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The Tales that Launched a Thousand Ships!


Study, Château de Elbe

"Nay, my son, I was not always successful” the old man said. His eyes were bright with conviction, but his body was lifeless, like a dummy, sprawled out on this chaise-longue that Louis XV of France had bestowed on him as an honour. I had spent the past hour or so on a tough wooden chair next to him, providing him company, and willing to hear his stories, which had long held a reputation in my court.
He had recounted to me a brief summary of his early life (as everyone surely knows of his accomplishments later in life); his birth in the spring of 1720 at Bodenweder, a quaint little village which his family had owned for generations, in the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg, his childhood spent in the hills of that country, his sending-to the court of the Duke and his employment as a page of the son of Duke, Louis Ernest, his travelling to Paris with his employer, and becoming a part of the French court in his own right. I could see where he got his reputation from; the tales he told were both fantastical and yet grounded in reality, and he weaved his stories like an Arabian spinstress weaves her thread. He continued with this new story after a brief pause.

“It was the year of 1749, and I was a young, fit courtier – or at least younger and fitter than I am now – and I was joining a party of French ambassadorial governors, on a voyage to the city of Constantinople, the Gateway to the East. At this time, the French were aligned to the Turks, and we were promised safe passage between Marseilles and our final destination. We were passing through the Mediterranean Ocean, the south of it, below the Italian peninsula. The skies were blue, light blue, and clear for nearly as far as the eye could see.
But to the west, a vast and dark black storm was headed our way – I informed the captain, who told me to get the passengers below to the container of the ships, where they had their beds. I did, but I myself stayed on the deck, as the heavens above me turned from a happy shade of blue to the darkest grey, and the temperature dropped to arctic temperatures. Sheets of rain came lashing down, dirty water from, the captain told me, the mud flats of Africa; the most rain I have ever seen! It was then I looked out onto the sea – not only had it become a similar shade to the sky, but it was being inundated with waves, the smallest of which was 10 foot in height. The ship lurched up and crashed down with each new wave, and with the ship, so my stomach went. The first thuds of thunder were heard, quickly followed by a flash, and a glimpse of a fork of lightning reaching from God’s realm to the ocean in the distance. It was whilst I was staring at one of these mesmerising paths that a scene came before me that horrified the crew and I. A wave of epic proportions, a-hundred-feet in height and similar rose in a blur of white rapids in front of us – AAAAH! – we screamed, us all, together! The ship, this massive ship, was towered over by a wave. The initial showering of white water confused us for a moment, but after, we looked up, and for a few seconds we could see the brilliant blue inside of a wave, reflections of the gold of lost civilisations shimmering onto it. And then, just as we had lost our thoughts, we were hit with the brute force of the entire ocean. It was in this confusion that me and some other members of the crew were cast into the ocean, salty water choking us and stinging our eyes – we watched, squinting, as the boat went under the sea, and re-emerged a few seconds later, rocking but still moving onwards into the distance. I sank, to the bottom, and fell into a lurid state of semi-consciousness.
Fishpeople played around me, but made no effort to save me, but then I felt a warm touch on my skin, of a soft hide – something was placing me on its back! I was sped through leagues of sea, until me and my companion reached the surface. I grabbed onto the nearest solid object I could see, a wood plank, presumably from the ship. My saver allowed me to thank him for a second, before scuttling off down to the bottom of the sea-it was a miracle! I got my bearings on the plank. There I cried out for anybody. I discovered one man, and helped him climb onto my humble vessel, where we embraced, thanking the Lord to have survived, before our tiredness overcame us, and we slept. When I awoke, two others had crawled onto our small plank. I looked above me, and, sure enough, it was clear, but the boat was nowhere to be seen. We waited that day, planning what we would do. We were all as equally clueless as each other – one of the men had a flask of water on them, and another had a half-full bottle of gin. Fish were frolicking around us, surely we could catch them. Hours of silence ensued, until at midday, one fellow, by the name of Philippe, sighted a ship on the horizon, and it was heading for us. We rejoiced, and screamed so that the crew of the ship could see us and rescue us. What a mistake that was!
The ship did surely approach us, and pick us up into the boat, but then they sent us to a dingy container below where there were stored maybe forty or fifty other people. We wept there, as all the others were weeping. We knew we had been captured by the ruthless pirates, or corsairs, of the Barbary. Two days of this undignified, uncivilised and inhumane treatment we endured, with only a sip of water and some stale bread each day, before the constant motion of the ship moving beneath our feet ceased. We were led out into the brightest sunlight I had ever been subject to, in chains. At our head was a large, stocky man of obvious Arabic disposition, wearing expensive purple robes, and a large green turban. His beard stretched to unimaginable lengths – it reached his foot, and was as bushy as it was at his chin! We were placed in the centre of a large square, surrounded by onlookers and tall, sand-coloured buildings. I found out later that we were in the city of Tripoli. I shall not subject such a young and free mind, unrestricted by all the bad in this world, such as yours, to a vivid description of the horrors I saw there. Indeed, I have only ever revealed them after four bottles or so, when characters are high. I was sold to a man who appeared to be very wealthy – he was a very fat man and was wearing the largest turban of any of the onlookers. We were taken to his home, which was ten minutes ride from the square. Infront of it the city of Tripoli sprawled out without form or distinction from any other town, but behind it lay a large garden of the most brilliant emerald green, which served as the opposite from its surrounding desert. In the middle of it lay a huge, circular lake, which allowed the viewer to see any place in the world in great detail he so wanted to, although I was never allowed near it. The man, I soon discovered, was the ruler of this- the Pasha of Tripolitania, the vast coastal province of the Turkish Empire that was known to the Romans as the two, separate provinces of Africa and Cyrenaica. He was a man greatly revered by the local population, and he also happened to be Lord of the Corsairs, representative of the Turk Emperor, and wealthy merchant – he owned one-thousand gold mines!”

I yawned. It was not because the story had became boring, or that I found his tone uninteresting, but merely because I had not slept for a day and a night, and I felt it was time to be departing his grand home for my humble apartment. He took my hint, surprisingly. I left his château, around five miles into the country from my lodgings in the centre of Paris, and on the journey I contemplated what I had heard during my meeting with him and was perplexed by the character of this infamous man. We corresponded and arranged a second visit, on the same day the week after. I had no knowledge, of course, then, of what my relationship with he would become – I his official biographer, nay biographer and confidante, and then perhaps overall companion for the man whose tales launched a thousand ships.

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Can anyone guess who this guy is? Or the POD?
Comments are always welcome! Thanks.
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