Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie - The VOC, literally the "United East India Company", and more popularly known in the English-speaking world as the Dutch East India Company, was a quasi-governmental corporation formed in 1602 to coordinate the Dutch exploitation of the Far East. It controlled Dutch trade with India, China, and Japan, as well as the colonized Dutch East Indies (roughly, modern-day Indonesia). Some industrial historians regard the VOC as the first megacorporation. It was dissolved on the first day of 1800, having gone bankrupt in 1799 (owing largely to the fact that the British Empire was on the rise and the British were eating the Dutchmen's lunch in the Far East by that point).

packet Dageraad - Packets were small, fast ships which were mostly used for carrying mail (hence the name—they customarily carried "packets" of documents rather than bulk cargo). The name of this particular one is a bit ironic in context: "Daybreak".

Kaap de Goede Hoop - The Dutch name for what is today the Cape of Good Hope, a headland on the Atlantic coast of South Africa. A critical waypoint on the Europe-to-Asia trading routes until the construction of the Suez Canal allowed ships to bypass the long passage around Africa altogether, the Cape was a Dutch possession, and the first/last major stop for outbound/homeward-bound VOC ships, until 1795. Its capture by the English in that year was part of the process that led to the VOC's downfall.

Texel - An island in North Holland. One of the VOC's home ports was located there.

a single tiny artificial island - Dejima, which was specifically constructed on the orders of the Tokugawa shōgunate as an entrepôt where the few foreigners allowed to trade with Japan (originally the Portuguese, then the Dutch) could be confined.

correspondent of the Herschels - William Herschel and his sister Caroline, German-English astronomers and natural philosophers of great renown in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

the Dutchmen only ever addressed her as "girl" - The Dutch for this, not entirely coincidentally, is meid. (That is, after all, what the English word "maid" meant, before it came to connote a female domestic servant.)

Van Zandt was the most disagreeable - No reflection on any actual person named Van Zandt, Van Zant, Vanzandt, etc. is intended or implied.

a bosun's whip - In the Age of Sail, one of the boatswain's odder odd jobs was the administration of capital punishment, usually in the form of a bareback whipping, to delinquent sailors. Grown men were sometimes killed by this ordeal, although the ship's surgeon was customarily on hand during floggings to (try to) prevent this.

one of those animals from House Dracul - In Stoker's Dracula, one of Jonathan Harker's first solid indications that something seriously messed-up is going on at Castle Dracula is when the Count brings home a sack that is clearly implied to contain a live child with which to feed his vampire brides. (In a later scene, the child's distraught mother appears at the castle gates to curse the Count and demand the child's return, for which the Count has her devoured by his pack of wolves.)

thirty guilders - A fairly substantial but not astonishing amount of money, more than half a month's pay for a VOC first mate. Exact comparisons are difficult after so much time, but the best estimate I was able to find uggests that amount of guilders in the 1790s had the buying power of something like $350 today.

her name is Sakuya - Japanese names have many potential meanings, but both of Sakuya's have an astronomical bent that can be read as something to do with the moon—Sakuya can mean "last night", which can refer either to the full or the new moon depending on how you read the lunar cycle, and Izayoi is "sixteenth night", i.e., the night immediately after the full moon. It is unknown whether Count Victor had these specific connotations in mind—it seems likely, given that the pivotal events aboard the Dageraad happened on the night of a full moon—but either way, the words have a nice ring to them and would have caught his eye when he looked at that lunar chart.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.