Monday, May 9, 2016

Empress Nadira: Backstory

Born in Spain or a Spanish colony around 1650, the young woman now known as Empress Nadira was working as an indentured servant in the New World by 1670. Living in a port town, in view of the constant comings and goings of the merchant ships, Nadira looked to the sea for her freedom. Since the small town was continually raided by pirates, Nadira learned to defend herself. Befriending the pirates who used the town as a sanctuary, she soon learned to fight, use a sword, and shoot as well as any member of their crews. She became adept at slipping out at night, and haunting the docks and wharves, among the taverns and dives where the sailors, mariners, freebooters, privateers, bucanneers and old tars were to be found. She was fascinated by their tall tales and outrageous stories.

Eventually, during a raid on the town one night, Nadira managed to slip away and join the marauding pirates. The first man who tried to touch her quickly ended up dead, and others were soon to join the pile. In short order, she became an able sailor, quickly rising to boatswain, then second mate, then first mate. Within a few years she had a captaincy of her own, and her own ship. Within a decade she was a well-known privateer, with letters of marque from at least three different colonial governors.

By about 1680, the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean was waning, and Nadira - who had always stayed two steps ahead of the law (while working both sides of it) - knew it was time to move on. She seems to have dropped out of sight for a while, before resurfacing first in New England and then in the Pacific, trading and raiding throughout coastal North and South America.

By the 1690s, we find Nadira in the Indian Ocean, first as an influential captain engaged in the Pirate Round - raiding and trading from Zanzibar to Borneo, from Araby to Cathay- then as an admiral in her own right, controlling the area around Libertatia after the other fools had all been caught. Reports of her daring exploits and amazing adventures from throughout the region appear in many cultures, through about the 1720s: setting shiploads of slaves free, asking them to join her armada, decimating the slave trade while living off the fat spoils of her merchantman prizes: silks, spices, silver, sugar, coffee, tea, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, gold, furs, guns and powder, swords and shot.

After about 1720, Nadira slips from sight again, before being spotted briefly in the New World. It is thought that she may have retired for a while, living in the Americas, traveling and exploring the interior of both continents. She was, after all, a woman of about seventy years old by now.

The strange thing that is often remarked about her is that from about 1690, when Nadira first appeared in the Indian Ocean, (at around the age of forty), to the end of the Pirate Round era, Nadira is said to have aged not one day, looking as hale and fit as she ever had in the prime of her life. When she "retired" around 1720, she still looked the same, or so it is said.

What isn't known by most of her biographers is that Nadira discovered many things in the Indian Ocean around the year 1690 or so, not least among them lost Lemuria, unknown Mu, the secrets of flight, gigantic interplanetary gateways, industrial-scale teleportation, alien races throughout the solar system, and the keys to everlasting life.

[We find her raiding as far north as the Baltic by the 1770s, for Swedish silver and Russian hemp, around Barbary and Rabat-Sale thereafter, raiding the slavers and freeing their captives, and in the South and China Seas by the 1820s, raiding the slave trade and building another armada.]

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