The Ends of the Earth


 * The Ends of the Earth
 * by President Chester A. Arthur
 * 15 January 2002

From He Who Controls the Spice

The myth of “Xerxes of the East” that so occupied Persian merchants and scholars through the mid-200s and early 300s puzzled later scholars once the tale of a powerful Christian king in the eastern areas of the Spice Islands were discredited completely a few centuries later.

Modern reconstruction, however, seems to suggest that “Xerxes” was loosely based on Ambon the Great, a pirate chieftain and refugee from the Chola court who subdued the various peoples of Timor around 220 SE [992 CE] and converted to a heavily bastardized form of Nestorian Christianity before being assassinated in 254 SE [1026 CE]. Filtering through Java and Sumatra, however, meant that Company merchants brought home tales of a Nestorian Christian ruler, a man who controlled a vast empire of spices and jewels, who rode a chariot pulled by winged lizards, and who would eagerly trade with any Christians who could find his kingdom...

...While none of the eastern expeditions of 278-293 [1050-1065 CE] found the Xerxes of the East, they did succeed in establishing trade depots in the major ports of Sumatra and Java, as well as planting small trading settlements, none larger than fifty hardy souls, FN1 among the islands of the Lesser Sundas. Piracy combined with the occasional conquest by natives, Chola-backed mercenaries, and distance ensured that they would only be slightly more profitable than the shorter trip to Sumatra, but Khruso's Company had a foothold in the Far East.

The most famous of the eastern expeditions, of course, was the largest and last of 293. "Ghazi's Expedition", named for the Egyptian merchant sailing in the service of the Company in the name of the King of Kings, FN2 left a few months later than its predecessors, and so ran into one of the great storms of the Eastern Ocean.

Beset by storm, driven south and east, Ghazi's eight ships staggered south from the eastern Company port at the southern tip of Serendip, swinging too far south to reach Java. Pulling themselves north, with three of the eight sunk and the rest damaged, the small fleet were fully aware they were sailing in an exotic, unknown sea, but they had no choice. They needed to take on fresh water, they needed to repair their ships. FN3

It was on Nestor's Day, near the middle of the Northern Hemisphere's winter, when they finally sighted land, and it was at dawn the next day when the five ships dropped anchor in a new land. (It was not a new land, of course, but the sparse, isolated Aboriginal bands on the western shore of the Underbelly Continent didn't count to 3rd century Persians, at least not at first.)

Through the long winter of 293 and the spring of 294 [1066 CE] (Ghazi's astonishment at the inverted seasons proved one of the many attractive factors for future migration), the several hundred Company men (and the dozen or so Company women) went about the business of repairing their ships. They built Fort Resurrection, they beached their ships, and they set about gathering wood and supplies.

And in the meantime, they explored! A Persian sailor who had worked in the King of Kings' personal menagerie before the trip named the river that flowed past Fort Resurrection after his favorite bird, the swan; a translation error produced the name for the fantastic khangru. By the time the ships were repaired, the canny Company men knew they had found a truly new land. It seemed to have everything: land suitable for agriculture, exotic creatures, and pliable locals.

Leaving a score of men and their wives, Persian or native behind, and with firm instructions to be friendly to the natives, Ghazi set sail, first to the new company port in the Mentawis off Sumatra, and then home. He himself would die before the return expedition arrived in SE 296 [1068 CE] with a legion of explorers (landless noblemen with enough peasant farmers to feed the lot of them), but they chose to name the first real city in the land known as New Parthia after him...