Reading: old PBM manual
Music: John Hartford
TV/Movie: This Island Earth (original)
Link o' the Day: ThePulp.Net




Today's mailbag contains, as usual, two items: the first being an old, aged browned envelope with a stamp that might be worth quite a bit of money were it actually be legible. Time was not its friend. Carefully, I extracted the letter within and it reads thusly:

Dear Mr. Briggs,
As requested, we have conducted a full-scale, premium historical search on your ancestor and namesake Montesque Forsyth Briggs, born 1620 in the village of Stub-On-The-Wye, Cornwall, England.

Following your suggestion, we found records of one M. Briggs boarding The Eye of Galway to France in autumn of 1641, but records indicate that the ship never reached Calais. The registery of sunken ships suggests it may have been hit by lightning and burned to the waterline in the middle of the Channel.

At your urging, we continued our search in Spain and found a Sr. M Brigges in the court of a minor coastal nobleman in 1651 serving as a master cartographer and keeper of the royal chest--an unheard of position for a foreigner. In 1652 the castle was looted by pirates and ignited. Brigges was not listed among the dead nor survivors.

In 1661 an MF Briggeks appears in the governor's tax role in Curacao. He is listed as a ship outfitter and seller of optics. In 1662 Curucao was attacked by natives and burned to the ground.

According to tales told among the Seminole indian tribe, a white man named Monty Brights in 1671 (as determined by certain weather events) headed an expedition into the swamplands. He took with him several native guides and paid for their service with a merchant boat loaded with Eastern spices. The group was never heard from again, but stories persisted of strange explosions in the north.

Nothing can be found of Montesque F Briggs for a while, then in 1711 a whaling captain named Briggs arrived in New Bedford aboard The Maui with over 2,000 barrels of light whale oil. His crew numbered ten Japanese sailors who had been stranded in Saipan. Before off-loading the oil, The Maui went up in flames. Briggs and his sailors disappeared.

He shows up again in 1721 in the company of five "men of the East" in Humbold, Germany. He is captured as a spy. Due to his age, he is laced under house arrest at a local inn. The inn burns to the ground and only five skeletons are found in what was his quarters.

In 1741, an MF Brigges marries Dotty Park in Stub-On-The-Wye, Cornwall, England and they give birth a year later to Montesque Forsyth Briggs.

Records after this cease to exist. The church burned down.

Please note that we are not keeping any copy of these findings. All copies made during our research, and all originals, have been sent to your offices by special courier. Call us superstitious, but the number of fires associated with this research are disconcerting and... well, we're not ones to take chances. I'm sure you understand.

Yours sincerely,

Keyes Historical Research
Chicago, Illinois
October 1871

Alongside this interesting tidbit of someone's family history is the familiar rag paper note written with crimson-colored ink.

To Whom It May Concern:
Did you drop this?
If so, is this the signal?
We require clarification.
We require a signal.
We await your signal.

signed (unsigned)

Yeah.

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Today's link visits ThePulp.Net a hub on all the info you'll ever need on the great pulp magazines of days of yore. Don't forget to check out the Doc Savage page. Why? Because Doc Savage rules.

Cheers!