However, it’s geographically improbable
Eh, pirate sails around the world, picks up disgraced samurai who needs to leave Japan. Afterwards they’ll sail to England at some point or another, and the thief is looking for passage to America (as a thief he needs to get abroad for a while). They sail over the Atlantic, where they meet the cowboy who’s driven cattle from the West to sell at a better price on the East coast.
A call to adventure on top, aaand campaign is a go.
Would make more sense if the thief was bound for Australia as a convict with the privateer,then some shit happened and they ended up in Japan, then sailed for the west coast of the US.
I like the suggestion, but had to do a bit of research for it.
As with sailing, traveling routes are not as simple as with flying.
So I began to wonder how common it would’ve been to sail from Japan to the US during that time. Which is why I did my route as I did. The Atlantic was more common to use, at least during a certain part of history.
Here’s the common route too Australia
But, I ended reading that whole reply more or less. https://www.quora.com/During-the-age-of-sail-how-would-crossing-the-Pacific-Ocean-have-compared-to-crossing-the-Atlantic-Ocean
And I guess yours is plausible and might make for a better story, actually. But pretty much just barely timing wise, as the scenario takes place in the 1860’s right? The Treaty of Kanagawa was signed on March 31, 1854, ending Japan’s 220-year-old policy of national seclusion (sakoku).
Gunslinger comes across the samurai who has escaped to America and is hiding as a railroad worker. Some kind of fuckery happens and they escape and go to San Francisco. They meet the English dandy and they get into some more fuckery and the privateer gets them back out to sea.
It’s actually pretty plausible, the first wave of Japanese people to immigrate to California and Hawaii was in the 1860s. By the 1900 census there were nearly 25k Japanese people living on the West Coast.
And I guess since the Meiji Restoration was bad news for the samurai class, it makes sense that they would want to emigrate.
(I looked it up because often it isn’t the upper classes that are motivated to leave a society, but in this case it checks out.)
That’s basically One Piece
And the fax machine was invented in 1843. So do with that what you want.
The samurai duels on the roof of the train while the gunslinger is forced to take their place in a complex tea ceremony being used as a distraction for the thief to steal an artifact. At the end, they escape by disconnecting the rest of the cars from the locomotive, which has been pirated.
Pretty much Jack Shaftoe’s storyline in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle
Wait, I know about that author and the Shaftoes from Cryptonomicon. You’re saying there’s more?!
