(urth) Seventeen

[António Pedro Marques]

Nicholas Gevers wrote (23-05-2011 10:43):
> A possible reference by Wolfe is to the Dutch East India Company of the 17th and
> 18th centuries, which was governed by a board of managers or factors called the
> "Heere Seventien" or Group of Seventeen. Given the Company's association with
> the sea, and origin in a country partly reclaimed from the sea, Wolfe might have
> intended a coded pelagic reference, thus to Abaia, Scylla, and the rest. The
> DEIC didn't have a very savoury reputation. Of course, the only overt reference
> to the Dutch in the entire Briah Cycle is in *On Blue's Waters* and *Return to
> the Whorl*, with Dorp and its doughty sailors...

Yet one in which he explicitly decries the outcome of a society giving 
absolute power to inflexible Law and its enforcers...