After months of planning and traveling from the Dutch colony of Deshima to Edo, the capital of Japan, or Dai Nippon (Great Kingdom of the Origin of the Sun) as the locals know it as, you the opperhoofd, the Chief Factor, and an accompanying doctor, are now to be received by the Shogun, the military leader of Japan. The fact that you have an opportunity to have an audience at all means that you are someone worthy, for it is not anyone who has that privilege. You are in the inn

With heavy taxes due to the Shogun to support the upper classes, the peasants were often strapped for money to feed their own families and lived a life of subsistence, working from day to day and unable to grow in wealth or raise their position in life. But for one resourceful fisherman, whose name has been lost in history, he was not satisfied with his lot in life and was determined to increase his wealth. He knew that his countrymen were interested in the odd and strange,

It was a cold miserable January month in 1834 at Fort Nisqually. Francis Heron, a Chief Trader for Hudson’s Bay Company and manager at Fort Nisqually, was alone in his room with a bottle of genuine Hudson’s Bay Company whiskey, produced at Fort Vancouver at one of the three stills. The blazing fireplace crackled from the damp cedar wood. At the time of the year, if it wasn’t raining, then it was snowing—so unlike his home in Donegal County in Northern Ireland with its mild w