Forcedlabour Stories

One more job and then Selena was done working for the agency. She would miss it, they'd done good work, but she was tired and wanted to build her own life. The last job wasn't at all what she was expecting though and this time there's more on the line than just her safety.

A 16th century scheme purportedly to help persecuted religious minorities to escape to a new life in the New World is , six centuries later, revealed to have been a deadly scam to maroon the passengers on an Arctic coast in order to provide forced labour for a factory, where feathers from a rare seabird (the snaegeir - a relative of the great auk) are harvested to supply a lucrative trade in Europe - a wholesale slaughter which, within a few years, brought the birds to the edge of extinction. In the present day, Robertson Crutcher, a descendant of Johannes Cruytser, the merchant venturer who initiated the trade and built the factory, sets about atoning for t-he bloody stain upon his ancestry by placating the ghosts of the exploited would-be pilgrims and rescuing what may be the last surviving pair of snaegeir birds from Alba Maior, after a reported sighting by a whaling crew. The title, you may have recognised, comes from Coleridge's the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is a major reference point. "Like one who, on a lonely road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turned round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. In addition, The story draws heavily upon the facts of Martin Frobisher's life as a privateer and explorer, and his largely fruitless voyages to the coast of Labrador in 1576-78, including his association with the merchant venturer Michael Lok and the 'astrologer royal' Doctor John Dee.