The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

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  *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 the 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 the Established Church and was why dissidents like Drake had no logical choice but to espouse the concept of the Gathered Church, which drew like-minded persons from an arbitrary geographical territory. In making it legally possible 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-range-of-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.

  *Not that Bob was a Puritan—far from it—but he was known to talk that way, to demonstrate his superiority over Jack.

  *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-and-thrust 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 0 1 1 1 1 1.

  *But sometimes they formally held these positions and sometimes they didn’t.

  *“What are the odds of that?” had been Jack’s response, when he’d been made aware, for he’d had dealings with the Esphahnians before; but the others had rolled their eyes and, it seemed, bit their tongues—giving Jack a clew that there were no accidents, at least where Armenians were concerned, and that the presence of a Esphahnian on his oar was anything but fortuitous.

  *Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company

  *Princess Eleanor of Saxe-Eisenach, impoverished widow and mother, who along with her six-year-old daughter, Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, had befriended Eliza in the Hague

  *For the Marquis believed that his half-brother Étienne was the father, which, if it had been true, would have meant that Jean-Jacques was a de Lavardac bastard just like him.

  *In the part of France she was talking about, the Saône and the Loire ran in parallel courses about fifty miles apart, but in opposite directions. The Saône flowed south to its confluence with the Rhône and thence to Marseille. The Loire ran north to Orléans, where it bent westward and continued down to the Atlantic. Several miles north of Lyon was the portage that linked these two rivers: a road, or rather a bundle of roads and tracks, that cut westward over a line of hills to the town of Roanne, about fifty miles away, which lay on the upper Loire.

  *For the French did not recognize William’s title as King of England

  *The East London mudlark who had succeeded in stealing an anchor only after sacrificing Dick Shaftoe to the Thames, and then passed out drinking so that he was apprehended the next day.

  †Who was not especially pleasant to pass the time with, but who had a knack for getting things done.

  *“Ship” in this context meaning anything with three masts, square-rigged.

  *It was the rule, on Corsair-galleys, that the raïs was in command of the ship and its crew, while the Agha of the Janissaries was in command of the fighters.

  *This galleot was the Argo, the Cabal were Argonauts on their way to the Orient in search of the Golden Fleece, and the treacherous slaves were like Ares, fallen into the hands of the Aloadae to be chained up in a bronze vessel for thirteen months

  *In this context meaning a cavalry stable, a large structure situated near a palace, and serving as home and headquarters for a military organization, as opposed to a barn for keeping beasts out of the rain.

  *Wheel of Books.

  *Egypt

  *Meaning that seen in cross-section, her hull had a V shape instead of being flat-bottomed.

  *Maybe it was a translation problem; the German word for infinite is unendlich, or, roughly, unendly, without an end, and perhaps it came through to the Tsar as “a certain amount every year.”

  *The future King of England.

  †The future King of Prussia

  *Salamón went by the name Sanchez.

  *Sterling Waterhouse (1630–1703), Daniel’s older half-brother, a real estate developer ennobled later in life as the Earl of Willesden.

  *George Augustus of Hanover, later George II.

  *A.k.a. James Stuart, “The Pretender,” son of the late former King James II, and would-be James III.

  *One of the English titles of that same George Augustus of Hanover.

  *Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar.

  †The Kit-Cat Clubb.

  ‡An allusion to the lightning-bolts forged by Vulcan; alternately, perhaps, golden guineas turned out by the Mint, which was no longer under Roger’s direction since Oxford and Bolingbroke had overthrown the Whig Juncto, but still run by men associated with Roger, such as Newton.

  §Jupiter, to whom Vulcan supplied lightning-bolts; but possibly a cheeky allusion to George Louis of Hanover, for whom, it was hoped, the Mint would soon be turning out guineas.

  **Bolingbroke.

  ††Queen Anne.

  ‡‡An allusion to a myth in which an angry Vulcan fashioned a trick throne containing hidden restraints, and gave it to his mother, Juno; when she sat on it, she was trapped, and only Vulcan could release her.

  *Partry.

  *In honor of Lady Anne Sunderland, the daughter of the Duke of Marlborough.

  *As everyone in the room knew, Leibniz was using the word animal in an ancient and somewhat technical sense of something animated, i.e., possessing, or possessed by, an anima, or spirit.

  *Females who are found guilty of High Treason are punished thus, rather than being subjected to the indecency of what is about to happen to Jack.