Dear Readers,
Welcome!
In our last, we continued discussion of our heroes. So far, we’ve talked about the French and the English, their look and their ships. Now we want to say something briefly about our heroes—mostly, in fact, heroines—from the Calm Sea (in our world, the Pacific).
As we began to model our villains, as we’ve said, we combined the look of the Inuit with that of Persians and Ottoman Turks. This gave us both a wintery exterior and a lush, brightly-colored interior.
For our Calm Sea heroes, we’ve looked to the Polynesian adventurers who colonized the eastern and southern islands of the Pacific between 800 and 1300AD.
To narrow this a bit, we borrowed linguistically mainly from the Tahitians, but visually from a wide variety of peoples, with perhaps more visuals chosen from the Maori than others. We call our people the Matan’a’e amavi’o, “the people of the goddess Matan’a’e”.
For example, our heroines, Matan’o’ahei, the warrior priestess of the goddess Matan’a’e, and her younger sister, Naru, both wear a distinctive Maori tattoo, or moko, on their lower faces as a mark of their status as belonging to a priestly family.
The warriors of the Matan’a’e amavi’o we imagined as looking like Maori warriors—here doing a traditional war dance, a haka, in this early 19th-century illustration.
Here’s a selection of Maori weapons—the weapons of the Matan’a’e amavi’o, as well.
For their ships, we have created a sort of Polynesian-based warship, our model being the catamaran.
To give such a ship some teeth, we added this, a small, very basic catapult, of the sort seen in early China.
As for their opponents, whom the Matan’a’e amavi’o call the Atuk amavi’o, “the people of cold”, we will discuss their ships in our next post.
If you have any questions about any of our past posts, or about the civilizations we are developing in our novels, please let us know.
Thanks for reading!
MTCIDC
CD
doubtfulsea 