[1106] Virginia!

"I heard a story, swept across the ocean on the wind..."
Wonder who told him. The timing would roughly check, I think.

I've wildly speculated that the Court was founded in 1715. Linky to old post. The fashion they're wearing in the comic is a little late for that but I figure that being free-thinkers they'd shed some of the inhibitions a little faster then they did in Caer Lud.



Here is a repost of a picture I took when Renard and I went to Hampton Manor.





Though the thought of dimwitted and spoiled aristocrats starving entertains me, I must find fault with your account. It is far too focused on those at the top of the scheme. My ancestors were imported to America around this time. For your entertainment, here is their history in brief.

According to family tradition they were cattle-thieves and brigands who were forcibly transported here, and additionally 2/3 of them were the rightful heirs to the throne of Scotland. They did much of the actual work and fought the indians and the french and whoever else needed fighting. Sadly they chose the losing side in the revolution and were (again) imprisoned, this time on a small island near New York. They broke jail and swam to shore, and were fleeing to Canada when they noticed that nobody cared enough to chase them. So, they settled down midway and intermarried with religious fanatics.

They mysteriously and quickly accumulated a large herd of cows. Soon indians and the French needed fighting again, so they found moderate success, bought some decent land, and became dairy farmers for the next few centuries. They only left their homesteads for wars (for money not ideology). I grew up hearing stories of Fort 4 and Robert Rogers was spoken as highly of as our revered ancestor Robert the Bruce.

When the civil war happened we were smarter this time, having some people fighting on both sides to make sure we were on the winning team whatever happened. Supposedly that made for fun family reunions afterward, though.

Yeah, but I take it that Tom is saying that the time between this and the Langdon estate she spends more or less in the wilderness and has something to do with Coyote.

WANDERING in the wilderniss, you mean? imirite?

Now that I think of it... I wonder if Jones knew Rey personally before either of them got to know Coyote.

To be fair, I think half of scotland can make the same claim that they were related to robert the bruce! If you go back far enough and do the statistics, you can relate almost everyone to everyone else. (not wishing to diminish your story, I just love the field of evolutionary genetics and how much ancestry everyone has. Go back 30 generations and everyone has over 1 billion ancestors, more people than were even alive at the time!)

Back to the strip though, is Jones supposed to be the heathen wife the sailors were talking about? I was a bit confused about this strip.
-Actually before I posted I thankfully did a quick google of Rolfe and Golden Weed, Jones obviously isn't the heathen wife, ok I don't know much about US history!

True, the recorded perspective is usually the bourgeois one, however there were a lot more upper class men looking for adventure on the first trip, enough to endanger food production when enough of them considered farm-work to be beneath them. More a Roanoke phenominon, obviously, by the time Jamestown was setting down some of those rich people had sent word back about how bloody hard it was. "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn is a great one if you get a chance.

You are very lucky that you can trace your family that completely. All I can get is the German/British side from my mother, my dad's side are pretty much all dead, including the latest iteration, so they can't point me in the right direction, but I managed to get some genealogies on the maternal side. Nothing very exciting unfortunately. The highlight is probably the great-great uncle who was in the Sturmabteilung and got murdered during the Night of Long Knives. All the rest take too long to tell and don't have great tales of badassery that are characteristic of the Scots.

Heck, even that one doesn't exactley inspire me. Damn it von Hagele, why couldn't you have picked the Schutzstaffel? Then at least you could have lived a little longer.



I don't think that article is accurate then. The first slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, and it was enshrined in law in 1640 (probably earlier, but primary sources are scant after that many centuries).

As for Jones being an indentured servant, she wasn't tagging along with a man in this scene, and a spinster who is wearing that outfit did not come over without a good deal of cash or a promise of indentured servitude, which was frankly little better than slavery except that you eventually got out of it, a decade or so down the road.

Being immortal, a decade would mean nothing to her, and probably all the better to keep a low profile.

Or concerning Jones' preference of snapping her boys early on, that wouldn't stop Jones. ;D

Maybe it is. If it really is significant, Tom seems to be leaving an unusually large breadcrumb trail of clues, he has certainly done his research, so.....

Well, Wlerin, clearly you haven't followed the complete discussion. There even was a samuel langdon found living oposite to the john-langdon house. However, the whole langdon story is still fishy indeed, but some excelent people were kind enough to share with us there expertise in the history of fashion, which still gives us some handle on the Langdon-related pages. (and the eggers-pages too, actually). The factory disaster was actually pretty definitely defined when we found a news article discribing an accident in a factory of which the foreman was called edward jones (the Mr. Jones that Wandering Eye called Edward? pretty clear fit if you ask me). This time, Tom is nice enough to mention Pocahontas' marriage. It's clear that he did his historical research, and I don't se a reason to assume that he chronically displaced the historicalfacts he used as hooks.

Oh well, people, with further ado the new graph, in which I tried to condense the latest sum of your collective (historical) dating efforts. I changed the labels; they now contain both the estimated year and a short description of the supporting assumptions used for the estimate.



Next up: somewhere around 1400. Possibly hitch an earlier ride with collumbus in 1492, or more close to the prediction date and still in the old world: Jones loses her latest chargee to the european famine, or is winissing the rise of the ottoman empire

after that, around 1100. If she's still interested in crossing oceans, Venice is the place to be. Cool guy that also lived then: Saladin (who controlled egypt at the time, for all the Hathor freaks out here!)

cheers

What about beyond 1100 ad? Also, the 12th century is during the time of the crusades.

Assuming we add a century per iteration.

700s ( during the dark ages)

200s (Waning days of the Roman Empire, the split between western and eastern (Byzantine) Rome happened during the 3rd century I believe)

300 bc (Alexander the Greats time)

If we are going for the alchemy origin, we'll probably stop in the 15th century or no later than the 12th, however, if there is an Egyptian orign, we have several millennia to go. During the renaissance seems like a good place to do an alchemy orign.

This whole sequence has been fascinating (and enlightening), but how does it help Antimony? She is the one who asked the question; is any of this information getting to her? If so, how? (or is this a rare instance of Tom giving the readers MORE information than he gives the characters themselves?)

That would be rather inaccurate. You see, the natives had all the land cleared and planted in corn and beans and squash and so on, with the exception of some forested (but still cleared) areas set aside as game preserves. In fact, from what I've read, the countryside was as densely populated as rural Europe. It's just that the natives practiced this thing called crop rotation, where they let a field lie fallow every other year. And they didn't build fences.

The colonists were quite thrilled to find that corn and other food crops apparently grew wild in the new world. And of course they had to slaughter the natives when they trespassed on the newly civilized lands which they had reclaimed from the "wild."

Fortunately for them, the natives were experiencing something that must have seemed very much like the apocalypse -- a plague of new diseases with a combined death toll of 80 to 90 percent.



That's not exactly right. Plenty of things would take root where they landed. They just didn't bother planting anything except the money which grew money from the ground -- tobacco. They planted it in the fields, they even planted it along the streets in town. The leaders of the colony tried to force them to grow food crops via martial law, but the colonists were still too lazy to plant anything else. In fact, many of them just lay down and died.

Now this might sound passing odd, until you remember what else the colonists brought with them. Malaria. And it thrived in the local mosquitoes. And malaria kills red blood cells, the things which distribute oxygen around the body and enable you to have enough energy to work in the fields, get up and walk around, or finally just breath.
From what I've read, the death rate among the colonists was very close to 100 percent. That is, if a ship brought 500 colonists, when the next ship carrying 500 arrived, there would be about 30 left, and when the NEXT ship got there, of that thousand there would be maybe 40.