Jasper Endicott

Description

British, late forties. Pale, soft-handed, fussy. Chalk dust perpetually on his cuffs. The face of a man who has spent more time in archives than in sunlight. He asks too many questions about hold ventilation, argues with the mate about temperature, and is protective of a large wooden crate stored below decks.

Background

Antiquarian and dealer, operating on the fringes of respectability. His crate contains a collection of pre-classical shrine artifacts from Saria, the small island north of Karpathos. The site is a coastal cave-shrine, Minoan or possibly pre-Minoan, dedicated to an unknown maritime deity. Stone carvings, bronze figurines, and inscribed tablets depicting creatures that are not fish, not octopi, and not anything in Mediterranean natural history. The script is not Linear A, not Linear B, and not any known Greek dialect.

He is a Europe-based dealer, not the man who dug the things up. The Saria lot reached him the way all smuggled Levantine antiquities reach the West: out through Smyrna and Constantinople to the great Adriatic free ports, Trieste and Venice, both gorged on Ottoman trade. He assembled the collection there. (The artifacts are illegally exported from Ottoman territory, Karpathos being under the Sultan in 1814, which is the root of his perpetual customs anxiety.)

His gamble is not a sale. It is decipherment. The upper register of the tablets is an unknown script, and in 1814 an unread ancient script is the most coveted prize in scholarship, the Rosetta Stone being prised open in these very years. The one place that might read it is not London but Calcutta, where the comparative philologists of the Asiatic Society of Bengal have made the breaking of dead languages their particular glory. Endicott means to lay his tablets before them, see the script read, and make his name and his fortune at a stroke. Hauling a crate of stone to India for that is the act of a desperate man. It is also, for a fringe antiquarian in this exact decade, the right kind of desperate.

Motivations

Get his collection to Calcutta intact, get the unknown script read by the Asiatic Society’s philologists, and ride the discovery to the fame and money that have eluded him in Europe. He is a smuggler, not a cultist. His obsessive behaviour around the crate is the anxiety of a man protecting an illegal and fragile cargo on which he has staked everything, not ritual devotion.

Connections

• La Speranza — Passage to Calcutta
• Capitano Niccolo Zanier — Ship’s captain (strained relationship over hold access)
• Freddy Cavendish — Fellow Englishman aboard (Endicott attaches himself socially)
• Endicott Saria Tablet — His working notebook; holds the funerary inscription (the unwitting key to The Funeral Rite)

Appearances

Session 2 Developments

The red herring ran exactly as designed. Freddy charmed Endicott’s confession out of him over wine on Day 4 — the smuggled Saria funerary tablets and bronze plaques, their illegal Ottoman provenance, and the goal of reaching the Asiatic Society of Bengal to have the unknown script deciphered. The party examined the crate themselves on the sixth night (tablets with non-fish carvings, bilingual Greek funerary inscriptions) and confirmed antiquities, not Mythos. The crew, however, fixed on him: Spiros and Ivo reported him “speaking in two voices” alone in the hold (reading the funerary verse aloud and answering himself), Drago demanded the crate go overboard, and on Day 11 a near-mutiny tried to throw him over the side before Zanier’s pistol stopped it.

Current state (carry-forward): Endicott is barricaded in his cabin, refusing to emerge for fear of the crew and refusing food unless the party gives him more information. His crate has been moved into a rowboat towed behind the ship — the knocking continued regardless, confirming (to the Keeper, if not yet the party) that the crate was never the cause. His notebook (Endicott Saria Tablet) holds the funerary text — discovery path 4 to The Funeral Rite.

Session 3 — Death

South of Crete, on the first night of the drowned dead’s siege (~1 September 1814), the terrified crew made Endicott their scapegoat. Adrien secured the cabin key from Zanier and persuaded the mob to tie a rope to Endicott’s leg before throwing him over — a thin mercy, in case the sacrifice “didn’t take.” It did not matter. The sailors lowered him head-first into the green water, and The Drowned reached up and dragged him under; the rope zipped through a young sailor’s hands and went slack. Endicott is dead — taken by the dead his crew tried to appease — and the knocking did not stop.

The next day the crew threw his crate (the Saria tablets) overboard; it filled and sank. Only the journal pages Georgiana had copied survive (Endicott Saria Tablet) — and they proved the key to The Funeral Rite that ended the becalming. The Asiatic Society decipherment he staked everything on dies with him.

Loose end: the Alexandria antiquities dealer Lucas Pyke was expecting Endicott’s shipment and is now asking questions about the brig that arrived without it.

Relationships

• Passenger La Speranza — Paying passenger. Has the captain's cabin and a crate in the hold he won't stop checking.
• Social Freddy Cavendish — Gravitates to Freddy as a fellow Englishman of good family. Latches on for company.