Quicksilver (133 page)

A
WORK LIKE THIS ONE
hangs in an immense web of dependencies that cannot be done justice by a brief acknowledgments page. Such a project would be inconceivable were it not for the efforts of scholars and scientists dating back to the era of Wilkins and Comenius, and extending into the present day. Not to say as much would be unjust. But in a work of fiction, which necessarily strays from historical and scientific truth, acknowledgments can backfire. Serious scholars mentioned below should be applauded for their good work, never blamed for my tawdry divagations.

The project would not have happened it all were it not for serendipitous conversations several years ago with George Dyson and Steven Horst.

The following scholars (again in alphabetical order) have published work that was essential to the completion of this project. While eager to give them due credit, I am aware that they may be chagrined by my work’s many excursions from historical truth. Readers who want to know what really happened should buy and read their books, while blaming the errors herein on me: Julian Barbour, Gale E. Christianson, A. Rupert Hall, David Kahn, Hans Georg Schulte-Albert, Lee Smolin, Richard Westfall, D. T. Whiteside.

Particular mention must go to Fernand Braudel, to whose work this book may be considered a discursive footnote. Many other scholarly works were consulted during this project, and space does not permit mentioning them here. Of particular note is Sir Winston Spencer Churchill’s six-volume biography of Marlborough, which people who are
really
interested in this period of history should
read,
and people who think that
I
am too long-winded should
weigh
.

Special thanks to Béla and Gabriella Bollobás, Doug Carlston, and Tomi Pierce for providing me with access to places I could not
have seen (Bollobás) or worked in (Carlston/Pierce) otherwise. George Jewsbury and Catherine Durandin and Hugo Durandin DeSousa provided timely assistance. Greg Bear lent me two books; I promise to return them! And for talking to me about gunpowder, and listening equably to the occasional rant about Alchemy, thanks to Marco Kaltofen, P. E., of the Natick Indian Plantation and Needham West Militia Companies.

Helping in many ways to make this possible on the publishing end, and exhibiting superhuman patience, were Jennifer Hershey, Liz Darhansoff, Jennifer Brehl, and Ravi Mirchandani.

Jeremy Bornstein, Alvy Ray Smith, and Lisa Gold read the penultimate draft and supplied useful commentary. The latter two, along with the cartographer Nick Springer, participated in creation of maps, diagrams, and family trees. More detail is to be found on the website BaroqueCycle.com.

Cryptonomicon

The ‘Diamond Age

Snow Crash

Zodiac

*
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.