[…]when a commotion outside the dining room began to intrude, and finally a single piercing shriek, like a woman’s cry, interrupted the increasingly loud and slurred conversation.

Silence fell, glasses stopped in mid-air, some chairs were pushed back; Staunton rose, a little wavering, and begged their pardon. Before he could go to investigate, the door was thrust abruptly open, Staunton’s anxious servant stumbling back into the room still protesting volubly in Chinese. He was gently but with complete firmness being pressed aside by another Oriental man, dressed in a padded jacket and a round, domed hat rising above a thick roll of dark wool; the stranger’s clothing was dusty and stained yellow in places, and not much like the usual native dress, and on his gauntled hand perched an angry-looking eagle, brown and golden feathers ruffled up and a yellow eye glaring; it clacked its beak and shifted its perch uneasily, great talons puncturing the heavy block of padding.

When they had stared at him and he at them in turn, the stranger further astonished the room by saying, in pure drawing-room accents, “I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for interrupting your dinner; my errand cannot wait. Is Captain William Laurence here?”

Laurence was at first too bemused with wine and surprise to react; then he rose and stepped away from the table, to accept a sealed oilskin packet under the eagle’s unfriendly stare[…]

[The stranger] did not smile, but there was a glint in his eye suggestive of amusement at the reaction of the room, which he was surely accustomed to provoking […]

first appearance of Tenzig Tharkay (Naomi Novik’s Black Powder War)
Source: conjuringscribeziel

Hello! I was wondering if you had any books you’d recommend for someone who wants to learn more about tall ships, and how people went about sailing them? I’ve really enjoyed your blog, and I hope you had a lovely holiday. :)

Hey! Most of the books I’ve read are more about things that happened on or to ships than the mechanics of ships themselves, so I can’t think of anything that’s exactly what you’re describing (my nautical goodreads shelf is here, if that helps), but I’ll post this publicly and let folks weigh in! @focsle, @vimyvickers, or @ventureonwilderseas might have opinions on the topic? 

vimyvickers replied to your post: it’s 25 degrees out and there is an honest to god…

Oh man, I walked through Harvard Yard this afternoon on my way to the Revels (also hey, I think we probably inhabited the same general locale at some point today unbeknownst to us) and there were so many so Very Cold looking tourists. Why.

like ships in the night! and yeah I mean… I was a cold tourist in Cambridge today but that’s why I went to a museum and stayed there! I didn’t wander around staring up at buildings and shivering, ffs. 

@ningenalentari replied to your photoset: The Harvard Museum of Natural History terrible…

How did that work? Would animals be collected for the sole purpose of taxidermy? If so, bad luck to be preserved horribly like that.

A lot of Natural History museums have both research and display collections of animals preserved in various ways (university museums are more likely to have large research collections! For example, the Burke Museum at the University of Washington has over 55,000 objects in their Mammalogy department alone, but maybe 50-70 of those are actually on view to the public at any given time; the rest are kept in their collections storage and are used by researchers, both from the UW and guests) Most were collected by scientists for exactly those purposes- the specimens kept back for research are invaluable when trying to understand how species have changed over time- or even how air quality has changed over time, like in this amazing study. Modern scientists get permits from state, local, and federal governments to collect small numbers of specimens for research, but in the past it was, admittedly, a lot more of a free-for-all. They also now get animals who die of natural causes in zoos or wildlife rehab centers, which is a really neat way of ensuring nothing is wasted and animals that were used for education in life continue to do so after they die. 

The taxidermy specimens that get displayed in natural history museums are typically prepared and posed specifically for display (researchers don’t need or want their specimen rearing up and snarling fiercely, obviously), and are often…. quite old (one thing museums hardly ever do? throw shit away. Also, many of the specimens in older museums are now extinct or too rare to responsibly collect, so century-old taxidermy is all that will ever likely be available to display), from a time when the preparation of taxidermy specimens was involved more creative interpretation than scientific accuracy, and when people really wanted drama in their cabinets full of dead animals. So a lot of them started out kinda funky, and then 100+ years in a cabinet with too much light damage and little-to-no humidity control results in fading and cracking in addition to the weird fake teeth and improbable expressions that long-ago taxidermists thought were cool.