"Quicksilver"

[fiefoe]

<Historical peculiarities>

• (Because pirates) have been out on the high seas violating Admiralty law, whose jurisdiction extends only to the high-tide mark. The implacable logic of the Law dictates that pirate-gallows must, therefore, be erected in the intertidal zone, and that pirate-corpses must be washed three times by the tide before they are cut down. ... But here, as in so many other matters, Providence has smiled upon Massachusetts, for Boston Harbor is choked with small islands that are washed by high tides, providing vast resources of pirate-hanging and -gibbeting real estate.
• Trinity's bell (always just a bit out of synchronization with King's)
• The goal of all persons who had houses in those days was to possess the smallest number of pieces of furniture needed to sustain life, but to make them as large and heavy and dark as possible. Accordingly, Daniel and Drake ate their potatoes and herring on a table that had the size and weight of a medieval drawbridge.
• the witty allusions to boots worn by young men about town
• Louis XIV's Croatian mercenaries, les Cravates, had made a practice of tying their giant, flapping lace collars down so that gusts of wind would not blow them tip over their faces in the middle of a battle or duel, and this had become a fashion in Paris.
  

<Eccentricities>
__ The condition of Mayflower's womb affected the moods of England as the Moon ruled the tides.
__ "I always have it with me," Pepys said, producing an irregular nodule about the size of a tennis ball, "as you have all your parts." ... "Why, then?" "It is my conversation-starter of last resort. It gets anyone talking: Germans, Puritans, Red Indians..."
 
A search for 'Mrs. Green's coffee house' led me to Old Bailey , ('London 1674 to 1834...the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published').

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