Reminders of One Piece

Sigh, anime is getting to my head...

So here I was reading through a book on the Opium War for my term paper and I come across a passage and think, "Hm, that's like how in One Piece..."

This French Lazarist by the name of Faivre is travelling up the coast of China on the English opium clipper Red Rover to spread the Word (Christ and Opium, who would've thought? - but that's another story) and they run aground bad weather.

"Two days later Red Rover finally got away, but bad weather plagued her the rest of the way up the coast. Once she met an offshore wind so persistent and so powerful that, though several miles from the shore, the helmsman could hardly see for flying sand. Another time it turned hot, cold, thundered, rained, hailed, dropped to a dead calm, then blew furiously again, all in the space of twenty-four hours" (111).

And later during the war, the English blockade at Canton at the end of June of 1840 prompts the Chinese authorities to place bounties on English heads -- and some interesting language here:

"Now, bumptious and thieving as the fan kuei notoriously were, they had never systematically preyed upon shipping. It was the Chinese who habitually stopped the trade when the barbarians needed disciplining, not the other way around! The blockade and the detaining of salt junks made the authorities very angry. In June there had been rumors that Englishmen were to have prices put upon their heads. Now suddenly it was fact. An edict appeared offering amounts that descended as rank descended: $5,000 for a man-of-war's captain; $100 for a plain soldier, sailor, or merchant taken alive; $20 for his head. A seventy-four burned to the waterline commanded $10,000. Even the little Louisa, which Johnston used in Elliot's absence, was worth $100" (244).

Elliot, the English Superintendent, is later revealed to have a $50,000 bounty.

Source: Fay, Peter Ward. The Opium War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.