Happy Thanksgiving

Which as we all know has its roots in Canada in one of Martin Frobisher's ill-fated ventures into the arctic.

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada can be traced back to the 1578 voyage of Martin Frobisher from England in search of the Northwest Passage. In this, his third, voyage to the Frobisher Bay area of Baffin Island in the present Canadian Territory of Nunavut, it was also the intention to start a small settlement and his fleet of 15 ships were so fitted out with men, materials and provisions for this purpose. However, the loss of one of his ships through contact with ice along with much of the building material was to prevent him from doing so. The expedition was plagued by ice and freak storms which at times had scattered the fleet and on meeting together again at their anchorage in Frobisher Bay, “..Mayster Wolfall, [ Robert Wolfall ] a learned man, appointed by her Majesties Councell to be their minister and preacher, made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankefull to God for their strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places,…” . They celebrated Communion and “The celebration of divine mystery was the first sign, scale, and confirmation of Christ's name, death and passion ever known in all these quarters.”

Frobisher returned to England in the fall of the year with over a thousand tons of what he thought was precious gold ore which turned out to be totally worthless, and minus “fortie”, or about ten percent of his ships’ compliment “which number is not great, considering how many ships were in the fleet, and how strange fortunes we passed."

The Foundation Trilogy: Part Three of Eight

Foundation: The Merchant Princes

The Traders appears to have been dropped entirely from the BBC version. Since these are largely independent stories, that won't affect things too much.

This is set about a century and a half after the founding of the Encyclopedia. Terminus still has its little empire of religion addled Kingdoms but is experiencing some difficulty expanding into new territory because the surrounding principalities aren't run by idiots and they are not keen on becoming more pocket theocracies.

Terminus also has a community of traders and one of those, Mallow, is dispatched by a politician named Sutt (pronounced Soot) to Korell, supposedly to see if suspicions that Korell has somehow gained access to atomic technology and weapons are correct [1]. Sutt is worried that Terminus may be facing a Seldon Crisis and that rival atomic powers might be part of it. He's also got his eye on gaining more power on Terminus.

Mallow is a competent man and he not only manages to avoid an engineered political confrontation (at the cost of handing a seemingly harmless religious nut over to an angry mob) and establish firm trade ties to Korell but he also manages to track down the source of the atomics, which is none other than the Galactic Empire itself, much reduced but still a power to be reckoned with.

Mallow is aided in his intelligence mission into the corrupt and self-destructive Empire by an old man who is so astonishingly willing to tell a total stranger about his family's plan to get even with the ambitious officer who needless massacred millions that Mallow is driven to ask why the old man is so willing to tell a stranger that e.g. his only surviving son has worked his way into the official's inner circle and is even now waiting the moment to strike. The old man says he recognizes Mallow as another enemy of the officer but it seems to be there are at least two other explanations, one of which is funny; either the old man is senile or in fact none of his sons are in the fellow's inner circle and the repeated tale is intended to set off a completely pointless witch hunt amongst the bureaucrat's closest allies.

Mallow returns to Terminus where Sutt and Mallow end up on opposite sides of a struggle over Terminus's fate (except that it has All Been Ordained by Seldon so in fact while Mallow and Sutt may be the playing pieces on the board at the time, the player is the long dead Seldon). Mallow expresses a belief that religion has had its day and that in the future Terminus will binds its enemies with chains of gold (at the cost of being entangled in them themselves), that the effectiveness of trade as a weapon of war will be demonstrated in the coming war with ambitious Korell and that the Empire's technology, while impressive, cannot be used to effectively counter Terminus. Mallow proves he is the protagonist by demonstrating the power of the smug lecture of ultimate fate and also by outmaneuvering Sutt at every turn.

Once again, arresting political opponents to keep them from office is a well established trick on Terminus.

I'm kind of baffled that a story whose moral is "dictators who force their nations into economically destructive wars will inevitably be overthrown by consumers missing their luxuries and masters of industry desiring their old levels of profit" got published in 1944. It's true Korell is particularly vulnerable but it still seems like odd timing.

Oh, it's also clear the Foundation uses atomic weapons from time to time. Since cities and ships can be shielded, this will not have the same consequences atomic war would have on a world like 1940s Earth.

[added later]

This, by the way, is the first Foundation story that has women on stage. There are two, one literally a walk-on (we hear her footsteps and nothing else) and the other a dictator's wife who discusses strategy with her husband.



1: The only two sources Sutt can imagine are either that the Korellians have somehow developed it themselves or that some Foundation traitor is selling it to them. The excluded middle may be intended to indicate Sutt is not the protagonist he believes himself to be.