck by a train in 1885 at St. Thomas, Ontario, where there is now a life-sized statue of the beast installed at a safe distance from the railway tracks.

Chapter 25 – A Warm Welcome

The “exotically primitive painting – liberal in its use of gold-leaf” Elliott sees on the cabin wall is an icon of St. Nicholas, patron saint of seafarers, whose image was common on Greek and Russian ships.

Martello Towers are little round forts that were built all over the British Empire at various times between the 1790s and the 1850s. They generally had cannon on the roof, and quarters for soldiers within. The most famous Martello tower in the world is the one in Sandycove, Ireland, which is renowned for having hosted the writer James Joyce for a few days. Joyce would have stayed longer had his friend not started firing his pistol at Joyce. Exactly why he did this is unknown, but when we consider that Joyce was one of the ringleaders responsible for the creation of The Modern Novel, then one may perhaps gain a better insight into the motives behind the shooting incident.

The Naval Display in Halifax Harbour occurred more or less as described, apart from the Krasnaya Luna’s involvement. They pulled out all the stops to celebrate the Jubilee, with forts attacking ships, ships launching torpedoes, and even a mine that blew up a small islet in the harbour. Very enjoyable for everyone, except the fish.

Chapter 26 - Χαίρετε, νικωμεν (Rejoice, We Conquer)

There’s not too much in this chapter that needs annotation, so let me simply conclude with the minor culinary observations that the Thompsons did, in fact, grow their own strawberries, and that Wilson’s restaurant on Hollis Street was one of Thompson's favourite haunts, where he was wont to eat mutton pie and tea.

The End.